The Chameleon Effect

Since I was a kid, I never really quite fit in. Back then I wanted to be cool but just didn’t fit the bill of what others labeled as that. For years I sat alone in crowded cafeterias getting picked on. That was until I became a chameleon.

Chameleons are a type of lizard that can change their colors to blend in with their habit around them. It’s usually done as a way of protecting themselves from predators. I have often identified with this type of creature because of how I learned to change my own colors to hide from the predators I’ve endured throughout my life. In my grammar school years, those predators were the bullies that picked on me day in and day out. In college, they were some of my fraternity brothers who liked to make jokes on my behalf. And as an adult, it was most of the people I got into relationships with. In all of those periods of my life, I found ways to adapt who I was, what I believed in, what I looked like, how I talked, and more, just to fit in so I wouldn’t be preyed upon by any of those predators. But all for what price? I lost sight of myself and who I really was inside.

Changing my colors to avoid all those predators throughout my life included doing many things that I look back on today with shock that I even allowed myself to go there. While it started simply with me changing my clothing styles and hairdo back in my teenage years, it progressed to heavily drinking and sampling various illegal drugs, and then later it involved giving myself away sexually to people I really didn’t want to be with. I even went so far as to deny God was ever going to help me heal at one point in the chameleon phases of my life.

Being this chameleon may have helped me to avoid many confrontations from those predators in life but it also led me to not liking myself very much. With God’s help today, I am trying to not change my colors anymore to fit in with those around me. Unfortunately, that’s led me right back to how it was when I was that young kid sitting alone in that cafeteria getting picked on.

I don’t know why I’ve always been such an easy target for other’s people jokes but the one thing I can say is that at least I’m not being a chameleon anymore to avoid them. It has allowed me to truly learn to like myself a lot more. Even better, the few friends in my life today embrace me for me and appreciate my individuality without having to pick on me. I think that’s a whole lot better than having crowds of people around me who like me because I’m fitting what their image of cool is.

I encourage everyone to stay away from living in The Chameleon Effect. It will only lead you away from being the special and unique person that God brought you here to be. In the long run, while you may not have as many friends, you will definitely like yourself a whole lot more and so will the few people that remain by your side.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Making Compromises In A Relationship

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

When It’s Time To Break That Relationship Off…

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