the events of friday

and my subsequent post about my 'disappointment' gave me lots to think about over the weekend...

sooo guess i wanted to start with a public apology (since even though i didn't do a public name & blame, it probably felt like that to someone....someone very special to me)...so i'm sorry!

it's really interesting to me that the essay i am writing at the moment and the study i'm doing seem so pertinent and scarily relevant to what i am experiencing in my own life - as if the universe has aligned in some way to help me learn this lesson (hopefully i will finally get it this time) by not only providing an 'experience' but also by providing the 'support and information' i need to work it out! thank you - i'll do my best to learn it and move on...

relationships are a funny thing - they are absolutely the source of much joy and happiness (well my relationship with ben is), and they bring with them a mirror that we are just sometimes not ready to look into...i guess the last 2 months has been one of the happiest 2 month periods of my life and more recently is starting to be a mirror - no doubt that what i see in the mirror is what i'm meant to see right now, and no doubt, there are lessons in the 'seeing' that i absolutely need to learn, but must it be so hard? must it remind me of a whole lot of crap that with ben is absolutely NOT relevant?

well, guess i answered my own question whilst contemplating this over the weekend: yes it must be hard - the expression no pain, no gain comes to mind! and yes it must bring up shit i think isn't relevant - coz it isn't relevant, but sometimes it feels as though it is, and it's my job right now to challenge all that old stuff and decide if i want to stick with it....seems easy right? well, it's really not

see when you've spent 39 years creating a belief (and reality is there are way more than just one!) which in turn lends itself to certain behaviours, it's not that easy to just switch it off and start behaving in a different way, no matter how much you want to! and man how i have wished it was....what i have learned though is that by trying to understand where the belief stems from, and looking at it somewhat objectively given my circumstances now, i can (theoretically) make an informed decision about whether i want to hang onto it, or create a new belief, with a whole lot of different behaviours...

sooo pretty cool really, except that last friday i chose not to do that and ended up behaving in a way i was totally embarrassed about and worse still, caused someone else to be upset :-(

so the last few days (which explains my silence) has been a time of contemplation and review, and there are some beliefs that i think i am ready to ditch...what surprises me is that i have done a lot of work in therapy about the sort of person i want to be and how i want to behave and what sort of relationship i would like to find myself in, but doing it theoretically and in the safety of the counselling room are a WHOLE lot different from trying it out in one's real life! guess it's true what some of the great theorists in psychology say: in isolation we are nothing and that until someone holds a mirror up for us, we don't really know who we are...

so ben, to you: thank you for being you, for understanding and caring, for being in my life and for holding up that mirror for me xox