Standing Your Ground

There are times when standing your ground is the right (sometimes only) idea. No, we are not talking about the “Stand Your Ground” law around shootings and gun violence. We’re talking about the way we feel pushed around on an everyday basis.

Whether it’s by someone who will not take “No” for an answer, or someone asking us to go against our own principles in an extreme way, or someone trying to guilt and scare us into thinking the way they do, standing your ground may be the only answer.

It’s true even when you find yourself staring at your reflection in the mirror, with doubt gazing back at you in that unshielded regard. Sometimes standing your ground is the only answer that gets you where you want to go.

When we are fighting addictions of any kind (food, tobacco, drugs, alcohol, or some emotional toxicity) slippage, while it may happen, is nothing to be condoned or accepted as “just the way of things.” We must hold ourselves to what is true, what is right for us, what is our center.

Sometimes this can be extremely difficult when we are moving away from situations or people.

My client, Celia, was mentored for decades by a woman who was strong, brilliant in her field, and absolutely knew who she was. The mentor had a particular way of looking at and acting in the world, and my client tried to emulate her for years.

It was a difficult road. Often in striving to be like her mentor, Celia would “go off the rails” in terms of who she thought herself to be. Celia would directly contradict her own heart and mind and insisted to herself she was wrong because it wasn’t the way her mentor would handle things.

The mentor — believing staunchly in her own worldview — only made things worse, not better, by agreeing that what Celia was feeling and thinking was the wrong way to go.

By measuring herself in large and small ways against a woman whose circumstances were light-years away from her own, Celia was mired in constant self-doubt. Just walking into this woman’s presence, Celia felt her own lack.

Eventually, Celia became an entrepreneur in her own right in an entirely different field. She gained confidence in who she was and how she saw the world around her. She began to know her own truths.

Still, whenever she and her mentor got together, there would be the subtle (or not so subtle) hints that however Celia saw the world and her own place in it, she was wrong. That she was responding inappropriately. That she simply wasn’t as good as her former mentor at navigating her own soul and life path — and never would be.

Celia doesn’t speak with her mentor much anymore.

“It was a wrench,” she admits. “I thought we’d be friends forever. But eventually, I realized that she wasn’t always right and that the strongest and the best thing I could do for myself was to bless her and release her to live her own life, as I live mine.

“If I was going to be who I was meant to be, I had to stand my ground, even if that meant losing her friendship.”

That situation and Celia’s decision regarding the friendship are together a perfect example of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quote: “In style, swim with the current; in principle, stand like a rock.”

Even when it comes to your belief systems, I encourage you to listen to other points of view. See if you want to change your understanding as a result. You might even find your current beliefs fitting you better if you adjust your perspective.

For example, if you believe that your health is the most important thing in your life, you may stand strongly on the side of exercise, supplements, and a certain way of eating.

Yet others may bring your attention to their ways of taking care of their health, which excludes some of the things you believe to be vital or includes things you never thought about before.

As a result, you may decide to ditch a supplement regimen and eat more unprocessed and whole foods. You may recognize that stress and lack of sleep are playing a detrimental part in your health regimen. Thus, you make changes.

That’s adaptability.

On the other hand, if your friend believes staunchly that we should “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and they drink and smoke, their ways of self-care are directly opposed to what you know and believe. So, stand your ground.

And standing your ground is important in the Wide World itself. To address today’s worldview, you may believe that the way to peace is reaching out through interfaith alliances, changing the current economic strata, or reprioritizing our responses to crises. If that’s the case, then don’t let the naysayers (who are calling you a fool and threatening you with their way of life) make you back down.

You don’t need to go from one side of your belief systems all the way to the other out of fear or under duress. That’s not compromise or adaptability; that’s caving in.

I encourage you to look at your life as a whole.

What’s perfect for you?

What are you willing to change?

What is the core of your soul that you wouldn’t trade for diamonds and power?

When you know how you want your life structured, what you will compromise on and what must stay solid in its own essence?