Control and....forgiveness - AGAIN!

Disclaimer:
To my lovely friends who ‘read between the lines’ I’m ok, this has been helpful.
To my lovely friends, and the rest of the world who I don’t know, that this might help come to some conclusions, fill your boots!

What prompts us to hold onto things after the cause has:
just gone
moved away,
apparently been forgotten
said sorry but didn’t really mean it, in our opinion,
or even died?

My intension was to post purely about CONTROL but it occurred to me that our desire to control ourselves, situations, relationship etc.etc, is possibly/ quite probably a symptom of something else that is eating away at us, but that we just can’t begin to or just don’t want to rationalise, vocalise, visualise. Also, I don’t think that I have enough experience of it if I’m honest, and looking at my question, I can see that the conclusion of this blog is not going to be at all fulfilling unless I go somewhere dark and murky first .

I don’t put myself into the set of people known as Control Freaks and I don’t think many people who know me would say that I am controlling or even am in control for much of the time.

I am a reactive kind of person, it’s very freeing, almost a relinquishing of responsibility really, and am not proud of that either. I am intentionally training myself to have more of a plan, not just for my day to day work, but for my day to day LIFE, so I have the intention to be more in control, but the desire to be in control eludes me.

I wonder if that’s because, at the end of the day
I don’t want to be responsible when it all goes wrong!!
See…. a dark and murky place.

*1 Funny though, that I beat myself up frequently, because so often I think that it all goes wrong anyway, so there must be some other reason that control eludes me.
*1Added after 50th proof read

This post is an exercise in CONTROL. I am typing it in WORD first, rather than just rattling it off as a quick post and I have to say, that it’s quite an enlightening, if actually alarming way of exploring an issue. It will make for a long posting though.

During my NVQ course I touched minutely on Child Psychology and one of the theories is that the adult characteristics we grow into, are as a direct result of the events we experienced as a child – it’s not Brain Surgery*2, to see that, in many cases, that’s true – might not be true for everybody but it probably is and there we have it:

Isn’t that what control is about?
Modifying our behaviour to mask or deny what’s really the issue.

*2The traditional comparison here might be ‘it’s not Rocket Science’, but it has been pointed out to me that Rocket Science is actually quite easy – equal and opposite forces, thrust and fuel, whereas Brain Surgery is actually much harder. In my imaginary world where everything revolves around me, and everyone in the world reads my blog, doctors will now adore me, physicists will not – ho hum.

So, as the topic of forgiveness seems to be one that continues to pepper my thoughts, posting and comments on other people’s blogs, I’m wondering if being able to forgive, or actually being unable to forgive, is something that becomes the cement in a wall that we build around ourselves to keep control.

As a person who really doesn’t have the time to explore many complex issues (‘That’s an excuse!’ I hear all you psychologists in the world who are monitoring my blog shout), maybe that’s my externally imposed control…yeah, a posh phrase for EXCUSE. I don’t want to explore complex issues, so I’ll get married *3, have 3 children and a variety of pets, think about maintaining a long garden, have a job that’s mental at times, be active in my church and get a blog.

*3 It was our 19th wedding anniversary on the 28th May, and for Keith’s prezzie, I taught him how to create a blog – he’s ever so grateful.

So, I think that actually, forgiveness is an issue, not just for me, but for lots of people, and there are SO many ways of dealing with the consequences of needing some kind of forgiveness or being able to be forgiving, but just not being able to become vulnerable enough to ‘go there’ .

So at the end of this posting, I have discovered that the actual issue for me is it that when push comes to shove, I just don’t like confrontation, so someone says ‘sorry’, in a round about way, and I say ‘that’s ok’ when actually it isn’t, life goes on and XYZ years later…it still comes up sometimes.

( I won’t be pre - posting in word again by the way, far too scary )