stop living in the pastThis is an open letter to every single woman out there, and I want you to listen very carefully.

I’m about to reveal a female trait that drives men nuts. I’m not saying it’s only a female trait; there are men that do it as well.  But women are definitely more guilty of it.

I was talking to a friend of mind the other day, and he was telling me about an ex who can’t stop bringing up something he said about three years ago. It was something that hurt her a lot, and I understand how much pain she was in when he said it, but it was three years ago and he’s never repeated it since.

Unfortunately, women have this habit of going back to a story created from something that was said three years before. Let me tell you something, I don’t remember what I said three years ago, or even one year ago. Whatever I say is in the moment. If I was held accountable for everything I’d ever said in my life then I would never grow ever.

Think about this. If everything I ever said since the day I was born I stuck by, then I wouldn’t be the person I am now, and neither would you. Let me tell you I probably said some crazy stuff when I was when I was toddler, when I was five and when I was ten. You can’t hold me accountable for something I said years ago, because since then I’ve learned and grown.

Then why when it comes to an argument, do you consistently have to go back to that day?

“Remember that day years ago when you said this, remember when you said that?”

When I was eight years old, I remember I had this really big crush on Diane. I asked her out and I did it wrong. I ended up calling her mean girl. Imagine if I kept that mean girl thing going, and called every other girl who rejected me mean girl because of what Diane did.  If I kept harboring that hate, that disdain, that pain that I suffered with Diane, then that’s what my life would be like.

I know that’s a random story, but you think about it… we say things in the moment, we have triggers that make us say things we shouldn’t.  I’m a firm “sweep it under the table and make everything sound great” person. I know my story really well.

In fact, when I was three and a half years old my brother passed away.  He was nine months old. At that time, my mother taught me one of the habits I’ve been trying to get rid of my entire life.

It’s called, “making it seem like everything’s okay.”

No matter what turmoil I go through, I always tell myself “it’s going to be fine, life’s going to be great when we don’t talk about things that hurt.”  When my brother passed away when I was a little kid, nobody talked about it.  I was three and a half, I looked at my mom and asked, “Did Mark die?”

“Yeah he did.” She said. And we never talked about it again.

During a time of crisis, I can always come up with a good game plan, because I’ve been trained to believe everything will be OK. That’s what I learned from my parents. “Yeah, your brother just died. Don’t worry about it. We’re going to be fine as a family. We’re just missing someone but we’re not going to explain what happened.”

Whenever anything went wrong in my life, I’d just tell everyone I was fine. It was only once I started doing some deeper work on myself I realize how I was burying things. By burying things, I wasn’t growing as a person.

Some men find it hard to show their emotions. It’s not because we don’t care. It’s because sometimes we don’t know how to handle it, and that’s fine as long as we do the necessary work to correct it. Judge the man standing in front of you now, not the man who said something years ago. If he’s doing lots of work on himself, reading self-help groups, and trying to grow, you’ll see him growing in leaps and bounds. You have to forgive him for what he said in one moment.

Allow that moment to be whatever it was. If you see a different man in front of you, then embrace that different man in front of you as hard as it might be because you’re stuck in your story from the past. You need to start looking at that man you see now, because what he’s trying to do is to come out. He’s trying to come out of the cave that he’s probably been in his entire life. He’s trying to escape the man cave he’s been stuck in.

A man cave that no longer serves him, and he’s trying to be seen, and he’s choosing you to be seen by. He wants you to see who he is. He wants you to see the beauty of who the new him is, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Every time you go back into story mode about something that he said years ago or that he did years ago, you’re not really seeing the person he is now. You’re mired so deep into it. You’re not in the present. It’s okay; we all do it, but women do it a lot more than men.

I’m all about expansion, and getting you to create a new story in the present. If you have a new man standing in front of you, it may look like the old man, but he certainly doesn’t act like it.