I am a bit sad. I swapped comment service for my blog, and all the comments that has ever been made in this blog is now deleted forever. New comments from now on will stay, but the old ones are still gone. Maybe I can retrieve them, but I don't know how.
I think the file that contain all the comments is an XML file. The blog service that I used before was called Echo: (Link to Echo)
If anybody has a clue, I would be extremely grateful for help or suggestions.
Sad me
- Åsa
Update: I have the comments in an XML file: aasaaaaaaaaaaa.blogspot.com-comments.xml
but I don't know how to export them to Blogger. If anybody knows I am happy about any kind of help :-)
UPDATE: I am trying out the instructions here:
http://www.ellenshapiro.com/blog/2010/02/so-you-want-to-move-your-comments-from-haloscan-to-blogger/
but I cannot seem to do it. Basically because the instructions are not updated to the programs.
Anybody with a clue that possibly could help me?
The following is from A Conscious Person's Guide to
Relationships
Involvement, Yes;
Addiction, No.
To get the most from your relationship, you'll find it helpful to distinguish between involvement with a person and addiction to being with the person. Let's define these two terms. Involvement means "l share my life with you." Addiction means "l create the experience in my mind that I in one way or another need you. You provide me with a feeling I want and therefore I need you in my life. Without you I cannot find this to the same degree"
Involvement means spending some good time together. Addiction can have many ways of showing itself in a relationship. It can mean creating emotion-backed demands in my head that dictate what my partner should say and do -- in other words "ownership." Bascially, you do not love the person, but who the person COULD be if they changed. It can mean a need to constantly be around my partner, or to give total focus on them and not myself. This will fill the void of other feelings I might have. It might fill my conscious or unconscious needs not met by myself. Or it can be an easy way for my to escape depression or other feelings I do not want to deal with. Addiction has many faces, but what it has in common is the unbalanced way it presents itself. It does not set a base for a healthy, balanced, true relationship between people, no matter the nature of the relation (Friend, lover or companion).
Involvement means that I choose to share of my life with my beloved and build a mutual reality together based on trust and openness. It means seeing the other person for who they are and following the natural flow of energy that flows between us. Of letting go and of coming back. Of giving room and space to yourself and to find together in closeness. Addiction means that I feel insecure without someone, or something (Sex, attention, flirt, companionship, or something else) -- l want him or her to save me. I don`t want to do without this in my life no matter what it costs me or if I get it from people who are not good for me.
A natural involvement gives me the opportunity to experience all of the beautiful, loving things that a relationship can bring into my life. It also lets us shoulder together the responsibilities and problems of life and develop a mutual trust. Addiction opens a can of worms that makes me tarnish the beauty of my relationship. It makes me impose a lot of emotion-backed models of how my partner, friend or lover should be for me to let myself be happy. It also puts a great deal of pressure on my partner,- through addiction I place my hopes and dreams on the other person for them to carry. It is not hard to understand that such a burden is not healthy for anyone to put on their shoulders.
Since a balanced involvement offers us the deeper enjoyments of a relationship, and addiction leads to misery in a relationship, let's look more closely at how involvement and addiction interact. It's possible to have a relationship in which there is:
1. Maximum involvement and maximum addiction.
2. Minimum involvement and maximum addiction.
3. Minimum involvement and minimum addiction.
4. Maximum involvement and minimum addiction.
Since these four possibilities create varying degrees of heaven or hell in a relationship, let's find out how you can set up your relationship so that it can be as heavenly as possible.
But first, remember that I am talking about your own involvement and your own addictions. It does not refer to what your partner says or does. Instead it puts the spotlight on how you are
operating your head. And this is good news. Any approach to getting the most out of life that depends on manipulating or changing another person is ultimately doomed to fail. But when you know how to succeed within yourself, you have all the aces in your hand. Actually it's only your mental habits that stand between you and your continuous enjoyment of the melodrama of your life.
Let's look at setup number one -- maximum involvement with maximum addiction. In this state you have deeply involved your life with the life of another person. You are living with your partner, and are usually with him or her many hours each day. You are addicted to being with this person. You have "territorial" feelings toward your beloved; you have many emotion-backed demands of how this person should act to fit your models. We often call this situation "romantic love." Once the romance is killed by addictions, what's left is just "possessive love."
Romantic or possessive love is unstable and tends to be emotionally explosive. Frequently heard are such statements as "lf you really loved me you would . . . ." (fill in your addictive demand). This romantic possessive aspect of the maximum involvement and maximum addiction phase keeps you yo-yoing up and down. You're very happy when things are fitting your addictions; you're very unhappy when they aren't. And in this phase, love is highly conditional. I love you when you meet my addictive models, and I'm rejecting you when you don't. Romantic or possessive love can create beautiful feelings at times. But it is a bumpy road-often with a washout at the end.
Now let's look at what happens when you have minimum involvement and maximum addiction. This is when the tears get to flow in your soap opera. It's usually called "broken heart." Minimum involvement means that you do not spend much time (or any time) with the other person, but you're still creating the experience that your happiness depends on being with him or her. Minimum involvement and maximum addiction sets you up for triggering disillusionment, cynicism, anger, resentment and the whole Pandora's box of separating emotions. Although you're not involved in living together, your mind can still produce an intense experience of jealousy.
A third type of situation occurs when there is minimum involvement and minimum addiction. It's often called "good friends." Since minimum involvement means that you're not spending much time together, you're not tuning in to the richer veins of human experience that more involvement offers. However, you're not creating a lot of stuff either, since your mind is not playing out heavy addictions about how the relationship should be. With minimum involvement and minimum addiction, your relationship is generally a light and pleasant one.
It's the fourth state that gives you all of the goodies of a deep relationship and none of the unhappiness. This is characterised by maximum involvement and minimum addiction. In this state, you consciously enjoy the relationship and realistically play the relationship "game". By having the opportunity to more deeply participate in each others thoughts and feelings, you have the greatest opportunity to create all of the beautiful sharing that the relationship can bring you. And yet by minimising your addiction, you do not keep the here-and-now muddied up with emotion-backed demands that your partner say and do things differently.
In this ideal state, your love is less and less conditional. You can communicate with your partner and tell him or her what you prefer in the relationship. But you quickly work on yourself to handle any addictions you are creating that can chip away at your feelings of love. You get to cooperate in the great adventure of life together and to contribute to each others well-being. Here's a chart that can be helpful in sorting out how involvement and addiction interact to determine the quality and quantity of your relationship.
INVOLVEMENT ADDICTION WHAT'S HAPPENING
Maximum Maximum Full drama
Minimum Maximum Broken Heart
Minimum Minimum Friends
All the Goodies
Maximum Minimum No Unhappiness
The importance of working on your addictions is spotlighted by what I'm going to call the "law" governing relationships: IF YOU DON'T HANDLE YOUR ADDICTIONS, YOU'LL AUTOMATICALLY DECREASE YOUR INVOLVEMENT. From this it follows that to maintain a high level of involvement or to increase your involvement, you must handle your addictions. Now you've got some keys to living "happily ever after" -- used them if you want to ;-)
