Painting Life

I had a dream last night that I was painting an ocean scene. The message in the dream was that insight is like taking out a paint brush and starting with a blank canvas, painting a picture of your life. Often people just look at themselves or the scenery around them, but rarely look deeper into what they are seeing. When you are painting or drawing, you observe every detail more carefully. You see colors, characteristics, shadows and contours that you rarely see when you glance quickly at something or someone. When you look deeper, you see so much more. When you begin looking more closely at yourself, you start seeing your life in a different light. The other observation is that the more you are willing to look at yourself, the more clearly you can see others. Several clients reminded me of this dynamic recently. As they have grown, their insight into their spouses and family members has become clearer than ever. One client asked, "How is that I could have lived with someone for so many years and knew that there were some concerns, yet somehow denied how bad it really was." That is easy to answer. It is like taking the canvas of your painting and smudging the colors together. You begin to blur the scene you had painted. Some people just paint distorted scenes altogether portraying a fantasy rather than painting reality. Everyone denies reality at some time in their lives. When you are ready to break the denial, you see the scenery with more clarity and your painting becomes more detailed. People have their own unique perspectives, thus they live in different realities. Take 20 people and sit them on a beach with a canvas and paints. Each and every painting might resemble each other, yet would be completely different. Their focus and details would vary significantly. That is absolutely true in a relationship. Two people can have absolutely opposing perspectives on the same relationship. Here is an example of opposing views in a relationship. A client said that his wife is so angry that he wants a divorce and just wants to blame him and retaliate. The angry spouse lives in her own reality. In her painting, she only sees herself. She does not see how her behavior affected the marriage and does not want to see how tense the relationship had been for years. In her painting, the details reflected a distorted reality, no matter how many times reality tried to tell her otherwise. So many people live in this type of denial. Also, if people have narcissistic wounds from childhood, they really deny how their behavior affects their relationships in any way. They often become vengeful, spreading lies about the spouse who dares to leave the relationship. They have to justify their rage....so they blame. The big problem is when the angry person begins recruiting anybody who will listen which only reinforces their distorted reality. They show their painting around town, telling everyone how the title wave came out of the blue and how the "other" who caused the wave is awful. This is why the more insightful you can be about your feelings and your own behavior, the more vivid and clear your painting can become. In fact, the beauty of life is that we can all start again with a blank canvas and recreate our lives and thus our paintings. Life is an ever changing experience and with a stroke of the brush and a keen eye for seeing things in life we never noticed before, we can paint our lives in a new direction. "A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience"...(Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.).