CSI: Relationship Breakdown - The 'What Worked?' Weekly - 24-11-19

Key Themes, this week:

• Forensic analysis of what happens when two people who love each other step out of love
• The 'Transformation Initiation' begins, all welcome
• Group dynamics - can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em

Visualising myself behind the 'crime scene' tape, I'm forensically piecing together how my wife Louisa, and I, fell out - again.

Here's how it went as I recall:

1. She simply reported a feeling
2. I took responsibility for her feeling
3. I worked it up into a failing. (A feeling became a failing!)
4. I was hurt by what now looked like a slur on all my efforts to make her life better
5. I withdrew and iced over
6. The iceberg occasionally rolled over to reveal its raging and dangerous underbelly
7. I refused her efforts to reach out to me
8. Eventually saw this 'program/pattern' playing out. Thawed.

It may not have been as simple as this. And certainly not as clinically cool and smooth. But you get the gist, the emotional juice. Emerging from the red fog, I'm heartened that it's a quicker process.

But I'm also sick of it. 

The BIG and horrible conclusion of the week is: If a woman is upset in my vicinity, it's either my fault or there's something I should be doing to sort it out for her.

Add to that that nothing I ever do will be good enough, and there you have a recipe for much unhappiness.

I'm working on it. And thankfully, as my friend and healer associate - Scott Clover - reminded me this week, 55% of healing is in acknowledging the issue.

I'm thankful for the creation and existence of my new framework - The 'Transformation Initiation', which was launched on Friday and is best represented here as a few memes for your visual self to consume:

Yes. the Transformation Initiation is up and running and it's my unfolding passion to share it with others as a focal point for healing, and at the same time my own focal point for research, sharing and accountability.

Elsewhere, in my group work, things made the transition, after a couple of weeks of politeness and settling, into storming and chaos.

Actually that's a good moment to share two group frameworks (from where these adjectives come) as a useful reminder for anyone looking for the support of a group, whilst understanding how its dynamics might play out:

Scott Peck's Four Stages of Community Building - "a community goes through four distinct and predictable phases":

1. Pseudocommunity. The essential dynamic of pseudocommunity is conflict avoidance
2. Chaos. Once individual differences surface, the group almost immediately moves into chaos
3. Emptiness
4. True community

Bruce Tuckman's 'forming–storming–norming–performing' model of group development, first proposed in 1965: "these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, face up to challenges, tackle problems, find solutions, plan work, and deliver results"

The work continues! Join me here in the Facebook group, commit to the Transformation Initiation (as it appears some already are) and let's look after each other on this powerful and compelling journey...

www.thepoweroffoww.com