Slight Bump

[linviolin]

Hi everybody,

The last time I posted I was relating the problem of my father's temper and how it made everyone around him, my mother especially, sad and moody. His tongue can be quite harsh.

However thanks to some great advice I received online, particularly spirit4711 who told me to "be the change that you want to see", I coped with it well. I found Steve's model of subjective reality interesting as well. So now when I am lectured by my father, I practice tolerance and patience instead of losing my temper as well. Subjective reality challenges me to look at my father as a different part of me that is not in agreement with another part. As a result my realtionship with him has improved, and I've encouraged my mother to do the same.

However there is a slight bump. I don't like digging at old wounds, but last year my father was involved with another woman. This left quite a deep emotional scar on my mom. Earlier this year he was big about it and confessed everything to my mom, and things have been uphill since.

My mother still cannot bring herself to totally let go of the case, I think, because every month she tracks the phone bills as she suspects the woman is communicating with my father via text messaging. The woman's number came up quite a lot of times, which drove my mom to paranoia and edginess. (She asked my sister to try to hack my dad's email account to check his messages.)

However most of the time she is happier than before, making jokes with my father like they used to. She is much better now, but I cannot help but feel that the little niggling bit in her subconscious mind is creating this situation for her.

As for me, I used to get really uptight and angry about the situation, but I'm working on the forgiveness part. I think I've forgiven my dad and the woman 90%, and now a feel a strange sort of calm. I don't view it as something that I can't change; rather its a problem that appeared in order for me to learn something from it. I think we all learnt to value each other more from this whole sorry affair, as when the affair happened we as a family simply didn't appreciate each other enough.

On the whole I think it's actually put some things in perspective for me. My relationship with my father is getting better; I'm finding new threads of connection every few times that I talk to him. In fact just two hours ago we had a nice time chatting and laughing about Star Trek. (I had no idea he was such a huge Trekkie.) We were discussing our mutual love for Mr.Spock and how nice it would be to wear skin-tight Trekkie suits and attend conventions in the U.S if we didn't live in Asia. I felt very much connected, even though if we were only talking about a TV series franchise. (Coincidentally I became intrigued by Star Trek after reading about it on Personal Development for Smart People - Steve Pavlina)

So what do you think is actually happening to my mother? I'd like to be able to help her release some of her negative feelings. Or is this something that she has to do and discover for herself?

Sorry, long post. Had to get that off my chest.