By Michael Kline
 
At the RIM Institute, we’ve been surveying students and retreat participants for the last few years about emotional traits. I see a common thread around three issues. 1. Asking for what you need. 2. Receiving love and support from others. And 3. Setting effective boundaries.
 
Do you find yourself consistently feeling unfulfilled in a variety of relationships, not asserting yourself enough, or perhaps you have difficulty figuring out where your responsibility for someone else ends? Issues like these and others, such as perfectionism, low self-esteem, distrust, and even physical illness related to stress can indicate that you have some codependent behavior.
 
Codependency can show up in any relationship in the family, the neighborhood, at work, or anywhere else. A common example is when a loved one needs support because of an addiction, or an illness and we take care of that person at the expense of ourselves. Codependents can also attempt to control everything within a relationship, again, without addressing their own needs, thus setting us up for unfulfilling interactions and even sometimes unintentionally discouraging the loved one from seeking help.
 
We learn codependency by watching and imitating people in our family and in society who display the behavior; thus, it is often passed down from generation to generation.
 
Many of us are taught not to be assertive, for instance, or we don’t know how to ask directly for our needs to be met. Women are sometimes taught that codependent behavior is how all women should behave.
 
Since codependency is a learned emotional and behavioral condition, that means it can also be unlearned. Here are some ways to begin:

Recognize where it comes from. Many things we were taught as children set us up to become codependent. For example, sayings like: “Don’t rock the boat” teach us to be passive and keep the peace at all costs.

Begin to understand where the boundary is between yourself and other people. Although this can be confusing for the codependent at first, when you start to realize that you are not responsible for your partner’s depression or anger, for example, it will become an easier concept to grasp. You have to take care of yourself first. Remember the airline safety rule to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs? You can’t truly help someone else until you’ve taken care of your own needs.

Learn when and how to say “no.” As you become more self-reliant, you will have to learn to say “no.” That can be challenging, but understand that your no is usually expressed anyway, often through resentment. It’s empowering to say “no” when you want to. You’ll also find that standing up for your needs and expressing yourself more frequently will improve your well-being and, even, your relationships. Remember, if you never say “no”, your “yes” has no value.
The cycle of codependency can be broken as you find freedom and self-esteem in the constructive process of recovering your own voice and expressing it. In time and with practice, you won’t worry so much about what others think of you, and you won’t feel the need to control others or their response to you. Healing is possible, and it can start today.

You’ll find that it’s okay to talk openly about problems and feelings, and you won’t worry so much about others. As helpful as talking about problems and sharing feeling can be, we now know that it’s more effective to regenerate the original script we were taught.

Take June, a consultant from a large US city I recently worked with. June found herself losing sales, and felt she was responsible for her customers feelings more than for helping them resolve the problem she is trained to do. As she holds back asking the tough questions that she fears will make them uncomfortable, she is keeping them in their suffering and hurting her own sales. Through the RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory) process, June went on a metaphoric journey exploring sensations in her own body like the chronic pain in her left hip. As her imagination gives it form, colors and texture, she imagines moving into it and is surprised to find herself in a childhood memory of her mother ignoring her complaints and giving her more chores and responsibilities. After creating safety to do so, young June is able to have a dialogue with Mom, expressing her grievances and feeling listened to and heard for the first time in her life. Mom shares how sorry she is, and how she was raised in the same way. They both realize the journey they share and can now have a very different relationship. Because she regenerated the original memory, and the nervous system treats a well-imagined event as a real event, her new emotional memories change how she feels, rather than just how she thinks. Now June can more easily change her behavior, without relying on sheer will power to remember to try to think differently.

As Melody Beattie wrote in Codependent No More: “Worrying about people and problems doesn’t help. It doesn’t solve problems, it doesn’t help other people, and it doesn’t help us. It is wasted energy.”

Michael J. Kline is a Master Trainer, Retreat Leader and Firekeeper. You can often find him teaching emotional processing skills like RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory), or assisting Jack Canfield, training transformational trainers, or hosting a retreat at Con Smania in Costa Rica. Otherwise, he’s at home in Sarasota FL, with his husband of 34 years, and their labradoodle Luke. You can reach him through his website www.michaeljkline.com or e-mail [email protected]
 
Author’s content used under license, © Claire Communications

By Michael Kline
 
Check the thesaurus, and the synonyms for overwhelm are pretty awful: overpower, subdue, oppress, quash, engulf, swallow, submerge, bury, suffocate. Ugh.
 
To anyone who’s experienced overwhelm, and that’s plenty of us, those words may be all too familiar. Whether the overwhelm is sudden or cumulative, chronic or acute, the feeling is one of drowning, immobility and powerlessness.
 
During those times, everything feels too big. It’s not just everyday busyness and packed schedules. When we’re overwhelmed, making dinner becomes a monumental effort. Better eat out. Bills, housework? Forget it. Tasks that used to take only 10 or 15 minutes now seem utterly impossible. There seems to be no time for anything. So we do nothing.
 
Worse, we have no faith that this, too, shall pass. We seem hopelessly mired in the quicksand of “too much.” We keep trying to will our way out of the quicksand with a will that just wants to lie down.
 
We live in a very overwhelming time. Instant and constant news, social media and smart phone addiction, even smart watches that throw data at us about every little thing. And things are speeding up. Technology’s well-touted time saving seems to have yielded less leisure time, not more. Employers are demanding more work, while many adults are sandwiched between the needs of older and younger generations.
 
Most of us have really lost connection with nature, and with our own human nature. We’re moving so fast through our activities and alerts and instant messages and fast food, and now even our relaxation is fast – instant ways to relax quickly, use an app to calm yourself, which might be great if it wasn’t on the same smart phone that lures you into a wasted hour of tik-toks while you meant to meditate!
 
Our lives are in such fast forward that we don’t even recognize we might need help until we’re drowning. Part of the problem is the cultural belief system in place, one that overrates doing and achievement and underrates quality of experience and connection with values.
 
In that cultural mindset, it’s not uncommon for a friend or a magazine article, with all good intention, to suggest the “Nike solution”: Just do it. Make priorities. Choose three things and accomplish them quickly. Go through the mail as soon as it arrives. Do a “brain dump” and create a huge to-do list with everything that you can think of on it. Now get started! 
 
Not bad suggestions necessarily, but overcoming overwhelm isn’t really about measuring accomplishment. It’s about connecting with what has meaning for us, with what feeds and enlivens us.
 
Deciding to do more, to overcome the overwhelm of having to do more, will never us where we want to be. This future-based state of mind never ends because there will always be more to do.  Stop it!
 
Being in relationship with what has meaning, is fulfilling in the here and now. That connection provides the natural fuel for getting things done.
 
Thus, when we come into alignment with our values and needs, we find the inner resources and spaciousness needed to get on with life. Productivity is the side effect of well-being.
 
First, however, we need to identify our individual symptoms and triggers for overwhelm. Our symptoms can be physical (e.g., nail biting, clumsiness, neck ache); psychological (forgetful, rude, defensive); social (poor hygiene, inadequate boundaries); or spiritual (loss of sense of purpose, unsure of what’s important).
 
Triggers are just as individual: a deadline, a certain tone of voice, change.
 
Noticing these symptoms and triggers is like setting off the two-minute warning buzzer: time for intervention techniques. And after we’ve come back to ourselves, it’s time for prevention techniques, such as adequate rest, nutrition, exercise and, as always, connection to purpose.
 
I find that with many clients, the overwhelm feeling is rooted in some deep-seeded need to be better to be good enough. To be perfect to deserve love, or to produce more to meet the unending, insatiable desire to prove our worth as a man, as a woman, as a parent…
 
This is a human condition. You are not broken just because you feel the overwhelm. Let’s stop identifying as if we actually ARE the condition – so you are not overwhelmed, you are FEELING the overwhelm. Notice the difference. This means you can separate from overwhelm and enjoy life without that feeling in the future. If overwhelm is a frequent stressor in your life, maybe it’s time to remove it. You’d be surprised at how quickly and easily we can identify the true root cause and change it at the source. If you’re curious, you can learn how a truly transformational technique called RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory) is helping people just like you, live their best lives.
 
Michael J. Kline is a Master RIM Facilitator and Trainer, Retreat Leader and Firekeeper. You can often find him teaching RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory), or assisting Jack Canfield training transformational trainers, or hosting a retreat at Con Smania in Costa Rica. Otherwise, he’s at home in Sarasota FL, with his husband of 34 years, and their labradoodle Luke. You can reach him through his website www.michaeljkline.com or e-mail [email protected]
 
 
Author’s content used under license, © Claire Communications

With every client, there’s often an elephant in the room. Who is this elephant? It is the self. The invisible and always present voice in our client’s head. It’s the elephant in the room because it’s the one big, usually obvious thing that prevents them from doing what they want to do, achieve, pursue, accomplish, avoid, or change.
 
The irony is this voice comes from the same mind who created the desired intention in the first place. So, there’s the struggle – the vicious circle of our client’s own creation. (I’m guessing that by now, you’ve realized we’re talking about ourselves too). In other words, we become our own worst enemy and biggest critic.
 
What if we could shut off the voice like a switch, how much would that be worth? Without being aware of it, most people attempt this every day. Trying to alter our state of mind through endless activities, drugs, alcohol, exercise, yoga, meditation, plant medicine, etc. All in attempt to stop the voices from running the show.
 
Most people understand what being in “the zone” feels like - doing something without thinking, just flowing without a sense of time, perhaps even a feeling of bliss. Even if it’s rare or just for a brief time, we usually love this experience. The zone is where we often feel our best and perform our best. It’s no coincidence that athletes try to get in this state of mind, at will. Unfortunately, the elephant in the room usually has something to say about that.
 
The science community has identified 6 important chemical reactions in the brain that occur when in the state of flow, they are, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and oxytocin. When these chemicals are active, they quiet the voice in the head, and can allow focus without interruption and access to the zone.
 
What does all this mean? Knowing about these chemicals might be intriguing but it doesn’t help to get us in the zone. When we’re working with our clients, using our amazing powerful questioning skills, and exploring different avenues, the client’s mind will either let you in or reject what you are saying, and you don’t always know for sure which one it is. In fact, the client may not even know because what they say and how they respond will not necessarily line up with what they will do.
 
Every human has this inner voice, and it has been well-trained to think the way it does, to keep us feeling safe and loved. The good news is that convincing even the most well-trained and stubborn elephants to consider new ideas and other possibilities is much easier than you might think. The self, the voice in the head, gets all its information from subconscious memories from all life experiences which drives current decisions and behavior.
 
A tool I use with my groups and individual clients is RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory). The process allows the client to naturally dip into a state where the elephant’s voice got it’s training in the first place. There, in this pliable state, we can take advantage of the science of neuroplasticity and regenerate a sense of safety and love all the elephant voices, so that it will cooperate with desired outcomes.
 
In RIM work, the whole brain is active allowing the perfect relevant subconscious programs to surface automatically, without any psychological manipulation whatsoever. The client is always in control and creates their own healing/growing journey. Through gentle, somatic sensing, neutral witnessing and following the client, stuck negative emotions surface and dissipate, making room for new positive feelings and freedom from old programs by creating new neuropathways in the brain.
 
Since there is no switch or app on our phone to turn off the voice in our head, RIM is the most powerful tool we’ve found to help clients get out of their own way. I hope you will join me on a journey of self-healing and helping clients break the vicious cycle of the voice in their head. By Mastering Emotional Processing Skills using RIM, you will never feel helpless no matter what shows up. I teach these skills online, live and at retreats. You can find more info and upcoming classes here. 

​Michael J. Kline is a Master RIM Facilitator and Trainer, Retreat Leader and Firekeeper. You can often find him teaching RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory), or assisting Jack Canfield training transformational trainers, or hosting a retreat at Con Smania in Costa Rica. Otherwise, he’s at home in Sarasota FL, with his husband of 34 years, and their labradoodle Luke. You can reach him through his website www.michaeljkline.com or e-mail [email protected]​