Category: Words To Live By

Being selfish and self-centered makes it impossible to make compromises in any relationship. I believe that’s why for the longest time I was so unsuccessful with anyone I’d attempt to date or have a long-term relationship with.

I’ve been in my current relationship now for about 17 months. During all those months there is one thing I’ve done differently that I believe has continued to help in my ability to stay out of self and work towards compromises on just about everything; I ask God each day to be at the center of my relationship with my partner.

Asking God for this has helped me to understand many things in this relationship from a much healthier perspective. One of which is the realization that both people have their own opinions on things such as where to go out to dinner, what movie to see, where to go on vacation, what plants to buy for the gardens, what paint colors to choose, etc. In a thriving connection, all of those decisions take compromises especially when both parties have different desires.

In most of my failed relationships in the past, I didn’t do compromises well at all. That’s only because I really didn’t care about the needs of the people I was with and instead, only thought of my own wants. Because of this, I always made convincing arguments when those mutual decisions needed to be made that always slanted everything towards my own needs. In being this way, I ended up at the restaurants I liked. I went the movies I wanted to go to. I travelled to the destinations for trips that I had the desire to visit. And so on and so forth. But guess what, I also always ended up in many arguments and eventually, always single.

What I didn’t realize until I asked for God’s help, was that while a partner may go along for the ride and do all the things that I want to do for awhile, deep down they will become resentful the more it continues to happen because they will feel their voice and opinion doesn’t matter. Until I became willing to ask God to be at the center of my relationship, I never grasped this lesson and repeated the same behaviors time after time. The only result was one failed attempt at a relationship after another.

Just the other day, I got to see the progress within myself on how far I’ve come from those old behaviors when I went to Lowe’s with my partner. We were looking for a carpet to put down in the master bedroom that’s being redone and we were also needing to get a new weed whacker due to his former one kicking the bucket recently. For something like this in my past, there’s no question that it would have ended up in a big argument in the store where others would have been pointing and whispering at the antics they were seeing. But thankfully, with the work God has been doing in my life, my partner and I were in and out of the store in a short period of time with mutual agreements on both things we needed to get.

The truth is that I think of my partner’s needs first now more times than not and this is making any compromises I need to make with him much easier. I can only give credit to God for that and the healing being done within me. It has led me to moving farther and farther away from being that selfish and self-centered person I once was throughout my entire life.

I encourage anyone who may be reading this that is having trouble in their own relationship, to consider the possibility that maybe one or the both of you are thinking only of your own needs when it comes to decisions being made. There are two people in every relationship and each have opinions and voices that matter. Ask God to be at the center of your relationship and in doing so, you’ll probably find yourself making much better compromises when it comes to decisions and noticing you’re arguing a lot less.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A long time ago I joined a men’s organization called The ManKind Project (MKP) when I went through a weekend long retreat. I previously chronicled this experience in an earlier blog posting but felt another entry was noteworthy given a situation that occurred the other night in my MKP I-Group.

First off, I want to explain what an I-Group is, but that involves going back to the beginning of my journey with MKP. If I were to sum up why anyone comes to MKP, I would say it is to find healing from any number of serious tragedies and traumas that repeatedly block men from living their life fully. One of the greatest things I learned to love about this organization is how it showed me the fallacy of the belief that grown men shouldn’t cry. Frequently, one of the biggest problems in a man’s life is the acceptance that crying makes one weak. But what many men don’t realize is that not crying can often prevent one from fully healing from any of life’s calamities. For me, it was my father’s suicide that brought me to MKP. I had remained blocked for three years with little to no tears after my father’s passing. The processes that MKP utilized during the retreat helped me to fully release and heal from that trial in my life.

Most men who go through MKP’s initial retreat, nicknamed The New Warrior Training, find the healing they seek when they stick it out to the end of the weekend. But a man’s involvement with MKP doesn’t have to end there and for some, like myself, it didn’t. The next level of commitment is to an I-Group. Using many of the principles learned during the retreat, I-Groups continue to help men do their work to get through the many ups and downs that life can bring. To put it more simply, one single I-Group meeting is like taking eight sessions of talk therapy that one might have with a counselor and actually doing something about what’s being talked about.

I spent too many years in therapy doing nothing more than talking, talking, and more talking and never really making it anywhere but more frustrated. The I-Groups I’ve belonged to helped me over the years to move beyond the many blockages I had within me such as from being molested, from my mother’s alcoholism and control issues, to the bad relationships I kept landing in, and so much more. While therapy didn’t cut it to work through many of those issues, being in I-Groups did.

At the end of last year, after having taken a break from participation in MKP for several years, I rejoined an I-Group that met on the first and third Thursday each month. One of the main things an I-Group is supposed to do is build a safe and strong container that allows each man to work through their issues. Unfortunately, after eight months, I learned this group was unable to do create that. Creating a safe container involves many things. It involves each man actually showing up to have a group. It involves being honest and in integrity to each other in that group. And it involves being there for each other when a man asks for help.

More often than not, this I-Group was never able to reach a quorum to hold a meeting and on the occasions when there was, some men took the time to verbally attack other men instead of working on the reasons within themselves for their anger. This organization taught me a very valuable principle that all anger is only a mirror to look back at oneself and find the broken pieces within to heal. I-Groups are meant to help with this, but with this group lacking in honesty and integrity, amongst other things, it rarely happened. And for the times that I really needed the support of the men in this I-group to get me through some dark times, none was usually found.

Being a member of that group, or any group for that matter, is no different than being in a relationship. It takes work from all people within it to keep it growing, and when at least one or more are not working on themselves, it begins to fall apart. For the longest time in my life, I stayed in those types of relationships hoping they would get better, but they rarely did. The only thing that did change was my state of misery, which only soared higher the longer I was in them. But through a closer connection with God today, I have learned to love myself a lot more. Because of that, I don’t subject myself anymore to remaining in bad relationships hence the reason why I ended my connection to this I-Group the other night.

Sometimes I wonder why so many of us continue to stay in those toxic connections, groups, or relationships way beyond their expiration date. It only brings about greater misery, anger, and frustration when we do it. Today, I don’t have to do this anymore and thankfully, I’m not. So while I may have closed the door to one dysfunctional relationship when I left that I-group, I opened myself up to the many others that may be out there. Hopefully I will be led to one that is strong and healthy, especially because that’s what I am trying to become.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Last weekend I was in a vehicle with two of my friends who were using their Global Positioning System (GPS) to guide them to a destination we were all heading to. Early on in this drive, I noticed they were referring to their Tom Tom GPS as “Dumb Dumb” when it started to take them in a different direction as compared to what they thought would be a better and faster route. As they veered off their GPS’s course and took some of the directions into their own hands, not only did we hit some traffic, but we also didn’t see the things on the drive that we might have seen if we have stayed on the path that was given to us. At some point during that drive, this got me to thinking on how I feel that God is a lot like our GPS.

The main point of all GPS systems from the beginning of their creation was always to remove the need to use our own sense of direction and maps usage. Over time, people have found that in using any of them, that the route it sends them on may not always be the most direct or fastest but it indeed always does get them to where they need to go. Unfortunately, people are impatient and many feel today that they don’t like the routes begin given to them by their GPS and instead are taking matters into their own hands by altering some or all of the course it gives them. In doing so, things can happen in that new route that were unforeseen such as bridges or roads that are closed, traffic snarls, missing something beautiful, and more. This is no different to what happens with many of us when we pursue any of our own destinations in life on a route different than the one God may have us on.

Throughout our lives there are many different types of destinations we head to such as schools we might attend, careers we seek, relationships we pursue, houses we buy, children we birth, etc. Imagine if God was meant to be our GPS for all of them and prayer was meant to be the mechanism for plugging in any of those desired destinations. Wouldn’t the route that is given to us always get us to where we need to go, just like our car’s GPS, even if it doesn’t seem like the best or the fastest way? Often many of us will use our free will because of this and like my friends did with that drive the other day, they followed their own path. As a result, traffic was hit and sights were missed because of their choice. This same principle holds true in our impatience in life with any of our destinations. When we use our free will and plot some or all of the way to those destinations, we experience things like leaving those colleges before graduating, jumping from one job to the next or being fired from one of them, relationships end up breaking up, divorces happen, houses go to short sale or bankruptcy, children become unwanted, and worse. What if most, if not all, of those things only occurred because we plotted our own directions to those destinations when we felt the path God gave us wasn’t the best one for us to get there?

For three very long years now, and then some, I have been enduring high levels of chronic pain and have spent much time writing about them in here. At times, I have tried to take a path different than what God has been telling me, and ended up getting more sick along the way. This only elongated the whole process of healing, almost like it feels when one gets stuck in traffic for hours and hours..

For my friends, getting stuck in traffic or missing some sights along the way may not have been that big of a deal when they ventured off their GPS’s course. But on a bigger scale in life, I’ve learned that venturing off any of the routes that God’s GPS provides, only ends up with more pain and despair. I truly don’t need any more of that so I’ve decided that while the route God’s GPS has plotted me to fully heal may not seem the best or the fastest in my brain, it is inevitable that I will get there…I just have to remain patient.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson