{"id":472,"date":"2007-09-04T01:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-04T07:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=472"},"modified":"2007-09-04T01:22:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-04T07:22:00","slug":"2007-09-04-apologies-a-monday-night-at-aaca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/2007-09-04-apologies-a-monday-night-at-aaca\/","title":{"rendered":"2007-09-04 Apologies &#8212; a Monday Night at AACA"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }<\/style>\n<div class=\"flickr-frame\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/royblumenthal\/1318988476\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1130\/1318988476_a39ce000a5.jpg?w=605\" class=\"flickr-photo\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><br \/> <span class=\"flickr-caption\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/royblumenthal\/1318988476\/\">2007-09-04 Apologies &#8212; a Monday Night at AACA<\/a>, originally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/royblumenthal\/\">royblumenthal<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n<p class=\"flickr-yourcomment\"> Last night&#8217;s AACA meeting was pretty cool for me. Rod talked about the tendency of Adult Children of Abuse to defend their right to be right at all costs.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve found that I&#8217;ve been mellowing a lot in this respect since I started going to AACA meetings. My own tendency in the past has been to take extremely principled stands about stuff. Even to my detriment.<\/p>\n<p>One of the ways this used to manifest was in perfectionism in my old career as an advertising copywriter. I would often get into fights with client service people because &#8216;I was right and they were wrong&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Nowadays, I recognise that sometimes <span style=\"color: rgb(0, 153, 0);\">certain <\/span>clients are idiots with or without my help, and nothing I can do will change them from their idiocy. And this means I&#8217;m much less rigid about things. And I&#8217;ll do the <span style=\"color: rgb(0, 153, 0);\">excellent, yet<\/span> non-perfectionistic thing now.<\/p>\n<p>This is a very tough thing for me to do. Cos I&#8217;m into excellence. And to let go control for the sake of a crap client goes against everything I&#8217;m used to in myself.<\/p>\n<p>But hey&#8230; as the saying goes: &#8216;Perfect is the enemy of the good.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: rgb(0, 153, 0);\" class=\"flickr-yourcomment\">Thankfully, I have very few bad clients nowadays. I seem to have perfected the art of attracting bright, intelligent, capable clients into my world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"flickr-yourcomment\"><i>This painting was made in two stages&#8230; (1) I doodled it into my Moleskine at AACA last night. (2) I scanned it this morning, and coloured it in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ambientdesign.com\/artrage.html\">ArtRage 2.5<\/a> on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc. And I resisted perfectionism.<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"flickr-yourcomment\"><span style=\"font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 153, 0);\">UPDATED Friday 7 Sept 2007: I added the bits in green text today, after Jennifer pointed out that I sound like a disgruntled fellow suffering through the burden of only having bad clients. I didn&#8217;t intend that at all. The poor clients are a thing of the past. The last crap client I had was about two years ago. And since then, they&#8217;ve all been damn cool. My purpose in talking about this stuff is that the focus in the AACA meeting was on people who don&#8217;t get on well with others, thanks to their background of being abused. I was trying to illustrate that everything can be overcome. I hope this clarifies things somewhat.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"flickr-yourcomment\"><span style=\"font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 153, 0);\"><\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"font-style: italic;\" class=\"tag_list\"><span style=\"font-size:85%;\">Tags: <span class=\"tags\"><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/aaca\" rel=\"tag\">aaca<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/abuse\" rel=\"tag\">abuse<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/recovery\" rel=\"tag\">recovery<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/aa\" rel=\"tag\">aa<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/twelve+steps\" rel=\"tag\">twelve steps<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/12+steps\" rel=\"tag\">12 steps<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/adult+children+of+abuse\" rel=\"tag\">adult children of abuse<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/royblumenthal\" rel=\"tag\">royblumenthal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/roy+blumenthal\" rel=\"tag\">roy blumenthal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/blumenthal\" rel=\"tag\">blumenthal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/coffeeshopschmuck\" rel=\"tag\">coffeeshopschmuck<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2007-09-04 Apologies &#8212; a Monday Night at AACA, originally uploaded by royblumenthal. Last night&#8217;s AACA meeting was pretty cool for me. Rod talked about the tendency of Adult Children of Abuse to defend their right to be right at all &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/2007-09-04-apologies-a-monday-night-at-aaca\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">2007-09-04 Apologies &#8212; a Monday Night at AACA<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aaca","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-7C","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}