July 10th, 2013 - Wednesday - Cruelty

June 10th, 2013 - Wednesday - Cruelty - Mars and Gemini say hello in the cruelest way... the passive aggressive card... spinning and whirling your mind is seeking ways to make your point without making your point...are you a victim?  Are you feeling like the world shit on you? Narrow is the beam to balance between standing up for yourself and raging over into the fertile territory of cruelty.

What are we really saying here? Someone or something has wronged you.  Screwed you. You got it good.  Probably for real.  You were actually wronged!

So what do you do with that?  Here's what the card is telling you that you will find yourself doing. Instead of standing up for yourself in a graceful powerful way, you'll make one of three mistakes.  

1.  You'll get passive aggressive and do some smarmy shitty little things.  This won't serve.  Go ahead, it might be your habit, give it a try, but witness it and see if it works....  Stand back.  See if it works.
2.  You'll explode and cruelly destroy someone.
3.  You'll martyr yourself, and sacrifice yourself in a gratuitous display of victim hood.

And just to make this whole thing super fun and give you something to think about: The person you could be pissed at... could be yourself!  So you can be beating yourself up slyly... or aggressively.  

Walk that graceful center path...  Take deep breaths, witness yourself, write down some things about how you feel, and consider different angles on how to express it gracefully.  You might screw it up.  Sure.  But TRY.  Put your brain to work on how to deal with this.  Think.  Cut away the bullshit.  Use your mind to destroy illusions and say no no  no. That's bullshit.  And see what is really going on.  You have to do this.  There is no trick.  No one can do it for you.  You have to put some effort into this, fail perhaps, and try again.

Look, once in a while my wife will do something that hurts me.  And I have four paths I can take when it happens.  First I can be passive aggressive to her.  That is a short term solution.  I feel better for minute, but in the end it just makes it worse.

The next thing I can do is get really pissed at her for it and blow up.  That NEVER works, but sometimes I'm just so pissed I get cruel and stupid.  It's ugly.

Next... I say nothing... I martyr myself and suffer like a saint.  What a turd.

So what do I really want to do?  Well the word we want to remember is GRACE

Just like I said, I think about it.  I really think about how to communicate to my woman, and express what happened to me, in a graceful way.  Humor helps.  

Most of the time when I try this I fail.  Really. I gently try to express how I was hurt and wronged and it comes off as an accusation.  It just riles her up and then we go to war or silence.  It sucks.  it's stupid.  So I try again.  And again. 

And here is some serious bad news: Each time this comes up, you have to gracefully find a NEW way.    Sometimes I gracefully find a way to tell her and it's beautiful.... and it works... and peace is created... but that way never works the NEXT time it happens... I always have to come up with a new graceful way.

What a challenge.  :)