You can’t make a choice, so you put it off, endlessly considering the pros and cons. But you’ve already made your choice—one that will keep you stuck and in pain forever.
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Recently, I conducted a 30-minute relationship health assessment session with a coaching client. This man is stuck in a dysfunctional, high-conflict, unsupportive marriage that isn’t meeting his needs or his partner’s. But of course, there are kids, a house, jobs and finances, there is the pretense of marriage and the shame and horror stories surrounding divorce, and there is denial, and inertia.
I helped him find his non-negotiables—those things he is unwilling to accept in a relationship … but is nonetheless accepting. And I understand, because I lived a life similar to his for 15 years, why he is accepting them, why he holds out hope that things will change for the better, why he believes that if he just works a little harder, gives a little more, sacrifices a little more of himself, and offers one more shred of his tattered heart that love and warmth, intimacy and connection, the good times he and his wife shared at the beginning of their relationship, will return.
He knows, as I did, that the status quo is unsustainable, that he is risking his own emotional disintegration, but he is stuck, as I was, unable to get off the fence, unable to make a decision on staying or leaving. He is trapped in the deadly limbo of ambivalence.
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I understand why he’s both hopeful and afraid. Why he has faith but also has his doubts. He knows, as I did, that the status quo is unsustainable, that he is risking his own emotional disintegration, but he is stuck, as I was, unable to get off the fence, unable to make a decision on staying or leaving. He is trapped in the deadly limbo of ambivalence.
In a post titled 21 Signs Your Relationship Is Doomed, I wrote:
When turned towards the positive, hope and faith are powerful forces and miraculous sources of healing, but when employed as mechanisms of denial, they form the pillars of a delusional world, along with their companion—fantasy. Quitting is a dirty word, and it’s drilled into us that we should never give up. Knowing when it’s right to quit, when it’s best to move on, is the key to your emotional survival …
But how can my client—or anyone—know when it’s time to dig in and go all in or time to call it quits and file for divorce?
Well, there are books and tests and of course therapists and counselors who can help you try to figure it out.
But the truthful answer is, sometimes you can’t know with complete certainty. Sometimes you just have to make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time, because not making a decision means you’re wasting the rest of your life in limbo, half-in and half-out, never getting any traction on anything you do because you refuse to move forward.
So how can you get your butt off the fence (and the fence post out of your ass), and make a decision when you’re worried that both decisions might be wrong, that both might bring grave consequences and deep regrets?
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So how can you get your butt off the fence (and the fence post out of your ass), and make a decision when you’re worried that both decisions might be wrong, that both might bring grave consequences and deep regrets? And when deciding one way involves hurting yourself and the other way hurting someone you love? The takeaway from the time I spent working with my client on this conundrum was this:
When we’re stuck in an unhealthy situation, the only thing holding us back is fear. We can cite dozens of logical, practical reasons for changing or not changing, but it’s the fear of making a wrong decision and regretting that decision that keeps us from acting. We torture ourselves with the shadow outcomes of imagined pain and loss from either choice instead of focusing on the pain and loss we’re experiencing in the present moment. Fear is a great immobilizer, despite our fight or flight response. We become frozen in terror, and instead of fighting to make the relationship work or fleeing to save ourselves, we default to the tragic course of withdrawing from life but staying in the relationship, sacrificing love and intimacy and connection, and convincing ourselves we don’t deserve to be happy (which for anyone lacking self-esteem is not that hard). I described this in a post titled The Power of Conscious Choice:
You may feel stuck—in your job, your marriage, a financial mess. You may not like the alternatives to your current situation. So you shut them out, convince yourself that there are no alternatives, and attempt to absolve yourself of responsibility for your life. But this is not absolution. It’s abdication. The alternatives do exist. They may involve hard work, unpleasantness, hurt, radical change, leaving things and people behind, overcoming paralyzing fear of the unknown.
The way to push through the fear of deciding is to remove the frame of right and wrong, to acknowledge that you have two choices (or perhaps more), with two different sets of consequences, and you simply must make the best choice you can …
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There is a way out—not necessarily out of the relationship but out of limbo. The way to push through the fear of deciding is to remove the frame of right and wrong, to acknowledge that you have two choices (or perhaps more), with two different sets of consequences, and you simply must make the best choice you can to address your present unhappy condition, instead of perpetuating it by obsessing over your imagined unhappy future.
By doing this, you’re making a conscious choice—one in which you’re aware of the consequences—as opposed to what was most likely an unconscious choice that got you into a dysfunctional relationship and launched unhealthy, destructive patterns of communication and interaction. Exactly what is a conscious choice?
There are two remarkably simple components to making conscious choices. First, get in touch with your feelings about the situation. How? Just ask yourself: “How do I feel about this?” and give yourself an honest answer. You may be ecstatic or despondent or somewhere in between. The key is to let yourself feel. The danger is not in acknowledging your feelings but in not acknowledging them. Then, ask yourself whether you want more of that feeling or less of it. Does despair serve you? Do you want more frustration or anger in your life? Are you getting something out of feeling powerless, helpless, put upon, overlooked, under-appreciated, mistreated, victimized? Do you really want to be the victim all the time, if that’s what you feel is happening? If you want more of the feeling, make the choice to go in the direction that provides that. If you want less, go the other way. It’s your choice, directed by a conscious interaction with your feelings.
One important note to add is that many of us who have difficulty establishing boundaries and making choices that honor and serve ourselves have experienced trauma at some point in our lives. As my colleague at The Good Men Project and Executive Director of Male Survivor, Christopher Anderson explains:
Anyone who has experienced a significant degree of trauma has also had to figure out a way to endure powerlessness. Many people learn (oftentimes because the trauma is endured in childhood) that there is no other solution when dealing with adults than to silently endure.
Viewing our stance of powerlessness through the trauma-informed perspective is critical to understanding our why, which can then help us approach our how differently and create happier and more fulfilling outcomes in our lives.
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A dysfunctional relationship is a small-scale, two-person (or more if kids are involved) moral crisis.
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I’ve always loved a famous quote from President John F. Kennedy, adapted from Dante’s Inferno, but I never understood until now how it applies brilliantly to dysfunctional relationships:
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.
A dysfunctional relationship is a small-scale, two-person (or more if kids are involved) moral crisis. It’s not genocide, but it’s emotional suicide, or self-icide, unless you address it. Staying in limbo is preserving neutrality. Make a choice. Get off the fence. Whatever you decide, you won’t regret deciding.
Photo—Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr
A collection of Thomas G. Fiffer’s articles for The Good Men Project on dysfunctional relationships is available on Amazon in his book, Why It Can’t Work: Detaching From Dysfunctional Relationships to Make Room for True Love.