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Jun
13
2017

Approval Seeking

Bev Pugh - Self Love

“No one is more or less important than anyone else.” ~Bev Pugh

When I was young and growing I had buck teeth, a flat chest, and grew overnight to be 5’5″. All of this happened at a very early age! I felt awkward and funny looking. I am sure I looked it! I began to develop ways of coping to handle my unpleasant feelings.

We all had times growing up when we experienced unpleasant feelings. Whether it was related to our bodies, relationships, expectations, or family dynamics.

I wonder what experiences you had and what your coping techniques were? We develop ways of managing our emotions. Positive habits are learned and negative habits are also adopted. The latter we want to extinguish as we get wiser.

Looking to others for validation and confirmation that we are okay can become a repetitive coping technique for dealing with our emotions. We have all experienced the feeling of wanting other people’s approval. For some of us, it can become a way of life. This we don’t want.

When we are approval seeking we are looking for a need within us to be met, and we are going outside of ourselves to have that need met. If we continue to look to others for love and affirmation, we lose the opportunity of developing a strong friendship with ourselves.

Approval seeking can be a way of dealing with a belief that we are not good enough in some way… so we give ourselves away to other people’s approval, with the hope of feeling important or loved or good enough.

When we are approval seeking several things happen:

1. We loose our personal power and give it to the other person.
2. We get out of touch with what we really think and feel.
3. We miss so many opportunities to love ourselves unconditionally because our focus is on others rather than on ourselves.
4. We can abuse ourselves because we are not honouring what we need.
5. We loose confidence.
6. We can loose our vitality.
7. We don’t develop a real friendship with ourselves.

This gives us so many reasons to start immediately noticing in our lives when we are seeking attention or approval from others, and call ourselves on it immediately.

But how do we turn all of this around?

The most important thing to remember is that we all have the innate capacity to love. As you are reading this, feel the love and warmth in your heart for someone you really love. It’s a beautiful open-hearted warm feeling. It’s a matter of turning that warm loving feeling to yourself and allowing yourself to receive it.

Somewhere in our history we began to judge ourselves for being “less than” in some way. Remember that judgment is a mental concept. It’s not the truth. We all have beautiful intrinsic value. But our judgement of ourselves keeps us from having that unconditional friendship.

Self acceptance and self love are the antidotes for approval seeking.

There are many ways to build our relationship with ourselves. The one I often relate to is feeling the love I have for family and nature, and then turning that beautiful love inwards to myself and allowing myself to receive it without blocking it with thought. Keep repeating this and let yourself soak it in.

I would really chase this theme of approval seeking. It keeps us “little” when the truth is we are really “big” and we need to let ourselves expand, rather than stay contracted in patterns that don’t serve us.

Enjoy developing a true friendship with yourself!!!

Tags: approval, Bev Pugh, coping, emotions, feeling, focus, friendship, good enough, habit, judgement, love, power, seeking, validation
Posted in awareness, holding power, Love, managing emotions, Relationships, Self Growth | 6 Comments »

Jan
09
2017

2017 – My New Years Gift to YOU

bear humour

One Bear to another Bear: “His name is Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a singe parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behaviour is shame based and codependent and he urges me to let my inner cub heal… I say we eat him.”
~ A cartoon I enjoyed while working in Japan. I love learning through laughter!!

Happy New Year everyone! I like the opportunity to start a New Year because it gives me the chance to do a personal review and reassess my accountability to myself. It’s like someone has blown a whistle and said “time out”, so I take some time to reflect.

I’d like to share one of my all time favourite quotes. I have carried this around with me for many years. Here it is:

“To know and not to do…is not yet to know.” ~ A Zen Saying

The quote reminds me that I already ‘know’ (on some level) and it challenges me to move into more integrity with myself. It is a humbling statement of wisdom.

This quote is a great navigational tool. Professionally and personally I have been described as having a good deal of wisdom, but I can do really dumb things. We all can. We forget what we know. The number of times in counselling sessions when I have heard people say “I know. I know.”, but their behaviour is different than what they know. I include myself in this. Our habits of reacting are strong. To erase them or weaken them, we have to be strong in our commitment to ourselves.

What I really love about this quote is it brings us to the truth of what is going on. We can all talk a good line, but are we living it? For me this quote asks me to review what I know is ‘right’ for me, and that takes me to a place of self inquiry. By self inquiry I mean I ask myself, “Bev, how are you really doing?”

As I respond to this self inquiry, I first let go of any blame I am carrying toward other people. All finger pointing is not where truth lies. I also step away from blaming circumstances or situations for any distress I feel. These are all not core issues. As you have heard me say in newsletters before, I am passionate about true self growth, not band aid approaches.

Band aids keep us in the same cycles, but give us temporary relief.

The core to self growth is to stay focused on yourself; to move into the area of self “response…ability”. It starts and ends with us – our thinking, our perceptions, our values, our clarity, and our willingness to take ourselves on.

2017 is about our commitment to ourselves. Remember: “To know and not to do… is not yet to know.”

What do you want to dig deeper and uproot this year?

Happy New Year everyone!

Tags: Beverley Pugh, blame, challenge, change, commitment, habit, inspiration, integrity, self-growth, truth, wisdom
Posted in change, Self Growth | 2 Comments »

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Beverley Pugh

Beverley Pugh

Beverley Pugh has international experience in Individual, Marital and Family Therapist services. Areas of practice include counselling in: individual, couples, family, anxiety, addictions, grief, depression, pain management, multicultural, workplace and others.

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Mastery Practice Tool

New Years Wisdom Exercise

Are you doing what you really ‘know’? For many of us we know, but we are not practicing what we know. Repetition of what we know is key. It is repetition that keeps our momentum going. So which habits do you want to strengthen? And which habits do you want to erase? Change is about developing new repetitive ways of choosing and acting that support you... this leads to consistency.

Take some time to be clear with yourself as to what are the repetitive thoughts, perspectives, and actions you would like to keep practicing that will take you to a more elevated place of living your life. The key to change is clarity of what we want, and then practice and repetition. Remember the word "response...ability". Spelling it this way brings us to a place of owning our own stuff. From this place we can all move forward.

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My daughter, Trinity, attended her first Children’s Empowerment Workshop and she loved it! It has helped her deal with some of the real anxieties that all children go through - from the not so nice kid at school, to the imagination that runs away with her at night time, when we are getting ready for bed.

She practices her rooting and the different breathing techniques that she has learned, and has become stronger and more confident in dealing with different situations.

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About Beverley

Beverley Pugh has international experience in Individual, Marital and Family Therapist services. Areas of practice include counselling in: individual, couples, family, anxiety, addictions, grief, depression, pain management, multicultural, workplace and others.

Contact

Telephone:
604-925-1513
Email:
bev@beverleypugh.com
Location:
120-1451 Marine Drive
West Vancouver, BC
V7T 1B8
Canada

Disclaimer: The information presented on this site about various psychological conditions, is of a general nature and is not a substitute for an assessment by a competent therapist and/or medical professional. If you believe that you or an important person in your life is in need of an intervention please seek qualified help as soon as possible.

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