I have been a part of Scholars for just under two weeks. I was feeling mildly annoyed with my mate this morning when I sat down to do a thought download, and unsurprisingly, page after page of negative thoughts and judgments spilled forth. Sometimes it’s easy for me to generate good/warm/loving thoughts, but this morning I felt it very difficult to access any of them. Here are a couple of my unintentional models:
C: Two years after the basement flood and $16,000 repair and renovation, the space is still largely just displaced clutter. I see lots of judgment there. Here’s another try:
C: We renovated our basement in 2019.
T: I think the basement should have been cleared of clutter by now.
F: Anger
A: Blame my spouse for not being able to decide what to keep and discard clearly unnecessary items; be mad that I am not at liberty to just clear the room myself; act out and be passive-aggressive to my mate; endure the clutter.
R: Room stays a mess; marital dissatisfaction and tension.
Another unintentional model:
C: Our kids are 17 and 19 and I work from home (she has been a stay-at-home mom for the last 20 years).
T: She now has time and liberty in her day to earn money to help support our household.
F: Resentment
A: Act like a breadwinner martyr; overwork; be passive-aggressive to my mate
R: Financial strain; marital dissatisfaction and tension.
I want to build an intentional model, with this as the R Line: R: I have a warm, loving connection to my mate. So, this is an intentional model I built working backwards from R:
C: My spouse and I have been together for 30 years
T: It is great that we’ve been able to weather all of the ups and downs of those years and still be committed to one another.
F: Loving
A: Look for ways to connect: re-find intimacy, travel, find activities we both enjoy to do together
R: I have a warm, loving connection to my mate.
This model is also an accurate reflection of how I see and feel about the relationship, but the intensity of the feeling is so much stronger in the unintentional models, making the distance between my unintentional models and my intentional model feel vast. So now what?
