WARNING: Esoteric BS ahead. Those with a low tolerance for amateur philosophy should stop reading NOW!
Rob,
This will be the first time I try to express this thought/way of looking at things I have had for a long time.
I think in many situations I see things represented by an hourglass sort of shape on it's side. On one side you have a lot of room to move, and relative freedom. You can see the other side, but the only way to get there is to squeeze through that little opening. When you squeeze through the opening, things get really tight. You feel very little freedom. You feel like turning back. You forget your goal to get to the other side. Once you get to the other side, you are free to expand again, to be free, without fear of just "slipping back" into the other side again. It's almost impossible to involuntarily go back to the other side once you've made it through. However, it's that last push to make it through that is the scariest because we are forced to leave not only the old "side" behind, but also we leave behind the PROCESS of getting to the new "side" as well, and both of them represent comfort of sorts for us. It's also important to think of the two side as only different, not good or bad.
Like I said, that's a recurring thought I have had throughout life when facing certain situations. This is one of them.
We start on the same side of the hourglass when we get married. If we explore, grow and find happiness together, we may stay there, or move to the other side together. In our cases, our W's at some point decided to see what the other side was like. It took a lot of pain, and growth to get there, and once there, it was just different, not necessarily better. For our W's, they have been on that other side of the hourglass from us. They have had freedom. They could see the other side, but didn't want to go there until they saw that there was enough possibility of freedom and happiness there to warrant the pain it would take to get back again. Now they have started the process and they're moving through the tight spot between, where it's easy to get claustrophobic and just slip, or turn back.
In my mind, I imagine a time when they will make it through and it will take a monumental effort (or f-up on our part) to even allow them to consider going back to the other side. The pain of moving between them is too great. Moving through the place between requires contracting yourself, becoming small, alone with your thoughts and your fears. It's not something we would do for fun, and certainly when are unsure of the safety/happiness on the other side.
I see US as having been living in the space between either during this crisis, or maybe long before. Our inability, or lack of motivation, to push towards either side just kept us in painful limbo that prevente us from seeing the freedom that we were missing. We too are now making it through. We are learning what it is to be in a place where there are horizons and not just the walls around us, that we have built. We are learning to be free, and what being free means in the context of our marriages. We hope our W's learn this too. The real problem we now face is the potential of ending up on the OTHER side from our W's again, i.e. we go through so much pain and just accept EITHER side, even if it's opposite where our W's are. It's when this happens that WE decide the M is over and it's time to move on rather than face any more pain or struggle.
I have had this vision for many things from the task of learning new things to emotional tests like this. Anything that requires a struggle to move from one place of knowing to another. Anytime we do this kind of growing we sense the loss of the freedom that came from our ignorance, the constricting, oppressive new rules/ideas we must obey, and then the release that comes when we finally make it through, our freedom regained in a new place where once again we are able to move and explore using our new knowledge to guide us.
I know all this sounds kinda strange (oh, and btw, I have never done drugs.lol), and I have NOT expressed it the way I feel it, but you may get the idea. He!!, I hope you do because I have no f-ing idea what I am talking about. lol.
