A Love For All Time Audiobook

MEN DATING MUCH YOUNGER WOMEN, Part 2: How to compete

A Love For All Time Audiobook Strategies an older woman could employ to acquire the qualities that men are attracted to in women much younger to successfully compete in the dating scene

SERIES OVERVIEW

Long-term committed relationships between an older man and a much younger woman are nothing new but, while not really common, these relationships are more prevalent that one might think.

By and large, no one wants to discuss these relationships because older women in general are vehemently antagonistic toward them and to many they are absolute anathema. People talk about them behind their hands and the media deals with them in its usual rather cursory and superficial way. Unfortunately, this has led to no one taking a definitive look at the characteristics of the people involved or the interpersonal dynamics.

Part 1 of this series looks at nine reasons that the men in such relationships consistently cite for having chosen the women that they did.

Part 2 explores what an older woman who wanted to be competitive in today's dating market can do to acquire some or all of those characteristics.

Part 3 will look at the types of the men who actually can attract and bond with a much younger woman.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have defined the break between younger and older women as occurring at or around the forty-year point. There is a rationale for choosing forty years of age as a dividing point. Women over forty are frequently described as "the invisible women". It is a painfully appropriate descriptor. When the average woman over forty walks into a room, it is not simply that the men there are not generally drawn to her, it is that they are by and large only superficially aware that she is there. She is, for all practical intents and purposes, largely invisible socially to the emotionally available men present.

It should also be noted that not all older or younger women are "created equal". When I speak of older women or younger, those descriptions are generic ones. Many young women are eighty when they are in their twenties. A rare few older women are youthful well into their sixties and perhaps beyond. Unfortunately, many people tend to be more charitable in their self-assessments of where they fall in these matters than reality would support.

Part 1: THE MYTHS AND THE REASONS

Why are men attracted to younger women?
The attraction that older men feel toward younger women is not based solely on what the popular myths would suggest. Yes, looks and youth do play a part, but a much smaller one than society is willing to concede. Instead, younger women in these scenarios tend to exhibit specific qualities that men have cited over and over when explaining why they chose to form a long-term committed relationship with women who were much younger than themselves. Go to Part 1 >>

Part 2: HOW TO COMPETE

What can an older woman do
to successfully compete in the dating scene?
Dating is a competitive endeavor. If you want to succeed, you have to position yourself to win. You have to polish your assets and hone your skills. Above all else, you have to have a winner's attitude. You do not win by bemoaning the rules. You win by accepting reality, understanding the rules of the game you are in and optimizing your own skills to succeed within that framework. You also win by understanding what your competition's assets are.

Some women over forty can offer a perspective mate things that most twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings cannot bring to the table. If she can add any of the nine qualities listed in Part 1 of this series, she will be ahead. If she can add most of them, she will have a significant advantage over almost all of her contemporaries as well as many of those significantly younger.

Hopefully, the strategies and information in this article will help women forty and up who are struggling to compete in today's dating scene develop the qualities necessary to win and make them part of a newer, better version of who they are. In actuality, these same strategies and insights will help almost anyone, irrespective of age or gender, to be happier, more competitive and more successful when dating.

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION, HOW ONE VIEWS IT, OFTEN DETERMINES THE OUTCOME

To survive and flourish, companies must reinvent themselves as they age. For the most part, companies are resistant to doing so. Still, old skills are seldom good enough, old assets have generally been severely devalued and deferred maintenance and corporate complacency has allowed what remains to deteriorate badly.

It is much the same with people. The average man or woman forty and beyond has rather let themselves run to seed. If they are content to just fade away over time, then they need do nothing. However if they are single and want a real life with someone else, they must transform themselves. As you get older, transforming yourself is undeniably harder. Unfortunately, those who do not want to be alone have no other option, for they face competition from both their contemporaries and those younger than themselves.

Learn to embrace the transformation process, to free yourself of things that are getting in the way of your happiness and that are limiting your outcomes.

The insights and strategies that follow are sequenced in the order that I have observed works best for my clients. In most instances, tackling certain issues and strategies before others seems to make progress with those that follow both faster and easier.

GETTING YOUR LIFE IN ORDER

One of the first things that you need to do to affect real change in your life is to get rid of things, circumstances, situations and people that are draining your time, money, energy and emotional vitality.

Your Actual Home Spend a week or even two getting rid of all the useless stuff that we all hang on to.

If you have stuff stored in a storage facility, your basement, your garage, attic or a friend's barn, and you have not done anything with the stuff in the last three years, get rid of it. The room you free up will either give you somewhere to put some of the clutter from your home or allow you to get rid of the storage space freeing up income.

Go through your closets and drawers and throw away anything that you have not worn in the last two years (unless you have avoided using it because it was too daring, too young, too fancy or too small). Give the stuff to a friend who needs it, donate it to a charity or just throw it in the trash and forget it.

Do the same with any books you never look at anymore, any recordings you never listen to anymore, anything that is not you, but you are holding on to it simply because you feel you should. Put this stuff in the nearest dumpster and never look back. It has been cluttering up your mind and your life.

The People In Your Life Sit down and list each person that you spend more than three minutes a day with. Make one of these lists for each day of the week. Next, sit down and do a list of all of the people that you socialize with, whether it is on the Internet, over the phone or in person. Do the list numerically on lined paper: one name per line.

Now go through each of the lists above and rate each person for how supportive they have been whenever you tried to do something to improve your life. Rate them S1 to S5 (from S1 for "not supportive" to S5 for "very supportive"). Go through the list again and rate each person for how negative they are. Rate them N1 to N5 ( N1 = very positive person, N3 = person who is neither particularly positive nor negative, N5 = very negative person). Go through the lists one last time and rate each person on the list assigning a number for how many active or interesting people they know. A typical entry will probably wind up looking something like this:
Joe Smoe, S2, N3, 8
Why are you doing all of this? Because negative, unsupportive people will drag you down, hampering all efforts you make to transform yourself into a happier, healthier, more involved person.

Go through the list you have made, write the names of anyone with a N4 or N5 on a list. These are people you need to phase out of your life as quickly as humanly possible. They will sabotage your efforts to improve your life in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways. Avoid talking to them like you would avoid a root canal.

Make a list of people who scored S3 to S5. These are people worth spending extra time with. So too with anyone who scored higher than 5 on the scale where you rated people by how many interesting people they know. These people and their friends will help you break out of your rut.

Irritants Over the next couple of weeks, make a list of everything that you are frustrated by or that irritates you.

Dry Cleaner does a horrible job or charges too much? Write it down. Your door bell is broken? Write it down. Handle loose on your oven? Write it down. Cannot find a decent vet? Write it down. Once you have a list of five to ten things that irritate or frustrate you, take action. Prioritize it by how much frustration or irritation each item causes. Now be pro-active. None of these situations is going away by itself. Take the first priority item and kill it dead... use research, ask friends, go on message boards... do whatever it takes to find a solution and solve it. Life's little aggravations add up to one immense energy drain. You are going to need that energy for more important stuff.

The Ultimate Useless Time Drain How would you respond if I said I was going to deprive you of 20% of your life? The average adult female in the U.S. watches 34 hours per week of television. That is 20% of your life spent watching television.

Think how much better off you would be if you invested 34 hours per week in your own life. Thirty-four hours a week is more than enough time to go to a gym, to take that night class that you have been procrastinating about, to go on that weekend trip. It is enough time to go to college.

Moreover, there is a steadily growing body of research that shows that TV makes people stupid. A great deal of research has shown that over a decade there is a significant drop in a person's measured IQ if they watch a lot of TV. In a an article on September 29, 1987, The New York Times noted:
"... in 1966-67, of the approximately 1.4 million students who took the verbal portion of the S.A.T. a score of 700 or higher was attained by more than 33, 000 students. In 1986-87, over 1.8 million students took the test, and a score of 700 or higher was attained by fewer than 14, 000"
Guess what happened between 1967 and 1987? Television became the prime time leisure activity of millions of young people.

Watching broadcast television is like flirting with a vampire. You are not going to gain anything and it will drain all vitality and life from you. Ask yourself, is your life measurably better from watching 3-5 hours of television daily?

What is worse, television fosters a very subtle, all pervasive, insidious detachment from reality. The next time you watch a program, ask yourself if anyone you know working the kind of job that a lead character on the show supposedly has would have the car, home, furniture, etc., that the character on TV does. Ask yourself whether the cute young woman in that sitcom actually would ever meet the kind of people she does on the show, if she held that same job in real life. Everything on broadcast television represents a distortion of real life.

Everyone knows this, right? Well, actually no. The problem is that this is like a very subtle form of brainwashing. People see these highly fictionalized and very distorted snapshots of other lives so much that they start to subconsciously take this for reality. Therein lies the problem. The world on television is not the real world. It is a fantasy world that all too frequently defines our real-life expectation set. We look for interpersonal situations that are stereotypical and simplistic. We expect problems to be solved quickly (in half hour - one hour show's time frame). We expect poor choices to have minimal consequences - after all on the programs we watch, you can get involved with drugs and be back on your feet fifty minutes later.

Stop watching so much TV. It encourages really unrealistic expectations. There is a real world out there. Start paying attention to how things work in that real world. There are real people out there. They are infinitely more interesting than the ones on television. Notice how they really behave, what they do, what their reactions to various situations are.

GETTING PHYSICALLY FIT

As noted in Part 1, getting physically fit will increase your self-esteem, help you seem and be more energetic, improve your health, give you a more positive mental and emotional outlook and make you more graceful. What is more, even modest improvements in your physical fitness will make acquiring the other eight qualities in this article significantly easier.

Being physically fit is not so much a matter of age as it is one of mindset. Becoming more physically fit does take exercising, but it also takes making better lifestyle choices, especially in the area of nutrition.

Nutrition For years there has been a rapidly mounting body of evidence that what America eats is killing us. Simply by changing what we eat and how we eat it, we can lose weight, gain strength and significantly raise mental acuity, alertness and our emotional sense of well-being.

Change the way you eat. Do you tend to eat a light breakfast, moderate lunches and massive dinners? Most Americans do. Europeans (especially Eastern Europeans), on the other hand, tend to eat heavier earlier in the day. That is one of the reasons they are thinner than we are. You do not need to stoke up on calorie-rich food in the evenings when your metabolism is slowing down. Also, several lighter meals are better than three heavy ones.

Change what you eat. Avoid all processed foods. Cut down on sweets, sugar and all sweeteners. Read ingredient labels and pick the food with less sugar. When you eat sugar, your body stores it as fat. Make a fanatical effort to avoid foods with corn sweeteners (fructose) in them. Avoid soft drinks with a passion. Drink water or juices instead, but beware of sugars or sugar substitutes added to juices. Beware of hidden sugar in all processed foods. A recent Huffington Post article in particular addressed the role of fructose (corn sweeteners) in health problems ranging from cardiac conditions to obesity and diabetes.

Read up on nutrition. Become conscious of what you eat. Be on the alert for all food additives. Many food additives that are routinely present in U.S. foods are illegal in Canada and Europe. For example, Potassium Bromate has been banned as a food additive in Canada, Europe - as well as in Sri Lanka, China, Nigeria, Brazil and Peru.

Veggies are good. Some meat, poultry and fish are necessary, but a diet of mostly high-fiber vegetables and modest amounts of protein is healthier and will help keep you slimmed down. Non-tuberous vegetables contain on average fewer calories per serving.

Drink more water. Drinking more water leaves you feeling fuller. It also helps your body flush out toxins.

If you eat healthier, you will be healthier. Healthier people are thinner, more energetic and more attractive.

Exercise Start slow. No one should go from a largely sedentary life to a very active one overnight. It is inviting injury and generally preordains failure. Slowly add more exercise back into your lifestyle. Taking walks is a place to start. Gradually add distance and speed to your walking. If possible, form or join a walking group.

Do things the harder way. Americans are lazy. They will drive around for twenty minutes in order to park half a block closer to their destination. As a result, they are overweight. Walk to do errands that do not require a car. Park further away, rather than closer. Take the stairs whenever possible. Carry manageable loads yourself rather than having someone do it for you. Yes, it is a little harder doing things these ways, but there is a one word descriptor for people who follow these practices: THINNER.

Integrate more exercise into your daily routine by mixing workout elements with more entertaining pastime. Listen to your favorite music while peddling a stationary bike or even college lectures while walking. Enjoy an audio book while you are on the Stair-Stepper.

Get a friend to join you or better still, join a group. This will help keep you motivated and will also help you meet new people. When they are part of a group, pride often keeps beginners from slacking off or quitting.

Mix different types of exercise. It keeps you from getting bored and works different muscle groups.

Get yourself to a gym and, if you can afford It, get a personal trainer. Once you are no longer a total couch-potato, it is time to join a gym. You will get more out of your workouts at a gym because they will ensure that you get a full body workout and cardio. It is also an excellent place to meet people who, like yourself, are committed to being fit, have a more positive outlook on life and will in general be more supportive of what you are trying to do.

Take up one or more active sports. Swimming, tennis, hiking, biking, skiing are all good. Activities such as these are fun and the burn off calories and pounds. Consult your doctor first, lest you discover that you have a latent health problem that would preclude your participation in sports.

As you take up new exercises, do not drop other earlier fitness steps. For instance, many people, once they join a gym, start looking for that parking place half a block away and start taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Fitness is an incremental thing. The more healthy lifestyle choices that you make and the more exercise that you get, the thinner and healthier you will be.

Drink water. Fluids lost while exercising should be replaced by plain water. If your exercise exceeds an hour, it is OK to drink a non-sugary sports drink to replace electrolytes. Otherwise stick with water.

A FORWARD PERSPECTIVE

People tell themselves that someday they are going to do the important things. All of my life, I have watched those same people run out of somedays. From the moment we are born, every day, every hour, every minute, every second could be our last. Don't waste them.

Many women in their forties have told me that the best years of their lives are over. Since they have not lived the second half of their lives, how do they know? Maybe the best years of their entire life are going to start a week from now. Just imagine though, that the best years of your life maybe are only going to happen, if a week from now you are standing on the southwest corner of 52nd and Madison at 4:18 PM - and instead you stay home in a depressive funk because you are convinced that most of your life is over.

Anyone in their forties who thinks half their life is over is technically probably right. Practically speaking, though, they are an idiot. The first 20 years of your life, you are not even a functioning adult. Yes, those are formative years, but for most of us, virtually all the important things that have happened or are going to happen come after the first 20 years. So a woman who is forty really only has about twenty years or a third of the productive years of their life behind her. Should she give up a third of the way through? Yesterday is a ghost, gone forever. All you have is today and the future. Richard Bach wrote, Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't.

Never assume that the best is behind you. Focus on what is yet to come. You cannot change anything that has happened... but you can shape the things that are about to happen. If you waste those opportunities ahead of you, you deserve to be miserable.

The best way that I know of to regain a forward perspective is to actually start being active again. Most adults, as they reach their late thirties to early forties, become somewhat set in their ways. Getting out of a rut requires conscious effort. The six techniques listed below are all proven ways to reboot your life and get it moving again.
Catch Enthusiasm From Someone Else A recent study by Dr. Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, found that depression is contagious. If you put one person, who is depressed, with another, who is not depressed, the person who was not depressed becomes depressed simply by being around the one who was. Fortunately, the converse seems to be equally true, several studies indicate that if you put one highly optimistic, enthusiastic, upbeat person in a group of otherwise neutral individuals, the entire group's perception turns more optimistic and upbeat.

There are two lessons here. The first is to surround yourself with as many upbeat and enthusiastic people as you possibly can. Their positive outlook and enthusiasm will infect you. Their attitude toward life will pull you up rather than down.

The second lesson is to avoid anyone who is always down. Their depression and negativity will suck you down like quicksand and literally smother any residual vitality that you have left.

Redecorate Yes, that is right, redecorate. Changing your day-to-day surroundings can invigorate your life. We get so used to what we are used to, that it no longer stimulates us. Many people have found that simply redecorating the walls of their home with a noticeably different hue seems to kick-start their lives and have an emotionally and psychologically invigorating effect. So if your walls are white / off-white / beige, you might want to try clear crisper tones of blue, or even peach tones. If your walls are somber tones, lighten them dramatically. Avoid the dark brooding tones of red, burgundy and green at all costs. Muddied, dingy tones of red, green and burgundy have been very much in style these last few years. Yet, these same tones have been shown to promote or amplify feelings of depression and despair.

Color influences our perceptions. Recent research has shown that dark dingy colors and lighter brighter colors profoundly effect our perceptions about the world in general. Still other research shows that color can significantly impact an individuals blood pressure, hormone levels, mood, behavior, brain activity, and even body posture.

If your home seems dull and lifeless, consider adding mirrors and accessories with bright, highly reflective surfaces. Avoid objects with rough or flat finishes.

Embrace The Language Of Change The words that we use shape our thinking. If you persist in using words like stagnation, boredom, ennui, guess what state of mind you will be in. Concentrate on expressions like growth, excitement and enthusiasm. Think opportunity, not problem. Think challenge, not obstacle. It may sound silly, but these kinds of shifts can radically alter our perceived reality... and perceived reality is where we live.

Every time that you find

yourself using a word with a negative spin or connotation, write it down, then write down another word with th e same general meaning but a more positive spin or connotation. Finally, strike a line through the negative word and start using the positive one.

Eliminate all waffle words from your thinking, writing and speech. Waffle words are back doors that let our determination make a graceful exit. Do not say you will try to get out more, say instead you will get out more. In lieu of if I can, just say I will.

Write Down Five New Goals Once A Week Write your goals down once a week and post the list somewhere very conspicuous (like on the bathroom mirror). This accomplishes two things: one, we actually remember things better when we write them down; two, seeing the goal day after day reinforces it in our consciousness and we feel guilty not accomplishing it. This is one of the few times in life when guilt serves any useful purpose.

Over time, the lists become a morale boosters as well. At first, it may take you a couple of weeks to do one of the items. A few weeks after that, you will do two. In time, you will be knocking the lists off like there was nothing to it. When you look back at the list from the beginning, it is great to appreciate just how far you have come.

Get A Coach Retaining a life coach to help you get out of a rut is often more efficient in terms of time and money expended to accomplish this goal. This is mostly because a coach will hold you accountable for achieving your objectives and prod you unmercifully until you do. This has nothing to do with whether they like you or they are a nice person, their job is to hold you accountable and prod you.

Coaches introduce an element of discipline. Many times when people try to break out of a rut on their own, they start a lot of things but abandon many of them. A coach will save you a lot of wasted registration fees, untouched class supplies and abandoned deposits. A good coach will make you take baby steps (manageable mini-bites out of your goal), that way you see one through before starting something else. This approach keeps most people from getting discouraged by starting something, abandoning it and getting disgusted with themselves.

Coaches are also very useful for keeping your morale up. You can whine and snivel (unlike your friends, they are being paid to listen) until you get it out of your system, then they will point you at the door and tell you to start all over.

Model Success Pick someone that you know who has a dynamic, busy life and start mimicking everything that you can manage to about them. Mimic their speech, their mannerism, their posture, their gestures, their intonation. Why? Because dynamic active people have voice intonations, posture, gestures and mannerisms that are characteristic of active dynamic people.

Do not pick a celebrity. When I write pick someone you know, I mean know personally: someone who comes from circumstances that pretty much mirror your own. Someone from your job, your neighborhood or even your circle of friends would be ideal. Look for someone who is always doing something. These people have a distinctive vibe all their own. You need to mimic it until it becomes your vibe as well. Have you heard the old saying, "Dress for the job you want, not the one that you have". This is a similar process. Both work.

VITALITY & BEING MORE ADVENTUROUS

These two qualities have been grouped together here because the strategies that will help you be more vital will lead to your being more adventurous.

Anyone can become more interesting simply by doing things. One thing is important though: get outside of your normal social circles and spheres of action. This will broaden your perspective immeasurably. You do not get out of a rut by going through the same doors you went through yesterday.

List five things that you have always wanted to do. Start with one and make it happen. Do not make excuses. Do not accept set-backs. Do not give up. Tell your friends that you are going to do whatever goal you are working on. Ask for their help. This will accomplish two things. First off, it will be too humiliating to face your friends if you give up. Second, you make your friends into a support network cheering you on. Make it happen.

Every city of any size has publications that list current happenings. Toward the beginning of each month, pick out one event, benefit, show, lecture, etc., and go to it. Pick something that you would not otherwise have considered. Each month, Meetup lists literally hundreds of upcoming group get-togethers in virtually every major metropolitan area. They have something for just about any conceivable taste.

Make a list of things that you have always been afraid to do. Break each fear down into the steps one has to take to do the thing that you fear doing. Take the steps necessary, one at a time. Keep telling yourself, all I have to do is the next step. When you reach the end of the list, make another list and start over.

Groups like Toastmasters teach public speaking. They also build confidence.

There are literally thousands of non-profit organizations that desperately need volunteers. Become a museum docent. Help out at an animal shelter. Volunteer at a food bank or a soup kitchen. Clean up parks, beaches, trails. Teach an underprivileged child to read. Make the world a better place, one small kindness at a time.

You will be proud of yourself and you will gain confidence as you go. You will also learn to appreciate the blessings that you have. Often others would treasure what we take for granted.

Join groups and organizations that do things or teach skills. Environmental and conservation groups have hikes, adventure vacations and lectures. Pick some and go. School districts, cities and colleges have night classes and seminars. There are luncheon and dinner groups that sample different cuisines and meet at different restaurants. Pick things that take you further afield socially than you normally go. Get outside your normal social circles.

ACQUIRING EMOTIONAL COURAGE

Taking a chance on love is always hard. Of all of the parts of us, the heart is perhaps the easiest to bruise and the slowest to heal. Every time that we take an emotional risk and it does not turn out well, we grow more reluctant to take the next chance. As we grow older, this reluctance can solidify into an outright unwillingness to take a chance... and then we are doomed, for one of the prices of love is always courage.

So the question arises: how does someone 40+ and emotionally frail find the courage to keep taking chances with their heart? Listed below are some strategies that should make it easier and more rewarding to take the risk that you have to when the time comes. The approach is two-fold: reducing the impact of the risks that you do take and avoiding the risks that you should never take.

Study Your Past Relationships - Especially If They Turned Out Badly Most people lose heart about taking a chance on love because it turned out so badly for them in the past. Yet a highly disproportionate amount of the time, when you talk to someone coming out of a failed relationship or affair about what happened, it quickly becomes apparent that they got into a relationship that no one in their right mind would have entered into in the first place.

Enlist the help of a perceptive friend or even a therapist and discuss the types of people that you are attracted to. Look really hard. Write down the things they had in common. When you think you have it figured out again, you haven't. The real answers that you need to understand are seldom very palatable. Answers that assign the blame solely or even largely to others are seldom the real answers. How many times have you heard a girlfriend say, 'I knew he was trouble, but I am so attracted to that type'? These same women will go looking for their "type" again and again. When it blows up in their face, they decry their fate. It was not fate that got them in trouble, it was poor choices.

Not every guy that you are attracted to will be a disaster, but people often choose people who are just like their last disaster. Make better choices.

Practice Risk Management By Emotional Diversification Emotionally needy people exercise poor judgment. If you desperately need someone to meet all of your emotional needs, you are very inclined to ignore warning signs that you should be paying attention to. Develop an emotional infrastructure of family, friendships and social connections that meet as many of your emotional needs as possible.

The first step to doing this is to raise your social profile. Go more places, meet more people. Pick some with whom you seem to have some affinity but who are not romantic prospects and cultivate long-term relationships with them. Try to pick the most active, positive people that you can. As this network of family, friends and social acquaintances begins to meet more of your emotional needs you are less likely to opt for a bad romance out of emotional desperation.

Remember; being emotionally needy = bad choices. You need to make better choices.

Learn What Trouble Looks Like You have to learn to see treasure when it is in front of you and to see trouble coming and run. To do that, you have to stop being lazy and put some real effort into learning what are the attributes, character and behaviors of someone who could make you happy and what are the attributes, character and behaviors of misery in a pretty package. To survive in the jungle of life the latter is an utmost priority.

Relationship-wise, certain types of individuals (alcoholics, gamblers, mama's boys, drug addicts, religious zealots, wife beaters, perpetual students, habitual cheats, the commitment phobic and control freaks) are emotional train wrecks waiting to happen. These types of individuals can initially be very charming and even seductive, but beneath a very thin veneer lurks a predator every bit as dangerous as any jungle cat. They have learned to use the humanity of others against them. They will use your willingness to give anyone a chance, your longing for attention, your need for sexual validation, even your own forthrightness to suck you into the nightmares of their own lives. They will take everything that you have to give until their personal demons have consumed you, then move on to another victim who will facilitate or enable their madness all over again.

Yet each of these emotional predators has a distinctive footprint. Mental health professionals have identified clusters of personality traits and marker behaviors that are emblematic of each of these personality types. Learn these clusters, especially for the types of personalities that have devastated your life and the lives of those near and dear to you in the past. These clusters are how you stay out of harm's way. They are not foolproof tools, but they are highly effective if you use them.

If you meet someone and they exhibit one of the behaviors or character traits of a problem personality, TAKE NOTE. It could mean something or be meaningless, but make sure that you note it for future reference and be heads up. If a person exhibits a second behavior or character trait from a marker cluster, the warning bells should start to ring loudly. If they exhibit more than two, put your running shoes on and flee for your life. Terminate all contact with that individual. They are heartache just around the corner.

Never delude yourself that you are going to reform this person. You are not. Mere mortals lack what it would takes to turn these maelstroms of human misery into anything fit to be part of your life. It is the worst kind of arrogance to think there is something so special about us that we are going to reform such a person when everything and everyone in life so far, has failed.

How do you learn these clusters? Go on the Internet and research the types of dysfunctional behaviors in question. Read everything you can about it. Talk to people in support groups for those contending with these behaviors and the devastating residuals of these behaviors. Contact experienced professionals (those with 10 plus years) who deal with these issues and ask what the marker behaviors and character traits are that are associated with this type of dysfunctional personality.

Learn To Accept The Idea That Some Risk Is Necessary Every time you take a chance in life, you risk failure, but every time that you refuse to take any chances you risk never having a life.

Wayne Gretzky once made a very good point, You miss 100% of the shots that you do not take. He had a point. Never take a chance = 100% failure, guaranteed. You can beat these odds simply by taking a chance.

You might also want to consider something that Peter F. Drucker said, There are risks that you cannot afford to take and there are risks that you cannot afford not to take. When the right person comes along, being with them is a chance you cannot afford to ignore. Yes, it will be a risk, but even if you fail, will that be any worse than never trying and being haunted for the rest of your life by the specter of things that might have been?

Bravery is something that you can nurture within yourself. Brave people are not those who are unafraid, they are those who conquer despite their fears.

Baby Steps & Accepting Human Frailty When you are loath to take a chance with another human being, it is not the other person that you do not trust, it is yourself. You are not sure that you will make the right decision. We all conjure up memories of when our judgment was flawed whenever we are confronted with the necessity of taking an emotional risk.

The truth is that the possibility of failure is always there, but there are no perfect opportunities, no ideal situations, no risk-free scenarios. You search out the best circumstances and person that you can find, and you take your chances.

You can, however, train yourself to both take chances and make better choices by practicing doing it. Start small with low-risk situations. Begin with low-risk interpersonal scenarios where there is no romantic element. Train yourself to take the big emotional risks by taking baby steps, trusting yourself to make good choices. You take a little risk and see how it goes. Some other day, you take another small risk and see how that one turns out. Sometimes it will be a disaster, but there will be times when it will be truly fantastic. Get used to the idea that truly fantastic is an occasional disaster. Learn to accept the idea that you are going to sometimes blow it; not even Superman bats 1000.

If you make the right choices even 51% of the time you are ahead.

Do Not Fall Victim To Other People's PR One of the things that make us feel our judgment is poor is that we compare ourselves to other people we know or know about, and they always seem to have it so much more together than we do. Guess what, they don't.

Whenever our world goes to shit, we invariably put on a brave face and act as if everything was just peachy. Unfortunately, this leads everyone around us, who is not too privy to the trials and tribulations of our life, and who find themselves stumbling incoherently from one disaster to another, thinking that they are the only ones who have these problems. We gauge our own emotional competency not against reality but again this illusion of other people's greater competency.

Consider some statistics. Fifty percent of all first marriages fail. Sixty-seven percent of all second marriages fail. Seventy-four percent of all third marriages fail. Over forty percent of all women whose first marriage fails permanently leave the marriage market. In a sampling of 1500 people, less than a third of married people described themselves as very happy.

If you do the math, it yields an insightful number: only 19.8% of the people out there are making really good choices. Eighty percent of the people are not any better at figuring this stuff out than you are.

Cultivate A Positive Outlook Numerous studies from multiple disciplines show that individuals who face challenges with an expectation of success invariably do significantly better than those with a more pessimistic outlook. Interestingly enough, they do significantly better even when objectively their circumstances are far worse than the circumstances of those with a more pessimistic view.

Some researchers have speculated that because they expect to win, they persevere until they do. Indeed this may be a factor, but I think that it is something else.

Have you ever gone into a shop where there were large number of pendulum clocks ticking away? Ever notice that all the pendulums seem to be swinging at the same rate? It must have something to do with the mechanisms, right? Actually no, even clocks with very different mechanisms will adapt their oscillations to one another. It occurs with pendulums, with sounds, with brainwaves, with women's periods.

In physics this phenomenon is called entrainment. In fact, quantum physics has shown that this synchronization of frequencies is a fundamental force in the universe. Quantum physics sees all existence (even what we consider solid matter) to be energy vibrating. Moreover, it seems that all energy in proximity entrains to the extent that is possible.

Now consider that your thoughts are vibrations (and they are, scientists have been able to record them).

So when you are thinking negative, pessimistic thoughts, everything around you is trying to synchronize with your negativity. When you are ruled by negative expectations, guess what type of outcome is most likely?

Expect positive things and more positive things will come your way.

RE-ACQUIRING A SENSE OF WONDER

Wayne Dyer wrote, Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into. Our sense of wonder is also something that we have to tune into. We had it as children. Most of us retained some measure of it into our twenties and thirties, but regrettably for many of us, something transpires in our late thirties to early forties that severely erodes our ability to experience the mystery and wonder of life that we encounter at every turn. We are often well-educated, successful, maybe even affluent, but we are utterly blind to the magic all around us. Yet so much of what makes life truly worth living is defined by intangible, ephemeral moments when something that we cannot explain touches some long-silent string within our souls and makes it sing.

Listed below are three techniques that will help you tune into the awesome magic that permeates every infinitesimal corner of our existence, if we but take the time to see and feel. Most of those techniques are drawn from the metaphysical disciplines of the Far East, and oddly enough that is more appropriate than you might think, for the real magic of life indisputably resides in the realm of things mystical.

Learn To Meditate Our minds are so inundated with superfluous information that we often cannot see what is really important and what is right in front of us. Meditation quiets the mind.

In day-to-day life, our minds are so filled with the detritus of modern life that all real meaning and significance get lost. It is like walking on a badly littered beach. You see the fast food containers, the pop cans, the broken pair of sunglasses, someone's thong, a sun-warped CD, the empty bottle to tanning lotion... and you hardly notice the ocean. Meditation can clear your mind and let the whirlwind of crap in it settle.

Anyone can learn meditation. Get a couple of books on meditation, take a class, join a meditation special interest group on the Internet... then practice. For a time, it will seem like you will never get the hang of it, then one day it will click and you will think, Why was this so hard?

Avoid the meditation groups that are affiliated with religious organizations like you would avoid the plague. Religious organizations with meditation groups have agendas of their own and in no case is their agenda in your best interest. You are trying to master a skill, not acquire an addiction. If you want to affiliate with a religious sect, it should be for other reasons.

Learn To Feel, Not Think About, The World That You Live In Begin by getting outdoors as often as possible... just you... no iPODs, no books, no work that you did not finish during the week... just you. Sit quietly in the sunshine. Feel the sun on your skin, notice the intricate patterns of light and shadow all around you, see how the light is reflected by somethings and shines through others. Close your eyes and smell. Notice how your own skins smells warmed by the sun, how the trees and grass smell.

In the rain, close your eyes and listen. Listen to the sound of the rain striking different surfaces, the almost soft trickle of water falling off of things, the whispering gurgle of some modest unnoticed torrent. Feel the gentle patter of the rain against your skin. Smell the rain.

Rain has a smell, not the smell of things wet from a rain, but the rain itself, it has a smell. Did you know that snow has a distinct smell and that different types of snow smell different? Have you ever taken the time to notice that fog has a smell all its own?

Someday just take a walk in the fog. Don't walk somewhere... just walk... experience the fog. Listen to how it affects the quality of sound. Notice how it shrinks your perceived world. Note how things suddenly stand out that you never noticed before because they were obscured by too much other detail. Feel how the fog warps your sense of time. Notice how everything seems suspended within it.

Commune With Nature Go for a walk or simply find some quiet place outdoors where you can sit. Places where the works of man are but a footnote are better.

If you have a forest nearby, stroll through it until you find a spot where you can sit down. Just sit. Try staring at a single rock or leaf for a minute or two merely to shift your consciousness a bit. Then gradually look around you, trying to take in all the little myriad details. Let your eyes wander across the sun-dappled patches of forest floor to a fallen log. Notice all the types of life that have colonized the log. For them, that half-rotten log is their world. Study the trees themselves. Whole communities of life have taken up residence there. Verdant moss cloaks the junctures of the branches, shelf mushrooms cling in terraced tiers like some alien condo project, bees have commandeered the cavity where a wasted branch used to be, lichen speckles expanses of bark, birds nest in the crotches of branches and in knotholes that they have enlarged to make their homes, countless insects come and go, scurrying about on business that only they understand. You will see berries you never noticed, plants that went unseen and tapestries of light and shadow that eluded you until you took the time to see. If you spend enough time, you will begin to understand much about who you are, the real scope of things and the wonder of life.

Visit an ocean beach. Feel the eternal ceaseless rhythms, smell the air laden with salt and the scents of rotting seaweed and other life jettisoned by the last tide. Wander along the beach. Feel the texture and mass of the sand beneath your feet. Watch the steady ebb and flow of the waves. Notice the sea birds, sprinting out and back, searching the receding water for their next meal. Hear their raucous arguments about whose treasure that small morsel of clam really was. See how the waves flow around that rock rooted in the sand. Flip over a bit of flotsam here and there and see the timid foragers that it concealed. Watch the surf pound relentlessly upon even the most humble of headlands. Feel the timeless power of those waves. Let your consciousness of self get lost in the sprays thrown up by them. Take a moment to realize that that same ocean has been pounding on rocks much like those you see for more eons than the human mind can encompass and will pound just as ceaselessly when Man and all his works have vanished into obscurity. Sit in the sun somewhere and feel the power all around you. Beside the ocean, you, I and all our paltry aspirations and fears are as nothing.

It does not have to be a great ocean or a primeval forest. It only has to be nature. Sit beside a tiny brook and explore the universe you never saw that plays out its little drama all around you. Take a moment under the shade of a desert cliff and learn what you can of the life and secrets of the searing desolation before you. Just sitting quietly in a garden will do it. The trick is to open your consciousness to what is so prevalent in our world that it goes largely unseen and unfelt. It is a matter of tuning in to the ephemeral splendor of existence.

ON HAVING A VICTIM MENTALITY

Over the last couple of decades our society has actively promoted the idea that whenever something does not turn out the way we wished, it is always someone else's fault. There are organizations and even whole industries who must nurture and extol this Victim Mentality lest they loose their constituencies and market niche. The idea that we are never really responsible or that we are only marginally responsible for our own outcomes is seductively attractive psychologically for a great number of individuals. It saves all of that really depressing self-examination to determine what we did wrong and what we need to change to ensure better outcomes. We can always blame someone else for our miserable lives being mired in a cesspool of irresponsible behavior, mediocrity and self-pity.

Those with a Victim Mentality cherish it like it was their only friend. Unfortunately, being enslaved by such a mindset precludes virtually all personal growth and progress. Alas, it (the Victim Mentality) is an illusion that all too often shatters when it hits the real world. The existential cowards who embrace the idea that they are victims are then in a panic-stricken frenzy, clinging to their illusion as it unravels around them. Worse still, they desperately attempt to proselytize anyone within earshot lest their insidious self-doubts overwhelm them.

Many of women, as they grow older, are particularly inclined to embrace and espouse the idea that they are victims. Unfortunately, their doing so only serves to alienate everyone subjected to their incessant whining. As a coping mechanism, it serves them ill since it positively screams that the person who has adopted it is either unwilling to or incapable of assuming responsibility for their own outcomes.

Divest Yourself Of The Idea That You Are A Victim It is hard to eradicate a victim mentality once it has infested your life, but it can be done. Once you are rid of this mindset, you will be infinitely more attractive to any romantic prospects who enter your life.

In the paragraphs below you will find six insights that should help you free yourself of this addictive mindset.

Own What Happens In Your Life If your life is shit, trust me, you had a guiding hand in it getting that way. Accept responsibility for your own choices in life. Did someone hold a gun on you and make you choose the course of action that landed you in the mess you are now in? When our lives disintegrate, they do so because we ourselves did something really foolish or imprudent, because we did not take corrective action while there was still time, because we simply did not try hard enough. Often it was simply lack of well-defined personal boundaries or simply bad choices that led you to your present circumstances.

Stop Waiting To Be Rescued Only one person has (or ever did have) straightening out your life as part of their job description. That person is not Prince Charming, your last or next husband / boyfriend or some guy on TV. It is you. You have to rescue yourself. All the other candidates are busy sorting out their own lives.

Do Not Look Out The Door For Answers - Look In The Mirror All the really important answers have to come from you. It is not a matter of having the perfect mentor, being guided by the right guru, finding a book with all the answers or signing up for a special program. It is not about what anyone else did or did not do. It is about what we ourselves did or did not do. Real introspection is almost always painful, but it is the one real springboard we can use to seek better outcomes.

It is easy to say, "my life is like this because someone else failed me, used me or abused me". It is easy, but it is practically never the truth. It is a lot harder to say, "my life is like this because I made some really stupid choices, or I was not paying attention or I took a situation for granted".

It is harder, but it is necessary, for only we can make the changes in ourselves that will keep us from going down those same roads again. In the last analysis, most of us already know what most of the answers are, and what we need to do. We just don't want to face those answers or take the necessary actions. We are lazy and we are scared.

In those rare cases where you really were victimized, guess what - you are still the only one who is going to get you out of the mess you are in. This is hard too, but it is nevertheless true.

You Are Not Entitled Forget forever the idea that anyone owed you anything. They did not. If you think that your parents, your boyfriend, your employer or anyone else is supposed to make you happy, you are retarded. Do this and you will be happy ever after is a fool's promise to herself. There are no one-stop answers that guarantee your needs are going to be met. You have to work at it every day. It is really tedious. Life is a bitch. Get over it.

Stop waiting for someone else to come up with the solution to your life. Your life and every aspect of it is not someone else's responsibility. It is yours. Stop wishing things will somehow work themselves out - they never do. You have to create your own solutions. You work them out.

Gain Some Perspective Sometimes it is necessary to step outside our own heads for a few days just to clear the cobwebs out. Work with the homeless. Help out at a cancer hospice. Work with those who have been severely burned. For most of us, it is pretty hard to take our problems quite so seriously after being exposed to real hopelessness.

Get A Better Attitude The attitude you have is a choice. No one forced it on you. It is something you chose for yourself... and you know what, it costs you dearly. Better attitudes equal better outcomes. Negative attitudes beget negative outcomes. Khalil Gibran wrote, Your living is not so much determined by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens".

Studies have shown that those who have more positive attitudes experience outcomes that are 33-56% better than those who had negative attitudes.

EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BAGGAGE

Everyone is scarred by life. If you live at all, life takes its toll. Each of us has been given our measure of irrational fears, unrealized aspirations, shattered dreams. Everyone has things they need to work through. I have never met anyone who did not. However, scars are what is left once healing has occurred. The raw unhealed wounds of unresolved emotional and psychological trauma are another matter.

Some people never seem to deal with these issues. They persist year after year, festering like open sores on the person's very soul and yet the people in question are curiously attached to these traumas, reluctant to let them go and move on. It is as if these individuals are held captive by the emotions triggered by the original incidents, forever unwilling to free themselves of the damage inflicted by life's myriad disappointments.

A disproportionate number of women over forty are walking around desperately trying to hold themselves together as they are being inexorably consumed by poisonous pockets of unresolved anger, bitterness, hostility, jealousy, envy, mistrust, fear, suspicion, anxiety and grief within themselves. What is worse, no matter how much they think that they contain their inner pain, they fail miserably to do so in reality. Anyone who tries to get close to them quickly discovers that they are a veritable emotional minefield where an imaginary slight or injudicious word often leads to volcanic emotional outbursts. As a result, people, including potential romantic partners, avoid them.

Often they feel trapped in a maze of emotions, impulses and compulsions that they barely understand. Yet oddly enough, they seem to almost cherish and fanatically cling to the emotional and psychological wounds that cause them. They use all the minor hurts and greater wounds of life to construct a cell within their own minds from which they peer out fearfully at a hostile world, thinking that this private prison keeps them inviolate, somehow indemnifying them against all future failures, losses and betrayals. The cells thus fashioned do nothing to protect them from the wounds sequestered within and eventually those wounds poison every second of every day, robbing all potential for any better life that the person might otherwise have known.

Still, it is possible to strip the underlying emotional and psychological issues of their awesome power. It is possible to heal.

Healing As is so often the case, the first step is the hardest. People with unresolved emotional and psychological issues are highly resistant to admitting that they have them. They usually think of the incidents that triggered these issues in terms of their being grievous wrongs that have been perpetrated against them, rather than thinking of them as the fairly commonplace bumps and bruises of everyday life. All of this not withstanding, the first step is to admit that you have a problem. It is not someone else's problem, it is yours. The solution does not lie in changing someone else, it lies in changing you.

More often than not, the person who you think caused you the damage has moved on with their life and possibly does not even remember perpetrating the acts which so devastated yours. Sometimes they are dead. Resolution will never come from them or from their surrogates. It must come within you.

Signs That You Do Indeed Have A Problem How do you know if it is unresolved emotional and psychological issues that are crippling you and destroying your chances for happiness? Well, if even one person has said you have such issues, there is a strong probability that you do.

Try asking a friend who you think will tell you the truth. Give them time to get out what they need to say. It is not easy to tell someone you care about that they are the walking wounded.

Then there are some of the symptoms that a therapist would look for. If you are prone to angry outbursts, frequently experience any sort of diffuse unfocused anxiety, are excessively on guard lest you suffer any harm from fairly innocuous situations and/or are disproportionately fearful about everyday life... then you probably have a few issues that need to be dealt with. Unresolved emotional and psychological issues often cause physical symptoms. If you have trouble concentrating or carrying through a course of action, suffer from insomnia, experience erratic sleep patterns, frequent or recurrent nightmares, are edgy and easily stirred up, startle easily, have unexplained aches and pains, clinch your teeth a lot, experience a lot of muscle tension on a regular basis... these are all classic signs of unresolved emotional and psychological issues that you need to address before you can get on with life. If you are inclined to mental fuzziness and confusion, often feel emotionally or psychologically detached, numb or disconnected, are often sad or hopeless, you are likely to have emotional and psychological issues that need to be worked through and laid to rest. The same is true if you are in shock or denial about what has happened to you. If you are unusually irritable or experience unexplained mood swings, it can be caused by a number of things: low blood sugar, thyroid problems or other health problems, but it frequently is indicative of unresolved emotional and/or psychological traumas.

These are not merely symptoms of having been subjected to emotional and psychological trauma, they are symptoms of not having healed.

Healing Old Wounds The only way to get past the destructive impact of emotional and psychological traumas that have been festering beneath the surface for years is to achieve closure. All the pain, the anger, the fears, the vulnerability have to be confronted and worked through.

There are five types of emotional and psychological trauma that women in their forties and up are often burdened with: Old Losses, Damage From Abuse, Unresolved Past Conflicts, Long-Repressed Fears and The Loss Of Their Youth. The last item in this list would seem to be associated with other kinds of grief and it is, but I have listed it separately because it is an issue more of the here and now, while many if not most of the others have their origins in the past.

Laying the dead to rest, grieving
Some of the most profound psychological wounds are born of deaths that went ungrieved. Sometimes it was the death of a spouse, a child, a lover or even a cherished friend. It could have been the death of a parent, mentor or sponsor: someone on whom we were totally dependent, or someone on whom our future prospects hinged. You can also have been affected by the loss of a marriage, a relationship, a job, your career, a pet, your home or even your country.

Losses like these touch a person at the very core of their being. They leave us utterly shattered and nakedly vulnerable. There exists no norm against which to measure how these things should affect us.

Each person's life is much like a spider web: each gossamer strand leading outward to myriad relationships, place unseen and emotions scarcely acknowledged or even recognized. Sometimes, a half dozen strands of the web can be blasted asunder and yet overall the web is but moderately disturbed. Another time, the snipping of but a single filament may shake our world to its very foundations. Again, there is no objective norm. All that really matters is how that very personal and particular loss wounded us.

For years, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross studied how people grieve and work through their losses. She identified five distinct stages of the grieving process.

The Five Stages of Grief:
1. Denial: It is not true. This cannot be happening
2. Anger: Whose fault is this? Why is this happening? Who is to blame?
3. Bargaining: Change things back as they were and in return, I'll do this
4. Depression: There is no point in going on. Life is over. There is no future.
5. Acceptance: I am still here. Where do we go from here? I can live with this.

Most people somehow manage to get through the first stage, DENIAL, but a surprisingly high percentage of us seem to become emotionally mired in two other stages, ANGER and DEPRESSION.

Part of the problem with dealing with grief-based anger is that there so seldom is a legitimate target upon whom we can vent. Who do you yell at? Fate? God? You can blame your relatives. You can can blame the other woman / man. You can blame your two-faced boss. None of it helps. Ultimately, all the cosmic complaint offices are closed. No amount of rage will change anything. Should you just let all that rage go? Should you suppress it? Neither is going to prove very helpful. Actually you need to feel it and let it out. You are going to alienate some people. You are going to feel rather foolish afterwards. They will get over it and so will you, but either way, you have to just be pissed off and blast until you achieve some measure of emotional catharsis. What does not work is staying enraged without the catharsis.

If you have been feeling this angry for any protracted period of time (more than a year or two), get help. Join a support group or organization that deals with grief issues. I have listed a number of them in the RESOURCES section at the end of this article. If you still cannot work through your anger with their help, then see a therapist who specializes in dealing with grief issues. There is nothing wrong with seeing a therapist. There is something very wrong with not seeing one and letting your emotions kill you and obliterate the happiness of you and your loved ones.

The other place where people seem to stall out in the process of grieving is the depression stage. When you lose something or someone that was a major linchpin in your world, it hurts. You have suffered a significant loss. Being down is only to be expected. During this stage, try to maintain normal relationships with family and friends. This support network should help bolster you emotionally. Take care of yourself health-wise. Get plenty of sleep, get exercise, eat well. Avoid drugs and alcohol because they only offer at best temporary surcease and, long-term, they both amplify depression. Get outdoors and interact with other people.

Contrary to what your shattered psyche is telling you, there is life after your loss. Eventually you will recover and life will resume. You may feel this is the end, but it is not. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote, What the caterpillar calls the end... the rest of the world calls a butterfly. A very wise man, Lao Tzu. A devastating loss is always the end of one chapter of our lives, but other chapters are waiting to be written.

If grief-based depression lasts more than a few months (2-3), you are getting into a problem area. Many forms of depression are self-perpetuating, meaning once you have them, the depression tends to induce a state that facilitates more depression. Seek out a therapist, join a support group. Seek out friends and go places with them. Get out of the house. Do things.

Overcoming damage from abuse Women are often carrying around immense burdens of self-loathing, guilt, fear and rage over abuse that they endured earlier in their lives. The original abuse may have been physical, emotional or sexual.

In the last analysis, it does not matter much what form the abuse took, it only matters how not dealing with it is eating away within you.

Many abuse survivors experience post traumatic stress disorder. They can be going along fine in life when something triggers a flashback and they are reliving the same horror all over again.

Survivors are often in denial about what happened. Incest survivors in particular are often unwilling to see how the effects of their early abuse are causing later in life their tendencies to seek out ongoing abusive relationship, their problems with intimacy, their feelings of self-loathing, their unwillingness to trust or their inability to ever feel safe again. Spousal battery victims make excuses for those who put them in emergency rooms, broke their bones, disfigured them and often crippled them. Victims of sexual assault wonder what they did to deserve what happened to them, and often actually convince themselves that it was their fault.

There are people who can heal themselves of the damage done by abuse. It is rare, but such people exist. My mother was one of them. Her first husband beat her unmercifully. She left him with nothing but a few hundred dollars and the five young children that she had bore him. She did not have time to feel sorry for herself or wallow in self-pity: she had five children to feed. She worked sixteen hours a day for years until she finally owned a small restaurant. Work, time and her upbeat nature healed her. I think my father healed her too. That was his nature.

Most people are not that lucky. Most abuse survivors are going to need some measure of therapy. There is no shame in this. It does not mean they are weak or deficient.

To recover from abuse almost always involves re-living that abuse, talking about it, feeling all of those terribly painful feelings yet again. It is a messy, stressful, ugly process... for the victim and for the therapist. It generally is not something that anyone wants to put their loved ones through. Therapists are paid to deal with this stuff, let them.

To obtain closure with such trauma, it is necessary to live it out again, to talk about it and accept that it happened. It is necessary to talk about how it made you feel, about how it altered your world. You are going to have to talk about your feelings of having been helpless, your rage, your grief, your guilt, your shame. This is ugly stuff. Someone once likened it to a stopped up toilet that backs up and spills all over. That is what has to happen. All of that pain needs to come spewing forth if you are ever going to be free of it.

Once catharsis has occurred, you start on the next phase, dealing with the residual damage. Most abuse victims have a highly impaired ability to trust anyone, low self-esteem, difficulty forming relationships. Many are self-destructive, often given to addictive behaviors, consumed by irrational guilt and constantly searching for approval, validation and nurturing. Victims usually are prone to panic attacks, excessive irrational fears, acute anxiety. Because many of them have a low sense of self-worth, they have a tendency to seek out those who will victimize them again. Working through these issues can take months or even years. There are no short-cuts.

It is important while you are healing to stay physically healthy.

Stay away from drugs and alcohol: they will bury you. They offer no real surcease and they will exasperate every symptom that you have. If you are an abuse survivor, you do not need any extra problems.

Get plenty of sleep. If you are having trouble sleeping, try melatonin or even herbs. Some people have had excellent results with either St.John's Wort, Valerian or Passion Flower teas. Consult your physician before using any herb or melatonin. They are generally safe, but there are specific circumstances where they are not.

Eat nutritious food. Skip the junk food as much as possible. Much of it contains food additives that are suspected of causing mental health problems.

Try to keep a normal routine (just like everyone else does). Go to bed at a fairly normal time, get up at a fairly normal time, take care of the routine tasks that everyone has to do to get by in life... attend to your personal hygiene, go shopping, do your laundry, cook, clean your home, take care of your kids and pets. Remember to take care of yourself. You are important. Your life is worth living.

Find non-destructive, non-threatening things that give you pleasure and enjoy them. Watching a puppy play, gardening, reading books... whatever it is that you can find that makes you happier for even a second here and there, you grab onto. Read jokes. If you can go to a comedy club, do. Laughter is a great healer.

Little by little, the rare seconds of happiness become minutes, minutes, in turn, become hours. A day comes when you say, "Yes, the abuse happened and it hurt, but it is in the past, it no longer exists and I am still here. The sky is still a pretty shade of blue, that cat is really cute, and I can be happy for a time at least". In time, "for a time" becomes a lifetime. Eventually, if you can, forgive those who perpetrated the abuse upon you and forget them and it.

Resolving those unresolvable conflicts
Conflicts arise in all human interactions. They are a normal part of life. That being said, there are conflicts in life that have proven hard to resolve for any number of reasons. Often we love or did love the people we were in conflict with and are fearful of losing that love or them if we press to hard for what we want. We may want something that is forbidden to us by social mores or the social contracts (such as marriage) that we have entered into with others. Sometimes, we are not even sure ourselves how reasonable what we want really is. There are even times, that we know beyond a doubt that what we want is unreasonable, but we want it, need it or feel we need it, nevertheless.

Conflicts that are difficult to resolve fall into two general categories: those between ourselves and society's or our own values, and interpersonal conflicts between ourselves and others.

Conflicts with social mores or our own values. Conflicts of the first type mentioned above happen when we want something that is at odds with the norms of our society or our own values. This is really pretty straight forward. We like to think it is not, mostly because we do not want to make the hard choices involved. For example, we want to have an affair with McBean, but we do not want to break our marriage vows or risk losing our marriage. In these types of situations, there are only two real variables: is what we want worth the price we might have to pay, and can we live with it and take personal responsibility for the outcome. Not really complicated but really, really uncomfortable.

There are only two pieces of advice that I or anyone with half a brain could give in these cases. One is to remember Murphy's Law: if anything can possibly go wrong in the course of action that you are proposing to undertake, it will go wrong. The other is a Russian proverb, "You only get free cheese in a mousetrap". Meaning everything has a price. Nothing in life is free. Be damn sure that you are able to live with the price you may pay. If you can, then own the decision and do what you must.

Interpersonal conflicts. There are conflicts where the other party (or parties) to the conflict feel vehemently that what they want or need is more important, more reasonable, more logical, maybe even more deserving than what we want. Some conflicts are situational; finances or other resource limitations dictate how the conflict gets resolved. We want something desperately, but circumstances or needs of the others with whom we are in social contract preclude our getting what we want.

All of these factors make resolving these issues difficult. Often past attempts at resolution have gone so horribly awry that what was left was a veritable tsunami of emotional pain on all sides. This, of course, complicates things immeasurably. Now on top of the original rather thorny problem, you have to deal with all the hurt feelings... the other party's and yours. In such instances, the first thing that must be done is make amends for the emotional hurt that you have inflicted and give others every chance to make amends as well. This generally involves actually saying you are sorry and meaning it.

This is not a time for insincerity. The other party will sense it, in a flat minute. This part of the process defuses the bomb, so to speak. This phase cannot be rushed and there is no set time frame that you can plan on. It takes the time that it takes.

The next step in resolving these type of issues is for you to own what it is that you really want. You need to define what it is... and it may be several things... and say irrespective of merit, "this is what I want or need". The other party needs to do the same.

Now comes the hard part: actually presenting your case. It helps if you can structure it in a win/win scenario. That way no one feels that they are getting short-changed. You should try to get the other party to do the same. Forget ideas about entitlement and what should or should not transpire. What matters here is what will work. You can be totally in the right and totally deserving and still not get what you want. Life and relationships work that way.

In these instances, one of the most common scenarios that play out is party "A" starts to say something, party "B" starts to puff up, their body language telegraphing some resistance to A's position, "A" sees the body language and launches an emotional frontal assault, then the sparks fly.

The culprit here is neither "A" nor "B" but the body language. If you can break this feedback loop long enough to get the whole idea out, things often go better. This strips this whole exchange of much of the body language (of which both parties are largely unaware) that provokes resistance and counter attack. What I and many others have found works better is simply writing it down and sending it in a letter to the other party. However, before you mail such a letter, you need to edit it really carefully for any verbal incendiaries that you have seeded around the real issue. Go through that letter with a fine toothed comb. Take out anything that is critical of the other party, anything that alludes to past failures to resolve the issue, anything judgmental about the merits of the other party's position. Just state your case, as logically as possible, remembering to structure it as much as you can in a way where everyone wins something. Be willing to compromise, not just expect the other person to do so. Make sure that you leave the other party a line of retreat, wherein they can back off of any stances that they have taken in the past, but without losing face. Make sure you leave yourself lines of retreat, as well.

This technique seems to work best when the parties are not going to see one another for a few days. This gives everyone a chance to think things through without the pressure of seeing the other party.

Facing repressed fears born of traumas early in life
Not infrequently, people experienced moments of stark terror, utter vulnerability, sudden abandonment or catastrophic disruptions of their lives when they were children. The fears engendered by these emotionally threatening events quite often linger for a lifetime. Quite frequently these fears are repressed by the child because they were too overwhelming to deal with any other way. Unfortunately, these repressed childhood fears quite often pollute, if not outright poison, our adult lives.

If you examine the past of adults whose responses to situations are highly inappropriate to the circumstances, you will generally find that the fears fueling their irrational behavior as adults can be traced back to a childhood trauma.

When you do something that costs you, stop and examine the whole sequence of behavior. Ask yourself why you did this, when it seems so dumb. More likely than not, you will discover that you were afraid of something. That fear will often seem irrational, even to you. Then start writing down things that happened earlier in your life that this situation reminds you of.

This process will often lead us to the core event responsible for some of our poor behavioral responses in our daily lives. Once you have identified those core events, you can use your adult rational mind to strip them of their emotional hold on your present existence.

The need to mourn the loss of youth and beauty
We often hear our society indicted for valuing youth and beauty, but in truth all human societies do and always have done so. Recent research has shown that this preference for youth and beauty is a survival mechanism of the human race, and while it certainly can be hard on specific individuals, it is beneficial to us as a species. This virtually universal preference profoundly affects the self-image of modern women. In the innermost reaches of their soul, all women from the time that they are little girls measure themselves against what they see in their mirrors. It may not be politically correct. It may not adhere to their feminist ideals. Yet, it is true.

A day inevitably comes when the reflection that they see is not quite as enticing as it was a year before.
That first fading of the rose is often easy to ignore, but year after year, time relentlessly takes its toll and a day arrives when each woman looks in the glass and sees someone no longer young, fresh and resplendent. For many women that moment is devastating beyond belief. They have lost something that will never be theirs again. This is especially true for those whose looks were their primary asset.

At first, most deny what they see, to others and to themselves most of all. After a time they become singularly angry and resentful. They shake their fists at the heavens and scream (sometimes silently, sometimes not) that it is not fair. Often they make little offerings to the cruel Fate that has stripped their beauty from them, "I will quit smoking, I'll go vegetarian, I'll take up yoga". Many, many women go into a deep depression that they seem all but powerless to shake off.

If all of this sounds familiar - it should... both because each woman has watched countless numbers of older women go through the process, and because these are the stages of grief. Just as the loss of a loved one or a marriage can shatter someone's world, the loss of her youth and beauty lays waste to a woman's very being. Unfortunately, most modern women feel a curious reluctance to mourn this loss. A few get caught up in the denial stage while most get caught up in the anger stage. Yet this is a loss that touches the very core of her being. It has to be mourned. It does not matter whether it was fair. It does not matter whether it is politically correct.

A woman has to confront this loss, feel the anguish, mourn it and move on. Otherwise her life is going to become mired in a very unhappy place.

There is a life on the other side of this loss and that life should not be wasted. It may be a different life but it is a life worth living. Moreover, even if you are single, life has not defeated you. This is not the end. It is only a bump in the road: maybe a bump that is a little bit bigger than most, but only a bump nonetheless. With courage and determination you may still find someone to love and you may yet make the world a little bit better than it was. To quote Marilyn vos Savant, "Being defeated is often a temporary condition, giving up is what makes it permanent".

BEING FORTY & OVERCOMING ISSUES

Women forty and up are more prone to anger, hostile attitudes and antagonist social behavior than their younger counterparts. These women frequently vitriolically espouse causes that are at best thinly veiled surrogates for their misplaced anger and rage. Worse still, the women who exhibit these behaviors are often fiercely in denial about them. Men usually say such women have issues.

Since only a total masochist would willingly subject themselves to the corrosive emotional energies given off by anyone carrying around that much anger and hostility, virtually all reasonably healthy men will distance themselves as quickly and thoroughly as possible from women who are

this prickly. Any woman with these kinds of behavior who wants to date needs to make addressing the real causes for these behaviors an exceedingly high priority in her life and eliminate them as soon as feasibly possible. They contribute nothing to her emotional well-being and cost her relationships that might otherwise enrich her life. Ralph Waldo Emerson said something worth considering, For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

The Nature Of Anger Some anger is a survival trait. When your life is threatened, it is appropriate to be angry. When you have just been assaulted or assault is imminent, anger is appropriate. This is survival-related anger.

Most non-survival related anger is born either from frustration or fear.

Frustration-triggered anger and rage
By and large, almost all frustration-triggered anger and rage comes from one (or more) of the five sources listed below:

1. Unrealistic Expectations
2. Self Deception
3. An Unjustified Narcissistic Sense of Entitlement
4. An Unreasonable Reluctance or Refusal to Accept Personal Limitations or Societal Rules and Restrictions 5. A Perceived or Actual Inability to Control Other People or Their Behaviors

Unrealistic expectations. Many things can lead us to have unrealistic expectation. Our hopes, fears, desires, emotional baggage, peer group expectations, even our fantasies can distort our ability to see things as they are and, if we do not take care, can lead us into the realm of serious delusion. All of these factors can make your mind single out less consequential bits and pieces of reality and enlarge them or even morph them into evidence that something is the way that we want it to be. Sometimes this selective perception sweeps away the obvious and pertinent things we do not want to see to preserve our comfortable fantasy that things are a certain way.

A good trick to highlight where we have done this is to consider the whole situation or scenario with someone else in the lead role, so to speak. Instead of seeing yourself in this situation or scenario, pick someone from your circle of acquaintances that you do not like. How would the situation look if it was THAT PERSON in it? Quite often this forces us to notice one or two significant red flags that we missed when we plunged into the situation wearing rose-colored glasses. What seems imminently reasonable when we are expecting certain behaviors or outcomes often seems a lot less reasonable when someone else is expecting them. With gender-related issues, try substituting someone who is not of your gender and see how different things look.

Self deception. Most of us are infinitely more charitable in our assessments of ourselves than we are in our assessments of others. Fortunately for most of us, our interactions with others tend to keep these assessments from getting too far out of hand. The outside world is more than willing to let us know when we overstep the mark. These little reality checks are good. Otherwise, we actually start to believe that we are as wonderful as our mother said we were when we were four.

Unfortunately, as a woman gets past forty years of age, her world starts to contract, unless she takes definitive steps to keep it from doing so. As noted in the first article of this series, women over forty tend to be less active and less interactive with the world around them as they age. This is also true of older men, but to a lesser degree since their careers often compel them to get out more than many older women's careers do. One of many undesirable consequences of an older woman not getting out is that she gets fewer reality checks. This often leads to a very distorted view of herself. One woman may greatly underestimate what she has to offer. Another may grossly overestimate what she has to offer. Alas, the latter situation is infinitely more common.

When people enter into a social interaction thinking that they have more to offer than they in fact realistically do, the outcomes they expect infrequently (if ever) occur. This leads to an immense amount of frustration and subsequent rage at all of those people who ostensibly kept the desired outcomes from happening. It takes an immense amount of self-discipline to reach the point where you can look in the mirror and say, "It was not those people who led me down the garden path... or blocked my stroll... it was me."

The first step in minimizing our capacity for self deception is simply to get out more. The second step is to realize that we may not be anywhere near as important as we thought we were. As was the case with Unrealistic Expectations, one of the simpler reality checks is to sit down and describe yourself and what you have to offer... then put Someone-you-do-not-like's name in place of yours and see if the assessment still looks as rosy. Another method is simply to get an expert evaluation. There are people who do this for a living.

Still another method is to sit down and list what you have to offer, then list what twenty people that you know have to offer. Most people are not as far out in front as they think. Lastly, take your list of what you have to offer and do two things. First, go through the list and compare it to the statistical norms for your peer group and any group that you have to compete against. Second, do some research on how important those traits really are to others. Most people are rather surprised to find out that things that they thought were pretty earth-shaking are perceived by others as no big deal. It does not matter that in your reality, it ought to be a big deal. In the world's reality it often is not. What is more, even if it is a big deal to the world, if it is not seen as a major plus by the specific group that you are trying to interact with, it is still not going to give you any edge. If we are going to interact with the rest of the world, we must to some large degree accept their assessment of how important something is to them.

This does not mean that having a good self image is bad. It does mean that you are setting yourself up for some really hard falls if you go into situations expecting to be treated like royalty when in fact you are either ordinary or only slightly ahead of others in your peer group.

A narcissistic sense of entitlement. Frequently people get it in their head that because they did this or that, people owe them a certain kind of privileged treatment. Not infrequently the "this" and "that" in question is, in fact, nothing special.

They gave so and so ten years of their lives, so and so owes them. They got a degree, they deserve respect. They have been through too much in life to settle for ordinary. Sound familiar? If it does, a false sense of entitlement is seriously distorting your perceptions of reality.

Do you deserve special treatment, better treatment, automatic compliance with your expectations? What makes you so special that you deserve these things? A degree, your family name, the kind of car you drive, X number of years spent with what's his / her name?

Degrees are a dime a dozen. Millions of very competent people have them, but so do some who are epic in their stupidity. Nothing so special there.

Your family name probably won't buy you much. Millions of millionaires out there in the cold cruel world. Worldwide, certainly several hundred thousand individuals who come from families that have made huge contributions to the human race. Even then, more often than not, the contribution was the life work of a particular individual, not the entire clan.

The car you drive is driven by millions of others. If it is a Rolls, Benz, Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW, it does not mean much. Lots of prominent people own them. Lots of people who cannot even make the payments own them. Drug dealers, pimps, arms merchants and con artists own them. Nothing real special here.

So you spent a certain number of years with someone. I spent lots of years living in New Canaan Connecticut. Do you suppose New Canaan owes me anything? No, probably not. If you lived with someone for a number of years, you must have gotten something out of it or you would not have been there. I have not encountered many relationships that came with retirement plans.

In reality, most of us are pretty ordinary. No one owes us anything. You cannot take for granted what you had, or have. You cannot expect to get anything unless you give something of equal value. If you go through life putting out the least acceptable level of effort, don't expect the world's applause. You are not going to hear it. If you expect that just by doing what you were supposed to do, you are going to be given a free pass in life, dream on. It ain't going to happen. If you expect to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements, don't hold your breath.

Oddly enough, I know a man who has numbered among his close personal friends and acquaintances somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen Nobel Laureates and three Pulitzer Prize winners. To his recollection, not a single one of them ever sought or expected any special treatment from the average people that they interacted with.

You might want to ask yourself if you are really superior to these folks the next time you feel entitled to anything.

An unreasonable reluctance to accept personal limitations. Everyone has limitations. Some people are poor, some sick, some short, some tall, some not too attractive, some down right stupid, some smart but poorly educated. Some came from the "wrong" town, the "wrong" country, the "wrong" race, the "wrong" school, the "wrong" family. Life is not fair. Do not expect it to be.

Most people take the limitations that life has burdened them with, and work around them. Not infrequently, they go on to achieve truly remarkable things.

However, there are people who simply cannot accept that they have any personal limitations and they go through life ignoring those limitations that they ought to be making allowances for. They get into situations where they lack the necessary competencies. They start projects that they do not have the resources to complete. They enter into social contracts without either the will or the character to see them through.

Do they mean to be this way? Probably not. They do, however, get very upset when situations in which they became involved despite their lacking the qualities and resources necessary to succeed go terribly awry. They morph events, personalities, behavior and even outcomes in ways that distance them and their personal limitations from any responsibility for the less-than-perfect outcomes. Unfortunately, these distortions of reality are fragile defenses against the frustrations seething just beneath the surface of their psyches.

An unreasonable reluctance to accept societal rules or restrictions. All societies have rules that govern the behavior of those within them. You do not steal your neighbor's car or husband. Do not steal, period. You do not try to get a position as a neurosurgeon without having gone through medical school, internships and specialist training. In most societies, you are expected to do what you say you will. You are expected to contribute. You are expected to deal in good faith.

There are people who, even though they stole your car, seduced your husband, lied, never paid you back the money they had borrowed, burned your house to the ground and ran over your cat, feel outraged when you are understandably miffed with their behavior. They cast themselves as misunderstood victims of your unreasonable attitudes.

These individuals spend their lives recasting their own outrageous behavior in some twisted delusion that they can somehow make it acceptable or at least palatable. They are unbelievably frustrated by the world's failure to understand that they meant well... or at least did not mean ill.

Rejecting all personal limitations and all personal responsibility, they distort all situations, outcomes and personal character issues in such a way as to feel they are enabled to do all the things they are so unprepared to take on.

The perceived or actual inability to control others and their behaviors. There are people who feel nakedly vulnerable unless they can delude themselves that they have total control over their environment, the circumstances of their life and the people in it. Such control does not exist. It is an illusion, and a dangerous one. Extreme drives to control circumstances and people are symptoms of past losses. The only way for such a person to rid themselves of such an obsessive drive for control is to confront the insecurities that underlay them.

Such an excessive need for control is a dead give-away that the person exhibiting such behavior has serious doubts about their own ability to cope with everyday life. To resolve the feelings of inadequacy that drive such behaviors, one of two things must occur: core competencies must be improved or the person needs to learn that their core competencies are adequate compared to others.

Fear-triggered anger and rage
Society really frowns on adults who show fear. From the time that we are children we are taught that we should not be afraid. Yet there are things that each of us fear. For some of us, it is a fear of disappointing someone we love. For others, it may be a fear of failure. Some adults fear not being seen as credible professionally or socially. Many women fear being abandoned. Others fear that they will not be tough enough to survive rejection.

There are thousands of things that adult men and women fear. Each of these fears is all too real to those who are plagued by it. The worst part of it is that we cannot bring ourselves to publicly acknowledge that we are afraid, and yet those emotions are powerful and looking for an avenue of expression. We repress our fears lest we be seen as weak, but the fears do not fade away tamely. What really happens is they grow until they have to come out somehow, and they come out as anger.

A curious bunch of things happen when you repress such emotions. Superficially, you no longer have them. You do not own these problematic emotions... nor do they (you think) own you. The problem is that in this state your ego exercises no control over these repressed emotions. Without conscious rational review they mutate, taking on a sort of autonomous existence of their own, becoming more primitive and unfocused until they are like some berserk amoeba. They come bubbling forth from our subconscious at singularly inappropriate moments and blast anything in their path.

Once repressed, the fears become anger that is like an evil alien will with its own agenda, hiding within us. It deceives us. Our perceptions become distorted because fear that has been repressed is generally projected onto people, circumstances and situations that have either no connection or a highly elusive connection to the original fear. It erodes our ability to accurately perceive the degree of real danger inherent in situations that we encounter, causes us to be misled about our surroundings and can even alter memories of past occurrences and poison our belief in future outcomes.

Just beyond our conscious ability to perceive it, the fear morphs into an indiscriminate mindless anger.
Because that anger is born of a fear that cannot be acknowledged, it is projected outward targeting people and circumstances that are like lightning rods despite their having nothing whatsoever to do with the original fear. Thus you find people becoming incensed beyond all reason about things that have either no or minimal real impact on their lives.

Defusing the anger. Generally, only the person generating it, can defuse this kind of anger. To do so requires a painful process of self-examination until the underlying fear is exposed and accepted as part of who they are. Unfortunately, quite often the repression has gone on so long that the person involved has lost all sense of proportion and reality. In these instances it will generally be necessary to work through these issues with a therapist or with a friend with a superhuman capacity to withstand emotional abuse.

The four critical steps which must occur are: identifying the underlying fear, owning that fear (saying I do fear this), understanding that it is okay to have such fears and lastly getting a real approximation of the magnitude of the situation. Regarding this last element, people who have horrendous self-doubt about their ability to deal with life often are perfectly competent in reality. They simply have convinced themselves that they are inadequate.

Part 3: WHO ARE THE MEN?

What kind of man can actually get a much younger woman?

Coming Soon

Readers with comments or questions, or those who simply want help with these issues, are encouraged to e-mail the author. Provisions for doing this can be found in the Author's Profile.

See Also:
K. LEE CHRISTIAN: THE SECRETS OF THE MASTER
or How I Became a Dating Consultant

SURPRISING FIRST STEPS TO DATING SUCCESS Being ready to date before you start to date

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