Sean Healy: Tools

Our family system has its own way of dealing with issues of intimacy and anxiety. One of the ways in which we find our place in our family system is to take on roles.

These roles have unhealthy and healthy expressions. They can serve to keep the family enmeshed and family anxiety suppressed.  The more challenged or dysfunctional the family, the more fixed the roles can get. Someone in the family may get cast as the troubled, messed up one whilst a sibling becomes the golden child. 

These roles, although they feel quite comfortable at times, can interfere with our ability to truly be ourselves around our family. In turn, what we learn in our family of origin we then can play out in our intimate adult relationships and professional lives.

In family systems that are too enmeshed any stand one makes for self even if it is perfectly reasonable can trigger anxiety in the family system. 

One way in which you can be pushed back into the fold, so to speak, is to be guilted back into behaving like everyone else again. What do you mean you're not coming to dinner? Everyone else will be there! Mom will be so disappointed! Don't you think about others?

Learning how to make a stand for self in a healthy mature way, whilst remaining connected is one of the most vital skills we can develop. Learning the difference between the things we are genuinely guilty over compared to triggered guilt that serves the family enmeshment is essential for self-clarity.

I don't know about anyone else, but the fairy tales that I heard as a child tended to promise that after the initial barriers to love were beaten, it was happy ever after! I thought all you had to do was find your soul mate and the rest would be easy! 

The reality is somewhat different and it turns out that if you want your relationship to continue to be meaningful, some expectations of effort need to be still met.

When a couple hasn't had discussions about expectations and standards in a relationship that are measurable, it is easy to lose our way. Setting agreed-upon standards, committing to those standards and regular check-ins can really be vital to staying together in a meaningful way.

This episode explores the value of standards in supporting, long term healthy relating.

When I'm feeling more confident then I will take on the world! Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work as well that way. As a person who likes to find the easiest way out, no one is more disappointed than me about this.

Genuine, informed confidence comes from engaging in the world, braving to risk even if that means facing temporary failure. Through taking risks and succeeding my confidence in myself and my abilities grows.

Through taking risks and falling short but working out how to move through that, my confidence grows. Action both informs and refines. As a result, my confidence grows but also has substance behind it.

This episode looks at the relationship between building confidence and educated risk-taking. How can I stack the deck in my favour? 

I find it so interesting how many successful people have managed to turn adversity and their own self-limitations into something that works for them or that they can work around.

We all have areas of life or aspects of our personalities that we see as not up to par. The relationship and strategies that we utilise to address where we feel weak can be the difference between getting where we wish to go and falling short.

In this episode, we explore this topic and some ways to integrate our limitations so that we can have greater success in life, love and business.

It is one thing to get to the top of your chosen profession and a whole other ball game to stay there.

The majority of individuals who reach their chosen idea of success might make it, but very few actually sustain that level.

This episode looks at some of the pitfalls that can get in the way of staying at the top. How do we get in our own way? What can we do to ensure that what we have built is sustained?

With every idea of success, you can generally find individuals who have employed different strategies to get to the same place. The great thing about books and the internet is they provide us with so much information and so many ways to get where you want to go. The downside of having the internet and thousands of books on success is that they provide us with so many ways to get where we want to go.

This episode looks at some of the fundamentals that seem to appear more often than not in how people do well at life. For example: More often than not people have had a mentor or mentors along the way. More often than not people have gotten further in life by having the right people around them personally and professionally.

This episode explores some of these elements and offers some areas of focus to help you achieve your goals in a best-fit way for you.

Money issues are one of the largest points of friction for couples. This episode looks at some of the things that can be implemented to make money more a source of joy than pain in our relationships.

Couples can clash over a number of factors around money but one, in particular, is around its allocation and spending choices. Do we save or do we splash out on a holiday?

Being able to schedule consistent, open and focused discussions on money issues in your relationship without it ending in a massive blow-up is vital to long term relationship health and survival.

This episode looks at some of the areas that if attended to in advance can help to avoid emotion-fueled clashes.

Sometimes the messages we received about success in our childhood feed into our drives as an adult.

Am I succeeding for me or because it is what I believe others have wanted for me?

Messages like "Be Perfect!", "Mistakes aren't tolerated!" and other such versions of these mean that we can be driven to excel past levels that actually return sufficient joy. 

It can be important to reflect on the sometimes crippling downside of perfect, so that we can ease up on ourselves and actually enjoy life and what we have accomplished in it.

A small aspect of the population who aren't bothered by guilt, shame and remorse in the ways that most of us are, seek relationships of self opportunity and exploitation.

Many of these individuals thrive just below the line of detection and have worked hard to get their exploitation game refined. There are many elements to these challenging individuals and the way they approach life.

This episode looks at how they seek vulnerability as a doorway to move into our lives and businesses for their own purposes. This may be through detecting or eliciting emotional vulnerability or through situational vulnerability where life circumstances have left us exposed in some way.

There are many amazing people working and studying in the area of Low Conscience Individuals but I wanted to acknowledge in particular Sandra Brown and Jennifier Young who have written the excellent book 'Women who love Psychopaths". I hope you find this episode informative.