In a prior blog, I talked about embracing all sides of you and balancing them.

In this blog, I am going to give you some tools to embody this concept.

Last week I talked about embracing all sides of you and balancing them.

This week I am going to give you some tools to embody this concept.

Grab a pen and paper and let's get journalling.

I want you to think about when life has gone really well. When things were smooth sailing, and you felt at your best. Most of us attribute this to circumstances or age, but it's not. Life just was how you liked it. Your dark side was happy and in balance.

You were doing the things that made you feel good. What were those? Write this down and try to be as specific as possible.

Now think of when life was not so great. What were the circumstances? What about that time was so awful? What did you do to get through that time? Were you using a crutch as a distraction? (Drugging behavior= Food, shopping, gossiping, controlling, shutting down, pretending it was fine, etc.) Write this down and be as specific as possible.

Now I want you to think of this cool study done with rats. They put rats in a cage and offered the rats a dopamine-inducing drug. This drug was similar to highly addictive street drugs. The rats constantly went and pushed the lever to get this drug just like a drug addict.

They then moved the rats to a super fabulous cage with all these toys, mazes, wheels, and all the things rats love to play with. They left the drug there too. They found that when rats lived in a rat park, they didn't use the drugs. They had the option to, but they were too busy playing in the rat park.

We are no different.

When we live in a way that feels like a rat park, it is so much easier to be in balance and not drug ourselves. When we live in a ("SHOULD") cage, we do all sorts of drugging and are easily pulled out of balance.

Look at what you wrote when you were the most unbalanced. How many “shoulds” do you have that are unquestioned?

Did you know you can create the equivalent of a rat park life for yourself? I know, I know, you probably say, "Yeah right. Easy for you to say!".
And I agree, most of us live in a mind-trap with limiting beliefs and shoulds. And most of us don't even know what we want.

So then, how do you create a rat park life when you don't know what you want, or what you don't want?

Well, you can't, but if you do the journaling exercises above, you will get an idea of what brings you joy.

When you can incorporate more joy in your life your dark side stands down. It is easier to be in balance when you don't have to work so hard against your dark side. (Remember, your dark side is actually the part of you that thinks it is taking care of you and rears its head when you are unbalanced.)

When you begin to know what your individual joys are, then you can create your own rat park. To do this write, your joys, your dislikes, your “shoulds”, and question all of it. It will take courage to move towards joy, but remember, it’s possible. I’ve seen every one of my clients do this eventually. It can be done.