When I began this blog experiment, I hoped for comments and responses to my posts, but I didn’t think that I would actually get any. The responses that I received to my post titled When Your Conscience Gets in the Way of No-Strings Sex really made me think and continue to work through my emotional baggage.

Now I want to be upfront with the fact that I don’t have a degree in psychology, social work or any related discipline that qualifies me to give advice. My comments are purely based on my life experiences and what I’ve learned through my own therapy.  So here comes the disclaimer …

For this installment of “The Y Factor” I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to feedback provided by a couple of readers. My intentions in responding to the feedback aren’t to rebut or “correct” anyone, but to internalize the comments and incorporate them into my own healing process.

In the blog titled “I’ll Hurt You Before You Hurt Me,” I wrote about my family’s unhealthy behavior of deflecting our internal pain into nasty verbal barbs towards each other. A reader named “Weiss” reflected on this saying, “It seems like you naturally mellowed. The fighting may have helped you along.” I think it’s entirely possible that I may have started to “mellow” with age (although I’m only 35!), but I don’t think that I would have begun the mellowing process if I hadn’t been jolted into it by circumstances that I brought on myself (offending a boss one too many times with my nasty attitude and getting fired). I suppose that the mellowing began when I started putting all of the pieces together in therapy. The concept that the “fighting may have helped (me) along” is hard for me to wrap my mind around. The fighting actually worked to drive us more apart before I became conscious of why I was doing it.