Half Empty or Half Full - Sad or Happy

I've been working with my granddaughter and the horses in the mornings for a while now. I love my granddaughter and I love my horses. I really look forward to spending time with them together. Having the opportunity to share my love of horses with someone I care about has been a gift.

But sometimes it's hard to see it that way. I drag myself out of bed early to go to the barn to met my crabby, grouchy teen aged granddaughter. As much as the kid loves horses, you'd think she'd be happy to be having this special time but instead she's full of complaints and obviously miserable.

One of the things I keep trying to tell her is that it's up to her whether she is happy or sad. It's all in how she decides to view the world. If she chooses to focus on how tired she is, how miserable she feels and how hard it is to do what I'm teaching her, instead of what an amazing opportunity she has, then she's going to feel miserable.

Hey, no one is more tired than me in the morning, I have to force myself out of bed but I do it and I don't dwell on how hard it is. AND my body aches but I don't let that stop me. I ride because I love it. If I have a problem with a horse, it's a learning opportunity and I appreciated it.

It is such a hard thing to learn. I remember, I used to be just like her but that was part of my victim thinking. Letting go of that glass is half empty mentality has been a huge step towards finding my own personal happiness.

Sometimes when I'm having a hard day, I have to remind myself I'm forgetting to see the fullness in the glass. When I dwell on the bad things, there is no room for the good things. Shifting gears from the bad to the good can change my whole outlook on the day AND my life!

On my horse blog I get comments all the time about how lucky my granddaughter is to have me. The only one that doesn't believe that, I think, is my granddaughter. She is so busy feeling sorry for herself because she didn't get to sleep in, that she totally misses she's actually living her dream. How sad is that?

Now it would be easy to point a finger at her and say what she's going through is nothing like what a multiple goes through. But, I'm here to tell you it's all the same thing. Taking my new skill of looking for the fullness in the glass of my life and teaching it to all of my parts within made a huge difference in my life.

Granted the half empty in most of my inner kids' lives wasn't such a silly thing as not getting sleep. It was huge things like being raped, tortured, abandoned. What are the half fulls there. Well, how about, you survived! You didn't turn out like them! You're getting help! It's over!!

It was amazing how well they responded to being urged to look for the good things in our lives. It was so much easier to stay focused on healing when we paid attention to those good things. We actually began to feel like we had good reasons to want to be alive instead of just having our instinct to stay alive keep us going.


multiple personality disorder MPD dissociative Identity disorder did