Gordon Clay here. I Wish I Knew Now What I Knew Then. You see, once upon a time, long, long ago, men knew how to express their true feelings. And, women did too. That was in an era when parents took time to be with us, as children, to hold us and carry us around on their bodies. When we were upset, we expressed it and our parents understood. When we were hungry, they could tell, and responded. When we were rambunctious, our feelings were put up front over our parents' need for quiet or for adult conversation. Along time ago, we knew how to express these true feelings. And others knew what those feelings meant. We were understood.

As time passed, the needs of the adults took priority. They invented things like cribs and strollers, and we children lost that human contact with our parents when we were very, very young.

Expressing how we really felt, we quickly learned, was unacceptable. To get attention, man of us had to change our "true" feelings to ones that got us noticed. So we would try different tacks. If one didn't work, we tried another, until we found the one that brought attention. Not always positive attention, but at least it was some attention.

If we were around adults who didn't respond in a healthy way to our true expressions, we had to learn different ones to feel safe, get attention, get what we need. And, if we were in a family with generations of violence in its past, we might have even learned that attention by getting hit was okay, too.

It hasn't always been so hard for us to express our true feelings. When we recover what we once knew, we open ourselves up to a whole new vista of relationship possibilities.