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July
The Rest of the Story
In order to fully understand this article, first go
read the one last month entitled, "Digging
My Own Hole".
About two days after the incident described in
the previous article, I noticed that when I woke up
in the morning, my back would begin to spasm. After
I walked about a bit, it went away. The next
morning the same thing happened again, only it
persisted a little longer. By the middle of the
week, I could barely bend forward without an
excruciating stabbing pain. So I got myself to my
chiropractor.
He's different from any chiropractor I have ever
been to. He won’t touch me before first
“body testing” me. I was a mess. Two of
my vertebrae in my neck were not right, and I had a
problem in my lower back and a disk out of place.
He worked on me for over a half hour before he was
finished. Then he told me that I had sustained an
injury that had a large component of anger to
it.
I immediately thought back to how angry I had
become at my wife for criticizing my driving. I
knew for certain that I had not done anything
physical that could account for so much damage.
He told me that anger could absolutely account
for the problems that I was having and explained
how the rush of chemicals and electrical impulses
during anger could produce such a clear and painful
situation.
I slowly began to realize that, on top of
damaging my relationship with my wife, my anger was
hurting me. Not only was I suffering pain, I was
also wasting time and spending a lot of money to
put myself back together again. This was a classic
“lose/lose” situation.
Then he reminded me that there are only two
emotions. These two emotions are how you look at
the world. One is fear and the other is love. Fear
creates anger, and love creates compassion.
We use anger to make the fear go away. In my
case, my fear was that in allowing my wife to
“get away” with putting me
“down”, I would lose my position as the
man in the relationship. I got angry and yelled to
keep that from happening. What I lost, temporarily,
was the relationship itself.
When I come from love, I am able to show
compassion for her, and what is creating her
reactions. What I get is a more loving
relationship, a pain-free life and more money to
spend on fun things. A classic win/win
situation.
©2008, Irv Engel
* * *
One's life has value so long as one attributes
values to the life of others, by means of love,
friendship, indignation and compassion., - Simone
de Beauvoir
Irv Engel is a
successful salesman, builder, husband, father,
grandfather and friend. He loves to sing, dance and
is currently taking an art class to learn water
color painting. He is the creator and coordinator
of the Relationship Training Course for Men. This
book, The
Real Deal: A Guide to Achieving Successful and Real
Relationships,
is the result of hundreds of hours spent writing
down the lessons learned in a lifetime of marriage,
divorce, re-marriage and raising four kids. He
hosts free telephone conference coaching sessions
in the evening or on weekends.The conference is a
good way to find out about relationship coaching
and to ask any personal questions around your own
relationships without risk to your money or your
privacy. E-mail
him for phone number, access
code and schedule. Irv and Monica live in Lake
Forest, Calif. They have eleven grandchildren. They
have celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding
anniversary. www.committedrelationships.com
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