I Stopped Talking Sh*t About My Life. Here's what happened next.

The harsh truth about my 2014 New Years Resolution to stop being an asshole.

Like the majority of women in America, as soon as the ball dropped into a New Year, I usually set out with a goal that had something to do with my body.

I needed to lose weight, get more toned, eat healthier…

You know the drill.

But one year I set the intention to change the way I spoke.

I wanted to change the way I talked about my own life, and the people in it.

This was smack dab in the middle of my realization that maybe buying our dream house wasn’t the right thing to do.

If you haven’t heard the story yet, the moment we decided to buy a bigger home was the same minute our perfect, happy family started falling apart.

Tom and I were barely speaking, and Destiny was spending more and more time in her basement bedroom… two stories away from where the rest of us slept.

All I had ever wanted in my whole life was a happy family. Now I had it, and I was at risk of losing it. What was worse is that I was also talking smack about all of them behind their backs.

No, I wasn’t spreading rumors about my kids, or telling lies about my husband. It was the typical life complaining we hear so casually it’s become normal.

You know…

“How was your night last night?”
“Ugh, well, the kids kept me up, they still don't sleep through the night. I’m exhausted, yawn.”

I had grown up hearing people talk about their spouses in a negative light. Not just, “Grrr, he never picks up his socks…” more like, “He’s such an ass, I never should have married him,” kind of thing.

Ya know?

Early on in our relationship I had set the intention not to speak that way about Tom — not to cut down his character or who he was as a human being.

Of course, he never gave me much reason to either. So, that helped.

Lately, however, as our marriage was struggling and our family was on shaky ground, complaining of any kind was not sitting well.

The realization I had was that whenever I complained about my kids or my husband, I was in fact complaining about the things in my life that I wanted more than anything. Our family unit was my absolute top priority, and yet so often what came out of my mouth were complaints.

I needed to stop.

This was smack-dab in the middle of my spiritual awakening, where I began learning that our words have power — and if that were true, I was using my powers for unintentional evil.

I was ready to stop complaining about the people I loved the most — and the rest of humanity if I could help it.

I was committed to quit whining about my own life. If I was blessed with so many great things, why on earth was I spending so much time acting like they were a burden?

But the thing no one tells you when you stop talking shit about other people — and life itself — is that your life will never be the same. If you struggle with abandonment issues like I do, that can be really scary, because there is a good chance you will lose a lot of people in the process of becoming a better human.

Here’s how it went down…