Together on a cool summer day about thirty-something years into our marriage, we are strolling through a mountain town and come upon a gift shop. Allow me to share one of my favorite stories of mismatched noble intentions, which my husband and I have come to call The Moosehook Epiphany. But it takes practice, even for a therapist who writes and teaches about this every day.
![aha moment tangled aha moment tangled](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/47/6e/36/476e36e220dc38d8eb602b7b098fdae0.jpg)
Knowing to look for the aha middle, realizing that there are legitimate reasons behind every difference we encounter, we find it faster, begin to anticipate each other’s stories, tend to them, work around them. Situations have a habit of making us lose touch with this crucial information-temporarily. Even if you’ve figured out many, many times before that the person you’re upset with is not a villain, you may not retain this knowledge in the heat of an argument. In the aha middle we realize that someone else’s why is as legitimate and noble as our own why. The question is, how do we get to that greater closeness faster, with the least bit of time being miserable together? The space where these clashes and disconnects are best resolved is in what I call the “aha middle”: where you say “aha!” realizing that there are no bad guys, no villains trying to hurt or reject or annoy you, recognizing anew that it’s just two people’s noblest intentions getting tangled up and painfully misconstrued until they can get sorted out. Despite their negative connotation, misunderstandings paradoxically can offer one of the greatest opportunities for closeness between two people (you knew I was going to say that, being a therapist and all). We know this, and yet we can be spectacularly caught off guard by them over and over again. Leave your comments below as you share what you learned.Disagreements are inevitable in any relationship. I encourage you to look at your aha moments and remember your pivotal moments. I could no longer view my world in the old way. When I look back at those pivotal moments I can see that my perception changed in the blink of an eye. Click here for a description of Life Energies or here for an audio. It informed the work that I do today and is the lens through which I see the world. I thought, “There’s nothing wrong with me and there’s a whole group of people who see things just the way I do!” It was liberating to see that not only was I ok, but to realize that other people reacted the way they did because of their Life Energies. During an exercise I joined a group who all had Aliveness Life Energy and had a life altering aha.
![aha moment tangled aha moment tangled](https://66.media.tumblr.com/6f21ef68d40b5c821ecf2bd4dd1f3899/tumblr_pn7fafiewn1tmzt1ro1_1280.jpg)
Here are three examples from my life, each very different from the other. You see how you hold your perspective differently than before.
![aha moment tangled aha moment tangled](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/7c/0b/94/7c0b9402c4c912925c1a28ed6282e3a0.jpg)
One benefit of re-visiting an aha moment is that it helps you remember context. You can’t see things the way you used to because your perspective has changed. I think of aha moments as those times when something occurs and in an instant, everything changes.