Family Is Not Everything
How to Minimize Their Mess, Maximize Your Happiness and
Enjoy Emotional Baggage Breakthroughs by Anita Washington

Are people constantly dumping their negative energy on you? Do you find yourself bombarded with painful thoughts from your past? What if with seven simple steps you could minimize their mess and maximize your happiness? Interested? Read on…

In Family Is Not Everything: How To Minimize Their Mess, Maximize Your Happiness and Enjoy Emotional Baggage Breakthroughs, author Anita Washington details personal stories of surviving a homicidal alcoholic father, a neglectful mother and an emotionally and physically abusive brother to show you how childhood trauma turns into adult dysfunctional behavior. She includes lessons to learn from her abuse and her life-altering mistakes, along with teaching you how to use the affirmations, techniques and activities of her 7-Step Method to resolve the effects of emotional baggage and create a life of purpose and meaning. The 7-Step Method is a process of seven sequential steps she had seen produce the greatest results. It has not only worked for her and her previous clients, it can also work for you!

BOOK REVIEWS

ASwirlGirl
5.0 out of 5 stars  This Book is Riveting!
I finished this book a few days ago and I’m still mulling over what I’ve read. So much of Family Is Not Everything is heartbreaking and painful to read, and my heart ached for Anita. I rejoice in the fact that despite EVERYTHING that happened in her childhood and young adult-hood, Anita TRIUMPHED. She shares realistic, actionable steps that can be taken by others who feel trapped by their past or the circumstances of life. I applaud Anita’s courage and transparency in writing this book. I’ve been impacted profoundly as a result of reading this, and I know I’ll be thinking about what I’ve read for years to come.

Falexia
5.0 out of 5 stars  A must read!
Amazing book, hard to put down. It’s heartbreaking to read about the horrible things Anita endured, but despite what she went through she didn’t let it destroy her. This book is for everyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family, it gives you hope and inspired you to use what you’ve gone through to help others. We are taught that family is everything, yet the Word even says that your enemies will be members of your own household, Matt 10:36, therefore family is not everything and it’s okay to cut them off if it means saving your life. The book helps you under generational curses and educated you on how to be an overcome and not stay a victim. This book is going to help a lot of people who want to be free from the prison of their past, it gives hope for those who grew up in a negative or toxic environment. Freedom can be yours if you put into actions the steps Anita lays out in this book.

Sharon Lawrence, LCSW-C
5.0 out of 5 stars Brave, Resilient, and Courageous!!
This book is amazing!!! It speaks for many who are afraid to share their stories of pain and trauma. Anita takes us on a journey while providing us with tools to improve our own lives with no guilt. It will teach you how to establish self-respect, set boundaries and live a free life. Thank you Anita!!!

Rhonda Dickerson
5.0 out of 5 stars  Family is Not Everything!!!
This book is sooo good. It is very hard to put down. After reading this book it gave me a extra push to finish my book and not worry about others opinion. I am so happy for you Anita. Thank you for allowing God to use you to help and health others. Love you!!

Charlie Latham
5.0 out of 5 stars  A helpful book that gives you actionable steps to work on
Everyone has traumatic events happen in their childhood and this is what shapes and molds our psychological behavior and outlook.
Ultimately we all have traits we don’t like because of this, and they vary in so many ways depending on what exactly we’ve been through. For me I mainly struggle with a mixture of anxiety and emotional detachment which grew from going to boarding school at a young age. Reading this helped me analyse why I had these personality traits, dissect that a bit and deal with it. It showed me how these had formed and gave me steps that I can actively follow to change this way of thinking and behaving.

About the Author

Anita Washington, M.Ed. & M.B.A., CEO & Founder of That Anita Live, LLC, host of the TV show That Anita Live and The Emotional Happiness Podcast with That Anita Live provides a platform for women to learn, laugh and more importantly heal emotionally by learning from the challenges and successes of others.

A former school and community agency counselor and creator of the 7-Step Method, Anita’s helped guide people from the ages of eleven to fifty through their own life issues, personal transformations and professional endeavors. With an old soul and a comedic, honest voice. She uses many southern colloquialisms and colorful expressions to unwrap personal stories of surviving a homicidal alcoholic father, a mother in denial and four physically and emotionally abusive brothers and relates them to guiding principles and healing techniques.

Through her powerful and uplifting interviews at ThatAnitaLive.TV and The Emotional Happiness Podcast women get to see and hear real women with resourceful stories living relentless lives after life’s most devastating events. Through her charismatic and compelling speaking, Anita helps women use the tools and resources they already have to reveal and release success blockers such as childhood trauma and family dysfunction to build self-confidence, boost their self-esteem and feel free to live true to their own personality, spirit and character.

She has self-published two books: number one ranked ebook, 7 Simple Steps to Beat Emotional Baggage: How To Become Whole, Healed, Healthy & Happy, which shares actionable techniques that will walk women through letting go of the past and rising above the glass ceiling to reach higher levels of success and satisfaction in life and newly released book (ebook and paperback), Family Is Not Everything: How To Minimize Their Mess, Maximize Your Happiness and Enjoy Emotional Baggage Breakthroughs which shares trauma stories you can relate to along with the seven techniques, affirmations and activities to help you heal.

From nine-to-five, Anita is a Senior Acquisition Support Specialist, possessing over nineteen years of performing and administering program management and cradle-to-grave commercial and federal contracting activities for acquisitions ranging from $500,000 to over $2 Billion. She has progressively worked her way up the federal acquisition life-cycle and commercial supply chain through various positions from pre-award and requirements definition to commodities buying to contract close-out. In her career, she has mastered the art of transitioning to level-up.

Anita is a graduate of Limestone College, Virginia State University, and Strayer University with a B.S. in Mathematics, an M.Ed. in Guidance & Counseling, and an M.B.A. in Contracts & Acquisitions. You can find Anita online at ThatAnitaLive.com, Twitter, Periscope, Instagram and Facebook. Her handle is That Anita Live on all four social media platforms.

Explore Books Anita Washington

AnitaTheAuthor.com/FINEAmazon (Amazon)

AnitaTheAuthor.com/FINEbn (Barnes and Noble)

Excerpt: Family Is Not Everything

BACK IN THE DAY

Once upon a time, we managed emotional problems with only prayer and encouragement. Seeking professional help was frowned upon. We were taught, What happens in this house, stays in this house. Seeking counseling services for divorce or molestation or addiction or domestic violence was taboo. Society expected the wife being battered by her husband to stay married, the niece being molested by an uncle to keep quiet, the daughter with the alcoholic father to make the best of it. Divorce wasn’t even regarded as a serious consideration. Instead, any spouse considering divorce was encouraged to make a new commitment to their vows, to pray, and to have faith. We were expected to achieve emotional wellness through a process of suppression and turning a blind eye. Adults had to live their lives according to who they were expected to be and hide who they really were. Children were expected to be seen and not heard.

Remember those days?

The unspoken belief was that when the person died, the problem died with them. When the alcoholic father died, the problems and effects of alcoholism died with him. When the physically abusive mother died, the problems and effects of battery died with her. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth and, because of this, generational curses have been present in our society for centuries. A generational curse is created when the effects of an emotional offense are passed down from one generation to another. It manifests through different dysfunctional behaviors in each family member but can be traced back to one common cause. So how is a generational curse passed down? In emotional baggage.

Children who grow up in dysfunctional environments become adults who exhibit dysfunctional behavior. A child learns from their experiences and from what they’re exposed to and then utilizes that later—albeit unknowingly—as a mechanism when they become an adult. In large part, the person you are today is a collection of your past experiences. Your behavior is shaped by what you think, and what you think is determined by what you’ve seen and heard. Basically, traumatic events experienced during childhood and left unresolved produce dysfunctional behavior in the adult. We carry it around unseen in the form of emotional baggage. Don’t believe me? Keep reading. Let me put it in live and living color for you.

THE STORY – THREE GENERATIONS

Imagine a family of three generations: a grandmother, mother, and daughter. Although the grandmother dies a couple years after the granddaughter is born, somehow, at the tender age of sixteen, they will each have become teenage mothers.

The year is 2000. In a small town in the southeastern United States, the high school football team is playing in the state championship game. The entire town is excited. Flat-panel TVs are mounted over the counters of local hotels and fast-food restaurants. Policemen direct the heavy traffic with glow-in-the-dark mascot paw prints painted on the palms of their gloves. Young and old, those with children and those without gather in the local stadium to watch the beloved home team take on their fifty-year rival. The bleachers rock from the beat of the fight songs played by the high school band as the crowd claps and dances along with the cheerleaders. The art club paints paw prints and jersey numbers on the faces of fans of every age. The booster club sells hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, and popcorn decorated in the team’s colors. The junior class volunteers sell commemorative programs and T-shirts to raise money for their impending senior trip. It’s the second quarter and the score is 14–7, with the home team in the lead.

While love, happiness, and excitement roar over the bleachers, under the bleachers lives lust and desire. Justin, affectionately called “the Magic Two” by other students, is the son of an alcoholic and the lead-scoring shooting guard for the high school basketball team. He stands six-four, is clean-cut and caramel colored, with hazel eyes. He has set his eyes on Monisha, a 4.0, coke-bottle-curved yet unpopular geek sophomore who has just celebrated her sixteenth birthday—and who is very conflicted. In her head she keeps hearing the one thing her mother has repeated her entire life: “Leave boys alone. They’ll ruin your life.” But inside she feels the butterflies flutter as Justin says, “You’re really beautiful,” and wraps his letterman’s jacket around her shoulders.

When Monisha was born in 1984, her mother, Monique, was sixteen, and her father, Clayton, was seventeen. They were the head cheerleader and captain of the football team, and everyone adored them. Wherever you saw her, you saw him and his cherry-red Ford Escort. Monique had thick, jet-black, shoulder-length hair and a tiny waist. Clayton had a bright, big, money-grip smile that sparkled with all the promises of possibility for future success. The night of the junior prom, Monique wore a floor-length Carolina Herrera sheath-silhouette evening gown with a twist one-shoulder strap. Clayton was in a black-and-white tuxedo. He picked Monique up at her home at seven o’clock Friday night and dropped her off at noon on Saturday; with that, Monisha was conceived. The generational curse had claimed another member of the family. The emotional baggage of hurt and shame had shut down healthy communication about love, sex, or relationships in Monique’s household. Monique too had been the product of a teen pregnancy, a disappointment to not only family but also the community, which was harbored by Millie, Monique’s mother, in silence.

Millie threw herself into making life look perfect and good, even though she was hurting on the inside. That silence left Monique to learn responsible behavior by trial and error. Millie was too hurt to bring it up for discussion and too ashamed to acknowledge the right way because it would shed light on the fact that she’d done it the wrong way. Millie and Sam, Monique’s father, were one of the more well-respected and affluent couples in town, the kind that keeps family faux pas quiet.

In 1968, Millie and Sam were the pride of the local Section 8 project community. A straight-A student, Millie excelled in math and science. Monique’s father, Sam, was the lead singer in a quartet, crooning Motown jams at parties every Saturday night and belting out soul-stirring gospel hymns in the churches every Sunday morning.

Millie and Sam managed to make marriage look good. Millie attended teachers’ college and secured a position teaching math at the elementary school. Sam traveled the world extensively, first as a lead singer, then as a solo artist. It was his way of handling his feelings of hurt and shame from teenage pregnancy, creating a family he was not able to provide for. If he didn’t see it, he didn’t have to face it.

The music hits and the steady paychecks were ever present in Monique’s home, but attention and love were not. Her parents provided food, clothing, and shelter but otherwise ignored Monique. She was the evidence of their failure to live a moral life. If they did not look at her, they didn’t have to wear the badge of embarrassment. Rumors of Sam’s cheating on the road would sometimes filter back to town, but proof didn’t materialize until the other wife and children attended his funeral. Neither Millie nor Sam was emotionally present or available to cultivate genuine love in their child. Unconsciously, her parents passed on the emotional baggage of hurt and shame and, though she was always the best-dressed girl in school, the baton of the family curse seamlessly moved from one generation to another and now another.

Monisha, the third generation, has her mother’s curves and her grandfather’s soulful songbird voice. Her grandmother, Millie, raised her until her untimely death when Monisha was three years old. At that time, Monisha went to live with her mother, Monique, who rarely smiled because, like Monique was to Millie, Monisha was the evidence of the life-altering mistake Monique had made. It had crushed her dreams of attending college and going to law school. She was stuck in a small town working swing shifts at a dead-end hourly job in the local food factory. Her conversations were full of pessimistic snappy comebacks uttered between the cigarettes she chain-smoked. Unfortunately, because of the emotional baggage she carried, she couldn’t free herself of the hurt and disappointment so she could mature and be a better mother to Monisha than Millie had been to her. When Monisha entered high school and the house phone started ringing with boys calling, Monique simply hung up the phone and told Monisha, “Leave boys alone, they’ll ruin your life.” Throughout Monisha’s childhood she heard her mother’s grumblings about how her father was no good. Monique complained constantly about how Clayton didn’t buy food or how he was not trustworthy enough to babysit.

The educational trend of social promotion of star athletes made it very difficult for Clayton to survive at the Ivy League college that heavily recruited him. Though he had a 3.7 GPA, it was obvious Clayton could read and write at only a fourth-grade level, so he dropped out. Out of compassion, the community business owners, who were once high school teammates of Clayton’s, employed him for odd jobs until his addiction to alcohol would take over his performance and he would return to rehab to dry out once again. He was of no assistance to Monique.

Teen pregnancy is the epidemic, lack of communication and courage to heal are its enablers, but hurt and shame are the generational curse. And so, two weeks after her sixteenth birthday and just twenty minutes after belting out a soulful rendition of the National Anthem, Monisha is under the bleachers at the state championship football game. She thinks she knows what love is. She believes Justin is the one to give her that forever-after kind of love. Justin has taken her from nerd-weird to crazy-cool with one wink of his eye and made her the most popular girl in school—that’s love, or so Monisha feels.

Our biggest problem as a society is that the emotional baggage of hurt, pain, guilt, and shame gets passed down but not resolved. It can live in a family for centuries yet never be discussed openly. Why? Some believe discussing it openly glorifies it. Others believe if it is not discussed, it will go away. These misconceptions breed life into the problem and death to the soul. It forces victims to continue to suffer in silence. It creates a breeding ground for dysfunctional behavior that can hurt future generations.

You’ve seen it a hundred times. The daughter of a teen mom grows up to have a baby at the exact same age her mom birthed her. The son of a heroin addict grows up to be addicted to heroin. The son of a physically abusive father grows up to physically assault his wife. The daughter of a battered and beaten mom grows up to only feel she is loved—when? When she’s being hit. The string of connected dots from one generation to another is a generational curse. But hold on—please do not think the “dots” are always the same kind of dysfunctional behavior.

The pattern of maladaptive behavior can manifest differently in each person. For instance, a father beaten and sodomized in the sixties commits suicide. His son, who was a teen at the time of the incident, becomes a substance abuser. And his son, the third generation, for lack of having a healthy father, becomes a womanizer. Suicide, substance abuse, and womanizing are all dysfunctional behaviors that can be traced back to the experience the family suffered in the sixties. All the behaviors—suicide, substance abuse, and womanizing—are dysfunctional behaviors but not the same behavior. Get it? Maybe this will help …

Imagine three generations of men—a grandfather and his brother, son, and grandson—exhibiting different coping mechanisms but carrying emotional baggage because of the same horrific historic incident.

The year was 1972. MLK Jr. and JFK had been assassinated. On every wall in America hung honors in their memory as the fight for civil rights raged on. Jim and his brother Peter were leaving a protest in Atlanta, Georgia, driving back to Charleston, South Carolina, when they stopped at a country corner store for gas. The sign in the window read “Always Open, All Welcome,” but the rifle pushing into Jim’s back as he paid for the gas Peter had just pumped said “White’s only.” Peter was forced behind the store at gunpoint with his hands up in the “don’t shoot” position. After the pillowcase went over Jim’s head, he began reciting the “Our Father” prayer. He thought about his darling wife, his aging mother, and the murders of Mr. Evers and Dr. King. Jim could hear Peter screaming as he was dragged behind the store. Both men were sodomized, severely beaten, and left for dead. Both men were found by a white college professor returning from a summit in Charleston, South Carolina, to his home in Atlanta when he stopped for gas around midnight and oddly found the store closed.

Jim and Peter were taken to a hospital. When they returned home, they were physically healed but emotionally destroyed. Jim sat for days without uttering a word. His wife continued to love and care for him until his death in 1983, just shy of his son Jeremiah’s sixteenth birthday.

Jeremiah doesn’t remember his father’s happy-go-lucky personality. He remembers only a lump of human existence that sat on the porch from sunup to sundown, and then at the dinner table until bedtime. Because she worked as a housekeeper at the local college, Jeremiah’s mother was gone all day, but Jeremiah’s Uncle Peter would stop by the house to see his brother, Jim. Somehow, Peter seemed to have bounced back to a normal life—always full of jokes for Jim and candy for Jeremiah. On one particular day, Peter didn’t stay on the porch with Jim. He softly walked the house and found it empty, with the exception of Jeremiah, napping in his bedroom. Sitting on the porch, Jim cried as he listened to his son scream for Uncle Peter to stop hurting him, but Jim never moved. Two years later, Jim drove to a nearby pond, locked all the doors on his 1957 Chevy pickup truck, set it ablaze, and burned to death.

Jeremiah’s high school friends affectionately called him Jerry. They loved his happy-go-lucky demeanor and warm smile. When they cut class to hang out at the baseball field, he always supplied the booze. Jerry started drinking heavily at fifteen—the same year he fell in love with Susan, the beautiful sixteen-year-old platinum blond with the baby-blue eyes. Together, they smoked, drank, and made love. The next year, they had Justin, a beautiful baby boy with hazel eyes. Jerry and Susan remained a couple. Though Susan worked full-time as a receptionist, Jerry bounced around doing handiwork for the people in town.

In 1984, Justin, a high school sophomore, is the star of the varsity high school basketball team, and Susan could often be seen in the stands sporting a sweatshirt screen printed with Justin’s jersey number. His dad, though, never made it to one game. Many nights after he and his mom returned from one of his basketball games, Justin stepped over his father, who was passed out in the doorway. Susan would pick Jerry up and drag him to their bedroom as the phone bounced off the hook, constantly ringing, from a steady stream of girls vying for Justin’s attention.

The family curse affected each of the men differently, though the root cause was the same. Peter became a molester; Jim committed suicide; his son, Jerry, became an alcoholic; and his grandson, Justin, was a womanizer. Unresolved guilt, hurt, pain, and shame was the emotional baggage handed down in the family’s generational curse. Without a strong positive father figure, the second and third generations were left to deal with the hurt and shame experienced by the first generation and to figure out how to become men on their own.

Everyone has been affected by dysfunctional behavior, if not through their family, then through their job, church, or community. Perhaps you can remember lying awake at night listening to your neighbor abuse his love interest. Maybe you watched over and over as the youth pastor or priest exhibited a stronger interest in one child as they disappeared into rooms alone. Or maybe you’ve suffered at the hands (or media coverage) of a mass shooter. However you were affected, everyone has some emotional baggage, and they may or may not be properly working through it.

Some people keep their story secret because they’ve suppressed it so well they aren’t immediately aware of it. Others keep it a secret because they think they’d just die if anyone found out. Unfortunately, emotional baggage can cause us to become stuck. It creates insecurities that prohibit us from living our best life in the moment. Insecurities can show up as self-doubt, negative self-talk, low self-esteem, arrogance, conceit, low self-confidence, worry, or indecisiveness. Behaviors that can become dysfunctional are belittling, intimidating, neglecting, hitting, baiting, threatening, manipulating, lying, choking, abstaining, and indulging.

When we’re stuck, the effects aren’t always obvious or overt. For example, we’ve earned two college degrees but still cannot break the desired six-figure income ceiling. We’re smart, beautiful, and accomplished but can’t find genuine romantic love. We’re always around loads of friends and have managed to establish a social calendar that would make Oprah and Gayle blush, but we feel lonely, lost, and purposeless. We’re driven, task-oriented, and the highest producer quarter after quarter, but life still feels aimless and empty. We’ve got the gorgeous husband and brilliant kids, but we feel invisible and underappreciated.

Occurrences are bubbling over, becoming systemic and uncontrollable in homes, schools, and workplaces all over the country. Divorce, addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse are social ills that create deep-seated emotional baggage that seeps from the secrecy of our families into mainstream malls, entertainment complexes, and workplaces. Over time they deteriorate the soul of the person carrying the hurt and shame of the trauma, causing that person to inflict wounds on other people. Every problem you have is your responsibility, regardless of who caused it. Take responsibility to not pass your pain to the next generation.

Managing emotional wellness with silence has driven us into a hurricane of destruction on every societal level—from the family to the workplace, church, and school. The bad news is that emotional baggage is killing our communities. The good news is that over the last decade or so, the tide has turned, and emotional wellness is now a societal priority. No longer are we expected to nurse our wounds in silence. It’s the best time to find your authentic self and live a fulfilled life of joy. At no other time in history have we had as many life coaches, counselors, and clinicians abundantly available to assist you or corporate brands publicly championing for mental health causes and social responsibility. Now is the time for you to move past the stories that cause you pain. This is your moment. This is your pivotal place in space and time. It is no longer a situation of chance—you get to decide to win!

CRACK THE MASK, BREAK THE MOLD

With this book, I want to help you accept your past and decide it will no longer control your future. I want you to discover the past experiences that created your limiting beliefs and fuel your sabotaging behavior so you can beam with joy from the inside out. I want you to utilize the process of continuous growth and development. Living the same year ninety-nine times is not living a life. There’s more, and you can do more than have it—you can thrive in it. I want you to remove the restrictions your past has put on your ability to feel free to live true to your own personality, spirit, and character.

You have to crack the mask to define success and happiness for yourself: In your wildest dreams, what would give you the greatest joy? Think of three things that, if you owned them or earned them, would make you feel like you are living your best life. For example, my three things would be a private jet, a five-acre estate, and a home management staff—no debt. What are your three things? Now, let’s do this. Pick up your cell phone (yes, I know it is right there next to you), join my Facebook Group at https://www.ThatAnitaLive.com/group, and post your “Best Life Top 3.” We are a safe circle of compassion and understanding. Who knows, your “Best Life Top 3” may pop up in your direct messages when you least expect it as a reminder that dreams do come true—you just have to put in the work.

But understand, time is of the essence. Change is evident and always evolving. Just as times changed to produce a new day of pride in one’s authentic self, it can quickly change to make anyone with an emotional issue a dangerous detriment to society. The focus of pop culture and public opinion is largely dependent upon the latest major headline—good or bad. The pendulum swing affects the openness with which we can practice self-help. Today, hashtags that end in “pride” fill every social media timeline daily, but how long will we be able to live unashamed? No one knows, which is why you need to move to create the life you were destined to live now. It’s time to soar to your next level in life. Will you continue to go round and round on the merry-go-round of sameness, or will you jump and reach for destiny’s brass ring of happiness and success?

IT’S YOUR TIME TO SOAR

In this book, I’m educating, entertaining, and teaching you a new process for dealing with emotional baggage. This process will not only help you to stop living an aimless life but will teach you how to sustain your momentum and steadily accomplish your goals. I’m going to educate you by demonstrating how childhood trauma becomes adult dysfunctional behavior through my own personal stories. I’m going to entertain you with my southern colloquialisms and quick-witted tongue but also by showing you the silver lining to your own dark clouds, the good things that have come out of all those tough times. Lastly, I’m going to teach you how to defend and prioritize what is most important—your happiness and your health.

That new process is my 7-Step Method, which got me off the emotional spin cycle. The basic format of the chapters in Section I are the same. First, I share a personal story highlighting a certain type of abuse and its lasting effects. In some chapters, I give you multiple examples of abusive incidents. I need you to know abusive behavior is not a onetime event. When a survivor says “I was abused,” the listener hears and sees one single event. I need you to see, hear, and feel that abuse is repetitive and will persist as long as the perpetrator has access to the victim.

Each chapter will also feature a Lesson to Learn section highlighting the dysfunctional behavior resulting from the abuse (the effects), and how the 7-Step Method can be used to overcome the maladaptive behavior (the technique). The activities will teach you how to minimize toxicity, maximize what serves you, and enjoy a meaningful life. Section II of this book—chapters seven, eight, and nine—shares with you how to keep your momentum going once you’ve gotten free.

The Techniques of the 7-Step Method are:

Step One – Life Mapping
Step Two – Track and Trace
Step Three – Dispose of Distractions
Step Four – Celebrating Self
Step Five – Inner Peace and Quiet
Step Six – Emotional Equation (Performance Review)
Step Seven – Gratitude and Give Back

My Successful 7-Step Method Affirmations include:

1. The better I know the person within, the happier I can make her.
2. I am the master of my emotions. I control them, they don’t control me.
3. Having boundaries shows I want self-respect. Forcing people to adhere to my boundaries shows I have self-respect.
4. I am precious.
5. I am peace. I am peaceful. I am at peace.
6. I am in a perfecting process.
7. I am receiving goodness and giving greatness back.

My successful 7-Step Method Activities include:

1. Life Mapping
2. Tracking and Tracing
3. Disposing of Distractions
4. Celebrating Self
5. Inner Peace and Quiet (Bonus: Finding My Father Collage)
6. Solving Your Emotional Equation
7. Gratitude and Give Back (Bonus activity: Creating a Family of Choice)

This book does not include a comprehensive list of all of the Affirmations, Techniques, or Activities in my 7-Step Method. It does include all the steps. However, I’ve carefully selected the specific Affirmation, Technique, and Activity that best correspond with the lesson to be learned from the True Story in the chapter.

WHY LISTEN TO ME?

I hear you, I hear you. Who is this woman and why should I listen to her? Why should I continue to read this book? Let me give you four reasons: my education, my career experience, my personal experience, and most important—my gift.

I’ve earned three degrees—a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, a Master of Education in Counseling, and a Master in Business Administration—and I do mean earned. I attended all my own classes, wrote all my own papers, and conducted all my own research. I learned from professors that cared more for my well-rounded, intellectual development and my ability to rise to the top than my feelings.

But I’m not just heavy on the education side; I’m also qualified by career experience. I’ve counseled, coached, and trained hundreds of people between the ages of eleven and fifty through their own personal transformations and professional endeavors. I’ve been a summer teen program counselor and a middle school guidance counselor. I’ve worked as a counselor in a life skills, education, and technical job training program as well as a career services counselor at a college. And I’m still that one friend everyone seeks out when they need help with their challenges. In addition, as you will learn in later chapters, I’ve been on every side of emotional baggage.

I am an expert because of the combination of my education, career experience, personal experience, and heavenly gifting at identifying where you’re stuck and mapping out how to move you from where you are to where you want to be in life. Yes, I said “heavenly gifting.” Consider what world-renowned celebrity personality Steve Harvey tells his audiences all over the world about The Gift:

“At birth God gave each and every one of us a gift. A gift is something you do the absolute best, with the least amount of effort. Gifts are more than just running, jumping, singing, and dancing. Your gift is where your success and happiness will be found.”

My gift is counseling—picking apart people’s insecurities and helping them find their emotional wellness. When life throws everything at you, when you’re buried under the mess of this world, I am the hand that you reach for, the hand that will pull you out of the dust, dirt, and mud, then teach you how to live a life of joy, love, and peace.

ARE YOU WITH ME?

Nothing gives you a better understanding of a topic than a 360-degree experience, and as I’ve said, I’ve been the victim, the witness, and the conduit God uses to heal. Using that full panoramic view, I have made this my mission—you will:

· Be EQUIPPED to boldly go beyond your comfort zone and refresh, reinvent, and revise your life for the better.

· Learn how to TRANSFORM negative thinking into positive thinking with 7 affirmations, 7 results-driven techniques, and 7 actionable activities.

· Learn how to DEFY your limiting beliefs about yourself and create a life you’ll love living.

· Be EMPOWERED to do more for yourself and demand even more from others.

· Learn how to CHANGE your self-sabotaging behavior.

· Learn how to RELEASE fear.

· Be MOVED by the vivid and transparent personal stories of violent abuse to realize you are not the only one with a past and it doesn’t define your destiny or stop you from getting it.
 

In chapter two we’ll examine the importance of self-awareness and why no one should know you better than you. We’ll review the benefits and the life-changing effects each benefit can have on us. Turn the page, and let’s get started.

( Continued… )

© 2018 All rights reserved. Book excerpt reprinted by permission of the author, Anita Washington. Do not reproduce, copy or use without the author’s written permission. This excerpt is used for promotional purposes only.

Explore Books Anita Washington

AnitaTheAuthor.com/FINEAmazon (Amazon)

AnitaTheAuthor.com/FINEbn (Barnes and Noble)

Intimate Conversation with Anita Washington 
 

Anita Washington, M.Ed. & M.B.A., CEO & Founder of That Anita Live, LLC, host of the TV show That Anita Live and The Emotional Happiness Podcast with That Anita Live provides a platform for women to learn, laugh and more importantly heal emotionally by learning from the challenges and successes of others.

A former school and community agency counselor and creator of the 7-Step Method, Anita’s helped guide people from the ages of eleven to fifty through their own life issues, personal transformations and professional endeavors. With an old soul and a comedic, honest voice. She uses many southern colloquialisms and colorful expressions to unwrap personal stories of surviving a homicidal alcoholic father, a mother in denial and four physically and emotionally abusive brothers and relates them to guiding principles and healing techniques.

Through her powerful and uplifting interviews at ThatAnitaLive.TV and The Emotional Happiness Podcast women get to see and hear real women with resourceful stories living relentless lives after life’s most devastating events. Through her charismatic and compelling speaking, Anita helps women use the tools and resources they already have to reveal and release success blockers such as childhood trauma and family dysfunction to build self-confidence, boost their self-esteem and feel free to live true to their own personality, spirit and character.

She has self-published two books: number one ranked ebook, 7 Simple Steps to Beat Emotional Baggage: How To Become Whole, Healed, Healthy & Happy, which shares actionable techniques that will walk women through letting go of the past and rising above the glass ceiling to reach higher levels of success and satisfaction in life and newly released book (ebook and paperback), Family Is Not Everything: How To Minimize Their Mess, Maximize Your Happiness and Enjoy Emotional Baggage Breakthroughs which shares trauma stories you can relate to along with the seven techniques, affirmations and activities to help you heal.

BPM: It is such a pleasure to have you join us to discuss, your latest book, Family Is Not Everything. Describe yourself in three words.
Disciplined, Determined and Destined.

BPM: Describe what you do outside of writing to expand your business or brand.
I coach women on how to create the life they secretly crave. I also host a podcast titled, The Emotional Happiness Podcast with That Anita Live and I host a local television show called, That Anita Live.

BPM: Have you written any other books that are not published?
Yes, right now I’m editing two devotionals and a journal I want to share with my tribe. I’d like to offer more of the inspiration and motivation that helped me accomplish big things in my life.

BPM: What is your preferred method to have readers get in touch with or follow you?
I love Twitter and Instagram. Readers can connect with me on either platform and I’m always open to answer questions or respond to comments.

BPM: Are you an author that interacts a great deal with your readers?
Yes! We have a good time. We tweet each other and I follow them on Instagram and comment on their posts all the time.

BPM: How do you balance the professional, personal and spiritual sides of your life, while pursuing your dreams?
I compartmentalize time for each area of my life. Each area has a designated time slot and during that time, I’m all in. I live fully in the experience of that moment.

BPM: What does the phrase ‘Fail Forward’ mean to you?
It means as long as you are in motion, even though you may not be seeing the success you desire, momentum moves you closer to success.

BPM: If you could pass on a single piece of advice to authors out there reading this interview, what would it be?
Live authentically through the words you write, by being true to yourself and your beliefs.

BPM: How do you stay connected with others in your industry?
I stay connected through networking. Once a calendar quarter I gather with other authors and life coaches to meet for lunch or dinner and discuss new marketing strategies or to bounce ideas off of each other. We’re suppose to meet for business but we goof off and have a lot of fun.

BPM: How can we support you? What’s next for you?
Follow me on social media and stay in touch. Give me your feedback on my posts. If you like a post or tweet, like it, but also comment and let me know what you think. I love knowing what readers think of the posts and tweets I share.

BPM: Please share ways that our readers can stay connected to you online. 
Facebook.com/ThatAnitaLive
Twitter.com/ThatAnitaLive
Instagram.com/ThatAnitaLive
ThatAnitaLive.com/youtube