Being Let Down & Being Let Go During the Holidays Doesn’t Mean Giving Up

The holiday season is supposed to be a time of love, merriment, good cheer, good tidings, sharing, giving, and above all compassion. It is one of my most favorite times of the year. The colorful decorations, the bright Christmas lights, the Christmas carolers, the holiday parties, the hustle and bustle of shopping, along with the beautifully wrapped gifts, all help to brighten spirits and lighten moods.

All of the above sounds great, as long as nothing or no one interferes with the sense of utopia!  Does the Grinch really exist? Does he just lurk around to spoil your holiday season with his unexpected and unwanted antics? Unfortunately the Grinch doesn’t just exist during the holiday season; he throws a wrench into your life three hundred and sixty-five day of the year. He playa hates and seeks to   make your life downright miserable.

For many of you, the holiday season brings back memories of loss and loneliness. And for many more of you, it is a time of let downs and disappointments by family members, spouses, mates, friends, and coworkers. It is also a time that many of you have been let go…from jobs, from relationships, from business deals, and from other engagements that you thought would exist for an extended period of time.    

Being let down and being let go is a very difficult experience, no matter what time of the year they occur. The impact of these experiences can be GREAT, and in some cases GRAVE! Along with the unexpected let downs and the lack of preparedness associated with being let go comes many unpleasant emotions.

Being let down and let go not only affects you emotionally, but also psychologically, physically, spiritually, socially, and economically. You will probably experience feelings of rejection, isolation, betrayal, confusion, anger, sadness, despair, depression, loneliness, hopelessness, disappointment, stress, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and homicidal thoughts. Although these feelings can occur any time you experience being let down or let go, the holiday season tends to exacerbate these emotions.

Having these emotions is not the major issue; it’s what you do with them that will make the difference. With assistance from family, friends, and mental health professionals, you can learn to manage your emotions and move forward. You must remember; just as the holiday season passes, whatever is taking place in your life will also pass. It is imperative that you do not make long-term decisions over short-term problems.

But then you have to ask yourself, ‘was I wearing blinders or rose-colored glasses and couldn’t see or did I not want to see the let down or the let go coming?’   Too often, when others betray you, reject you, or unfairly dismiss you, the first place you tend to go is to blame yourself. And too often, you try to put your foot in your own behind, blaming yourself for the let down or the let go you experienced.

Ask yourself if you would’ve been prepared for the let down or the let go whenever it took place. Would January, March, May, or any other months have made the acts of rejection and betrayal more palatable for you? The reality is that pain and disappointment are the same, whenever they occur. Because we have been socialized to expect wonderful things and grand acts of kindness to take place during the Christmas holiday season, we find ourselves devastated when the opposite occurs.

Isn’t it amazing that your mate decided to dump you during the holidays? Guess what? He/she probably wanted to dump you all along! The holidays seem to be the right time to do so. It means one less gift for him/her to purchase. And he/she seemed to use the holiday season as the reason to dump you and hide amidst the hustle and bustle of the season. You might be better off being dumped! You get to end your year free and start your new year free.

 The boss who let you go…he/she, like your mate, hid behind the merriness of the season to fire you and tie up loose ends before the New Year arrives. The overall message is, he/she doesn’t want to take you into the New Year, in an effort to cut losses.’ In all actuality, this seeming setback can be a setup for you to move up! Sometimes, doors that need to be open will remain closed, until the doors that need to be closed are closed.

I know it seems heartless and compassionless to have someone to trample on your emotions, impact and sometimes destroy your earning capacity, while many times inhibiting and/or prohibiting your ability to move forward; especially during the holiday season. And it is probably just as heartless and compassionless as you believe! But in some cases, you must evaluate your options. If there is something to be done to cure the let down or the let go you have experienced, as well as the process and outcome of the experience, then fighting back will be an asset rather than a liability. By all means, get up and fight! What do you have to lose?! After all, “Being let down & being let go during the holidays does not mean giving up.”  

As the holiday season comes, it will go. So, too, will your pain, disappointment, disgrace, and other negative emotions associated with the seemingly callous act put forth against you. The reality is, just because you have been let down, knocked down, or let go, it doesn’t mean you have to lie down or stay down. You can get back up! What seems to be a door closing on you and on your future can become an opportunity for many great doors to open for you and in front of you. You can get back up and you can once again look up!

Here are some pointers in helping you to handle being let down or let go, not only during the holiday season, but three hundred and fifty days of the year.

1.     Recognize that in life, there will always be let downs & you will be let go by someone or from something. Don’t put your eggs in one basket. Relationships are not guaranteed, and jobs and other agreements are not guaranteed forever. The holiday season does not bring an exception to the rule!

2.     Recognize that sometimes the decisions made by others have nothing to do with you. The person who lets you down or lets you go sometimes suffer from selfishness, engage in politics, and they have a need for control, face insecurity, inadequacy, and fear. They many times project these negative attributes on to others and seem to enjoy letting others down and letting them go; all in the name of control.

3.     Assess your role in the let down and the let go. What could you have done differently? Did you really have any control over the situation or the outcome in the first place?

4.     Recognize that what you view as a let down could actually be the set up you need in order for you to get up and move up!

5.     Recognize that being let go could be an opportunity for you to be set free.

6.     Don’t be afraid to own your feelings and confront them. Decide to get up out of your bed of despair, desperation, and depression each and every day. Open your blinds/curtains everyday when you arise, even if the sun is not shining on the outside.

7.     Recognize that YOU are in control of YOU! Don’t wallow in your pain. Remember the reason for the season. Remember, just like the holiday season, the let downs and the let go’s of life will also pass!

8.     Engage with PPGP’s…Positive People Going Places. See the holiday season as an opportunity for you to enlarge your territory, meet new people, and to seize a chance to be introduced to new and greater opportunities.

9.     Remember; when the weight of the let down and being let go becomes too heavy for your shoulders and too large for your heart…PUT THEM DOWN! TALK WITH SOMEONE; FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE & NOT THE NEGATIVE. Start looking through your windshield of life, which is much larger than the rear view mirror of your let down or you being let go; even during the holidays

10.  And if you can’t reach within yourself to find the strength to go on and move on, seek the help of a professional. THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR YOU TO MAKE A LONG-TERM DECISION OVER A SHORT-TERM PROBLEM! GET UP & MOVE UP!

©2015; J.Morley Productions, Inc; P.O. Box 1745; Decatur, GA 30031; 770-808-6570; www.doctorjoyce.com

Allowing Truth to Reign Over the Lies & Pain in Your Life

It is interesting how many people would rather hear and accept a lie, rather than hear and accept the truth. Like you, most people don’t wan to hear the truth, let alone face the truth. To some, facing the truth is like undergoing a test. And you have determined in your mind, ‘if found out, life will be over for me.’ However, life can be over for you much sooner with a lie than with the truth. Uncovering the truth can and will uncover new and grand opportunities for you, setting you free to be you!

Yes, I know; sometimes the truth hurts. In the scheme of things, a lie hurts much worse than the truth. And guess what? You will eventually get over the hurt and the pain associated with the truth. However, lies are much more detrimental and devastating than the truth could ever be, and lies tend to live on forever. If you are like me, you have been lied on and lied to. I am sure you can remember the astonishment, the pain, the devastation, as well as the struggle and wasted time it took for the truth to be uncovered, in order to free you from a possible loss, scandal, embarrassment, or other emotional, financial, and economical devastations. Two of my major pet peeves are people who lie to me or lie on me! There is no reason for a lie; so why are you lying when you know the pain associated with lies?!

I know for many of you, life can become a daunting task at times. You seem to spend most of your days struggling with which side of the fence you will stand, whose side you should take in an argument, and whether to take a stand or stance for a cause; if you take a stand at all. Along with the aforementioned, you also probably struggle with whether you should stand for what you KNOW is right, or whether you should continue to sit idly by, accepting the wrongs in life, watching truth fly out the windows of your life, while allowing lies to become the norm, rather than the exception.

When you denounce the truth you allow others to pronounce and to promote who they want you to be and how they want you to be. If you are not able to live in and with the truth, allowing the measure of who you are to be determined by your yardstick, you will exist, based on the truths of others, which becomes your lie. As a matter of fact, your lies are your denial of the truth.

It is even more challenging for you to perpetrate a fraud each and every day, abandoning the real you, while accepting a pseudo you, just so that you can fit, where you really don’t belong anyhow, forcing yourself to live one continuous lie after another! Okay, I know it is difficult and painful to admit your role in the fiction you have created in your life, about your life, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t abandon the lies that have permeated your life and begin to live in truth…FOR REAL!

Lies are cousins to deceit, secrets, betrayal, denial, avoidance, and confusion. When you tell one lie, you must keep telling them in order to cover the lie you told before. And I am sure you have heard of pathological liars. These people tend to tell a lie each time they open their mouths. They lie for the sake of lying and don’t even know they are lying most of the time. Lies reign over truth and their every waking moment is some faction of a lie.

When you lie about your education, you must lie to get the job, and keep lying in order to maintain the job, always looking over your shoulders and behind your back. If you lie about your health status, especially related to STD’s, you will continue to deceive the woman or man who chooses to sleep with you, endangering their health and their life. When you lie about your marital status or sexuality, you increase the risk of the number of people hurt or killed. While truth is your freedom, lies are your emotional, psychological, physical, economical, and spiritual bondage!

My mother used to say, ‘a liar will cheat, a liar will steal, and a liar will kill in order to cover his/her lie.’ As long as you continue to live a life of lies, continue to walk in lies, speak lies, and accept the bondage associated with lies, you are a lie and you are perpetrating a fraud. This fraud begins to dictate the lies you tell about who you are, what you have, where you are, where you came from, what you have accomplished, and where you are going. As a matter of fact, the more you engage in perpetrating a fraud, the more you begin to believe that the lies you have been perpetrating are truths.

If you aren’t living truth, you are living a lie. It is incumbent upon you to decide if you want to continue down a path of untruths and fantasy, or are you willing to take the risk to face actualities, no matter how difficult or how painful. Many times you avoid facing and living in truth because your reality is too painful and you will have to view, see, and accept some things, some situations, and some people in a totally different light in which you have been accustomed. 

As a matter of fact, once the truth is out, it moves in a straight line, eventually fading away, losing its relevancy. On the other hand, lies are spun like a spider’s web. Once you start telling them, you become entangled in them, and you weave others into your web of lies; whether they want to be a part of them or not. Unlike the truth, lies never die; they multiply! They have a domino effect, knocking down everyone and everything in its path.

A lie is a nothing more than a grandiose disguise of the truth of who you are, what you are, what you stand for, where you are, where you have been, and where you are going. A lie makes you invisible, because you have decided to hide from the truth.

Truth is freedom and freedom allows you to be you. Once you seek truth, see truth, accept truth, and begin to live in truth, you are free to make choices based on who you are and not based on who and what others want you to be. Your freedom through truth allows you to be human, to fall, to falter, and to fail. The freedom associated with truth also allows you to get back up without guilt, shame, or embarrassment, boldly pronouncing and announcing your strength, without denouncing who you are.

Although the truth might be painful when you have to face it, a lie is not only painful when you face it, but the impact and effects are greater even after you have faced it. A lie implies that you and others are not worthy. A lie also implies that everyone else is stupid but you, ‘I can say anything and you will believe it,’ and that ‘everyone plays a fool ALL the time.’ When you lie to or on someone, you are basically calling them an ‘ASS.’

Your engagement in perpetuating lies is often evidence of you looking on the outside to fix the inside, not recognizing that the truth you have been avoiding and many times the truth that you have been seeking for so long, exists within you, and not on the outside of you. Your lies are further indication of you running away from something or someone, and on some occasions, you running toward something or someone, desperately trying to find that piece of you that seems lost.

Your lies are also indication of you making attempts to deal with your brokenness. However, in all actuality, the lies in which you seek solace for your brokenness, pain, and lost state of being, often exacerbates the raw emotion for which you are trying to cover and escape. It is at this time that you can begin to weigh the benefits of how much better you will begin to feel, once again begin to breathe, find relief, and move forward in your life by seeking and confronting the truths needed to really heal and end your brokenness. 

The problem with walking in truth and living in truth is you first must take the time to define truth. However, you cannot define truth based on your biases of the truth. The true definition of truth must be based on your life’s reality, as well as the reality around you and in which you exist. Further, when defining truth, it is important to decide whose truth is it? Is it the truth based on your reality, or truth based on someone else’s REALITY?

One thing you must remember, no matter how many lies you tell and no matter what measures you undertake to cover your lies, eventually, the he truth will be uncovered and truth reigns! There is no such thing as ‘a little white lie!’ A lie is a lie, is a lie, no matter who tells it, when it is told, where it is told, or how it is told, and lies should never be minimized.

Don’t dismay; you can and will recover from a lie and from being a liar. In order to recover, you must engage in a process of discovery or rediscovery. You must discover or rediscover who you are. Talk with family members and friends to unveil the truths you have evaded and buried deep within. Get with a mental health professional or life coach in order for you to begin to sort out, gain insight, and understanding as to your reasons for your lying, including who and what you were running away from or running to. You must also be willing to ask for forgiveness from those people you have hurt with your lies. However, the main person you have to forgive is yourself!

Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today…here is your opportunity to remove yourself from the clouds of lies, into the sunshine of TRUTH! It is time for you to abandon a life of lies and the bondage associated with it, as you embrace truth’s freedom, recognizing the gain associated with truth, instead of living in the pain associated with lies.  No matter what happens, truth reigns!! 

©2015; J. Morley Productions, Inc. P.O. Box 1745, Decatur, GA, 30031; www.doctorjoyce.com; 770-808-6570

Winning the Fight for Life: Not Succumbing to Death

Your cries seem to get louder each and every day...cries of desperation and cries of frustration. The lives of children are being threatened at school on a daily basis, as well as on the streets of our communities, women, men, and children are trying to comprehend and gain understanding of what and why are we seemingly facing loss of life on a daily basis in mass proportion, rather than promoting life. Diseases, emotional instability, lack of direction, and destruction of self and others seem to be the norm, rather than the exception.

 

The past few years have been difficult times for many of you and your family members. Each and every day you have been faced with one major catastrophe after another within our country. Sadly, many of these catastrophes are related to multiple losses of lives due to gun violence. President Barack Obama has had to appear before the nation and the world at least sixteen (16) times during his seven-year tenure, with the same cries of desperation, exasperation, frustration, and seeming sense of helplessness about the continuous acts of gun violence in our country.

October is breast cancer awareness month, as well as domestic violence awareness month. I know as you are reading this blog, you can think of more than one relative, friend, co-worker, or even yourself, who has had to face breast cancer and/or domestic violence. In all actuality, either of these experiences can serve as killers of women. Each and everyday, too many women are faced with breast cancer and many more are faced with domestic violence. In essence, women are fighting for their lives. However, those women facing breast cancer or those women who have survived breast cancer are in a daily battle of winning their fight for life. They didn’t cause their unfortunate experience and cannot control it. Women facing domestic violence, in many cases cannot control and did not ask for the violence acted upon them. They, too, are fighting on a daily basis for life and not death.

Sadly, as women fight to win life over death when it comes to breast cancer and domestic violence, our country is constantly thrown into a tailspin of controllable incidents of violence and death being raised up against them. Even though many of these incidents of violence and death do not directly impact these women, there is an indirect impact, which does add to their levels of stress and anxiety. After all, they are human. And when children and families are hurt, no matter where they are, the average woman is impacted and feels the pain.

There have been forty-five…yes 45-school shootings in our country in 2015. The mass shooing rate has tripled from one every two hundred (200) days, between September 1982 and September 2011, to one every sixty-four (64) days, between September 2011 and September 2014. Guns in America have killed over eight thousand (8,000) people in 2015 alone. There have been one hundred forty-two (142) school shootings since the Sandy Hooks shooting in 2012, with forty-five (45) school shootings in 2015,  (Harvard School of Public Health & Northeastern University Professors). 

It is past time in our society for us to demand that women, men, girls, and boys are given a chance at life. It is time for each of you to decide to become proactive by demanding that a cure for breast cancer is found, that women are made safe from domestic violence, and that gun control becomes the rule and not the exception.  Each of you must decide to do all in your power to demand that the political pundits begin to stand for something by demanding the lives of women, men, girls, boys, and families are protected! And that they stop falling for the same lame excuses as they have in the past!

As women are faced with breast cancer and domestic violence, they most certainly don’t need anything else to have to fight against. They are already in the fight of their life, for life! I implore each of you to support your mother, your wife, your sister, your aunt, your friend, and your co-worker, as she battles breast cancer and/or domestic violence. In that same vein, I implore you to demand more funds for treatment and a cure for breast cancer, support for survivors, treatment and help for domestic violence survivors, funds for mental health treatment, as well as legislation and funds for gun control.

The situation almost seems hopeless. However, I would like to encourage you to never lose your faith and never lose your hope.  I know that many of you have wondered, “When will it all end?” This is the million-dollar question, which no one seems to have an answer for.  The problem is not having an answer to the loss of lives due to guns, it’s having people in powerful positions, with money and control, who are so arrogant and haughty that they choose to not make the necessary changes for legislation to put forth gun control, which is the real issue related to gun violence in this country.

We ask why there is no cure for breast cancer with all the money that has been raised, why incidents of domestic violence have increased and become more deadly, and why gun violence has exacerbated? It’s all about the almighty dollar! If breast cancer is cured, domestic violence is all but eliminated, and there is gun control, those making money and getting rich from these deadly societal ills will drastically cut their earning potential. This is a topic no one really wants to talk about! Although they make money off of the deaths of women, men, children, and families in general, they never take time to look at the back of the money they receive, which simply states, “IN GOD WE TRUST.”

The statement, “IN GOD WE TRUST,” is a reminder as to whom we must turn to, in order to help us to find a cure and relief for ALL of these deadly issues, by helping us to win the fight for life, and not succumb to death.   When prayer was taken out of our schools and out of society in general, you began to see the downward spiral of lawlessness, ruthlessness, and an increase in violence and diseases. Where God doesn’t exist, pain and violence tend to exist. But, hold on; God is STILL in control!

You are probably asking, “What can I do?” Join Dr. Joyce on her campaign of “Winning the Fight for Life.” In this quest to win the fight for life, it is imperative that you become aware, informed, and active. Get with your neighbors, friends, family members, and colleagues to develop strategies to combat these major ills in our society. You must develop and engage in strategic conversations, as well as brave political movements of consciousness, awareness, and action to address these issues. You must also demand that politicians stop using mental health disorders as the primary excuse for gun violence, while recognizing that mental health disorders are real and must be treated as such. It is time to recognize that persons facing mental health disorders are not necessarily the catalyst for murders and violence. However, when guns are in the wrong hands, violence will occur, whether they have a mental disorder or not.

As you and your family weep for loved ones facing breast cancer and/or domestic violence, you shouldn’t have to add additional tears and weep for the loss of loved ones due to gun violence. Let’s affirm today that you will dry your tears, weep no more, continue to PRAY, keep looking up, and take a stand for life! You have decided today to join Dr. Joyce in “Winning the Fight for Life, By Not Succumbing to Death!”   

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

©2015; J.Morley Productions, Inc.; P.O. Box 1745, Decatur, GA 30031; www.doctorjoyce.com; 770-808-6570