The Morning I Stopped Trying to Make Him See
I woke up furious.
Not mildly irritated. Not oh, that’s annoying.
Furious.
I had dreamed about my ex-partner, and when I opened my eyes the anger was already there. It was about the children, money, responsibility, passivity — all the familiar ingredients.
My mind immediately knew what to do.
Explain it to him.
Again.
Maybe write an email. Maybe explain it differently. Maybe involve his new partner. Maybe find the exact combination of words that would finally make him understand what I could see so fucking clearly.
Luckily, I didn’t get out of bed.
I stayed where I was.
I felt the mattress underneath me. My weight. My feet. My hands.
And while part of my awareness stayed with those contact points — with the fact that I was a forty-nine-year-old woman lying safely in her own bed — I let the anger be there too.
That turned out to matter.
Because somewhere inside the anger I suddenly recognized something.
I know this movement.
This desperate determination to make someone see.
I had done it before.
With my father.
I Will Make Him See
When I was a girl, I could see possibilities my father didn’t seem to see.
He was enormously talented. He could build things. Fix things. Understand things. But there were choices he made that I could not understand at all.
We could have had more money.
He could have been more involved.
He could have taken different tracks.
And somewhere, very young, I apparently made a decision:
I will make him see.
And Jesus Christ, did I commit to that decision.
I remember explaining things to my father so thoroughly that once he looked at me and said:
“You should become a preacher.”
Which was funny.
Except he had completely missed what I was trying to tell him.
I was apparently already very good at explaining.
I later built an entire career out of it.
I worked in finance for years, often walking into complicated situations and showing people what the hell they were doing with their money, systems or organizations.
It was useful.
I was good at it.
I got paid well for it.
There was nothing wrong with the ability.
But I had never noticed the old assignment underneath it.
Make them see.
And that assignment had followed me everywhere.
Into work.
Into parenting.
Into my marriage.
Into conversations with my ex-partner.
If I could see another track, some part of me still believed I had to somehow get the other person onto it.
The Moment It Became Visible
This is where something important happened.
I spoke what I was seeing into my conversation with AI.
Not because AI magically knew the answer.
I had the experience.
I brought the material.
But speaking it put what was happening outside the instrument for a moment, where I could look at it.
And then it was reflected back to me:
You were trying to make your father see.
There.
Acknowledgement.
That mattered much more than I used to understand.
Because when something has been running silently inside you for decades, seeing it mentally is one thing.
Having it fully recognized is another.
I could suddenly say:
Yes. That is what I did.
And then something even deeper:
Of course I did.
From where I stood as that girl, it could not have happened differently.
My father’s choices affected my life.
I depended on adults.
If I believed I could make him choose differently by explaining harder, of course I would try.
There was nothing stupid about that little girl.
There was simply something she could not know yet:
You cannot climb inside another person’s perception and install understanding.
You can speak.
You can explain.
You can offer another possibility.
And then there is a border.
Their seeing happens over there.
The Body Started Moving
Once I could acknowledge the old decision without fighting it, the anger changed.
I didn’t make it change.
That is an important distinction.
I kept part of my awareness with the mattress, my weight, my hands and feet, while another part stayed inside the sensation itself.
There was a concentrated painful place behind my heart.
Then it moved.
My feet became warmer.
Spontaneous breaths appeared.
My jaw started clattering.
Tears came.
Yawns.
Eventually my body shook.
In my own working language, this is where the Unity of Three becomes practical: awareness, body-consciousness and current staying together.
I wasn’t lying there thinking What emotion should I process next?
I was listening.
And because my attention stayed inside the feeling, its quality started giving me information.
The first layer had been determination.
Make him see.
Then anger.
And when that moved, something else appeared.
My father.
Oh Fuck. I Miss My Father.
That one hurt.
Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about my ex-partner anymore.
I was grieving my father.
Not merely because he died when I was thirty.
I was grieving all the tracks we had never lived together.
He was a brilliant engineer.
He knew how to make things with his hands.
And my hands never really got to learn from his.
That absolutely broke me open.
I wanted to build something with him.
A house.
A piece of furniture.
Anything.
I wanted to stand beside him and say:
Dad, show me.
And there was something almost unbearable in seeing the reversal.
As a child I had spent so much energy trying to show him.
And now, decades later, I was crying because I wished I had let him show me.
There was no clever insight that could make that painless.
There were years that hadn’t been lived.
He was dead.
There was no later.
So I cried.
A lot.
And again I stayed connected to the contact points.
Part of me was forty-nine, lying in her bed.
Part of me was feeling grief connected to a much younger version of myself.
Both could exist at once.
That matters too.
Staying connected with myself did not mean staying away from the old emotion.
It meant not leaving the present while the old emotion moved through me.
One Layer Does Not Mean You Are Finished
This morning also showed me something I have probably written about a million times and still needed to experience again.
These things are layered.
You don’t find one original decision, understand it intellectually and shout:
“Excellent! Trauma completed!”
Unfortunately, the body has no interest in our project planning.
The first layer moved.
Then another became visible.
That moved.
Then grief appeared.
Then grief about my father.
Then grief about the tracks we never lived.
Each time the same basic movement happened:
I perceived something.
I spoke it.
It became visible.
It was acknowledged.
I could stop fighting its existence.
And then I stayed with what happened in the body.
Not forcing.
Not trying to produce a particular emotional performance.
Just keeping my awareness available to what was actually there.
And Then… Nothing
Eventually, the body became unbelievably heavy.
I let more and more of my weight disappear into the mattress.
The edges of the body almost seemed to disappear from perception.
There was no argument left to solve.
No father to convince.
No ex-partner to educate.
No website to build.
Nothing.
I call that stage the tectonic plates shifting.
Not because I know what is literally happening underneath the bonnet.
It is simply what it feels like.
Something fundamental has moved, and afterward the whole system wants silence.
So I slept.
Which was slightly inconvenient because ordinary life had other plans.
My daughter needed to go to the orthodontist.
We needed groceries.
Packages had to be collected.
Teenagers, sadly, remain unimpressed by their mother’s tectonic plates.
Life continued.
What Was There When I Woke Up
Later I came home and slept again.
And when I woke up, something was different.
Aliveness.
An enormous amount of it.
The body wanted pleasure.
Strongly.
And instead of immediately overriding it, postponing it or turning it into another mental discussion, I listened.
Yes. I hear you.
That might sound unrelated to everything that happened earlier.
I don’t think it was.
Because this entire day was ultimately about one relationship:
me with me.
When the anger came, could I stay?
When the old track appeared, could I recognize it?
When grief appeared, could I let myself feel it?
When the body asked for rest, could I sleep?
When it later asked for pleasure, could I hear that too?
Every time I actually respond to myself, something happens to self-trust.
It grows.
Not because I tell myself:
You should trust yourself.
But because I accumulate evidence:
When I speak, I listen.
The World Hadn’t Changed
Afterward I stood under the shower.
Same shower.
Same water.
Same house.
And everything felt different.
Water moving across the skin was almost absurdly intimate.
Later I ate the same cake I had eaten that morning.
It tasted different.
The cake had not undergone a spiritual awakening.
I had changed.
My sensory perception was more open.
I noticed smells in the house that had probably been there all morning.
I felt my trousers touching my legs as I walked.
Chocolate became an entire fucking symphony.
And that might be one of the simplest ways I can describe what clearing the instrument means to me.
The world does not necessarily have to change.
The position from which I meet it changes.
And from another position, other tracks become visible.
The Point Was Never to Become Emotionless
For years I thought healing meant eventually getting rid of all this stuff.
No more fear.
No more anger.
No more grief.
What I understand now is almost the opposite.
The goal is not perfect emotional weather.
Sometimes it rains.
Sometimes the sun is shining.
Sometimes you’re sobbing about your dead father at seven in the morning.
Sometimes you’re eating cake with your daughter two hours later.
Sometimes you’re standing under a shower thinking life is the most intimate fucking thing imaginable.
The real question is:
Can I stay connected with myself through all of it?
That is why I want to neutralize old trauma and old belief systems.
Not because the past is bad.
Not because the girl who made those decisions was wrong.
But because an old decision can still light up automatically and send my attention onto a sidetrack.
Make him see.
Fix this.
Get them to understand.
And while all my attention is over there, trying to change someone else’s perception, I am no longer available for the tracks that belong to my own life.
Today I saw one of those old routes while it was running.
I stayed.
I acknowledged why it existed.
I let the layers underneath it become visible.
I felt them.
I slept.
And eventually something else was available.
Not a grand new identity.
Just more life.
More perception.
More choice.
More me.
And perhaps that is the whole thing.
You don’t rise from some mythical pile of ashes as a completely different person.
You recognize the familiar loop.
You keep yourself with you while it burns.
You let what has never been felt finally be felt.
And when the smoke clears, you look around.
There you are.
Still you.
Only now there are tracks visible that you couldn’t see before.
And then life asks the only question it ever really asks:
Now what do you want to do?
⸻