How to practice detachment? Figure out the worst thing that could happen to you? (Spiers Doctrine - "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.")...when you aren't afraid of the outcome, you can't get hurt if you are already dead.
As the author, for lack of a better term, of the "Spiers Doctrine" -- a notion I latched onto back in May -- let me weigh in here, especially as I am a failed DB'er (a longish post I'm working on at my own thread).
I was recently sorting through all the receipts, unopened mail, and the like I accumulated during the first few, awful months of LBSdom. And there I came across a receipt for the entry fee to Famous Art Museum in Big Midwestern City. I saved it, for it was a tangible symbol of my re-birthday.
Let me explain: Like many of the newbies -- like all newbies, I suppose -- I was mired in it after the Bomb. Bitter self-recrimination, "what-if-itis," "if-only-itis" -- in other words, I was doing the full-bore Mope-'n'-Hope.
It was reflected in everything -- my lack of interest in work (6 months of lost manuscript time, for example), my half-hearted attempts at GALing, the physical way I walked, a tenuous feeling inside me as if everyone in the world were looking at me, seeing -- knowing -- what a Loser I was, what a figure of, alternatively, scorn and pity.
When I found The Divorce Remedy, I latched onto it like it was the rosetta stone of relationships -- the key to unlocking the mysteries. And with DR came the boards and the all-important, impossible-to-overestimate-the-value-of realization that my experience wasn't World Historic. I'd been like a teenager, you see -- You don't understand! No one else felt this way in the Whole History of Forever!
Well, well, well; turns out, I was just Joe Average Left-Behind. Everyone feels this way. It's the way These Things are done.
For me, that was one absolutely essential awakening. Because what that meant was that divorce -- a divorce, the divorce, my divorce -- would, in fact, not be fatal. Oh sure -- we kind of secretly want it to be, don't we, in that immediate, adolescent-like rush of anguish after the Bomb? Oh, if only it would really kill me, that would teach him/her! Then s/he'd see how True I am and Worthy of Marriage!
I had been wallowing in the sentiments expressed in W.H. Auden's poem, "Funeral Blues" (best known for its recitation by the gay character in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (YouTube) but in fact written by Auden to be sung by the (female) performer Hedli Anderson, as if for a lost lover):
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
But I have kids, as many of you do, and very quickly realized that I'm not a teenager any more. I have responsibilities. Two of them. And that forced me to redirect my focus somewhat. Yes, yes, yes -- "it would be better for the kids if." But it ain't "if." It's "is."
So that redirection was the second essential step in detaching. Once I had my head around that, the GALing actually became meaningful because I started taking pleasure in what I was doing for its sake and my sake -- not for her sake.
So those posts that have described detachment as a process are, IMO, spot-on; I started to rediscover things that I love, things that I enjoy -- things, indeed, that I had suppressed, ignored, and abandoned as part of the role of Husband Dude.
Being a thinker (with all due respect and apologies to my esteemed colleague @Thinker) -- often, if the gentle (and not-infrequently-not-so-gentle) pokes by some of our colleagues here are any indication, too much so -- I began then to reassess my marriage. And that's when I got my mojo.
Objectively -- or, if not "objectively" in the strict sense of the word, then objectively in the sense that I stopped making the D all about my failures. I have observed that there's a tendency to accept nearly all the blame -- even in instances of EA/PA by the Walkaway -- especially early in the recovery process. The divorce-busting paradigm is, in a sense, predicated upon it -- what did you do to make Walkaway walk, Left-Behind? Go 180 and un-do it. And the like.
But at a point -- and, regrettably, that point is undefined -- it is well I think to reassess just how happy you were in the M. Not rose-colored glasses reassessment (of course I was happy! s/he was my North, my South, my East, my West) but real reassessment. Let's face it -- all of us are aggrieved, unhappy, disappointed, reluctantly brought to compromise, during the course of a long-term relationship. Some (many?) we do willingly; other compromises (of self) we make reluctantly; still others unknowingly.
And as I did that, I began to reach what is (IMO and for me at any rate) a better (i.e., healthier) anger stage.
I began to question why it was I had put up with this and that; was the balance sheet really in my favor? Not that any one, or even all, of my grievances would have led me to drop the Bomb, but it became clear to me that I was constructing an artificial view of my marriage in order to (I think) justify or rationalize my own post-Bomb misery: If I felt this bad, then it must be because the marriage was simply Wonderfulness, right?
No. Not right. Perhaps I was in a fog myself during the marriage. Perhaps I was unwilling at the conscious level to see what I could now see. Perhaps I was just naive or blind. Perhaps it was fear, yellow freaking fear; like Joe Banks (YouTube @4:50), I was too chicken-sh*t afraid to speak up. All possible.
But the point was, in terms of detachment, I now had the opportunity to look at the totality of my relationship with my Walkaway Wife coldly -- as if looking at someone else's life and not my own (cf, the out-of-body experience described up-thread).
And it didn't look so good. It was a series of petty debates, little compromises, an untold-number of settling-fors -- and why? What had it gotten me? This! The Bomb! So what, really, had been the point?
And there I was, in Big Midwestern City -- my home town -- to undertake some kind of GAL thing, it was unclear what, just to get away, whatever, and it was rainy and I went to Famous Art Museum to look at the pictures there that I always consulted when I felt myself adrift, and She called.
She called and she carped and she attacked -- because, for a Walkaway, she sure did have a lot of desire, most often expressed as a desire to attack, to poke, to "prove" that what she was doing was "right" -- and I -- because I had no ability (desire?) to Drop The Rope, to Not Engage, to Ignore, to Hang Up -- I sat there, on my butt, on the cold marble staircase, for nearly an hour, the battery on my phone draining like the battery on my patience, like my soul.
And when she said -- no, she didn't "say," she sneered -- "goodbye" and hung up, I sat there feeling like Wiley E. Coyote (YouTube). The only thing I could do, the only thing I could think of, was to get up and walk.
Up and down Magnificent Boulevard I walked, in the pouring rain, thinking-but-not-thinking, reacting, feeling.
And that's when the "Spiers Doctrine" (YouTube) came to me. Having been a soldier, and having been in Iraq for over a year, I understood intuitively the absolute necessity of detachment in crisis. By way of example, many rape victims will report later, during therapy, that they were completely detached during their victimization; it is a pure survival instinct.
The challenge is to activate it consciously. How does one consciously accept fate? By acting, via DR, "as-if" -- as-if the thing one fears the most has already happened.
So. That's the way it was going to be? She was going to leave me and then attack me? Leave me and then reach out to me, day-after-day, simply to reinforce what a great idea it was to leave me? As if I didn't feel enough like sh*t as it was?
Well f*ck that.
So be it. I was already dead; I was already divorced.
And I went into my favorite tavern, ordered up an Irish coffee or three -- purely for medicinal purposes, you understand -- and read the local papers and chatted with my fellow patrons and....
When I left the bar, I was detached. There was nothing, I could now see, to be gained by not being detached. Yes, after a while, I had that fear that I could be too detached, and, as I am writing on my own thread, may well in fact have become so.
But that's an indictment of me, my resentment, my anger, my impatience, rather than an indictment of detaching. But since it's time for breakfast and for two rambunctious kids to spring from their beds to face the day, I will have to close this much-longer-than-anticipated response and suspend drafting of my own post for a couple hours.
How do you do it, this detaching? By doing it. There's no recipe, there's no procedure, there's no magic bullet. But you can't fake it. You can't pretend. You have to do it, deliberately and consciously.
You have to accept that you're already dead. That you have no control. That there is no logic, no argument, no plea, no justification, no photograph, no memory, no rationalization, no prayer, no wish, no hope big enough, strong enough, persuasive enough, enough enough, to deter Walkaway.
And you have to live it. You have the Walk That Path every minute, every day. When you feel yourself drifting, you have to consciously bring yourself back. Put away the photographs, Left-Behind. Put away the love notes. Stop idealizing her. Stop idealizing him. There are, in fact, other fish in the sea -- you know it as well as you know yourself. You may not want them, not now, but you know this to be true.
It doesn't mean you didn't/don't love Walkaway. It doesn't mean you didn't/don't cherish your marriage, value your marriage, desire your marriage. It doesn't mean you didn't/don't believe in the institution.
It means you love, cherish, value, desire, believe in...yourself.
