A true friend...

It is so easy to focus on the negative. I am struggling right now with the end of winter - wishing and hoping for sunshine, springtime, and flowers. With that discouragement, it can be easy to focus on how tired I feel, and how much I wish for this stage in my life to be complete, and how ready I am to move on to the next. A general sense of dissatisfaction of life can easily overtake me.
My husband and I are working very hard to start a business, focus on our marriage while we are just the two of us, and to be able to provide spiritual, emotional and financial stability for each other. Believe me though, it is easy to focus on how far away we are from our goals, how many hours a week we put into work, and how tired we are when we are at home. Making a better life for us and our future child(ren) is hard, hard work.
I really think that it is a true friend who instead of letting me complain, whine and generally "kvetch" on my life, helps me to re-frame my experiences and see how current decisions are laying the foundation of a very solid life. It is also incredible to me that I am blessed with so many friends who provide the "reality check" I need to focus on the positive things happening in our lives.


Re-framing, I believe is a skill second only to learning the "adult voice" (see previous blogs), required to help find satisfaction and happiness in life. Re-framing is a skill where instead of focusing on how issues or incidents have every appearance of being a negative impact on your life, its seeing the baby-steps towards growth, or seeing the way this negative can be used for a positive solution. One of my friends always points out to me through this process that even though we are tired, discouraged and generally whiny at times, that my husband and I are becoming a better team, learning how to communicate, trust, and rely on each other more and more each day. You know what, she is right!!


And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." (Romans 12:2)

Re-Frame: (v. t.) To frame again or anew

Choosing a positive focus over the negative it appears.
Making Strength based decisions
“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given circumstance.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Viktor Frankl (Austrian Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist) Man’s Search for Meaning