If you’ve been hurt by the one you love, don’t forget to look at the flip side. That’s the other side of the coin, the positives, the reason you have been with the person in the first place. It’s only fair, but don’t do it because it’s fair. Do it because the flip side saysContinue reading “Looking at the Flip Side”
Category Archives: Reconciliation
The Road to Reconciliation: The Journey, Restated
I’ve been at this series for quite a while, describing the road to reconciliation. These posts are an early draft of what I expect to be my next book. You have the privilege of getting it first; but, sometimes, as I write, need to go back and revise. That’s the case this time. I hadContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: The Journey, Restated”
The Road to Reconciliation: Learn to Walk
Stand with your feet comfortably together. If you want to go somewhere, what do you do? You take one foot and put it forward until you throw yourself off balance. Then, at the last instant, when you’re about to fall on your face, you bring the other foot up to meet it, until you areContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: Learn to Walk”
The Road to Reconciliation: Calibrate your Compass
Take a perfectly functional compass and put it in a room with an electromagnet and it will forget which way is north. It’ll point to the magnet because the magnet is exerting a force that it cannot ignore, far more powerful than that exercised by the distant, measly north pole. When a problem enters aContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: Calibrate your Compass”
The Road to Reconciliation: Understand the People of the Mind
As if it wasn’t hard enough to deal with the people who hurt you, you also have to deal with their representatives you carry around in your head. Actual people you can divorce, send to jail, move across the country and never see again; the people of the mind follow you, they share your bedContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: Understand the People of the Mind”
The Road to Reconciliation: Get out of the middle of the picture
Let’s say you are deeply disappointed in your mother, who never was the mother you needed her to be when you were a child. You want to get past this because, after all, you’re not a child anymore, right? The story, as you tell it, goes like this: My mother divorced my father when IContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: Get out of the middle of the picture”
The Road to Reconcilation: Stay on the Road
First, I had you acknowledge your feelings, then set them aside. I had you recognize that you were a victim, then I urged you to stop playing the victim. I told you to not forgive cheaply, then I said you were a fool not to forgive. So, which is it? You ask. What do IContinue reading “The Road to Reconcilation: Stay on the Road”
The Road to Reconciliation: Avoid Playing the Victim
So far, I’ve been urging you to bear right on the road to reconciliation. There’s a good reason for this. To the left are all the hazards that come from not taking your injuries seriously enough: cheap pardon and being out of touch with feelings and uncommitted to values. Now I want you to slightlyContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: Avoid Playing the Victim”
The Road to Reconciliation: See the Context
The world may have been created out of nothing, out of a nameless void, they say; but since then, anything that has happened has arisen out of something else. We call this context. If you want to come to some peace over something that has happened to you, then see the context from which itContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: See the Context”
The Road to Reconciliation: How to Re-Traumatize Yourself
First, a bad thing happens. Rape, murder, combat, abuse. You don’t have a lot of control over it. That’s the point. Something happens way, way out of your control. You barely make it. Now you’re left with the memories. That’s the trauma. Second, the memories come up. You don’t have a lot of control overContinue reading “The Road to Reconciliation: How to Re-Traumatize Yourself”
Keith Wilson - Counseling 