Dear tinysparkofhope:

I will try to explain myself better, what I meant by seeing and accepting reality for what it is, for you:

To see reality for what it is requires a willingness and ability to endure discomfort. All the efforts you made (the ones I listed in my last post to you) are efforts to FEEL better. Here is the reality that doesn’t feel good: injustice is real. Many people mistreat people. When you encountered injustice in the work place, as you have; when you were mistreated, you naturally got angry. What did you do next? You did everything you could to get rid of that anger, to cover it with feeling good. If you stayed with your anger and attended to it as a useful emotion, which carries a helpful message to you, then you may have done something assertive that maybe would have landed you in a better position at that job. And maybe there are ways for you to be assertive now: too late to change what happened, but maybe the old message still applies to your current life: being assertive.

There are factors regarding your current unemployment that are out of your control: economy, resume with gaps, your age, and such. But maybe being assertive, now, can increase your chances to be hired.

We all want to feel better, and all the things you tried, most are useful, in context. You wrote before that there is more for you to learn. Some of what there is to learn is to abandon things that don’t work for you, limit to context what did work, expand on what you didn’t try, finding opportunities to practice a new skill, such as evaluating people and situations realistically and deciding how to behave with different individuals considering who they are.

The “universe” doesn’t give you credit for being a saint. The credit you seek, I believe, is in correct evaluation of people and situations and then proceeding according to your values AND the reality of people and situations.

anita