I am Mad…at Myself

Disclaimer: I seem to be in quite the snarky mood, which is unusual for me.  I think it’s because my kids have been gone all week, and I decided to live off of salads and bits of dark chocolate.  I was feeling so skinny, so “beyond” the need to really eat dinner, and I thought it was an ingenious way to avoid cooking and cleaning.  Well, it don’t think it has been good for me, but I thought I’d blog while I’m in this mood because maybe a new kind of edginess would come out of my writing (like I’m so avant garde).

Anyway, have you ever gotten really, really angry at someone?  So angry that you wanted to burn all bridges and just let the person really have it?  And then you calmed down just a touch and you realized that the person that you were really mad at was yourself?

As many of you know, I have recently started working with a relationship coach, Sheila Paxton, of Intentional Relationships.  Yesterday was our third of ten sessions.  Her objective is to get people to think about dating and relationships in a new way so as to not repeat old patterns, and in order to find the kind of relationship that really suits their needs and jibes with their values.  As I have been doing her work, I have been finding a certain struggle between what I thought was my head and my gut.  For those of you who are interested in personality typing systems, I am an ENTJ in the Meyers Briggs and an 8 in the Enneagram, which means that I make decisions very intuitively, including decisions to get romantically involved.  As Sheila and I were talking yesterday, she was encouraging me to be more patient, more present, and not to make snap judgments about a date.  When I told her this was a struggle for me, she said that it would appear that my gut had led me astray in the past, and that I needed to be more objective and mindful (which, to me, sounds like using my head more).

Well, today when I got really mad at this person, I eventually realized that I was frustrated more at myself.  This person’s actions were, in a lot of ways, congruent with what I had seen when we were first getting to know each other.  However, I overrode my intuitions about him because I was hoping that we could make a relationship work.  I wanted him to be my prince charming, so to speak, and in a lot of ways, he played that role valiantly.  Yet the gut response that I had when we first met turned out to be right.  I certainly don’t regret anything that I did because 1) I had tons of fun doing it (until the breakup of course, that’s never fun) and 2) it has led me to some important insights.

My intellect and my intuition are not at odds, as I had led Sheila to believe, yesterday.  I’m just not always listening to my intuition.  Sometimes her voice is so subtle that I can’t hear her speak.  She is the quiet student in my class who infrequently raises her hand, but when she does, she has tremendous insight.  At times there are louder, more charming, more loquacious students who dominate the field, but this student will always have the right answer when I remember to call on her.

This is why I need yoga.  This is why working with a coach has been so fruitful.  This is why I need to write (or journal, as my friend says) because it helps me connect to that inner voice of wisdom, call it my higher self or my godhead (as the Gnostics would say).  Whew.  Now I can breathe again.

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Second disclaimer: Sheila has agreed to waive her fee in exchange for me writing about my work with her.  But as you all have come to expect from me, I’m always honest about what I think.  So far, her counseling has been very helpful.  Go check out her website.