– Living Life with Integrity Through Nashville Counseling Services

LIVING LIFE WITH INTEGRITY THROUGH NASHVILLE COUNSELING SERVICES

Integrity is a complicated word. It has been used relentlessly throughout our lives and has become one of those words without much meaning these days. It’s thrown around a lot, but not much attention is paid to it. I believe it’s an ideal most of us want to live up to, but it’s been so overused, we’re not even sure what to make of it. I think it would be hard for a person to say, “Nope. I don’t want to be a person of integrity.” But, what does it mean to have integrity?

I think integrity means something different to every person. That sounds like a cop out.   What I mean is that each person has a vision for how they want their life to turn out. And that vision is usually pretty unique to each individual.

CAN NASHVILLE COUNSELING SERVICES HELP US FIND OUR INTEGRITY?

In order to determine if we have integrity, we must first discover what type of life we want to live. Integrity simply means acting in ways that are in alignment with our vision. But my vision for my life might differ dramatically from yours. Unfortunately, this happens so often in marriages. Not that each partner’s vision is so dramatically different, but there will be some areas that don’t equally line up with their partner’s vision. But I think we get confused. We get confused because we haven’t taken the time understand and determine our own vision. It’s takes time and effort and energy to create a vision for our lives. It means making choices. And whenever we make choices, we eliminate other choices. We don’t like accepting our limitations as humans. So, we put off creating a vision for our lives. We long to be a person of integrity, but we can’t have integrity about “something.”

Nashville counseling services can help us unpack our life, take a step back, dream, and create a vision for the type of person we want to become. Then, we can make decisions and judgments about our integrity. Integrity becomes incredibly valuable, because it grounds us back into our original vision for the type of life we want to live. Or, just as helpful, we may have found along the way that our vision has changed. So, when we act without integrity toward our original vision, we can step back and assess if perhaps our vision has changed! This is a great thing! Our visions will usually change as we move through life.

Integrity is not a static thing, as most of us were taught. Integrity is not universal to every person. We can avoid integrity altogether by never getting clear about the type of life we want to live. The problem with not having a vision, though, is that we make commitments to our loved ones based on certain ideals and hopes. We give the appearance that have a vision for our lives and implicitly agree to live a life according to that vision. But, we never really sat down and made a conscious decision about our vision, and so we feel trapped. Most of us don’t know we feel trapped. Or, we don’t know why we feel trapped. We just do and we don’t like it. And because we feel trapped, we act out. We try to show that we are our own individual and can do whatever we want. We feel we have the freedom to do this, because we never sat down explicitly and shared our personal vision for our life with another person. It leads to so much mischief.

Nashville counseling services can be so beneficial for people who feel trapped or lost or annoyed that people say they are not living with integrity. Those people are right…and they are wrong. If you are looking for help finding your vision for your life, Chris Roberts is licensed professional counselor and would love to help you.