The terrible jaws of regret

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Don’t you hate it when, just as you least expect it, the untamed past escapes its cage?

With silent stealth, it attacks without warning, devouring any present peace in one fell swoop.

Before you even know what’s happened, it pounces and you find yourself captive, dangling powerless from the terrible jaws of regret.

The pain is so immediate and piercing, it takes your breath away.

At times, you are ashamed to admit, you have yearned for a swift end to what feels like interminable suffering.

You long to turn away, to blind the eyes that cannot close to things you said and the things you did and far worse still, that which went undone and unspoken.

Oh, the cruelty of hindsight, how it taunts us with impossible possibilities of how we could have been.

The shoulds, the coulds, the questions without answer.   The answers you wish you could change.

The quality of mercy may fall unstrained like rain from heaven but,

Hidden in the dungeon  of our  lack of self-forgiveness,

There is no absolution.

“This is not what I signed up for” How talking about the sub-text can heal your relationship

One of the biggest relationship mistakes that people make is to express anger instead of fear or sadness.    That anger often arises from a sense of betrayal derived from the idea that an unwritten rule has been broken, the thought being ‘This is not what I signed up for’.    But more often than not, instead of sharing the thoughts and feelings underneath it all, we ignore the elephant in the room and fight about the symptoms instead of the causes.

For Brad and Julie it all started when they had twins, right around the time he got his big promotion.   All of a sudden their worlds were upside down.   Between recovering from the caesarian and taking care of two babies with colic, Julie was completely overwhelmed and couldn’t wait for Brad to get home from work to give her a break.