Life Lessons: Living with Ghostly Chaos

This is a new series. In my book "Was That a Ghost?" I discuss a good deal about how, with the right life skills tools, we can deal with the unknown and how we can use those tools for our everyday life and relationships. I'm going to apply some of those in this series.

Today's lesson is how to live with chaos from the spirit world and the living world.

At any given time, a person living in a haunted house is going to be dealing with the unpredictable. In fact, every single moment he lives in a haunted house, he will be dealing with a degree of uncertainty. Shit happens, but in a haunted house, shit happens any time of the day, day of the week, week of the month, month of the year... In fact, part of what I'm striving for on my team, POE, is to figure out what might trigger it to activate and conversely, what might quiet it down. For now, there are little, if any patterns, we can discern.

So, you live in a home in which a dish can break, a painting can fall, a door can slam, a voice can moan, a chair can creak from the weight of a body that isn't visible. When living in a place where it's unpredictable, it's easy to become keyed up all the time, edgy, nervous, anxious because your world seems to have no rhyme or reason.

If we look at your life amongst humans, it can be much the same. Humans are like ghosts (wonder why? hee hee) and living with them you discover that you don't know what mood or drama they bring to the table on any given day. They do things when you don't expect it, they blow up when you weren't seeing it coming, they create drama by becoming demanding or controlling or even manipulatively weepy.

Now, we use the same principles with these incidents (ghostly and human) to decide how to proceed. If you are living with ghostly activity that has not shown a tendency to be harmful to you and you have been in a living relationship that is not abusive, then you make a decision to not add to the drama. You don't feed the human's rants by getting angry back and pushing and pressing and demanding and escalating the emotions. The same goes with ghostly phenomena. You don't respond with anger, demands, and high emotion. Both instances call for old-fashioned assertion skills. The process goes like this: No name calling. You simply say "when you do (this) it makes me feel (this) and so I would like it if you would do (this) instead."

Here's how you might approach the ghostly phenomena:

"I understand that you feel the need to remain in my home, but my husband and I are living here and this is where we are raising our children. When you slam doors and tug at our blankets, you frighten us. We would like it if you would move on and find your own family, then we can all be happier."

In a living relationship, it might go like this:

"When you come at me with accusations, it makes me feel like you don't trust me. I'd like it if next time you feel I'm doing something wrong, you let me know. It's difficult for me to clear up the thoughts in your head if you don't express them out loud."

Ghosts and the living are unpredictable elements in our world. I grew up as the youngest of five children and my elders were quite difficult growing up. I learned early on that people create their own drama. I was not a drama creator, but those around me spun out of control. I could do nothing to stop their own process, but I did have to share their space. This not only taught me compassion for how others must learn life's lessons, but also made me thankful that I didn't need to make the mistakes I saw them making. The secret to my survival was to not get sucked into the drama. It was about their own issues and not mine, but they would have become my issues if I jumped into the fray and demanded they do things the way I want them done.

The key here is that there is no "right" way to do things or "smart way." There is only the way that people with certain personalities and life experiences, egos and issues do things and that is not always the "sensible" way. When you give up expecting everyone doing things the "right" way and let the do it "their" way, you no longer get sucked into the drama.

Lastly, it goes without saying that a relationship that is downright abusive, whether ghostly or living, is a deal breaker.

My favorite local ghost team wrote a fantastic post about what it takes to be a good paranormal investigator--very insightful!

**On a happy note, apparently my blog is #9 on top paranormal sites. Very cool! Thanks y'all for being such a supportive family.