Safe People lead to Safe Relationships....

Hello everybody!

I hope you are nestled and warm, all snug in your homes! It is C-O-L-D!!!! There's nothing like nesting this time of year!

In keeping with my challenge of getting real about your relationships( my 2011 Challenge - the 5 F's), I am encouraging you to take stock of the people who have most influenced you in your life. Make a list and chart how they treated you,(was it consistent, did they always support you no matter what or was it unpredictable) how they treated others and how they thought about themselves in your opinion. Remember to go back from childhood to present day. You will be amazed at what stares back at you. You have either surrounded yourself with emotionally safe people whom you could count on or you have a stack of folks who have been there once in a while but definitely not on a healthy, dependable, predictable basis.


When you assess the people who have influenced your development, take a look at how you relate to others. Are you having a hard time discerning who is really there for you and who is healthy for you? Don't worry, this is common for a lot of us. This topic has come up often this week. I have been referring folks to Henry Cloud and John Townsend's books, Safe People and Boundaries (both are available on the buy books/cd's portion of my website). They couch both subjects with a Christian perspective in a clinical sense. I have found the books useful no matter what your belief system may be. They indicate that when we have not developed the ability to discern healthy people, we tend to repeat patterns and draw into our lives people who are not safe for us and we start to believe it is because we are too needy that they let us down. We start to believe something is wrong with us when it continues to happen in a continual pattern in our families, relationships, marriages and friendships.

Take stock this week and let's get on the road to healthy by re-evaluating the true relationships in our lives versus the ones we believe to be true.

Make it a great week! Stop by my facebook page and drop me a line! Don't forget to tune in on Friday at 11am to Frankly Speaking at 1530 am or at WCTR.com to listen online by clicking listen live and scrolling down and clicking on Frankly Speaking.

Be well,
Andrea