I’ve long abandoned drinking but I’m still working on letting go of other habits that hinder my happiness.

Beliefs are an amazing thing. We hear the word “belief” and we immediately connect it to religion and spirituality, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. We actually have beliefs that can run even deeper than ideas on God. They attempt to explain things just as religious and spiritual beliefs do, but the beliefs I’m talking about are the ones that literally underlie who we are and create life as we know it. Yet, despite the incredible power of the thoughts dictating our every action, many of us are completely oblivious to them! We go about doing what we do without ever giving a thought to the subconscious reasoning that fuels our behavior, and we never stop to wonder how our thoughts and behaviors impact our daily lives.

Forceful ideas and opinions fly under our radar each and every day. Hard as they may be to recognize, they’re most definitely there. I first realized this with drinking.

I had an interesting upbringing that began Mormon and slowly transformed into something very not Mormon. It began when my family left all our relatives behind in California so that we could move to a peaceful city in Montana. A year within that move, my parents were in a nasty divorce that had our father taking off for 10 years while we were left alone with our mother. She battled with insecurities, and without any family or friends around, things quickly took to spiraling downward. Boyfriends came and went, and after getting a job as a bartender, the men in our home went from being clean cut to being tattooed, rough and heavy drinkers. My mother slowly shed the idealized image of the “perfect Mormon woman” and soon took on the habits of the men in her life.

My mother never handled stress well and she could never be happy. There was always something inconveniencing her and keeping her from attaining happiness, and that something always had someone to blame. Being children, that was all-too-easy to throw on our shoulders.  Read more “the fix”..