Texas Two Stepping

[soldier]

Nettles, I was thinking about your most current revelations and as I started thinking about it deeply I had the thought that might be hard to swallow but my thought is that a two week vacation with your W is much more intense than a few lunches and what not. My thought is this, are you sure that even if she is OK with you going on the trip that it is the wisest move in the long run. You are both moving slowly into something that would seem to be positive and a long period of exposure could accidentally cause a relapse. I know you obviously would want to go for more reasons than just your wife as your children are also involved but on the other hand sometimes you have to loss the battle to win the war.

So you are knee deep into your travel of the three C’s of change which “good husband great marriage” labels as consciousness, conduct and character. First you realize the behavior you want to adopt then you start to catch yourself as you get use to this behavioral change and lastly you make it a permanently new behavior where you no longer need to catch yourself due to it being a part of you. From your posts I get the impression that you are somewhere within that second C and thus you still have some small relapses as you work to making your changes a way of life. One of these relapses, even small as it might be, could do major damage to the foundation you have worked so hard to rebuild.

In the end the choice is yours assuming she does say you could come along but I just wanted to offer some additional food for thought as I started to ponder your potential situation. I thought about me and if my wife called and said she would like to come back home. I want this more than anything in the world right now but I know I am still catching my self-drifting in and out of my changes and I would hate for her to see a small relapse from me that reminded her of what she despised about me and then leave again after a few short weeks or months. Two weeks is a lot of exposure for your wife to see something such as what I described and it could be a set up for failure as we use to say in the military.