Making Conscious Decisions

One of the foundation principles I studied in my iPEC coaching program states “You cannot make a mistake."  When it came up in one of the modules, I could come up with a list of 10 mistakes I had made in the last week - how is it possible that they don’t exist??  But our instructor broke it down, and I realized that there truly are no mistakes.  I just made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time.

For a period in my life, I felt kind of lost.  I was in a relationship with someone I loved, but didn’t recognize at the time that the love I had for him was that of a best friend, and only a best friend.  I was also working a job that I liked, but wasn’t passionate about and didn’t feel a sense of fulfillment. (Side note: see the trend here?  Yes, this is exactly how I ended up as an intimacy coach!)

While I was in this relationship and working dispassionately at my job, I no longer felt like I recognized myself.  I had always felt like I had a healthy sex drive, and it seemed weird to me that I didn’t want to have sex with my boyfriend.  And I thought it was okay that I didn’t hate my job since I liked getting up and going to work in the morning, I just felt like the type of work I was doing wasn’t fulfilling to me.  It seemed like all my passion was draining out of me and I didn’t know where to begin on getting it back. 

(In an effort to not let this turn into a short story, or a ‘Nancy Novella’ as a dear friend likes to call it, I’m going to allow this blog to focus on the transition in my personal life and I’ll touch back on the professional life at a later date.) 

As I tend to do, I started with my personal life first.  I figured if I could get that figured out, the professional side would be easy, right?  (Yeah, okay, more on that later…)

I was three years in on a five year relationship, and I found myself in my lady doctor’s office (read: gynecologist) crying and saying I didn’t understand why I didn’t want to have sex with my boyfriend.  Thankfully she is an amazing doctor, and after letting me talk/sob about what was going on, brought up the idea of switching birth control to see if it was something hormonal.  I eagerly jumped at the chance.  Unfortunately, there was no magic cure for this situation.  I still only recognized the lack of passion in the relationship.  We tried spicing things up, and still I felt disinterested.  It was one of the hardest experiences for me at that time in my life, feeling like I was with a good person who supported me, why didn’t that translate over into anything more?  And I knew he was getting frustrated, he would try so hard to figure out what I needed in order to make our situation better, which of course, would lead me to sometimes just feel worse for not being able to fix it myself.  Two more years would go by before I would really be able to accept the fact that my then-boyfriend was a great guy, he just wasn’t the right guy for me. 

It was incredibly difficult for me to realize that I loved my best friend, but wasn’t in love with my best friend.  When I finally hit the point where I realized I had to move on from the relationship, it was one of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had to have.  My ex and I dated for five years, and have been friends for over four years on top of that (9 years everybody).  Our love now is that best friend love, that bear and bug love, that will always be there but on a very different level from that true partnership love.   

Looking back, I’m able to see that I wasn’t connected to myself and I wasn’t making the right decisions for me.  I saw the signs earlier on in the relationship, but wanted to believe that everything would just get better.  Now in my life, I’m at a different place where I feel like I know myself better than I ever have before.  The decisions I make are conscious ones, ones where I trust my intuition and allow myself to sit with emotions in order to better understand the feelings behind them.  The passion in my personal life is thriving, and I recognize my what my needs are in order to not lose touch with myself again.

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