By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7)
I was watching the movie Iron Lady today and a few lines of the character Margaret Thatcher jumped out at me and made me think of that verse above from the Bible. Here are the lines from Mrs. Thatcher, as she was speaking with her physician.
Watch your thoughts
for they become words,
Watch your words
for they become your actions,
Watch your actions
For they become your habits
Watch your habits
for they become your character
Watch your character
for it becomes your destinyWhat we think we become.
How many times do we prove those words, originally attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, to be true? How many times do our “self-fulfilling prophecies” become reality because we thought something bad was going to happen. Or we thought we were going to fail, and we failed.
Attitude is so important in how our lives go. How we think is instrumental in what we can accomplish, or fail to accomplish.
The balky mule
I may have told this story before, and if I have, please forgive me, but it bears repeating. My grandfather was very poor during the Depression and he had to buy mules that others either couldn’t handle, because they were dangerous or in some way impaired, but they were cheap to purchase. My grandfather was sort of a “mule whisperer,” and could “psych-out” these mules and get them to work for him.
He bought one mare mule that would “balk,” which was refusing to pull. My grandfather knew why horses or mules would “balk;” it was from poor training. They were hooked up to loads that were too heavy to pull, and then when they tried their best, they couldn’t do it. The trainer would whip them even though they were doing their best, and they would fail to move the load. They were convinced that they could not pull any load, so would not even try. They would “balk” (not try), and then just stand there and take the whipping they knew was coming. It was “trained failure.” They knew in their hearts that they could not pull the load, so they gave up.
This particular mare mule only balked at the foot of a hill, so my grandfather figured that she had been whipped because she was hooked to a load she could pull on the level, but not up a hill. So as they traveled along the first day when they approached the bottom of a hill where he figured she would stop and balk, he said “Whoa!” and stopped her before she stopped herself. Then he got out, whistling and happy, petted her on the neck, adjusted the harness a bit and then got back into the wagon and said, “get up” and she did. She never balked again. He had shown her that she didn’t have to take a whipping and that she could pull the wagon up the hill because he would not over load her. It was his idea to stop, not hers.
If you think you can, or think you can’t
Our own attitudes about what we can pull in the way of a “load” are partly determined (if not fully determined) by our own attitudes.
As the Bible says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” If we think we are weak and unimportant, then we become that. If we think we are strong and can over come obstacles, leap tall buildings with a single bound and be faster than a speeding bullet, then we can be.
We all find ourselves thinking “negative thoughts” once in a while, feeling down, and telling ourselves we are going to fail. When you find yourself thinking those thoughts, scream to yourself, “STOP!” Then reverse that thinking, and think “I CAN overcome this problem. I can succeed. I WILL succeed.” Then go out and do it!
God bless.
Skylar…..I triple “like” your response.
Hens, the fact that this guy is a Marine would give me pause, on every level. This is NOT to say that “all Marines are nuts,” because that simply isn’t true. But, it’s a known fact that this branch of the military dehumanizes the recruits and rebuilds them into cannon fodder. Commissioned Officers are often so much swagger that I can’t really abide them for more than a few minutes.
Caution, Hens…….caution…….
yes I have to be cautious, but as I said he is only here a few weeks out of the year…
the lady’s sister agree’s with me that he’s an asshole.
if he was mistreating the lady in anyway I wouldnt hesitate to bring him down, job or no job..
I have never seen any sign of that.
thanx to all of you for listening to my drama..hugs
Thanks Truthspeak, for triple “liking” my response. 🙂
Hens, what I have learned about disordered people is that even though they may deserve “punishment” sometimes, it hurts us more than it hurts them to do the punishing. They want violence because it brings us to their level. They want drama.
The only way to truly punish them is to not give them any drama, instead, give them rope and let them hang themselves.
If he is a spath, he will predictably try to isolate the victim. When he thinks she is done for, he will drop the mask. That’s when you can ride to the rescue. Until then, he holds the cards because she WANTS to believe in what he tells her.
It makes me sick to know there are so many people who use these tactics and manipulations as part of their lifestyle. They are heartless.
My spath did that to me. I was lucky that, even though he had isolated me, there were still people – even strangers – who came to my rescue. But only people he had no knowledge of. EVERYONE who knew both of us, abandoned me. He had that much power to persuade. I have no idea what he persuaded them of. All I know is that if he couldn’t persuade them to hate me, they were removed from my life somehow.
Skylar, the more attention I’m paying to the people around me, the more I find that I’m detaching from them, completely.
I don’t want a confrontation with anyone, not even the exspath. I just want to put my life back together.
Pfffffffffffffffffffffffft………(waving left hand)…..it will go as it goes.
sky, your right, give em enuff rope…
the lady did say something tho ” I just love J but if we were married we wouldnt like each other at all ”
I am not the least bit jealous of him, I am glad she has a BF and I am glad he has her.
but he messed with me – his mistake..
Truth and Hens,
last night I watched “Batman, The Dark Knight”.
I don’t know if I had watched it before, I’ve found that most movies I watched with the spath, are completely erased from my mind, for some reason.
Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was how much the Joker reminded me of my spath. Even some of the ways he would talk, when he was explaining WHY he was doing things.
It was particularly interesting how the Joker wanted to make the “good” characters do bad things. He placed bombs on 2 ferries filled with people. The detonators for those bombs, he placed on the ferries too, but he placed each detonator on the OTHER ferry. Then he told them the people that they could only save themselves by blowing up the other ferry.
There were various other instances of him goading people to BECOME LIKE HIM. He says good people are only good as long as the world allows them to be good, but when push comes to shove, they will turn on each other.
I disagree. I think bad people only behave “good” as long as there is someone watching them. Good people are good regardless. Good people will sacrifice themselves so that others don’t need to suffer.
I no longer think that’s a good thing –necessarily– to sacrifice for others, but I do think it’s good to WANT to.
Anyway, I think that the movie did a pretty good job with the character and motivations of a spath. The joker even said that he didn’t want money, he only wanted chaos. After he got all the money he burned a 40 foot pile of it. My spath threw a $1000 out the window (or so he told me) just to see the look on my face.
The joker (and my spath) wanted randomness so that people would feel that life wasn’t fair. Then people would have no motive to behave fairly towards others.
Once you get how they think, it’s pretty clear what we need to do. Spaths do serve a purpose: as an example of how not to be.
Use the 180 rule and do exactly the opposite of what they want us to do.
the dark knight, dark night..they do have a darkness about them. no contact is the exact opposite of what they want from us. I remember batman and robin movies when I was a kid. look how violent and sadistic they have become now. I wanted to take my grandson’s to see the latest spiderman movie and my dil said ” they dont need to see that” I always thot she was a little to rigid about what the boys could watch but I respect her more all the time…
yes hens, dil understands, I think. good job raising a son with good intuition.
The movie was much too dark for me, but I rented it expressly so I could analyze the Joker. I had heard that his spath performance was spot on.
Sky,
Yup, Heath Ledger was spot on in that role of his as the Joker. What I found incredibly interesting was his spiel on how he got to be who he is… a different story each time, depending on who he’s talking to. Sometimes to evoke pity, sometimes to instill fear, always a different mask, and by showing that the script goes beyond this trap of ‘explaining why the villain is a villain’.
Usually, superhero movies and comics involve some explanation why the villain becomes a villain: fell into a bath of acid and his or her face is deformed (Nicholson’s Joker in the batman of the 90s); wife was killed in some science freak experiment (2nd spiderman movie?)… But these explanations has the premisse that everyone is good and will go stark crazy with revenge and off massacring people in devious planned ways. Now those ‘rational explanations’ for the most unreasonable and senseless behaviour don’t make any sense to me anymore.
Heath Ledger’s Joker tries to play that spiel, but since we as viewers see him give a different talk every time, you know it’s HIM, not some pitiful misfortune. That is one of the strong points about the movie, which for me is an adult movie.
Oxy,
Out of curiosity I decided to read something that was posted before I started coming to lovefraud.Amazingly I came upon your article about “How Our Thoughts Affect Our Lives.” EXCELLENT as are all of your articles!This one was “Spot-on” with what my counselor and I were talking about today!We were actually discussing what I’ve learned from what I’ve read thus far in the book “Self-Compassion” by Kristin Neff PH.D.Because we do learn the ways to live and make decisions from childhood,it becomes necessary to talk to ourselves(atleast mentally!)to change some things.Just as your grandfather “whispered” to mules.As for balking-it could have cost me my life!
The book I mentioned above shows that we need to be kind to ourselves.Everyone needs hugs,consoling touch.Hopefully we have lots of supportive friends.But if not,we can still (in private) talk kindly and consolingly to ourselves,stroke our face or arm gently;even hug ourselves.