Sunday 30 June 2013

Gluttons for punishment

The girls were still horrible. One of the ring leaders actually was getting a dose of her own medicine and was getting fazed out. I think she was beginning to see that it doesn't pay to be friends with these girls, but I know how girls are and they will still run back to them even if they make them feel horrible.

What is it about girls? It is almost like we are gluttons for punishment. We almost purposefully take the hard rode or allow ourselves to be treated like crap over and over again. We want the attention and affection so much we are almost willing to do anything. We will ruin ourselves just to feel it, experience love, belonging. But I do not believe that it is our fault. I feel as though we have this predisposition to seek love, to find love. The upbringings that we have do not normally help either. The absent fathers, the screwed up mothers with self-concept issues of their own. And we are expected to come out unscathed. "Beautiful from the inside out." When really on the inside we have no idea what love is or who we even are.

It is really sad because very few girls have this natural, healthy self-concept. Where they face the world head on, no excuses for who they are. They have this "take me or leave me attitude."

The rest of us spend our whole lives wanting to feel needed, apart of something, enough for someone. There are some of those, if they are lucky, that somehow change it, reverse it and are not completely consumed by this need to feel loved. They, through a long process, are able to, most of the time, feel good about themselves without any compliments or guys turning their heads. I will say it took how many years of making these bad habits and how many years is it going to take to reverse them?

I will say it took 23 years for me, creating these unhealthy habits, that I criticized myself for, but are actually quite normal for a girl. It took a good year of counseling mood swings, amazing friends with insight, and I finally got just that. Insight. I understood that God loved me no matter what, seriously no matter what. And it was something that simple yet that profound to crack through my shell. To finally shatter everything I had known. Because seriously I had heard many times Jesus loves you, God's love is healing, God's love is unconditional. But for some reason I did not really understand it. Maybe it was the right timing. Or some might say that I am naive and ignorant. Whatever you want to call it I feel good about myself. I am not self-destructive.  I do not have convince myself that I am worth it anymore, I know I am. So whatever you want to say I am better for it.

I feel for girls, especially those that I can tell simply want to be loved. Even more so these young girls that just do not know any better. They have figured out the girl game, and are ready to play. But they just want attention. I was wonder what is going on at home, or in their heads. Because most of them are not bad girls they are simply desiring a basic need, love. You may not say it is a basic need but really think about it. How fulfilling can life be if you do not have love. How far can you get in life if you do not have love. And women, I would say more than men, truly feel this void.  I feel for these girls, the girls who simply want to be loved.

Good behavior change I mean chain!

Wow its been awhile. Let me catch you up.

Well since my last horrific blog post I decided to turn things around. I was talking to a friend and she is a social worker at a school and she gave me a few ideas. The one I chose to go with was a good behavior chain. If I saw the students doing something nice for someone else or if a student came and told me about a good deed than that person would get their name on a piece of paper and that paper would be added to the chain. The students would get different incentives for how far the chain got. It did not even take a week and the chain hit the floor.

I began to realize that it is difficult for young children, okay lets be honest anyone, to simply do nice things for people. That is why I had an external award for these students. If they got the chain across the room they would get a pizza party. They had 6 weeks or so.

They actually were very excited about this. When it touched the floor they were ecstatic. They did not get across the room, but very close. I gave them ice cream instead of a pizza party, but it was still an incentive.

I think I am going to start it at the beginning of this next year, I will have four classes and I think I will make it a competition among the classes and see how it goes.

The behavior did seem to be better, at least in front of me.

The girls were still horrible. One of the ring leaders actually was getting a dose of her own medicine and was getting fazed out. I think she was beginning to see that it doesn't pay to be friends with these girls, but I know how girls are and they will still run back to them even if they make them feel horrible.

See the rest in my next post about girls!