How many New Years resolutions did you make last year?

How many of those resolutions did you keep?

Don't feel too bad if you found your resolutions falling by the wayside long before you stop writing last years dates on your checks, it is estimated that over 75% of Americans break their resolutions within the first week.

There are a lot of great intentions out there, but intention and action are two entirely different things. We all know we should take better care of ourselves, physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, romantically...

We know, but there is a wide gap between knowing something and doing it isn't there? Over 90% of people will break their New Years resolutions long before the new month rolls into double digits.

For most of us resolutions seem to get lost in the translation from thought to action.

Even when we have decided to make a goal to better our lives in one way or another, we lack the follow through, and the follow through is what really makes the pattern take shape.

So often when we make a goal, we see each failure as a setback, but failure too is part of that cycle.

How many times you failed to reach your goal isn't nearly as important as how many times you got back on track and followed it through.

Imagine you find yourself at a lakeside cabin, and your goal is to create a new path from the cabin to the lake. Making the trip once is not enough to leave a permanent path, the same actions must be repeated over and over to wear that path deep enough and wide enough to be of practical use.

Our failures, no matter how many there are do not have any effect whatsoever upon that path, they do not help to move progress farther, but they do not stop progress entirely either unless we let them. If we miss a day or even a week or two our path is there patiently waiting for us to being working on it again.

So many people fail to get back on that path and move towards their goal once again, instead telling themselves that all hope is lost so they might as well give up entirely. Accepting defeat is the surest way to fail in any goal, no matter how small or large that goal may be, when we count only our failures we fail to see our successes.

Count your successes not your failures, and just keep walking your path.

Happy New Year everyone!!!

When I was working with our local advocacy center as a client, I think I knew even then that I would become an advocate someday. When I thought about all of the things they did for me, I just knew I wanted to give that gift to others as soon as I was strong enough.

I couldn’t help anyone if I couldn’t first help myself. It took a few years for me to get to a place where I felt I had dealt with my past enough to help others deal with their issues. Now I find I have been an advocate long enough that I am comfortable with the role.

There were some unexpected effects that came from my training. I should have seen it coming, but oddly I didn’t. It just kind of snuck up on me, slowly I found my self more and more intolerant of not just extreme abuse, but the more minor variations as well.

I see the way people sometimes treat other people, and where I might have been able to overlook disrespectful comments made by one partner to another I can’t anymore. Before I know it my mouth has opened and I am preaching again.

I don’t know what else to call it, it isn’t religious in nature but it is preaching just the same. Nobody has the right to make anyone feel inferior, ever, yet I hear one spouse do it to another and I cringe. This is supposed to be the person they love most in the world, and they choose to hurt them?

I’ve learned what not to say to a victim, even though it may be true in some cases, you still never tell a victim that someone who loves you would never abuse you. Because that is OUR definition of love, but theirs is different.

What right do we have to tell them that the person they love doesn’t love them? To take away the only form of love they know? They already feel unworthy of the love they have, and us taking what small glimpse of love they do have away does them more harm than good, no matter how well meaning.

The same thing has to happen with all of the people we try to help, in essence we must help them learn to redefine love, and that process begins with teaching them to love themselves. That’s really all there is to it.

Some people define it as man-hating, but we help men as well. Some say we are just feminists, out to destroy the role man for the sake of woman, that we want to demasculinize men and make women into combat boot wearing radical guerrillas in the war between the genders, nope, not really.

All we really want to do is teach those in abusive or painful circumstances is that they deserve better, we all do. I don’t want my daughters to hate men when they grow up, but I do want them to accept nothing but respect from any partner romantic or otherwise.

Life is too short to be wasted in misery. I spent a great many years there, it isn’t a pretty place to be. Looking back all of the memories from the times I have suffered from abuse are dark and hazy, no matter what time of day the memory takes place, in my mind I always see it as night.

I didn’t know what was going on was abuse, because I never had any black eyes, I never had any broken bones. Most of what I had were hurt feelings. Sometimes the thought would cross my mind that this was not love, that love wasn’t supposed to hurt more than it felt good...

I would think it and push it away before it really took hold. I couldn’t afford to think like that because I needed to be loved and I had to find a way to earn that love. If I just let them do whatever they wanted, they would stay with me. I wanted someone who would love me, and I wanted someone who would not leave me, even if that meant giving up myself.

It never occurred to me that I deserved to be loved just because I was me. I didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to do everything right, someone who really loved me would not punish me, people who love one another don’t punish, they work through it.

The funny thing is, I don’t even know why I thought that way. The only thing that changed from then until now is my thoughts, that’s it. I see things differently now.

If you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, show them what love really is...

How often does a person stop to appreciate their carpet, their kitchen tile, their doormat? I’m afraid it isn’t very often at all. Things that are made to walk on are rarely a part of our everyday thoughts. A doormat, is and always be a doormat, and a doormat is meant to be taken for granted.

People on the other hand, are meant to be loved and appreciated, it is a basic human need. Yet so many people feel that being a human doormat is the true path to love and acceptance. Somewhere along the way, they got the idea that need and love are the same thing.

So often in our culture need and love are represented as being one and the same, a myth perpetuated by romance novels and love songs. Need and love are in fact two different things, we can love someone without necessarily needing them, and we can most certainly need someone without loving them.

Being a doormat might make someone need us, but do they really want us? Sure we are really handy to have around, we take on all the the stress, worry, and responsibility. They might even come to believe they can’t live without us, but at what price?

Being a doormat gets exhausting after awhile, always finding new ways to get your own needs met by meeting the needs of others or pushing them aside altogether. Instead of just simply asking someone to love us, we are always trying to find a way to earn that love.

Love was never meant to be earned, it was meant to be given as a gift with nothing expected in return. As soon as it becomes an exchange, the word love no longer applies. If they take their love away from you, even for a moment your whole world begins to crumble.

Nobody has to remain a doormat forever, there is hope for even the worst people pleasers in the world.

For tips on overcoming the dreaded doormat disease read on at Squidoo>>>