I recently attended the Self Awareness Workshop (SAW) hoping to understand issues related to my anger, and how it lead to my wife asking for a separation. After 17 years of marriage, culminating in almost three years of therapy, individual sessions with a marriage counselor, and a number of conversations with my priest, what I got at SAW was amazing, and it was the one thing that has helped me more than the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars I've invested in "fixing" myself and my anger problem.

What I learned is that SAW is NOT about focusing on "symptoms" but real issues and problems. Looking back at childhood, learning to recognize events both good and bad, their effects on our behavior and why we react as we do. But most importantly, I learned that I do not have a real problem with anger – that the pain from rejection and fear had kept the REAL issues in my marriage from being addressed, and that I was not responsible, alone. By seeing it for what it was, it has helped eliminate the destructive behaviors and the fear about being alone after so many years of accepting blame and not focusing on the reality of our situation, and how it was spreading into many areas in my life. The fear and doubt that crept into my role running a business, the pain, guilt and loneliness of a blaming marriage, and the loss of self-identity that I chose to accept.

The SAW was much more than I had hoped for. It was an opportunity to learn and listen to the experiences of others, a chance to really drill WAY down and brutally re-examine relationships, issues, past behaviors, and to emerge being DIFFERENT. Different because of a huge self-discovery, different to have shared so much emotion and so much of the past that I didn't even know was there, and different because I really see myself in a much healthier light, excited about all the possibilities life has to offer.

I honestly don't know how I'd be today had I not gone to the workshop. It has been a gift for my sense of self and has enabled me to move forward focusing on so many things I am thankful for and really happy about. To overcome guilt, turn fear into the strength to move in a positive direction, to drill down into the issues that kept masking my opportunities for happiness, were the real issues whether I realized it or not! And years of counseling and therapy never got me as close as this one weekend.