Category: Doing Something New

This category covers things that relate to trying something different. It is a sort of catch-all category that contains things are more verb-like than noun-like. These things like be new movements, new ways to think, or a specific suggestion that you try something that you may never have tried before. It’s a big category because humans are action oriented beings that are kinesthetic learner who benefit the most from interacting with their immediate environment.

Your Brain Talks To Their Brain

Let’s take a moment to consider what is actually happening during a conversation; we’ll take a few passes at it striping away the layers of narrative to reveal something wonderful.

Two people are talking, exchanging ideas and information.

The ideas and information are created, stored and processed by the brain. The ears and mouth are the tools the brain uses to transmit and receive information.

The sound waves are manufactured by the vocal chords based on the nerve impulses that represent the information the brain is trying to transmit. The sound waves are received and shake the ear drum of the other creating nerve impulses that are channeled into the brain for processing.

The brain is the center of all information processing, the body is a tool that the brain uses to give-out and take in information.

During a conversation, two brains are interfacing to trade information. Any other distinction we add serves only to complicate what our understanding of what is happening.

So what?

This simplifies things. The fact that you are talking to the other persons brain, and that it is actually your brain talking to it, opens-up the ability to alter the way the other persons brain processes the information. The brain does not do the same thing with all the information that comes in. First off, different parts of the brain do different things with information. These parts are all interconnected so the combination of possible routes through the brain is limitless. Next, not all parts of the brain are active all of the time – the ramifications of this are that certain types of information / information processing services may not be available all of the time. This can be due to lack of fuel, chemical inhibition, or the conscious by-passing of processes.

It also complicates things. After all the narrative stuff has been stripped away we’re left with two of the most powerful information and pattern matching machines interfacing to exchange ideas. But how often does one really consider this fact during a conversation? Rarely. For most of us, there are two people, separate from each other and their environment. They are talking, exchanging stories, facts and feelings. They likely believe that what they are talking about is important and of significance in their lives. The impact of these narrative layers is powerful and it can bias the way the information is received, twisting the way one perceives facts. Imagine, for example, the impact a volatile relationship can have on the stories one tells their brain about what the other person is doing.

What does this mean?

Well, if you have the self-awareness to realize that there’s a lot going on in your brain and that you are only aware of a small portion of what it’s doing, you’ll see that there is a big difference between knowing this to be a fact and not knowing that it is a possibility. Those that know gain insight and control over their thinking simply because they accept that the brain is a machine and that consciousness and spontaneous thought are just consequences to it being a brain. Emotions are other consequences and they reflect a match of a pattern that is significant for some reason. Pattern matching isn’t perfect, and miss pairings are very simple given the amount of sensory input flowing into the brain while something is happening. Realizing that you are your brain is liberating. We can learn new patterns / pairings, we can stop thoughts at will and direct our mind onto the things we want, we can accept that some of our automatic behaviors are based on poor information collected years ago and we can replace them by doing the things that work for us.

Those that know that they are their brain are at a distinct advantage when they engage other people because they know how the other person can approach the world – as self-aware or not. This distinction is very important when communicating effectively with others. If a person doesn’t have much self-awareness, you are talking to their mind, their understanding of the world, all the assumptions and lessons they hold. With a self aware person, you are talking to someone who realizes that their mind can add or remove the different levels of narrative (those mentioned above when describing what is happening during a conversation) so you are able to engage the each other in the most effective way – your brain talking to their brain.

Pressing Reset

Sometimes life, like your computer, can just lock-up and stop almost dead in its tracks. I’ve asked some computer guys why this happens and while they didn’t say for sure they said it’s usually because some process gets stuck in a loop and all of the resources are being feed into it. I think that’s kind of what happens with life sometimes; you get caught in a thought process and over time it begins to sap away the energy needed to do anything else. The brain is a computer so of course this will happen.

With a computer it’s easy to fix, you just reach forward and push the reset button. The computer reboots. There’s a good chance things will be fine when the computer starts-up again, but you know you’ve lost any unsaved recent data. Pressing reset is rarely the end of your computer or its operating system.

Pressing reset on life is a lot like that. You are going to lose a lot of recent information and what remains after the reboot is often just a little bit more than was there after the last reboot. The body and the brain are fine, running more smoothly for having stopped and restarted. Some recent stuff is sticky and will be there when you walk back after pressing reset on life. A lot of things won’t be and these are likely the things that didn’t need to be there in the first place. Life is simpler and you may be slightly wiser if you don’t ever think about it again.

But the wisdom lies in realizing that the things that were not working for you were just symptom of a problem that likely still resides within you. You need to be fair with yourself here and admit that the brain does a ton of stuff that we know nothing about; if we did know something about it we might actually be able to change our behavior when we need to.

The reason for the life lock-up is the result of something inside of you that manifested itself as unworkable situations, behaviors, relationships or people in your life. None of those is good or bad, they simply are things. The issue is in the interaction between them and you; given that these things do not causes problems with everyone. What are YOU doing with those things that is creating or recreating the loop that drains your energy and causes the lock-up?

“Have you pressed “F8″ after you reboot?” was one of the questions the computer guy asked me. My “no, why?” was greeted with “it’s a little safer. You don’t get all of the functionality but it’s a lot easier to figure-out what went wrong.”

Being Honest About Time

Seeing life slip away can be beautiful. It has a big impact on the willingness for honesty and there’s a dramatic shift towards being authentic. Why pretend anymore? There’s a big difference between having 6 and believing you have 500 and knowing you have 6. When you know you have 6 you’ll enjoy them fully and you’ll not let anyone take any from you.

And I suppose that we all think we have 500 so we float along enjoying some, sharing others, and allowing some to be stolen from us.

Cancer is greedy. It takes more than it’s fair share of the 500. It takes more than what we let others steal. But it gives something in return those who steal do not, it illuminates the end of the timeline. The flash of the terminal diagnosis shines brightly on what you have left so following the path to the end is very easy. You clear your schedule of the stuff that steals any of the time that remains.

You call in your troops and they shield you from the nonsense. The family pick to block obnoxious one on ones, musical chairs to maintain the wall of one between the cancer and the cancer, it’s a play book being written with each visit from someone who never mattered to us and always seemed to cost us energy.

It’s a sad sort of dream team simply because it is needed.

I’ve been left wondering after a well played game why I’m in this situation and what other things have I been letting into my life that share the same root cause.

I really want to be liked by other people. At least I used to want this. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost anymore; not to assume it ever was. I’ve normalized this habit though. I’m more aware of the interactions with people that leave me feeling unsettled than I am about the ones that leave me feeling nothing. In the last 3 years I’ve started to tread away from these types of interactions in favor of ones that leave me feeling good but I still have a tough time telling people to get away from me or just ending “friendships” that never worked.

The new awareness that death comes sooner and that time becomes more valuable as you near the end is forcing the issue about the pointlessness of wanting to be liked by other people. Almost everyone I know now will not be there when I die. The people I am choosing to generate mental friction about are not even aware of it and none of them will be there in the end. Wanting to be liked isn’t working for me anymore so I’m giving up on that habit. It hasn’t been authentic for a long time.

The One Thing About This Year

Sharyl asked me what was the most useful thing I took out of the last year and I said “that I don’t know what my motivations are most of the time and most people have no idea why they do the things they do.” I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

It has been liberating because for most of my life I accepted that the reason why I thought I did something was the actual reason why I was doing it. In retrospect, this is ridiculous. The decision to accept that my first thoughts about a motive were accurate failed to consider that my initial thoughts about a situation tend to be emotional or reactive before they are logical and pragmatic.

My tendency to accept the first thing that popped into my mind effectively ended the search right as the more logical brain processes come on-line and the most effective problem solving takes place. Since these processes never tackled the question “why did I do this?” my initial assumption never got challenged or balanced with an alternatives. The brain assumed everything was correct and then devoted the rational thought processes to solving or engaging an erroneous assumption. This is why two people can end-up arguing passionately about something they don’t care about. It’s also why a number of people become extremely abusive during conversations or arguments.

For example, the immediate reaction to someone saying “you are asking me to do something that you didn’t do yesterday or the day before. In fact you never do what you are telling me I have to do” tends to be defensive; and sometimes aggressive.

The word “you” triggers something akin to being pointed at. Most people feel singled out when they hear it used in what they interpret as a negative situation. This feeling is automatic and unconscious, and it is chemical – it’s an emotional release in response to a match between the current situation and something stored in long term memory. The chemical make-up of the emotional release will be shaped by the earliest experiences and there is a diminishing marginal impact with further experiences – what happens later in life will have less and less impact on the automatic emotional response to similarly matched patterns REGARDLESS of increasing levels of maturity and brain development. Once the match has occurred, logical thinking will be impaired for as long as the emotion is sustained. NOTE: If ones first experiences of feeling singled out in a negative way were resolved effectively and in a way that allowed the experience to be balanced with facts, they won’t interpret “you” the same way as someone who did suffer abuse from their caregivers in response to being singled out for a negative thing.

So the statement already has them acting emotionally (illogically) and they then need to stew on being called a hypocrite (while it wasn’t said, this is what people hear). This has them become defensive and start looking for reasons why it is fair to ask you to do something that they are have not yet been willing to do.

There’s a lot of bull shit in all of that and it all has to do with trying to stop being the center of attention for negative reasons – in this case that goal is achieved when the other person is wrong in what they are saying. This is exactly WHY seemingly decent people will become raging assholes when confronted with facts about their behavior.

The next thought that springs to mind after the urge to defend (IF it is allowed to come forward) will usually be very logical. It tends to be something like “hey, I just felt the emotions float over and out of me!” then “what do I really want from this person right now and what is the request I am actually making of them?” Then maybe “yeah, I haven’t done that ever. Maybe I shouldn’t expect someone else to do it for me” or “I don’t know what I’m talking about here” and hopefully the words “I’m sorry, it isn’t fair of me to expect you to do that when I haven’t. Ultimately I’m hoping we can agree on the following….” or something like that. It’s a very different conversation.

That’s the big thing I took out of this year. My initial reaction will be defensive, as initial reactions should be. But by not taking action, I’m actual able to figure-out why I’m doing stuff because I’m not trying to dig myself out of an imaginary hole or pummel on someone to get them to say that I wasn’t wrong.

Visit to the Juravinski Cancer Centre – For Glioblastoma Multiforme (Brain Cancer)

Today was the first visit to the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton for my dad, with my mom, brother and me. This was the first time I had visited a cancer center and the last few weeks are the first time in almost 30 years that I have actually given cancer much of a thought.

I like the center. It’s clean and it was warm and I had the thought that it would be a comfortable temperature in the summer. There is a hospital like feel to the place and there’s no mistaking that you are in a health care facility. Missing though, thankful, was the chaotic semi-shell-shocked movements and anguish you get from the masses in emerge. At a cancer center everyone is there for a reason and everyone inside the building knows it. It’s all about the cancer and the people it’s killing.

The way this place worked today was simple. It’s a clinic and there are a team of doctors and health care providers who are specialized in cancer treatment. Our team had a neurosurgeon and a neurologist because of my dad’s diagnosis of Glioblastoma multiforme or GBM (brain cancer) – I would imagine that they’d have a specific type of surgeon and specialist for different types of cancer – along with an oncologist, 2 radiation doctors and a nurse.

The nurse introduced herself, chatted and collected a detailed health history, current medication, information about how my dad ended up in the hospital, symptoms, and she asked for any imagining that had been performed. She asked if we had any questions and left with the CT and MRI results.

The oncologist was next, he came holding, among other things, a picture of one of my dad’s MRI images. He chatted about about the key stuff – the last 6 weeks and ultimately what the neurosurgeon has said at the hospital 2 weeks ago – GBM, a brain tumor that cannot be removed. This doctor agreed. He showed my dad the MRI and pointed to a thing in the center that doesn’t look like anything else on the page.

He preformed a complete neurological exam and explained the next hour. The team of doctors would meet and review all of the information and then would be available to discuss the opinions on treatment and the prognosis. “Come back to the same room in about 30 minutes.”

He was nice, like the nurse. It sounds silly to say “nice” but that’s what they were. Try walking into a room with a time bomb, hand it off to a family, and still have them think you were nice. It was completely professional and if it hadn’t been for why we were there, I think we would have talked about how nice the whole thing was while we waited to hear what could be done about it.

Some food at the cafeteria / lounge that had a piano but no singer. The family chats back and forth about stuff. I’m looking around and starting to feel strange because as I look at each group of people I’m trying to guess which one of them has cancer. If you haven’t played this game, you don’t really win when you guess correctly. There’s a table of 3 people, one is dying, the two that aren’t are going to be grieving their asses off soon. You can’t guess who is who without looking at their faces and when you do, you see a 21 year old son with his mom and grandmother, mom’s in a wheelchair because she has cancer. I felt rage deep inside that made me want to wreck something for what’s about to happen to this poor kid. I suddenly wonder what type of cancer killed the cafeteria singer and as I do, my eyes meet Des’ and he’s just seen the kids future too. I glace away towards my dad unwittingly winning another round of the stupid game my brain is playing.

We head back to the room and the doctor returns. He presents the treatment options. The tumor cannot be removed so my dad will never be cured. If he wants to fight it, they’ll remove as much of the tumor mass as they can, give a course of radiation and chemo, some recovery time and then more radiation and chemo. He’s free to do nothing about it, and that isn’t an unreasonable choice. The nurse and doctor spoke candidly about GBM and what’s in store when you battle it. Your life lengthens by months. But they have to open your skull and cut pieces of tumor out while avoiding causing serious brain injury. The goal of this is to create enough space for the swelling caused by the radiation and chemo to fill without causing cognitive impairments.

The fight is brain surgery, then radiation and chemicals to kill cells. Give the body some time to recover from all of the trauma and go at it again.

It’s reasonable to say no thank you because it can be a rough ride, with no guarantee of doing much. And there are no halfway measure. You’re 100% into the fight or you are not. It’s becomes a philosophical issue more than a problem to be solved by science because with cancer, the science isn’t strong enough to offer guarantees. You throw the kitchen sink into the battle or you don’t. Either way, you are now dying from something.

The team of doctors came in and answered all of our questions. They removed the shame from making any choice while offering 100% of their focus to fill their piece of the treatment puzzle. Again, it was really professional and the conversation was honest and caring. The time-lines are estimates, the tumor is serious, the treatment is not a cure and it can be rough. Consider your options and we’ll talk next week. After the thank yous and the goodbyes we head home and they go to meet their next round potential soldiers in the fight against cancer; which is good because these are the type of people you would fight for and they are also the type of people you would not feel bad saying no to. They made it clear that there is only one right choice and that just happens to be the one that my dad will make.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be back to the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton. Right now that’s up to someone else. But if I go back it won’t be with a sense of trepidation or fear because my dad would be in good hands there.

Flat-Lining The Volatile Passion

Des has stopped letting me get away with my legacy habit of making declarations of how other people should act or feel. If you find yourself doing this and then stop, you’ll quickly notice that other person or people stop impacting you very quickly. That’s important because then they weren’t impacting you in the first place.

Des mentioned that the recent evidence suggests that emotions often come before their attributed cause. Intuitively this seems backwards until you consider the impact unconscious thought processes could have on the emotional system. Given our innate need to establish order and create cause and effect understandings of things, we’re going to be very effective at finding a reason for feeling a particular feeling. It just seems like we figured it out, but all we did was throw a label on something that was there already. We might have gotten it correct but we stop searching once we find a justification and simply embrace that as the cause. Chances are we are wrong though. Rarely do we stop to think what other reason we could have for feeling a particular feeling. Try it next time you feel something, there are lots of reasons to feel happy, sad, angry, blissful, etc….

The fundamental attribution error is a powerful thing. When someone cuts me off in traffic I think things about them. If I then get to see what they look like, or if there is something about their car that stands out, that becomes the reason why they did what they did. Crappy old pick-up truck? Drunk hippy. Pretty boy / girl or a BMW, self absorbed jack ass. Soccer mom or mini van, distracted moron who thinks their life and family are better than every one else. Oh wait, I’ve had my turn signal on for the last 5 minutes. Hey, I’ve had a tough day, I’m kind of tired and the radio is too loud. You people need to chill, it’s a small thing, 99.9% of the time I don’t drive around like this. You’re acting like you know something about my character without considering the circumstances surrounding my one small error.

People have a finite amount of will power and with each decision to go without, our chances of caving on the next option increase. Will power is fueled by glucose which means it will become depleted when used and it will not recover unless the blood sugar level is normalized. If you are restricting calories and your blood sugar level drops, it gets tougher and tougher to stay on track because the part of your brain that helps you stay on track is out of fuel. Eat frequently and do not go hungry. It’s already too late once the hunger pains set in.

Sharyl mentioned that while she’ll listen to everything I have to say, the amount of faith she has in it will be inversely related to the amount of shit I talk. This gave me cause to step back and wonder what I’ve been talking crap about. Mostly what other people should do or feel. And I read a lot and form untested theories about things. She’s tested a lot of them and they don’t work. I suppose I can talk some shit so long as I accept hearing that it isn’t accurate and learn something.

Feedback Destroyer – Post Revisited

Post Feedback Destroyer – Mitigating An Automatic Response got a timely spam comment because I would have forgotten something that happened on this week.

I got some feedback after yesterday’s All Terrain class and it is getting a lot easier to hear it and to understand where the person is coming from. It was a new participant to my class who was healthy enough to keep up with the physical aspects of it. Her feedback was that I should have mentioned more about the rpms or pedal speed that the riders should be aiming for. The bikes have a display that shows this information and I do make reference to it through-out class when I want the people to ride on beat because the music is a big component to it. Once it was clear what we were talking about I told her that riding to the beat is actually what I want the class to do, and asked her if mentioning more about the rpm would be helpful? She said it would have. I thanked her and said that I’ll focus more on it moving forward.

By virtue of her saying it, I wasn’t as effective as an instructor as I could have been so the class didn’t work for her as well as it could have. The fact that she was new to my class means that my coaching isn’t clear enough for new people to get the profile the music is creating. That will need to change. But as is the case when you are doing something for someone else, your own opinion about it tends not to matter all that much. When it comes to feedback, embracing the servant mindset will allow you to see the others point of view and make the needed changes quickly.

If you haven’t gotten any useful feedback in a while consider tabling your opinion about it when you receive it and instead use that energy to figure-out how and why they are correct.

3 Year Update – Cycling and Personal Training Certifications

It has been about 3 years since the post CanFitPro – Certification I Now Hold; a post about getting my personal training and indoor cycling certifications. For those who have been waiting around for an update, here it is:

I love personal training. It’s easy for me to get lost in the coaching, the conversation, whole experience of it. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with a lot of knowledgeable people and have had a couple of very significant mentors when it comes to understanding how the body, the brain and the mind work together to create the potential for optimal health. I’m able to find a flow state when I’m training and I find it very rewarding to see and coach to efficiency a movement pattern that isn’t effective. In the same way my clients body, brain and mind work together, mine do as well, to identify and correct / improve the needs of these clients. If I didn’t need money, I would work cheap at a gym and coach movement, health and performance. What I do has value so I won’t give it away, but I don’t particularly like doing it for money either. More accurately, I don’t like needing the money I get from doing it. That part sucks.

If I’m a good trainer, people don’t need to see me for very long – ideally 25% of the year once they have established some self sustainable good habits. My role is to update their programs, monitor form and movement patterns, as well as nutrition, address questions and tackle some of the performance issues. When we do work together, it’s to recondition their intensity and establish a new baseline. It’s easy to forget how hard you can work and it’s even easier to remember again with couple of weeks of one on one training. But that’s it once the proper foundation of knowledge, behavior and attitudes has been established. Being successful means constant selling and I’m tired of selling a service that, to be considered valuable to the customer, needs to be understood and followed 90% of the time by THEM. All I do is create a training experience and try to foster a mental attitude that leads to positive changes in their behavior but the result are 100% the consequences of their actions.

Given what I now know about myself I can see that this doesn’t work for me. I need for success to come from my effort, not my intervention in someone else’s life and the direction of their subsequent efforts. And I can’t go back to doing that now because that would be transferring responsibility of my success onto something that I don’t control. My money needs to come from something entirely outside the fitness field.

I love parts of the group cycling. I teach a 90 minute class on Friday nights and there are times during the week that I dread the thought of it. I do the choreography and music for the class so I get to pick songs that I like. Most of it is club music remixes and I’ve had to learn some sound editing to create profiles or specific length intervals and cut out swearing. That’s fun! Music makes me feel good inside and it can be fun to try and get a jump on the next big hit, playing it out before it ever gets traction on the radio. I don’t dread the work. I’m burning about 1100 calories in 85 minutes, average heart rate of about 83% and a max of 88%. I hold back on really taxing my heart because pushing as hard as I can will leave me ruined for the rest of the night and Saturday. I dread the 10 minutes surrounding the beginning of class because the class doesn’t have a big following; there can be 3 or there can be 15. It’s my class. I created everything about it and it’s the longest one on the schedule at the club. It’s the expression of what I know about cycling, training, coaching and instructing and it can make me feel down right pukey if my mind becomes a rubber ball of “what if no one shows up” type of thoughts.

The truth is that I don’t teach a fitness class, I lead a training session which happens to have some cool tunes and some heavy beat pop music. We don’t really yell or cheer, we don’t really clap, we just work our tails off and go home exhausted. Other than working hard, working them hard, there isn’t much to feel about it. It is very different from the RPM classes I teach because I’m encouraged to have more fun with them and they are about half the length in duration.

These two certification opened my life to a number of fun and important experiences, all of which have been critical at improving my awareness of who I am and what I need in order to be happy. Without them I would still be looking for a lot of things that I have found over the last 3 years!

Physical vs. Narrative Memories

I have a fairly good memory for events and things that happened. It comes in handy for stuff, like remembering programs, exercises, bike routes, etc… I remember these things well because they happened. My body traveled the bike route, I have witnessed people squatting correctly, I thought-up and wrote down the program. At a very simple level, a measurable amount of matter moved through the world allowing for the potential for physical memories to be created. These memories are static, nothing can be done to reverse them because we cannot go back in time. Normal people will not debate them as they are fact.

But I create other memories too, ones that are sort of based on reality, but not entirely. These memories are the result of my narration of what is or what has happened. Given that the voice in my head is there most of the time, it is easy to mistake what it says as fact vs. just being a subjective account of what happened or is happening. When it’s sunny outside and you hear yourself thinking “it’s sunny out” there isn’t an issue. The sensory input matches the narration. You KNOW that it is sunny out because you can see that it is sunny. But when the narration doesn’t match sensory input, you begin to tell a story that moves or keeps you away from reality.

An example, a new couple are watching TV. A fit attractive guy comes on the screen and the female says to her new boy friend “why can’t you look like that?” and laughs. The new boy friend gets angry and calls her a selfish and leaves. The relationship ends. Seemed crazy to hear but it’s really simple. The physical memory is clear, two people watch TV, one says something, the other says something else in anger and they stop making physical memories.

The narrative memories about the event are two completely different stories. The women made a joke, she didn’t consciously intend to make the guy feel anything negative, it was just an observation, possibly. His response was unreasonable. He got angry and there is no place for that in her life so she ended it. Her narrative is understandable and when she repeats it, it can be presented in a way that makes him seem like a complete knob.

His narrative is very different. He’s enjoying the evening with his new girl friend. He’s feeling comfortable and good for the first time in too long. In her he’s found someone who likes to exercise, cooks well, which are things he needs help with because he’s gotten kinda fat since his marriage failed a few years ago. Suddenly on the screen he sees something he wants to be like because he’s feeling like he deserves it. Life is coming together, he’s feeling good, he’s got a great girl friend who believes in him. He’s feeling better than life and out of her mouth he hears her say “I wish you looked like that” followed by a mocking laughter. He got angry, he called her names. He didn’t mean to, but why would she rip him from the happiness and remind him that he’s a failure, lost marriage, lost the house, shaky handle on reality and a fat disgusting piece of garbage? He’s better off with out her, better off without anyone. This shit isn’t worth it anymore.

I get both stories. He heard confirmation of his insecurities in her words and she wasn’t aware enough of his insecurities to NOT to say what she said. Their narrative stories are completely different although their physical memory is basically the same.

Since the narrative memories are not the same for both people, both are not accurate and given that they are fairly different from the physical memories, both need to change a little bit to reconcile these differences. And both SHOULD change to eliminate the dissonance between reality and perception. Experience, knowledge, counseling, time, evolution of thought or enlightenment are the things that will change narrative memories. Anything that provides more information can be applied to narrative memories and change them.

And your narrative memories SHOULD be adjusted repeatedly over time when new information becomes available.

The reprocessing of narrative memories tends to be the result of uncovering the cause of something that did not work, and the impact can be profound, changing an enemy into a friend when you realize their motives were not sinister. In the example above, the guy may realize that his girl friend wasn’t very aware of how sensitive he was and that he needs to fix himself before he gets into another relationship; words should not cause him to respond the way he did. She may realize just WHAT he heard vs. what she said. His response wasn’t appropriate but neither was what he heard. Sensitivity and caring are important in a relationship and when starting one you should find out what things make your new partner feel like crap and avoid saying and doing them.

You cannot change the past, but you can change the story you tell yourself about it. And you should change these narrative memories when you get new information. It’s an important part of putting the past away and learning from life.