December 30, 2014 ~ Always Learning About Myself: Temperament is Not Our "Fault"

I literally just went from laughing out loud to having a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes in about 2 seconds flat. But I get tears in my eyes every time that I learn something new about myself. And that's been happening a lot lately.

I was laughing as I was driving home from Sprouts, thinking about something my daughter did yesterday. It was the end of the day, Frozen was on, and I was catching up on things on my phone (ie checking facebook). She was carrying my heavy glass water bottle around for no good reason then looked at me and said, "Put phone down! Fill it up!" All 20 months of her put those two sentences together and demanded that I jump to action. I laughed at the memory and thought, "Yup, that's my girl. She sure is a lot like me."

The thoughts that followed went so quickly that I couldn't possibly put them into the exact words nor express the speed at which they went through my mind but it went something like this.

Well, that's just her temperament. She was born that way. 

But wait, why do I get so angry at myself for having that same temperament 

but I don't get angry with either of my kids for their temperament?

And that's when I got the lump in my throat and the tears in my eyes. You see, they were almost tears of joy. Because I figured out something pretty major about the negative self talk that goes on in my head. I do believe that temperament is something that we're born with and something that we can't change. My temperament is similar to my daughter's (or hers is like mine) in that we are both very intense and persistent. Maybe that's putting it nicely. We are both demanding.

I've often looked down on myself and wished that I could be less of both of those things. It probably goes back to the first marriage counselor that MSTBE and I saw who seemed to think that if I could be more "soft" that our marriage would be more successful. Gosh, I'd like to get deeper into that experience but I think I'll have to save that for another post because it would take quite a while to write about.

So maybe now that I've had this realization that my temperament is not my "fault," which I sincerely believe, I will be a little bit easier on myself. Check out this link on temperament and see what you think. Are there things that you do which are related to your temperament that you allow yourself to feel badly about? How about we all take a vow to remind ourselves about temperament whenever we start thinking negatively about ourselves?