The Powerful Secret Your Mother Never Told You

Power. Say that word out loud. Roll it around in your mouth. How does it feel? Does it excite you? Or do you feel the "OW" in the middle?

Successful people know how to express personal power on a fairly consistent basis. Yet for most of us, we fear power because we are at the mercy of someone else's power. This isn't surprising: As children, we learned to submit to other people's rules. We were told to eat food that we didn't like, to follow a schedule not our own, and to override our individual sense of inner knowing and self-determination. As children, our compliance was a matter of survival. We may even have forgotten how to hold on to personal power because giving it away was so automatic.

It is easy to find examples of giving away your power. Not speaking up when someone tells an offensive joke; not offering to lead a group at work or in the community; not voting; not expressing your preferences in your family. Finding your power means listening to the inner voice that longs for freedom and light.

The current "Us against THEM" mindset, like a revolt that demands to be heard, is what some people consider "taking Power." Yet fighting against something without vision or understanding is something else. Personal power does not mean aggression. David Hawkins makes a clear distinction in his book "Power vs. Force," page 132:

"Because force automatically creates counter-force, its effect is limited by definition. We could say that force is a movement-it goes from here to there (or tries to) against opposition. Power, on the other hand, is still. It's like a standing field that doesn't move. Gravity itself, for instance, doesn't move against anything. Its power moves all objects within its field, but the gravity field itself does not move.

"Force always moves against something, whereas power doesn't move against anything at all. Force is incomplete and therefore has to be fed energy constantly. Power is total and complete in itself and requires nothing from outside. It makes no demands; it has no needs."

To live in the world as a fully expressed human being requires personal power. You grow your personal power when you listen to the voice of clarity, freedom and love within you. Power comes from setting deliberate boundaries and eliminating unconscious limitations.

INCREASING YOUR PERSONAL POWER

Practicing each of the following steps will increase your power:

Open your heart to your dreams. Dare to picture what you REALLY want (whether you know how to get it or not). Your inner voice may have been smothered by years of neglect. It takes belief in your ability to dream to reawaken the authentic YOU.

Imagine that all you want already exists. After all, the picture in your mind is the first step of actual creation. Because you can see it, you can believe it, and with belief, you can create it. Every great invention, every successful company, every piece of art, began with a thought. If you can see it and hear it and feel it in your imagination, you can create it.

Be grateful for your life as it is today. If you focus on what you don't have, you focus on lack. You surround yourself with the sense that everything is scarce. You become unhappy and often beat yourself up for being in a "predicament." When you are grateful for what you have, you can sense the fullness of life in its giving you so very many wonderful things.

Accept everything that happens as a gift that moves you forward. Become an inverse paranoid. No matter how things look in the moment, believe that the world conspires to make you successful. Losing a job may open you to get a much better job, or to go back to school or start a business. Traffic jams saved some people's lives on Sept 11, 2001 because they did not get to work on time.

Set boundaries to define your values. Continue to gain clarity on what is important to you. Set your priorities around your clarity. Expect excellence-and expect that your vision is supported by others. Think BIG. Sequential thinking is small. For quantum growth, you must be willing to think out 5 to 10 years and see a massive organization. Once this goal resonates with you, the steps to get there will become clearer.

Listen and feel the resonance of YES. Success feels GOOD! If you find yourself miserable, overwhelmed and unhappy, you have fallen into an old pattern of giving up your power. Why is that? Well, if you don't have power, you can blame someone else for the problem. The trouble is that you have to acknowledge responsibility for your life. What we don't see when we take the easy way out is that we allow all our power to leak away, like water through a sieve.

With these attitudes, you can expand your personal power. Read about great leaders, volunteer for leadership roles, do every task with excellence. Before long you will find many goals magically showing up. Behind every successful human is a vivid dream whispering "yes..." Be willing to step up, over and over again. The path you really want is at the top of the heap. Keep stepping up.

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Becoming Your Mother's Mom

It's hard to have a parent with dementia. Not just for the obvious reasons -- the dementia. However, the other really big difficulty is the change in relationship.

Dementia takes away a number of very important abilities. That's exactly why the many dementing illnesses, of which Alzheimer's is only one, are so hard for families.

As adults, we make our own decisions. We plan. We follow through. We pay bills. We shop. We keep doctor's appointments. We drive to our friend's house for dinner. We live our life. At some point in the course of dementia, all of that will be stripped away.

The stripping usually begins item by item. Each step of that process poses a new dilemma for you. When do you take over each part of your Mom's life? How do you know if it's too soon? How do you know what you should do? When do you become boss?

For the outside person, a professional caregiver like me, it's much easier. So you could always start by asking yourself a few vital questions that we outsiders would ask.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself:
1. Is Mom safe in all she does?
2. Is she eating, drinking, bathing and dressing adequately?
3. Should she be driving?
4. Does she take her medicines properly?
5. Is she safe in the kitchen?

If you can't answer a resounding YES to all these, you do have a problem. Or rather, you have a dementia trend which results in problems, some of them very dangerous. Time to intervene.

Usually, already when families have the question -- when should we intervene with Mom? -- the answer is already "Now"! Family members are asking the question because they have already noticed signs of things not being okay.

It's always helpful to list the issues. The things you've noticed, the signs of decline, the factors that worry you. Run my Alzheimer's test: see what fresh foods are in the refrigerator, run your finger along the stove and see if there's the dust of an unused appliance, check washing machine and dryer to look for signs of
laundry in process, ask Mom what she did yesterday, sneak a look at her mail for unpaid bills and too much junk mail.

I know this sounds underhand, and it is, but for a very good reason. You want to know if your Mom needs help and she won't admit it. Two reasons: one is she doesn't remember the chaos her life is descending into and two is that she's too afraid to tell you.

Five Things Your Mom Hides:
1. That she can't manage;
2. That she's very frightened;
3. That she's confused;
4. That she can't remember;
5. That she's not willing tell you her needs.

She's in a very difficult stage of her life. She's a responsible adult who can't be that any more. So now she's a responsible adult with childlike fears and adolescent attitudes. That's why your relationship is getting complicated.

You are now the boss of her. But you must not boss her. You must support, nurture, protect and tiptoe forward subtly to pick up her slack with tact and kindness. Do not turn anything into a battle. You will both lose and it will be emotionally wrenching.

Five Things to Do Right now:
1. Bring meals over (or have them delivered);
2. Organize help with the housekeeping;
3. Dementia-proof her environment;
4. Call a family council;
5. Make a family plan.

Be kind to your Mom. That's the only way she'll trust you.

Frena Gray-Davidson is a longterm Alzheimer's caregiver and her latest book is "Alzheimer's 911: Hope, Help and Healing for Caregivers", available from http://www.amazon.com. Go to her website at http://www.alzguide.com/ and sign up for her free monthly email newsletter for caregivers.

I'm Not My Mother

The more we say this statement of not being our mother, the more we act just like her. Maybe there is something on the inside of us that has recorded everything about our mothers (those who were fortunate enough to be around her and study her) that we have become her in so many ways!

The only way we know that we have adapted her ways both good and bad is when someone tells us, "You act just like your mother." Now sometimes this person may be confused between looking like mother and acting like her. Just because we might look like her doesn't mean we act like her and for some mothers, who didn't necessarily like their mother, this can be irritating. I have personally been told I not only act like my mother, but look like her too. When I think of some of the things I have had to deal with over the years I can appreciate some of her mannerisms I inherited due to her genes, but my strength I achieved on my own. My life experiences created me into the woman I now am and when someone wants to give your mother that credit when it really should go to you, don't allow them to get away with it!

Our mothers were responsible for providing us with the foundation to help us learn how to problem solve, survive, love, and nurture others. But if she failed to accomplish that with us, we had to find it in someone else. This is why some mothers are still angry at their mothers even after they have long been buried. Why didn't she prepare her daughter like she should? Why wasn't she there when she needed her most? It would be selfish and foolish to assume that all mothers have a great relationship with their mother, because they don't.

A mother who has been left on the side of the road of life by her own mother has alot to cry about and as her sister we must embrace her, but we can't erase her pain! When she is rolling her eyes, yelling at the children, or huddled in a corner crying because of her mother, she is also angry at herself for what she doesn't know, for what she refuses to face, or for the unresolved issues she has about her own mother while the world tells her, "You look just like your mother. You act just like your mother!" For her, it isn't a compliment. You will be able to detect who some of these mothers are who have these cries for their mothers when she can't look you in the eye and say, "Thank you."

She is a motherless child. A mother who is expected to love her own children even in the midst of her own personal struggles with the woman who looks just like her mother in the mirror.