Bill Holmes - Activities - Women - Conflicted

You can't make rational decisions about relationships until you distinguish reality from your stories about it. A classic example is what happens to an innocuous event after my mother and her friends spend hours on the telephone amplifying it into a soap opera of "she said, he said, I said, she said he said, he must have, she must have ..." Occasionally I'll investigate, and explain the reality to their disappointment. Why women have this propensity to invent complex stories about something someone said or did, I may have something to do with back-handed complements, but it distorts their reality and, consequently their feelings about people and themselves.

The following is like a career assessment test in which the same questions are asked a dozen times in different ways to trick you into revealing what you really want to do as opposed to what you think your relatives or friends expect you to do, which is often a complete fabrication by you anyway. This exercise will trick you into seeing reality.

Part 1

Get two pads of paper secured at the top, ideally without lines and of different colors. Designate the pad with the color that makes you angry as the "Bad" pad. Designate the other pad as the "Good" pad. Get a felt-tip pen that makes wider lines when you press harder regardless of the orientation of the pen in your hand. Get a windup cooking timer with a loud click-click-click as it winds-down to an annoying alarm. Exercise it a few times.

Guarantee yourself fifteen minutes of absolutely uninterrupted time. Unplug the phones. Do whatever it takes to be free of interruptions.

Sit comfortably at a table with the pads next to each other. Write "Left" on the pad on the left of you.

Set the timer for fifteen minutes. The amount of time is unimportant. Encouraging you to write spontaneously is important. Hearing the timer click its countdown will rush you into being spontaneous.

Start the timer and start writing topic titles about your person of interest (Him): appearance, behaviors, things said, things not said, things done, things not done -- everything you hate and love about him on the appropriate pad in no particular order. Just write as thoughts and emotions arise.

Write only enough to make you remember two days later why you wrote it. Let the pen express your emotion. Write large, and leave lots of space between lines. You have more than enough pages to capture everything. Fly through them. The moment the timer alarms, stop writing and stash the pads somewhere safe. Do NOT look at them.

To avoid biasing your work on the first part of this three-part exercise, do NOT examine the instructions for the subsequent parts until you filled the pads for fifteen minutes.