Tag Archives: negativity

Nurture, Yes, but Three No Nos for Marriage

After a brief sojourn onto other topics I’m back with the alphabetical marriage blogs. This time is Ns turn – 1 great one on the positive side and 3 you definitely don’t want in your marriage. Nurturing Each person in a marriage needs to be nurturing and supportive of their spouse. To nurture means the care of promoting the development of another person. Nurturing means nourishing, feeding or supporting. This means more than just meeting their physical need with food but nurturing them by encouraging and helping, praising and building them up. It is supporting them in whatever they undertake. … Continue reading →

Sapping Self-Confidence

Are you sapping your spouse’s self-confidence and creating problems in your marriage? Recently I experienced an example of how negativity and negative comments can affect performance. It was on the tennis court. I was not playing with Mick since he’s not back to tennis yet since his health problems and would never have behaved like this anyway. The person I partnered in one set was so negative that an air of tension pervaded the court. I was all the time conscious of the negative vibes coming from my partner. The result was I became tentative in my shot making, found … Continue reading →

Identifying Weeds in a Marriage

Yesterday we looked at a few deceptive weeds that can creep into a marriage by looking attractive at first. A lot depends on your definition of weed. You might have different ideas about what is a weed and what is not. Though other people might call them flowers, like snowball trees, snowdrops, or white jonquils to me they are weeds. In our garden anything that flowers white is a weed by my standards. Mick dutifully g digs them out, because he knows how I hate them. But some weeds easy to spot. Here, in no particular order, are some weeds … Continue reading →

Wasting Energy on Negative Reactions

As parents, we have to say “no”—we have to set limits and boundaries and let our children know what can and cannot be done. This does NOT mean that we have to be negative. It may seem a little strange, but I do believe that we can set strong limits and boundaries with our kids and still be positive. In fact, I think it takes a lot of extra energy to be negative and when we react negatively to things going on with our children and our families, we are not only wasting energy, but also teaching our children how … Continue reading →

Resisting the Urge to be Negative

I like to think of myself as a generally positive and optimistic person, but sometimes, when I sit back and listen to myself talk, I realize how much negativity I let creep into my comments. When it comes to how we talk to and with our children, resisting the urge to say something with a negative slant can make us better and more positive parents (and it might just change the way our children speak and act too.) Sarcasm, aggravation, annoyance–all of those creep into my tone and speech, often without my even realizing it. While I may feel basically … Continue reading →

Who Am I to Judge?

It seems to be human nature to judge—whether we are judging other people, situations or events. As a single parent, sometime our jugmentalism comes from a place of feeling defensive or self-conscious. I know that I wrestle with catching myself judging other people and often it is somehow a reflection of my own feeling about myself. I have to remind myself that I definitely do not like being on the receiving end and feeling so judged, so who am I to judge others? I think it is incredibly typical for us as single parents to develop a thick shell and … Continue reading →

Are You Passing on Negativity and Criticism?

We want our children to take on our values and we might even be secretly hoping that they might inherit some of our “better points”–but children also have a way of showing us the less savory sides of ourselves. We can pass on all sorts of things–values, personality traits, and belief systems without really intending too. If we tend to be critical and negative about people and things that happen–we could be ensuring that our children will also be negative and critical. It can take some hard self-evaluation to identify if we are being openly critical and negative. Do you … Continue reading →

Coping With “The Sniper”

My son is currently in a stage I am calling “the sniper”–his modus operandi right now is to lurk about the outside edges of family interactions and then chip away with critical comments and attack from the flanks. His snarky, under-the-breath comments can be vicious, in addition to being downright annoying! It has taken me a while to come up with a coping strategy. As most of you parents know, it’s so much easier to see what OTHER PARENTS should be doing about their children’s troublesome behavior than to see objectively what one should be doing about her own. Besides, … Continue reading →

Are You Doing Too Much Whining?

We all need to vent and share our frustrations and “issues.” As home business owners, we may think we have more than our fair share of trials and tribulations. However, as the main representative of our home-based business, it is important to keep the whining and negative attitude in check—especially when dealing with customers, prospects, and vendors. Sometimes whining is hard to catch. We may spend so much time working alone or in isolation that when we make contact with a listening ear, we just need to vent. We may vent about other customers, a negative experience with a vendor … Continue reading →

Dealing with your own negativity

In Dealing with negative people, we looked at strategies for coping with negative friends, family and co-workers. Negative people can really sap your happiness levels and over time really bring you down. But what if you are the negative one? How can you change yourself so that you attract people to yourself rather than repel them with your constant moaning and criticizing? The first step in any sort of change is recognizing that you have a problem. If you realize that you are a negative person, congratulations! You have made the most important step in changing yourself into a more … Continue reading →