Over the course of several months, I had much more than usual contact with both my biological family as well as the biological family of my grown children’s dad, due to weddings, births, deaths, and graduations.

Attending these gatherings was like replaying lots of old situations and experiences, sometimes even with the original players.

What seemed to happen was that an incident or a situation would occur and I could hear myself start to play the Old Tapes of “what so and so will do next”, “how that will make the other person feel”, “how I will then feel” etc, etc.

Hearing these Old Tapes play, I could feel my discomfort upon seeing my contribution in the Old Situations.

But this time instead of repeating my part in the Old Tapes, I seemed to be able to remain silent while reminding myself that these were Old Tapes and that they did not need to be replayed.

I saw myself beginning to Let Go of some of my old needs to blame and to fix.