Last night I wandered about the house dutifully setting back all the clocks. As we know; spring forward, fall back. We may all have had that unfortunate experience of showing up late for Sunday church or the luncheon with friends; not to mention the kick off of your favorite football game, because we didn’t make this adjustment. Then we might say, “If I had only known it was ‘that’ night, I would have changed the clocks before I went to bed.” Sometimes we miss this opportunity for change because we forgot to pay attention that a change was necessary. At others times it is because we are in denial that change needs to happen.
The classes I teach are all focused on “change”. The Rebuilding class focus is to review what wasn’t working in the relationship that contributed to its eventual breakdown. In that case both denial about the need for change or a refusal to change may have contributed to the end of the relationship.
Some of what we review in class goes back as far as what happened in a person’s family of origin or what was overlooked in the dating process itself. In the Self-esteem and Relationship class the focus is on how personal internalized messages received in the past interfere with building relationships based on equal power and competency in the present. And, the focus in the Dating Dementia class is identifying the personal unsuccessful themes of past relationships and the relationship challenges those themes can cause so that changes can be made before moving forward again.
Somewhere within the ten weeks of any of my classes I will hear someone say, “If only I had known this a long time ago I could have avoided so much pain in my life. I could have changed things” The truth is we can’t take the information we learned today to go back and fix the past. We can only grieve that past, learn from it and then make the necessary changes needed to be more successful in the future. As I say in each class, “We can only do the best we can with the information we had at the time” because when it comes to change, you can’t change something until you see it clearly enough to understand it correctly and know that it is a problem. We can’t turn the clock back and we have yet to invent the time machine that allows us to go back and change the path were were on at the time. But, we all can learn from our choices and take different paths in the future.
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