I had issues that I had given up hope on get resolved during the Advanced Course.

We were doing an exercise where we examined an aspect of our life where things just weren’t working out. We cast our memory back to early instances where we noticed that we felt like something was wrong and we had changed our behavior to compensate. My area had to do with how I behave when I feel that I have failed/disappointed/hurt a woman in some way. Somehow this has become the worst thing in the world and I feel horrible if I let a woman down.

At first, my earliest memory had to do with the time I decided to make my mom happy by taking out the garbage unasked. She had always wanted me to do more chores around the house, so I thought this would be a nice thing to do. As it turns out, for whatever reason, she had left the garden hose in the bottom of the garbage can and it got taken away when the garbage truck came. She scolded me, telling me “That was a perfectly good garden hose you threw out!” So I learned that, despite my good intentions, I was never good enough for a woman to approve of me and I carried that with me in life.

But then, an earlier memory opened up like a forgotten door. There are whole years of my childhood memories that are just blank and dark. This was a memory before that time.

I was however old I was when I was in kindergarten (I have a problem with tracking  time). I had been put in a small, dark shed next to one of the neighbor’s houses. I was sitting on a wooden chair, maybe tied to it. There was someone else in a chair next to me. A boy, I think. There were two older girls there, one of which was my neighbor. I remember being told to stay quiet as they peeked out the crack in the door. My neighbor’s face moved in towards mine, filling my vision and then everything went dark. I have no idea what happened. I just remember having a crush on her and thinking it was important to impress her and do what she wanted. From that point on, I was attracted to girls and women who had a facial resemblance to her. If they were older than me, that was even better. There is nothing wrong with this attraction. It simply is. But that experience was ground zero for my behavior towards all women in my life since then.

I had speculated for a long time about what may have generated certain relationship issues and challenges in my life. I say “challenges” to protect my family, but some of you know what I mean. This insight tied so many issues together, it was indeed a missing piece of the puzzle and I cannot express the kind of freedom I feel having faced it.