Resolving Conflicts Without and Within (longish)
Resolving Conflicts Within and Without
Over the last 3 days I have walked approximately 12 miles and ridden my bike 42 miles, which gave me a little over 6 full hours of time to think…a scary prospect in itself, I admit. I spent most of that time thinking about the internal conflicts that have raged within me for so long (and contributed to my former size) and the upcoming conflicts I am likely to have with people I care about as I try to resolve those internal conflicts.
With the help of a few truly wonderful people I have reached a far higher level of self-acceptance this year than what I had been able to achieve at any previous time in my entire life. With that acceptance have come some unpleasant realizations. For example:
- I chose and stuck with my career path for the past 27 years to first please my father, then to please my wife, even while I have known that it hasn’t ever felt right.
I somehow rationalized that if I did what these important people in my life wanted of me, everything would be great, despite the fact that my career path carries with it a low likelihood of meeting some of my basic emotional needs. If I couldn’t accept myself as I am and feel worthy of trying to have my own needs met, then a plausible alternative would be to please others whose acceptance of me (or my perception of their acceptance of me, to be fair) apparently was conditioned on me following a certain path or life trajectory of their choosing, irrespective of what I needed of a career from an emotional standpoint.
It will shock no one who knows me that I have a relatively unusual personality type (INFP for you Myers-Briggs personality type fans). I have known for a very long time that what motivates me, what fulfills and drives me is different than it is for most other people, so, again to be fair to my father and my wife, how could they have known what my emotional needs were when 1) I am an introvert not previously prone to sharing my inner workings and 2) that I didn’t understand what my needs really were until recently? This is not to say that I didn’t recognize that there was a fundamental problem with my chosen career path because it hasn’t felt right from the start and, while there have been a few high points, I have spent many years trying to smother my career discontentment with food. My thinking was that if I couldn’t accept myself as I am and I couldn’t tolerate what the important people in my life thought was best for me career-wise, then deep down I would be nowhere, be nothing, just as I feared. So I plugged and chomped away……until now.
Now…..now I won’t allow myself to smother my feelings with food, so I can no longer avoid resolving this internal conflict between needing to have my own emotional needs met versus wanting desperately to please others by trying to meet their needs of me (in order to preserve their acceptance of me as a substitute for self-acceptance). So, that awful internal conflict will soon be turned outward. My mind reels with the negative potential of having to do that. I am a master at avoiding conflict, of being “Mr. Too Nice For My Own Good" as my parents have called me, and yet the time has come for me to banish this internal conflict to my past, to that larger and less happy man I used to be. Conflict with people you care about requires a deft and gentle hand…..I hope that I keep that in mind along the way.
RP
