Stopping the Cycle By Terri L. Noll Have you ever found yourself in a ...

Stopping the Cycle By Terri L. Noll Have you ever found yourself in a situation that you swore you’d never get yourself into again, so long as the good Lord would get you out of it this time? Then, fast forward to some time in the future, and guess what? You’re right back where you swore you’d never be. If you’re lucky, that’s never happened to you. If you’re like me, though, you’ve “been there, done that” more than a few times. Though not a therapist, I think the honorary Ph.D. I’ve earned in life (single mom, four kids, four ex-husbands) gives me some ability to speak on what not to do. It is not so much that I have extremely high standards or tremendously low tolerance. It’s much more basic than that. I pick the wrong kind of guy in the first place. Looking back at my past relationship failures (which have been many—I only married and divorced four of them), the red flags were waving furiously in the wind. I chose to ignore them. It was more important to me to try to be the kind of woman “he” wanted, whoever “he” was at the time, than to be true to myself and ask myself if this was really the kind of man I wanted in my life. It was more important to have a man in my life than have the right man in my life. I would change to be what he wanted—regardless of whether or not it had anything to do with if I wanted him in the first place. There was counseling through the years, trying to “fix” me, but none of it did any good until the last counselor. He told me, “I can’t tell you what to do… (wasn’t that what I was paying him for?), but I can tell you this: you keep making the same mistakes. You end up with the same kind of man, the same situation, and you swear you’re not going to do it again—and six months, a year later, there you are. You are in a cycle. What you need to do is find where you are in that cycle—and do something different. It doesn’t matter what you do differently, just do something differently.” And that’s been the best advice I ever got from a therapist. I’m proud to say that I’m neither married nor waiting/hoping for the next divorce. In fact, it’s the longest time in my adult life that I’ve not been engaged, married or in the process of divorce. I am true to who I am, what I like, want and need. It is not easy to do something different, instead of the destructive pattern that only repeats the cycle. Where ever you are in your life, if you are in a situation that keeps repeating itself, stop and think where you are in that cycle—think through what you would normally do next—and do something different. ~Terri L. Noll; freelance writer in Richmond, VA. Email comments to: [email protected].