Who Owns My Brain?

Speaking of blocks, looks like I ran into a doozy. It's been over a month since I last wrote. Life and its exigencies does make slaves of us all, does it not?

Lost a contract I've been working on for awhile, quite suddently. Supposidly, the client ran out of money. I'm pretty sure that was an excuse for some underlying issue he didn't see fit to discuss and attempt to resolve. Be that as it may, the turn of events left me in the financial lurch. Big time! The diversity of my reactions left me feeling as if my brain was split into distinct parts with an overriding consciousness making the observation.

I don't mean right brain/ left brain (brain research), ego, id, superego (Freud), or even parent, adult, child (Transactional Analysis) but something else--something I don't recall learning about in the many books, articles, conversations I've enjoyed over the course of my adult life and career as a human developer/educator.

One part of my brain (or mind, as it were) cried loudy, "oh, no, a huge loss of income, what you gonna do now?" while another was agonizing "what did I screw up this time?" A third wanted to objectively analyze and understand what had happened, a fourth felt angry and wanted to blame my client for being a jerk, and another--the overriding one said, "thank goodness that's over. What a relief!"

I wonder if it's usual to have such varied reactions to a situation--ones we simply don't pay sufficient attention to that we end up aware only of the reaction that's most "comfortable" (not necessarily pleasant or constructive, but usual). It becomes dominant and we simply don't notice the others.

For my part, I was suprised that my predominant response was relief to be free of a situation that was providing income but not a lot else. Usually, it's the "what have I screwed up now?" response that takes precedence. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, mine to survive (which was threatened by the abrupt end of income) should have been paramount. But it wasn't. It was there, for sure, but wasn't dominant.

Sadly for you, the reader, I don't have an answer to what this means. I'm just making the observation--one I think extremely interesting and bears more thought and, hopefully, a conclusion that can prove useful for all of us. If you've got an ideas, let me know. If I do, I'll let you know.