Tag Archives: psychology

6 Reasons Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail

by Kassandra Lamb

Happy New Year image — (image by Nevit Dilmen CC-SA-BY 3.0 Wikimedia Commons)

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? (Or perhaps you call them goals.) Do you find they have flown out the window by the end of February, and then you feel like a failure?

The problem may be with how you are wording the resolutions/goals. Or perhaps they aren’t quite the right ones for you.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that get at the most common reasons why New Year’s resolutions fail.

1. Is the goal/resolution too abstract?

I will be the best person possible sounds good, but it is doomed for failure as soon as you make your first mistake of the new year. Instead, ask yourself what traits or behaviors you would like to improve and make the goal more concrete and specific.

I will strive not to interrupt people during conversations is much more doable.

2. Is it too big?

Chunk it down into more manageable sub-goals. These can be celebrated as they are achieved, versus only looking at the big goal that feels so far away and difficult.

I will write and publish my first novel this year feels overwhelmingly hard. But if you chunk it down into:

I will finish the first draft by June.
I will strive to do two self-edits by September.
I will send it to a professional editor by October 1st.
I will investigate what is involved in getting my book published.
I will set the publication process in motion by the end of the year.

3. Is it something within your control?

When I was a novice psychotherapist, I foolishly thought that I could readily help people lose weight. I had studied hypnosis and figured it would be a great tool to get people to eat less and exercise more.

And the hypnotic suggestions usually did work, but I soon discovered that weight management was much more complicated than that. Even when people did everything they should do, they didn’t always lose weight. Sometimes there were physical issues—slow metabolism, medications, genetics, etc.—and sometimes there were psychological barriers. And sometimes it was a plain old mystery why the pounds weren’t coming off.

Note that I’m calling it “weight management,” not “weight control” as it is more often labeled. The reality is that we cannot directly control certain things, and our weight is one of them.

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.
― Epictetus (Greek Stoic philosopher, circa 55-135 AD)

So look at your resolutions and ask yourself if the end goal is totally within your control.

I will research and establish healthier eating patterns and increase my activity level is more realistic than I will lose thirty pounds.

4. Are you “shoulding” on yourself?

Is this a goal you really want or are you setting it because you believe it is something you should be doing?

Does I will find a better-paying job get shifted from one year’s resolution list to the next? Maybe you really like your job, but it just doesn’t pay enough to make ends meet. Are there other alternatives, such as asking for a raise or looking for a second-income source?

Maybe, after asking these questions, you realize you really should pursue the goal, even though you don’t particularly want to, but being clearer about why you are doing it may help you get there.

So the resolution may become I will look hard at my finances and try to find a way to ease them, which may require changing jobs.

5. Is your measurement criteria accurate? Or to putting it another way, are you judging success based on the right aspect of the goal?

I won’t get angry at my kids may not be all that realistic, since everyone gets angry and kids can be irritating at times. Maybe I will control my temper better and not yell at my kids when I’m angry is more doable.

One of the frustrations I encountered when working with clients on weight management issues was their obsession with the scale. The reality is that the number of pounds we weigh is not always the best measure of our health or even our appearance.

After a while, I started asking clients to put their scales up in their attics and use a measuring tape instead to keep track of how many inches they were losing as they lost fat and toned muscles (which get denser and heavier when they are toned). Going down three clothing sizes was a better indicator of success than how many pounds they had lost!

6. Is your resolution related to a goal or dream that you have lost interest in or one that you don’t care enough about to put in the effort required?

This can be a very subtle reason why New Year’s resolutions fail. Sometimes things we used to be gung-ho about aren’t so important anymore, and sometimes a goal turns out to be too damn difficult to be worth the bother.

It’s also sometimes hard to admit this to ourselves.

So ask this question, when you find yourself feeling lackluster about a resolution/goal: Are you giving up due to lack of confidence but you really do want it? (In which case, figure out what you need to improve your skills and confidence and push yourself to get there.)

OR are you not willing to make it happen because it’s just not important enough anymore?

There’s no shame in this. And it doesn’t mean the goal was stupid to begin with—things change over time, including our enthusiasm and willingness to commit resources to something. And it may be a goal that becomes important again down the road, when the resources are more readily available.

**My first novel, 17 years in the making.**

I started writing my first novel fifteen years before it was finished and seventeen years before it was published. For the first five of those years, I will finish my novel was on my New Year’s resolution list.

And every year, I would fool around with it some—change the opening, add a scene or two—but then I would get discouraged and put it away again.

I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t willing to put in the effort to get it published once it was written. This was back in the days when traditional publishing was the only viable alternative.

I knew getting a publisher would be difficult, involving many factors I couldn’t control, and I HATE not being in control of my own destiny.

At that point, I stopped putting it on my resolutions list and told myself I would pursue my writing dream once I was retired and had more time and energy. The story languished in my hard drive, all but forgotten, for years.

But after I retired, I decided to finish writing it, even if it never got published. In retirement, I could justify “wasting time” on something that might never pay off. I sat down and finished the first draft in six weeks. 🙂

Hopefully these tips will help you modify your resolutions/goals this year, so that they are less likely to end up on the trash heap. Can you think of other reasons why New Year’s resolutions fail?

Fireworks! — **HAPPY NEW YEAR!!** (Photo by Leandro Neumann Ciuffo CC-BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Posted by Kassandra Lamb. Kassandra is a retired psychotherapist turned mystery writer. She is the author of the Kate Huntington psychological mysteries, set in her native Maryland, and a new series, the Marcia Banks and Buddy cozy mysteries, set in Central Florida.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

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8 Do’s and Don’ts When Portraying Psychopaths and Narcissists (Plus a New Release)

Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Other Bad Guys and Gals

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by Kassandra Lamb

By far, the most popular posts on our site are those discussing psychopaths: What Is a Psychopath?, Are Psychopaths Born or Made?, and Can Psychopaths Be Cured?

Why are we humans so fascinated by these people who are essentially evil incarnate? I don’t have a good answer for that, but I don’t think it means we like that evil. Perhaps we are so intrigued because it is hard to fathom how some people can end up that way.

Today, I’m hanging out over at Jami Gold’s cyber-home, talking about psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists and other kinds of villains. What are the differences between these labels? How do the people who merit these labels behave? And what causes these pathological patterns of behavior?

Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Other Bad Guys and Gals

One of the toughest tasks we authors face is deciding how to portray our bad guys and gals. Will we make them out to be misguided and conflicted souls, or totally evil psychopaths, or somewhere in between? And exactly what is a psychopath anyway?

This question came up for me recently as I finished up a Halloween story in my cozy mystery series. I was tempted to go the conflicted soul route and have my antagonist be at least partially redeemed at the end, but some of the things this antagonist was destined to do, it would take a full-blown psychopath to go there. So that’s the direction I had to take.

Sometimes, like in this case, the plot dictates how evil and lacking in remorse the antagonist must be, but other times, most times really, we may want to have at least some positive traits in our bad guys.

So how to do that and still be true to human nature? (As it really is, not how it is portrayed all too often in movies and TV shows.)

What Is a Psychopath Anyway?

First, let me clarify our terminology. Sociopath and psychopath are essentially the same thing. They are two different words, coined at different points in the history of the mental health field, but referring to the same people … and neither is still officially used in the field today.

The official terminology is now antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and members of the mental health field will rarely use the terms sociopath or psychopath in any official capacity.

But saying “a person with antisocial personality disorder” is a bit cumbersome, so mental health professionals, especially in conversations with lay people, may unofficially use the word psychopath.

I will come back to the concept of sociopath in a bit.

So again, what is a psychopath exactly, i.e., someone with ASPD? They are noted for several personality traits, the most troublesome being a lack of remorse and inability to feel empathy for others. They engage in antisocial behaviors, such as aggression, stealing, lying, etc., with no concern for who they are harming. Indeed, they often get off on the sense of power that harming others gives them. They also tend to be thrill-seeking and impulsive.

What is a psychopath? A man who smiles for his mugshot.

This psychopath has just been arrested for multiple murders. He is smiling for the mugshot.

They have a very high threshold for stimulation, a fancy way of saying that it takes a lot to make them feel anything. So normal life, that would make most of us quite happy, feels incredibly boring to them. Thus the thrill-seeking. Also, their high threshold for stimulation keeps them from feeling fear in situations that most of us would find quite scary (like being arrested).

This means they will do some pretty outrageous things, either ignoring or rationalizing away the potential negative consequences for themselves. The really smart ones, however, may meticulously plan out their evil deeds, but this lack of fear can often be their downfall.

Antisocial Personality Disorder is caused by a combination of genetics and a harsh, abusive environment growing up. More on this in a moment.

Other Bad Guys and Gals

Sometimes we will want our antagonists to be basically good people who find themselves in bad situations. Maybe something pointed them down the wrong road—an event where they did something bad accidentally, or in self defense, and are now tortured by guilt about it. Maybe something extremely important to them is at risk and therefore they are willing to violate their moral code in order to protect it.

These bad guys and gals will feel guilt regarding their behavior, but they will push it aside as best they can and/or rationalize it, sometimes via displaced anger … READ MORE

And stay tuned. Next week, I will delve further into how authors develop the villains in their stories.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

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The Truth About UFOs (Or is it??)

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by Kirsten Weiss

According to two recent reports, UFO sightings have been declining in recent years, and general belief in UFOs has fallen. (Don’t tell that to the residents of my fictional town of Doyle, California. They’re certain UFOs are to blame for their long history of mysterious disappearances.) But what’s the truth about UFOs?

UFO Sightings

The truth about UFOs: photo of 1952 purported UFO sighting

Purported UFO sighting, 1952, Passaic, NJ (public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Reports of UFO sightings reached their peak in 2014, and have now declined to 55% of that year’s number, according to The Guardian. Most UFOs are later identified as comets, meteors, unusual cloud formations, aircraft, or other such explanations. But according to Wikipedia, about 5-20% remain unidentified.

There were many sightings in the 1940s and 50s by pilots, military and civilian, and people on the ground. The U.S. and other governments conducted secret investigations from the mid-1940s until 1970.

In the 1990s and 2000s in the U.S., there was an upsurge in interest again, accompanied by conspiracy theories that the government was hiding the results of their studies from the general public. Those theories lost some of their punch after disclosure of thousands of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Explanations Are Inconclusive

None of these investigations have definitively told us the truth about UFOs. Many of the early ones concluded that extraterrestrial explanations could not be ruled out. Later ones, from both private and public groups, ranged from derisive to neutral, calling for “continued study.”

The truth about UFOs: Sighting in Wallonia, Belgium June 15, 1990

Sighting in Wallonia, Belgium June 15, 1990 (public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

The psychologist, Carl Jung (1875-1961) believed UFO sightings were a part of being human, that they were actually repressed bits of the human psyche popping out. And that means UFOs aren’t going away.

Jung went all the way back to sightings reported in ancient Egyptian history and viewed UFOs as “manifestations of psychic changes” in the collective unconscious.

Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or ‘gods’ as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. ~ Carl Jung.

In other words, the more things change, the more unsettled we become, and the more we see (or technically, project from our unconscious) freaky lights in the sky.

UFOs or Fairies?

The truth behind UFOs: strange lights in sky over Sri Lanka

Close-up of light in sky, Sri Lanka (from The National Archives UK, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jung was on to something, because UFO reports go back hundreds of years. Though way back then, the lights-in-the-sky, kidnappings, and weird probings were blamed on fairies.

Of course, those devoted to the UFO theory claim that what our forefathers called fairies were simply aliens in disguise.

Or is the reverse true? Are aliens really fairies in disguise? Just what is the truth about UFOs? Maybe we will never know.

In Planet of the Grapes, book 2 in my Wits’ End series of cozy mystery novels, believers in the fairy myth and in UFOs clash at a UFO festival. B&B owner Susan Witsend must keep the combatants apart and the festival on track… in spite of all those pesky murders.

Curious? Read more about Planet of the Grapes below.

Your thoughts on the truth about UFOs? Do you believe in them, and/or in fairies?

Sources:
(2018) What is behind the decline in UFO sightings, The Guardian.
Unidentified flying object, Wikipedia.
Fraim, John (2013) The symbolism of UFOs and aliens, The Jung Page.

Planet of the Grapes, A Doyle Cozy Mystery (A Wits’ End Mystery #2)

Planet of the Grapes book cover

Aliens, fairies and murder, oh, my!

In small-town Doyle, California, UFO abductions are a budding tourist attraction. So, when Susan Witsend brings a UFO festival to town, she’s ready for some well-deserved time in the sun.

What she gets instead is the corpse of a UFO conspiracy theorist, brained with a bottle of local wine.

Susan may be the owner of a UFO-themed B&B, but she doesn’t wish on stars to get what she wants. She’s a woman with a planner. Plan A: Milk the UFO festival for all it’s worth. Plan B: Stop lusting after her best-friend-turned-security-consultant, Arsen Holiday.

But murder isn’t the only thing threatening Susan’s best-laid plans. Beset by alien protestors, aging nudists, and hidden secrets at every turn, Susan’s nearing her wits’ end. And now Plan C is to stay on the good side of a grumpy local sheriff.

Susan may not have a clue, but she knows she wants a certain security consultant at her side when the killer goes supernova.

Planet of the Grapes is book 2 in the Wits’ End series of cozy mystery novels. If you like laugh-out-loud cozy mysteries, you’ll like Planet of the Grapes. Breakfast recipes at the back of the book.

Available NOW on: AMAZON APPLE KOBO NOOK

Kirsten Weiss has never met a dessert she didn’t like, and her guilty pleasures are watching Ghost Whisperer re-runs and drinking red wine. The latter gives her heartburn, but she drinks it anyway. Now based in San Mateo, CA, she writes genre-blending cozy mystery, supernatural and steampunk suspense, mixing her experiences and imagination to create vivid worlds of fun and enchantment.

If you like funny cozy mysteries, check out her Pie Town, Paranormal Museum and Wits’ End books. If you’re looking for some magic with your mystery, give the Witches of Doyle, Riga Hayworth and Rocky Bridges books a try. And if you like steampunk, the Sensibility Grey series might be for you.

Kirsten sends out original short stories of mystery and magic to her mailing list. If you’d like to get them delivered straight to your inbox, make sure to sign up for her newsletter at kirstenweiss.com.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )

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6 Things My Still-Young Mind Can’t Fathom About My Aging Body (Plus New Releases!)

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by Kassandra Lamb

I recently turned 66. My mind is amazed by that. It feels more like it’s 35.

But more and more my mind gets daily reminders from my aging body—it may THINK it’s still relatively young, but oh boy…

Years ago, a friend of mine, on the occasion of her 50th birthday, said, “How did my 25-year-old mind get stuck in this 50-year-old body?” That totally captures how I’m feeling these days.

Here are six things that absolutely boggle that young-thinking mind of mine regarding my aging body:

This sign has a whole different meaning for me and my aging body! (image from photo by Rob Farrow CC-BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons)

1. I waddle for the first few steps when I stand up after sitting for a while.

It takes a moment or two for my hip joints to remember what they’re supposed to do.

I sometimes consciously try not to waddle. I can do that by walking very stiffly with my legs sort of pinched together. But as soon as I stop doing that, guess what… I waddle for a few steps.

2. I can’t say “Hold, please,” when I hear the call of nature.

Used to be if I was in the middle of something—writing a scene, feeding the dog, fixing my lunch—I could wait until I was done that task before heading for the bathroom.

Nope, not anymore. Old lady bladders do not wait!

3. I can’t eat rich food without paying the price.

a filet mignon, yet another food that my aging body can't quite handle

(photo by Robspinella CC-BY-SA 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons)

And the definition of rich food is getting narrower. A few weeks ago, We went out to one of the nicer restaurants in town to celebrate our anniversary. I had Caesar salad, filet mignon (almost melted in my mouth!), and mashed potatoes, for Pete’s sake! And for dessert, cinnamon beignets with dark chocolate dip.

Even the beignets weren’t all that rich. They were these light little cinnamon pastries, mostly air really, and I dipped just a corner in the chocolate. Delish!

I left the restaurant feeling pleasantly full and pleased with myself that I’d resisted the much richer dishes on the menu.

Yeah, about that… To avoid going into TMI territory, let’s just say that my system was not happy and it let me know about it. (I decided the steak and dessert were still worth it.)

And speaking of the dessert…

4. I can’t do ANY caffeine after 5ish if I want to sleep that night.

Sleep becomes more fragile as we age, the multiple reasons for insomnia increasing geometrically with every half a decade over 45.

Used to be I couldn’t do coffee or strong hot tea (the only way I like it) after 5 p.m. Then I could only have them in the mornings. But I could drink iced tea or colas well into the evening.

Then it was one cup of hot tea in the a.m. and iced tea until 6ish, but I could still eat chocolate in the evenings.

Yeah, you guessed it. Even that little bit of dark chocolate in the dip was too much. I was up every hour or so all night. (Again, still worth it!)

5. When I look in the mirror, my mother is staring back at me.

My mom laughing; despite her aging body, she never lost her sense of humor

I love this pic of my mom laughing over a gag gift at my sister-in-law’s baby shower. She’s 63 here.

I’ve looked more like my father’s side of the family for most of my adulthood. That was a good thing. They’re slimmer with higher metabolic rates than my mother’s clan.

Also, I don’t really remember what my mother looked like when I was a kid. Your mom is just your mom. You don’t actually LOOK at her.

So most of my memories of my mother’s appearance are from my teen years and beyond, when she was middle-aged… and beyond.

And now I am “beyond” and I look a lot like she did at my age. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mom. But I do not want to BE her.

6. I have no reserve tank, energy-wise. When I’m done, I’m done.

I used to be a very active person. I still am, I guess, “for my age.” I walk or do Zumba almost every day.

My cute new sideboard that it took three days to put together. The mind was willing, but the aging body, not so much.

But I also have five chronic health issues that cause fatigue. (Yup, five!) I’ve learned to pace myself, and I’m pretty good at it, most of the time. But there are times when I start something I can’t finish.

I bought a new piece of furniture recently. It came in pieces. It wasn’t that hard to put together, but I had to do it over three days, a couple of hours a day.

Okay, other oldsters out there, what aspects of your aging body tend to startle your still-youngish mind?

AND we have a new release for you, from Kirsten Weiss.

This is a really fun read!! And Kirsten will be posting later in the month with more about UFO sightings and such.

Planet of the Grapes book cover

Planet of the Grapes, A Doyle Cozy Mystery (A Wits’ End Mystery #2)

Aliens, fairies and murder, oh, my!

In small-town Doyle, California, UFO abductions are a budding tourist attraction. So when Susan Witsend brings a UFO festival to town, she’s ready for some well-deserved time in the sun.

What she gets instead is the corpse of a UFO conspiracy theorist, brained with a bottle of local wine.

Susan may be the owner of a UFO-themed B&B, but she doesn’t wish on stars to get what she wants. She’s a woman with a planner. Plan A) Milk the UFO festival for all it’s worth. Plan B) Stop lusting after her best friend turned security consultant, Arsen Holiday.

Susan may not have a clue, but she knows she wants a certain security consultant at her side when the killer goes supernova.

Planet of the Grapes is book 2 in the Wits’ End series of cozy mystery novels. If you like laugh-out-loud cozy mysteries, you’ll like Planet of the Grapes. Buy the book to start this hilarious caper today! Breakfast recipes at the back of the book.

Available NOW on: AMAZON APPLE KOBO NOOK

And I have a Cover Reveal for you!! Tada! (Releases next week.)

Legend of Sleepy Mayfair cover

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )

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Have You Ever Been Haunted by a Goddess?

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by S.O. Esposito

Have you ever been haunted by a goddess?

Over the past few years, a character named Alice has haunted me. She made her debut in a piece of flash fiction I wrote in 2011 called Mario’s Goddess. She now officially has her very own full-length story in my new psychological suspense, THE BURNING.

The Valkries' Vigil

This book came to me differently than my cozy mysteries, and it’s a much darker tale. In the flash fiction story, Alice is the goddess of war and is locked up in a mental institution. Over the past couple years, her character wouldn’t leave me alone, but I didn’t know what she wanted. What were the opposing forces in her life? What was her story?

Some of her life came to me in pieces, scenes actually, that I dutifully wrote down over the years. She was a mother with two small children. She was orphaned at birth, spent her life in and out of a children’s home. She couldn’t remember anything before her thirteenth birthday.

I have to say, she confused me. Was she a goddess of war? Was she a human mother? Was this a fantasy story? Magical realism? Paranormal? And then it hit me. She was both a human mother and the goddess of war, and this was a psychological suspense.

They don’t call it multiple personalities anymore, now it’s called dissociative identity disorder, and this is what Alice has. Or does she? (I’ll let the reader decide.) One of her personalities is Kali, the goddess of war, and she insists she’s a goddess having a human experience. She’s also the one who gets Alice into serious trouble. Arrested for arson and murder, in fact.

As more of the scenes came to me, I knew Alice/Kali needed an antagonist, but what kind?…READ MORE

I just finished the most compelling book I’ve ever read! The Burning is so amazing, riveting, spellbinding engrossing novel that every woman should read & take to heart!! -Bonnie O. (Reviewer)

THE BURNING, by S.O. Esposito

Now Available on AMAZON, NOOK, iBOOKS and KOBO

Alice Leininger seems to have the perfect life. She’s happily married, has two beautiful children, a close-knit group of friends, and a cause she cares deeply about. But beneath the surface, her world of safety and comfort is unraveling.

The periods of lost time she’s kept secret—even from her husband—are happening more frequently. She certainly doesn’t remember leaving her Sarasota home at three-thirty in the morning to burn someone alive. Now she sits in a Florida state mental institution, awaiting judgment on whether she’s fit to stand trial on charges of murder and arson.

While a psychologist works to help Alice face her past, her future depends on the answer to one question: How far did she go for justice?

*This book is recommended for mature audiences. While there are no explicit scenes of graphic violence, it does touch on mature themes.

How about you? Have you ever felt like you were haunted by a god or goddess? Do you believe in the Goddess of War?

S.O. Esposito began her writing career as a cozy mystery author under her full name, Shannon Esposito. She has four books in the PET PSYCHIC SERIES (misterio press) & two books in the PAWS & POSE SERIES (Severn House). But to keep her muse happy, she’s ventured into darker territory with her suspense debut THE BURNING. She lives in the sunny state of Florida with her husband, twin boys and two mastiffs, where she is an avid reader, beach-goer and lizard wrangler.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )

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Beta Men Make the Best Husbands

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by Kassandra Lamb

Hubs and I will be celebrating our 42nd Valentine’s Day this week. I’m not sure he’s even aware of this but Valentine’s Day is a particularly special day for our relationship. You see, I decided I could marry this man on the first Valentine’s Day we celebrated together. (It took him another 2 ½ weeks to catch on and actually propose.)

I’ve been writing some romantic suspense stories lately, and I recently took a little informal survey of my romantic suspense readers. One of the questions I asked was how important was it to them that the hero be an alpha male, and also I asked for their definition of an alpha male.

The split was about 65% yes, it had to be an alpha, and 35% said they didn’t care or preferred a beta male.

Most defined an alpha as strong, confident, and protective, but they didn’t like it if he was too controlling, cocky or arrogant. My favorite comment was this one:

“The hero doesn’t have to be an alpha necessarily, but when his woman is in danger, he needs to step up and do what needs to be done.”

Now, back to my husband and Valentine’s Day. I suspect my husband would be the first to admit that he is not an alpha male. He’s a fairly quiet, go-with-the-flow kind of guy, an excellent complement to my rather intense personality. Indeed, he is probably the only kind of man I could still be married to after 41 years!

I normally have no trouble standing up for myself. But the few times in my life when I couldn’t do that, for one reason or another, he was there. He stepped up. The first time was on that first Valentine’s Day. We’d been dating four months.

He’d made an 8:30 reservation at a relatively swanky restaurant in downtown Baltimore. We arrived on time and were seated in a little waiting area with quite a few other couples. Someone came by periodically and assured us that it would just be another few minutes.

By 10 o’clock we still hadn’t been seated. I was literally weak with hunger. It was a revolving restaurant on the top of a high-rise hotel. By this point, I was feeling quite queasy as the city slowly spun below us.

My then boyfriend went to the maitre d’ and complained for the second or third time. Ten minutes later we were led to our table and he said to the waiter, “Bring us house salads right away.” The waiter dropped a salad in front of me just a few minutes later.

Gee, doesn’t that look yummy! 😛

It was a quarter wedge of iceberg lettuce with some dressing drizzled over it. I looked at it and said, “I don’t think I have the energy to cut that up.”

Hubs aka then-boyfriend exploded. He called over the maitre d’. “You kept us waiting one and half hours after our reservation time, and now this…” He pointed to the green wedge on my plate. “What kind of salad is that?”

In a huffy voice, the man said, “That is the way salad is served in finer restaurants.”

Hubs aka then-boyfriend straightened to his full six-foot, 26-year-old lanky height and said, “Sir, I’ve been in finer restaurants before, and I’ve never seen a salad like that. Bring my girlfriend a real salad NOW!”

That was the I-could-marry-this-man moment. (Note: I’ve since seen that kind of salad a couple of times in other restaurants, but only a couple of times.)

About 30 seconds later, a waiter brought a tossed salad, with bite-sized pieces of lettuce, cherry tomatoes and slivers of carrots. I devoured it in another 30 seconds and felt much better.

Fast forward three and a half years and I have been in labor for 23 hours. Seventeen of them mild labor and six hard labor (by my definition, as in very painful). And something had changed. It was no longer muscle contraction pain. It was a sledge hammer pounding on your foot kind of pain. My gut, at least partly educated by Lamaze classes, said this was not normal.

But the resident doctors kept insisting I was “still in the early stages” and it wasn’t time yet to call my private obstetrician into the hospital. I won’t go into all the gory details of my interchanges with them, but when one of them told me, “Childbirth is supposed to be painful. Lie down, shut up and relax,” I’d had enough. (Yup, that’s what she said and yup, it was a woman—obviously one who had not yet given birth.)

Immediately after the next contraction, I said to my husband, through gritted teeth, “Get our %&*%^$ doctor here! And get back here before the next contraction!” He’d been rubbing my back during them, the only thing that made them bearable.

He raced out of the labor room, tossed his paper gown (he told me this part later) at the woman at the nurses’ station when she yelled, “You can’t go out there; you’re sterile,” and ran to the waiting room where my mother was. He quickly filled her in, asked her to call our doctor, raced back into the maternity ward, donned a fresh gown and was back by my side just as the next contraction started.

Our doctor arrived about fifteen minutes (and way too many excruciating contractions) later. He started bawling out my husband for “letting your mother-in-law sit out there and worry unnecessarily.” But we quickly filled him in on what the residents had not been reporting to him.

(Note: try not to give birth in a teaching hospital. I’m sure some resident doctors are lovely people, but others think they know more than they do!)

My mother and her new grandson

To make a long story short, our son was born at 3:46 a.m., about four hours after my husband’s heroic dash through the maternity ward.

(The next day, my doctor explained that I’d had a “stiff cervix” that wasn’t dilating… not a big deal, it happens sometimes with first births, blah, blah. Yeah, easy for you to say, Doc!)

My husband has performed his own brand of protective intervention on a few other occasions as well, but those are the two that stand out most in my memory.

So I’m sorry, romance readers, but my heroes are the beta males who know how to step up when needed. And in the real world, they make much better Happily-Ever-After husbands than those dark, troubled alpha types.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )

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To Resolve, Or Not To Resolve

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by Kassandra Lamb

image by Pixabay, CC0 (public domain) Wikimedia Commons

The end of a year and the beginning of a new one is a natural time to review what has come before and look ahead to how one may want to do things differently in the future.

I took an informal survey of some of my friends and fellow authors to see how folks felt about New Year’s resolutions these days. A few still make resolutions, while most said they prefer the term “goals.”

But even here the approach varied, from meticulously planning out the year complete with deadlines for each goal to only making relatively short-term goals. Motivations for the latter approach ranged from wanting to remain flexible to feeling that loftier, long-term goals would be too intimidating.

One person said if the goals were too big and she wasn’t making sufficient progress toward achieving them, then she would be tempted to throw in the towel and not even try anymore. But if she keeps the goals smaller and more short-term, then she can feel a sense of achievement as each is accomplished, which then motivates her to keep pushing toward the next goal.

I totally get that approach and it will help preserve one’s mental health. That’s pretty much how I handle concrete goals like “I will finish this current story by the end of January.”

But I also tend to make more general resolutions that are about how I want my life to go in the next year.

The last couple of years, my resolutions have been about finding a better balance between my writing business and my life. The business had become all consuming for a little while there and I needed to do some serious stepping back.

This past year, the balance has been better, but when I wasn’t “working,” whether that was writing or doing other business tasks, I was rather bored, at loose ends about what to do with my down time. I got back into reading more again and watching some of my favorite TV shows (it’s fun to binge on your faves now with Netflix and such). But those were still solitary activities.

beginning a list of resolutions

So this year’s resolution is to have more fun, and to especially have more fun with other people. I’m going to check out some local classes and such.

I also asked folks if they got upset with themselves if they didn’t meet their goals/resolutions. Some did, but most said they just regroup and try again.

And one person very wisely pointed out that when she doesn’t meet a goal, she stops to ask herself if she really wants to meet it. Has it failed to happen because it isn’t truly what she desires or needs in her life right now?

Very good questions! All too often we stick with a goal, even when maybe it’s not right for us, because letting it go feels like quitting. But letting it go is sometimes exactly what we need to do.

My favorite response, however, to the question about getting upset with oneself was one woman’s comment: “I’m too old to get worked up about that.” Amen, sister!

If age has taught me anything, it’s that life is too important to be taken seriously. And I’ve found that beating up on myself is one of the least productive things I can do.

I too tend to ask if the unachieved goal is truly relevant, and if I decide it is, then I adjust my approach and/or the time line. Sometimes the task was bigger than I thought it would be and is taking longer. Sometimes it needs to be broken down into more manageable sub-goals.

I think the best approach to resolutions was one person’s combination of resolutions and goals. She said she tries to have an overarching theme for the year, expressed in a few words, and then she makes short-term goals that are more concrete.

So my few words would be “Have more fun!” And the concrete goals to make that a reality will be to:

Streamline promotions and hire more of that work out to other people.
Spend more of my working time actually writing rather than doing other tasks.
Find some interesting/fun things to do that get me out of the house and allow me to interact more with people.

How about you? Do you make resolutions, set goals, or avoid both? Oh, and by the way. . .

Image by Helgi Halldórsson from Reykjavík, Iceland CC-BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons

A Reminder: we are officially posting every other week in 2018, although we may share some other interesting tidbits in the off weeks. And next time, on January 30th, we will be starting a special series of interviews to introduce you all to other mystery writers. (Interviews will be posted about once every 4-6 weeks.)

So please stay tuned!

Posted by Kassandra Lamb. Kassandra is a retired psychotherapist turned mystery writer. She is the author of the Kate Huntington psychological mysteries, set in her native Maryland, and a new series, the Marcia Banks and Buddy cozy mysteries, set in Central Florida.

We blog here at misterio press about twice a month, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )

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5 Tips for Surviving the Most Stressful Time of the Year (Plus New Releases!)

An Attitude of Gratitude

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by Kassandra Lamb

Thanksgiving is always a reminder that one should be grateful for one’s blessings.

paper turkey and gourds

I found this harder to do this year.

The last six months have been a rough time in my household. We seem to have been slammed with one stressor after another—some of them neutral, some of them bad, none of them all that good.

With all that has been going on, I’ve been way too near the edge of stress overload, and when I’m in that spot, I get depressed. Which doesn’t help one bit.

Well-meaning folks sometimes say, “Well, look at what others are dealing with? They have it much worse.” Sure one can usually find those whose life challenges are far worse than one’s own. But comparing one’s own pain to others is not mentally healthy, believe it or not.

For one thing, if you care about those people (such as the dear friend who was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness), that’s just more depressing stuff to think about.

Also, that makes you ashamed of feeling stressed and depressed. Then you try to bury those feelings. As I’ve mentioned before, buried feelings don’t go away. They just fester under the surface and can erupt somewhere else in a less than pleasant way.

Of course, applying strategies to lessen one’s stress in other areas is always a good idea. But in my case recently, even when the stress let up, I was still depressed.

I have two strategies that I find helpful when I get stuck in a negative mental state like this. One is to stop and count my blessings. Yes, this is a cliché, and it can also lead to shame and stifling the bad feelings if not done carefully.

When I do this, I don’t just focus on the blessings (which are all too easily taken for granted). I do a kind of counterbalance in my mind.

Yes, I have friends who are struggling with their health, and that brings home that I will be facing such major challenges in another decade or two. This means I should appreciate my own reasonably good health more and make sure I am living to the fullest during the remaining healthy years I have left.
Yes, money is tight right now due to unexpected expenses, but we have a good income and we’ll recover in a few months. I need to appreciate that good income more.
Yes, I lost my dog suddenly to cancer. But I now have a new four-legged buddy. He doesn’t replace the dog I lost in my heart, but he’s creating his own spot there. And again, I am grateful that I have the resources to give a shelter animal a new home.

You get the idea.

This process doesn’t eradicate the negative feelings, but it helps to put them in perspective. I don’t suddenly feel great because I have so many things to be thankful for, but I feel less depressed. And focusing on the resources I’ve been blessed with makes me more hopeful that this too shall pass. I will deal with the stressors and move on to better times.

Which brings me to my second strategy. When I am dealing with a major stressor, I ask myself at what point in the future will I have most likely already dealt with it and put it behind me. A month, six months, a year?

Then I keep telling myself this reminder: In a month (six months, a year), this will all just be a bad memory.

If need be, I remind myself of times in the past when I used this strategy, and indeed those stressors are now nothing but memories. If I can remember them at all.

When I first started teaching, I was a basketcase. I’d done public speaking before and wasn’t all that nervous, but facing students was a different matter. They don’t always give much away. They sit there and stare at you (if you’re lucky; sometimes they fall asleep). You don’t know if they are finding your words of wisdom fascinating or boring as all get out.

I gave myself two years that time. “In two years, I’ll be comfortable in front of the classroom and this will all be a bad memory.”

It didn’t take that long. By my third semester I was comfortable, and now years later, I can’t even really remember the anxiety I felt at the time. I just remember thinking, that first semester, that surely I would have an embarrassing accident in front of the classroom (involving bodily fluids) before the semester ended.

And having written this blog post, I now feel better. Not great, but better.

How about you? What strategies do you use to get unstuck from a negative mindset?

One thing I am definitely grateful for is the gift of my talent.

My Christmas novella is now available for preorder … Just $0.99

A Mayfair Christmas Carol, A Marcia Banks and Buddy Mystery Novella

A Christmas extravaganza in Mayfair, Florida, complete with an ice skating rink. What could go wrong?

When excavation for the skating rink uncovers a decades-old skeleton, its secrets threaten more than the town’s Christmas plans. Worried about her friends in her adopted town and feeling responsible since the let’s-attract-more-tourists idea was hers initially, dog trainer Marcia Banks is determined to help her police detective boyfriend solve the mystery—whether he wants her help or not. Perhaps href=”https://misteriopress.com/books/to-kill-a-labrador-a-marcia-banks-and-buddy-she can wheedle more out of the townspeople than he can.

But will she and her Black Lab, Buddy, be able to keep the ghost of Christmas past from destroying what is left of Mayfair’s founding family, or will her meddling make matters worse?

AMAZON NOOK APPLE KOBO

We blog here at misterio press once (sometimes twice) a week, usually on Tuesdays. Sometimes we talk about serious topics, and sometimes we just have some fun.

Please follow us so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting stuff, or the fun! (We do not lend, sell nor otherwise bend, spindle or mutilate followers’ e-mail addresses. 🙂 )