Back from Clearlake and a visit with my Dad.

I was hoping for a nice nourishing visit. Got AFGO – Another F^*&^ Growth Opportunity. Painful but probably very useful.

I really enjoyed meeting and seeing his people again. He has employees/co-workers/people that call him Uncle Carl that come every year for what he has to teach them. It was a great experiment. Mostly the parts that didn’t turn out well were the parts I made the wrong assumptions about and ended up causing my own problems. It led to my dad (and his wife) and I detailing out where communication issues are and how we can address them in the future. This is a Very Good Thing (TM).

Left my meds behind and had to come home or go through the withdrawal issues and that is to be avoided as much as humanly possible. And it is nice to be home where I can take care of myself.

It was interesting to see people that have worked with the enneagram for the last 3-10 years and they are nowhere near what I do with it. They have it in their lives but they don’t dig with it and use it as a tool of change. They are still grasping at what the different types actually are like. But we can all speak enneagram-speak to each other. I am sad to not get to spend more time with them hashing things out.

I am feeling rather skin-less at this time. Anyone with a different opinion, different viewpoint can scrape me raw. It is so tiring trying to understand others and explain yourself without setting off their issues. I am so tired of running into other people’s defenses. I think the enneagram training I have has made it easier for me to see when people are being defensive and most people don’t recognize it. They don’t see it when they run into it and don’t see it when they do it themselves. I like my understanding but I feel like it is a little like Polyamory: Very rewarding and a lot of hard work and not everyone can handle it. It is a lot of hard work but it is so worth it when everything works.

Sometimes I am ashamed? embarrassed? annoyed? not sure what the word is but it also includes I am not happy with my family. I didn’t think I was all that liberal but it appears that I come from very conservative roots. And not the type of conservative I appreciate. My dad has his mind/guts made up and is not interested in seeing both sides. It is the sort of thing where I look at Fox News and shake my head wondering how people can actually believe these sorts of things, they are so illogical. My dad (and his wife) made some statements about Muslims and the basis of the Islam faith and supported it strongly with standard statements. Me, I don’t have pre-loaded facts about most things. I argue ideas and balance. They are very much not balanced. So I researched their “facts” and asked if they would like to know the context these facts came in. While my dad and I usually end up agreeing by the time we work our ways all the way through something, this time he felt he had his gut instinct and is uninterested in studying what he feels is not a good thing. This is how he ended up voting against giving gays “special rights” in Colorado in the 90s. My brother has a tendency to have similar political views. My mom has a foot on each side of the line. Compared to my family, I am a radical liberal even though I am on the conservative side of things in the Bay Area.

My dad doesn’t like the intellectuals that are running the government right now. As an intellectual, I have such a hard time with people that make up their minds based on what they are exposed to and don’t want the other half of the story. I also own up that I have my own issues that I have blinders on as well. The only saving grace I have on that one is that I own up to not having the other side of the story and don’t try to convince others that I am in the right. Argggg.

Religion, politics, my head hurts. And I don’t feel it should but this is how people work.