Tag Archives: Conflict

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Challenger / Protector / Boss

What do I want to work on? Conflicts. I don’t care about them at work. There are some unreasonable consumers that I have for stakeholders, so I just disengage. I guess that is normal for who I am via the Enneagram because when I get stressed out I withdraw and think about my own things which are often pessimistic. The approach reads like a turtle. In the shell, head buried, stay in there, and then when you come out have a strategy. That’s gross. It is the natural stress point though with becoming an investigator when you’re under stress and are a Challenger.

One time in one of my buildings we were all stuck at work late at night because we are public servants and sometimes little makes sense and is a rule or simply bureaucratic. We were reading the Enneagram stuff and when it got to parts about an unhealthy 8, it basically described razing the area and everyone in the path to the ground whilst self-destructing. Hahahahaha.

The photographer said that I don’t seem like an 8, and that’s because I feel most comfortable living in the Giver and Helper, which is the heart of the 8. Like me, the climber is also an 8. I noticed that she only uses one noun to describe it: Protector. The photographer is a 3 and the term Achiever resonates with her. She told me that she is working on not having to accomplish daily.

I need to work on conflict. I am wondering if taking a walk would help the turtle. At that first twinge of disappointment / disagreement just say, “This situation seems to be going in circles. I’m going to take a walk, and come back in an hour. I value you and don’t want to say anything that is solely in anger.” I need to operate from a place of empathy when I come back and acknowledge any harm that I have caused.

Do you fight with lovers who you don’t live with and with whom you make concrete plans and only concentrate on those? I don’t think that you do. We had plans to climb the artificial wall at the Rec Center and those had to halt because we had a late meeting and celebration which ensued after the meeting was over. I didn’t trip out. And she didn’t trip out when I couldn’t find my car that night. She also had to cancel when she got rebound symptoms on 11/11 when we had plans. I didn’t trip out. I texted her that if she’d like we should go to a play, symphony or ballet sometime because I didn’t know how my hair looked straightened since I stop dyeing it, and we should do so and get dressed up together. She thought about it for three-weeks and then asked and we did it! No fight. No conflict. Not that we’re lovers… Yet.

I haven’t spent enough time with the photographer to test my evolving theory. I hope that she can make Tuesday work, because I had to flake out on indoor climbing and dinner plans with my old work husband and his real wife. Now, he’s got to reschedule those. I just have to watch the weather for winter summits. Those can be really impossible in windy conditions.

When the photographer and I got back to the trailhead where I parked on Sunday, I’d asked her if I could take her to lunch and she said that she had a 4 o’clock and that made me really conscious of the time. I think that I got back to her car at 3, so she made it. She said that she would not have any plans after our plans for the next get together. Again, no conflict. I still need to work on my skills with them though.

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Seasonal Anger

I process so slowly. It takes me forever to understand 1) impact and 2) what has truly gone on. I had met my ex-wife through a friend. Saying that I was obsessed with her by looking at her profile is more accurate, actually.

I spent about 18-months being stoned. I had a ton of issues turning 30, so I told a friend that I needed to get high. He said, “You won’t get high the first time that you smoke.” So, I told him that I was starting tonight–at 29, and I did. I got high with my Dad at my 30th birthday party, and it was the first time that I got stoned; although, I’d smoked probably a dozen times. Then, I didn’t do it much any longer.

When I was about 34, I was high for 18-months after I got home from work, and my son with his Dad. Then I had a terrible incident at a conference and didn’t smoke again. In this incident, I took one hit too many and had to crawl into one of the bathtubs. When the dominoes would hit the table in the front of the condo where we were staying, I felt like they were hitting me. I was awful. I don’t smoke or use. It’s legal now, as are some psychedelics. At times, I drink a lot of beer, and I do like Red Zin, but I don’t do any drugs–pot because of paranoia, and mushrooms because there is something that triggers my risk averse nature when I ponder that currently. Right place, right time, maybe.

Anyway, I saw a picture of my ex-wife while I was stoned. While high, I was with my friend whose sister with whom I’d gone to high school. We would open up Facebook and take turns logging in. The game is “Gay or Straight?” You play it stoned. She scrolled through my ex-wife’s profile.

“Straight.”

“Nope.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Her? This picture? Nice, hot. Are you fucking with me?”

“I am not.”

“When do I meet her?”

“You don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has stayed where we went to college. She has a whole community. She won’t ever leave the Northwest.”

“When does she visit?”

“Rarely. It’s been years. Honestly, no one hears from her much. We were high school best friends and college roommates.”

“I don’t care. When she does visit, I’ll meet her. We’ll date.”

*sigh / eye rolls / puff*

2012 – 37-years-old

She’s laying on a couch in a sun dress and gets up to meet me at her other best friend’s house. She had moved home five-months earlier. She smiles, sits up, walks toward me and shakes my hand. Beautiful: red hair, subtle make-up (it’s afternoon) and gray-blue eyes. I leave after an hour having gotten kicked out before ensuring that my friend will be able to get a ride back to her apartment because I drove.

We maintain an awkward friendship. She has a girlfriend. She always has a girlfriend. We eat some meals together, play cards, hang out with her girlfriend, and other times her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. She eats quiche at my house; she plays with my son. I hug hello and goodbye and keep my abdomen away from hers for a friendly hug, but I still embrace her tightly. Sometimes, I blush and other times my heart races a little, but with a girl like her, you don’t do anything weird. They break up and she dates, and I start dating the artist.

Right before I meet the artist, I go to my ex-mother-in-law’s house and have dinner there, and my ex-wife is crying because she is getting back with a woman who is polyamorous, in love with her ex, and likes to go to clubs to pick up multiple women, and gets upset that my ex-wife isn’t down for sex with women that they pick up and don’t know. She is crying and crying. I eat my salad, give her a hug, say goodbye to her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. The next weekend, I go to a wedding in a khaki skort, tank top that is at least embroidered, and black sandals with a heel. My friend says, “Why are you dressed casual?” This incredibly attractive brown haired woman with hazel eyes is kinda leering around my friend and I and she says, “Introduce me.” I hear it. My friend does. Later in the night, I hear my friend (she’s from Brooklyn) say “Don’t you think that I would have told you that I started dating a woman?!?!?!?” So, the artist pulls me out to dance and dances with me and on me. She can’t lead though, so it’s pretty awkward. She and I date for a couple of months, but don’t have sex. She is imbalanced and has pretty significant mental illness; although, she is gorgeous. She painted two pictures for me for my 39th birthday and they hang in my bathroom. Now, she lives in the mountains and is a mayor.

I start emailing with my ex-wife. We make plans over the course of a week and half through email. We were making dinner in her apartment that she called the treehouse. It had a separate entrance and was a large loft type of residence attached to a large house west of our city. We cook and we make out for two-hours. I go home soaring with emotion and arousal. I don’t want to have sex with her. I want to date her.

She has other plans. She wants to come down in two-days and do just what I think is too soon. I buckle. It was really good. She moves in with me three-months after that. We marry 7-months later. We never learn to resolve conflict. We knew each other ten-years, we were together for nine, and married for eight. I am pissed.

I’m angry about all the time that she would tell me that I get remote and blame me for absolutely everything in terms of our conflict. I talked to my best friend on Friday night and she said, “You worked and worked and worked on that–tirelessly. I think that you did absolutely everything that you could.” Even if that’s not true, I don’t miss all the imbalance. Move in with your Mom, move in with your sister, buy another residence, adopt more pets. Have 17 different jobs over the course of 10-years. Talk about conflicts at work over and over and over, freeze out your sister, fly home suddenly after “not feeling supported by” your Mom.

This June, I loved it when she finally moved out for good and we had a real fight. Not one in which I get quiet–I’m terrified by my temper–but one in which I told her how bizarre it was that she brought a man into our house (She has her own residence, but has a tenant.) and watched movies with him in the spare bedroom. “He didn’t touch your things.” “What? It’s my house!” “It’s mine too!” She never contributed to this mortgage, and has had her own since October of 2020; however, she made us refi together in 2014 which reduced the interest rate on this house and took 2-years off the mortgage. My ex-wife is really good with money and has good math and business sense. She could not see how disrespectful it was to have a date where my son and I sleep, and that I pay for, instead of going to coffee, a movie or a park with a man you met on the Internet. Talk about not seeing your part! That gelled it for me. I’ll never speak to her again. And, I am angry. Probably hurt too, and wonder if she ever truly loved me or if she was just doing what she knew her mother wanted her to, and liked the first couple years of really hot sex.

  1. I like a little bit of danger
  2. I like women who are more social than I am
  3. I want to have consistency
  4. I want to make a plan, and stick to that plan
  5. I want contact with a purpose
  6. In conflict, I want to take a break, come back and be accountable for things that I can change
  7. I want to grow
  8. I want to see what it’s like to be in love with at least two people concurrently