More and more people are turning to alcohol and drugs to alleviate their stress.
Even Dr. Oz, the internationally renowned cardiothoracic surgeon, author, and television personality of the Dr. Oz Show, reported that “the value of alcohol is to get rid of stress…..” during a Piers Morgan interview on CNN, May 18, 2012. However, how many people die from alcoholism as a result of their attempts to manage their stress with it, if for only a little while? Why would anyone want to manage something that might kill them (stress) with something else that could kill them (alcohol), rather than not have the root of the problem at all?
Clearly people who are other-dependent are stressed to the max. Their worry about others’ opinions of them, their need to look good, need to be right, and need to control the way things turn out are the root of their stress. This causes stress that affects people of all ages, gender, and lifestyles.
I would go one step further and say that other-dependency is the cause of stress as experienced in our contemporary society.
As other-dependent individuals living in an other-dependent society, how do we become stress-free? Is this even possible? There are a few among us who do appear to be stress free. They don’t let anything bother them — nothing “ruffles their feathers.” You may know someone like that and wonder how they do it. Perhaps the difference between you and them is that they aren’t worried about looking good or being right. They don’t worry about what others think about them, and they don’t need to control the outcome of things. Yep, you guessed it: They have self-dependent esteem.
Other-dependent individuals stress over just about everything. However, remember what we said about how thoughts create our reality. Could it be that stress is just a figment of the imagination?
