Modifying Bad Behaviors
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Everyone has some behaviors that they don’t like about themselves. Mine slipped under my personal radar for a very long time thanks to my drug addiction. Well…now I’m in addiction recovery and am becoming increasingly aware of certain things I don’t like about myself that could be changed with a little effort.
I am now a stay at home mom and to be real honest about it…I’m not the best housewife in the world. I took this job thinking that it would be easy and relaxing because it had been anytime I called in sick to work for absolutely no reason when I was still actively addicted. Things certainly do change once you are off mood altering substances.
It has come to my realization that I really don’t know the first thing about running a household. Sure I’ve been the person that works 40 hours a week, cooks dinner and cleans on the weekend. That I can do. What I have never been is the day to day maintenance person of a household. The person that makes sure that everything has a place, that the house isn’t cluttered, that messes are picked up as they are made.
I could ignore the situation like I had done when I was on drugs but it is a hell of a lot harder to do that when you are not taking a mood altering substance…funny how that works. No, I need to deal with this situation that I’ve found myself in.
There is absolutely no reason why I can’t run a clean and organized house. As it is right now I can’t have anyone over unexpectedly because my place is usually a mess. That is no way to live.
Then I found it. A website made for people who don’t have the first clue how to run a household. She calls herself the Flylady. The purpose of the site? It provides a system (free of charge) which slowly gets you into a routine of running a household. By adding something new to your list of responsibilities each day you slowly work up to a full day of taking care of a household.
It starts off really slowly…really slowly. How about just getting up, taking a shower and getting dressed all the way down to your shoes. Simple right? Well you would think so but when you usually don’t have to leave the house until after 11am for errands you can get caught up in not getting dressed until you absolutely have to. How can you expect to take charge of anything in your pj’s?
This is just an example of one of the things that I’m doing to help improve my behaviors and become a more productive person. I know that it sounds like basic stuff that I should know already but for some reason it is not. I felt kind of disgusting and stupid about this for a while now until I found the flylady site.
Reading stories on her site about other people who were also clueless about housework made me feel like I wasn’t alone and it made me feel less embarrassed about having to learn this stuff at age 29. As I typed my age just now I realized that I’m still kind of embarrassed…but not nearly as bad. At least now I can say I’m working on it.
If you get anything out of this post at all it should be that we all have some behaviors that we don’t like about ourselves. It’s just going to be that way, we’ve been ignoring so much for so long that we are bound to have let some behaviors remain that are less than desirable. But with some work they can be changed. It can be done…let’s get to work.
Posts
May 25th, 2007 at 10:31 am
[...] Modifying Bad Behaviors [...]
September 20th, 2007 at 8:08 am
[...] at this point you realize that in order to make improvements to your life you need to begin modifying bad behaviors which have gotten completely out of control thanks to the fact that you have been completely [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
[...] wrote post after post about modifying bad behaviors and building your self confidence because these were the exact things that I was struggling with in [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
[...] and have not once been “sick” for the sake of laying low. I felt that I was able to modify my bad behaviors. But let me tell you what I am experiencing [...]
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
[...] not always going to be easy. Let’s take into consideration the fact that I still have some bad behaviors to modify within myself. This can make my simple plan of doing what I can, the best that I can every day a [...]
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
[...] Once those feelings and thoughts are allowed to be felt, they can then be examined. It is through that examination that we begin to see some patters of behavior that are causing us to feel the way we do. It’s at that point that we begin to work on modifying bad behaviors. [...]
June 9th, 2008 at 10:56 am
[...] year, 5 months and some change since I entered into addiction recovery. I have overcome a lot of my bad behaviors and addictive thinking patterns but there is one huge behavior that I am having trouble [...]