• Single mother life brings feelings of every kind and degree. Some are intense, some are quite painful. For healing your resentments, experiencing your authenticity and feeling more inner peace, your inner being may call you to cope with these emotions. Doing so can increase your ability to cope with single mother life, and experience the full power of creative, effective parenting.
  • Here are some “simple” tips for dealing with your feelings. You can remember them as the three A’s–Awareness, Acceptance, Action. Practicing these tips can help you to feel better and make more constructive choices.
  • Awareness: You can learn how to know what you are feeling. One of the ways is to follow the stream of your thinking. Feelings and thinking are intertwined. To know one helps you to know the other. You may want to first find a way to learn what the names of feelings are, and what the categories are. You can start with the four major categories: sad, mad, bad and glad. There are many emotions in each category and they overlap too. Sometimes discussing thoughts and feelings with a trained listener can help you become more aware.
  • Acceptance: Accepting your feelings does not mean blaming yourself. This means basically knowing you have feelings and learning what choices you have about what to do when you are feeling them. Once you are aware, and say to yourself, “Okay, I am feeling……,” you have opened the opportunity to examine your options. There are many possibilities for responding to your feelings. Again, your thinking is a key. Regardless of what you decide to do, there is one more step in the acceptance category. Think through the various possible consequences of the various choices and how they might affect your relationships, the outcomes, and your peace of mind.
  • Action: Action means making a choice and implementing it. Once you know what you feel, and accept that you have options, you can make a choice of what to do, and follow it through. In some cases, the “action” might just be the acceptance itself.  In some cases the “action” might involve working something out with another person. In other situations, there may be legal actions. There are many possibilities; and awareness and acceptance can help you to thoughtfully reason out which is best for you. Be sure to consider how your choice of action might affect your children.
  • Consider whether you would get a short term relief from the feelings, or long term benefit. For example, if you just tell someone off, you might feel better for a bit, but does it really address the problem? Sometimes, the “action” requires a change of attitude or a new understanding of what the problem really is, or whose problem it is.
  • If you are willing to apply these tips to your circumstances, practice them, and evaluate how they are working for you, you can find that you have less worry and that your mental life has more room for uplifting thoughts, more gratitude and  more serenity.