CHAPTER [4]
BREAKING FREE FROM CRISIS AND CHAOS
Crisis and chaos close the doors on positive change and forward movement. A system that creates chaos and perpetuates crisis simply cannot lead people to healthy resolutions.
Crisis is a state of elevated emotions and cognitive dissonance where random reactions lead to random consequences. When crisis breeds chaos, people get stuck in their pain and despair. Making a healthy transition from crisis to contentedness is most easily achieved by peacefully trusting that everything in your life has purpose and is on purpose.
Make no mistake: Divorce is a painful process, a breeding ground for raw and abrading negative emotions. But here, as in everything else, life presents us with a choice: We can wallow in our misery, or we can accept the inevitability of pain and embrace its invaluable lessons.
In many respects, crisis is merely a matter of outlook and perception. As M. Kathleen Casey wrote, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
After my husband announced his intention to leave me, and again after I learned he was having an affair, I spent not only hours or even days but weeks on end staring at walls. I could sit through a movie and realize afterward that I couldn’t recall a single scene. I became completely preoccupied with my pain, and I obsessed relentlessly over the events that had precipitated it. I was stuck in it, like a terrified animal tangled up in a barbed-wire fence.
This is how many people respond in the face of serious emotional upset: They become paralyzed by their pain, and they can’t see a way to move beyond it.
Pain degrades into crisis when we get stuck, when we find that the days and weeks we spend in bed or staring at the walls turn into months or even years.
The wellsprings of chaos and crisis are denial and deceit. People in faltering or failing relationships deny or lie about their feelings for any number of reasons. Perhaps they think they’re protecting the other person; perhaps they’re waiting for 100 percent certainty that their dissatisfaction is justified; perhaps they’ve subscribed to the notion of “better the devil you know.”
No matter how reasonable or even noble these reasons may seem on the surface, they suffer unanimously from a major flaw: They force truth into the shadows. In order to be an authentic, unselfishly loving person, you must speak the truth at all times.
If honesty and integrity are in everyone’s best interest, why, when it comes to divorce, is the truth so elusive?
The answer is clear in my mind: It has much to do with the label society applies to divorce. Until we can move away from stigmatizing divorce and labeling it as “bad,” we will remain, as a culture, creators of chaos, mired in crisis.
So you’ve fallen out of love with your spouse and you’ve decided, for your own happiness’s sake, that you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with that person. Your feelings aren’t wrong. Your desire to leave the relationship doesn’t make you a bad person. The splitting up of your relationship isn’t a crime, yet society—and the way the traditional system deals with divorce—would have you believe that it is.
To shift the paradigm, we need to start challenging conventional thinking. If people no longer feared the backlash and censure of falling out of love or wanting to leave a relationship, they’d feel freer to speak their truth. With that truth come freedom and enlightenment for everyone, especially for the parties who didn’t want to end the relationship but who need to come to terms with reality and transition through it to new beginnings.
Imagine if divorce’s connotations were neutral rather than negative. We will explore later what this would mean to our children, but you can begin to imagine it now.
It would be wonderful, of course, if marriage always meant forever and the idea of divorce passed quietly into history, but the statistics don’t bode well for that likelihood. Why, then, should we persist in labeling 30-40 percent, more or less, of the population as “wrong”?
Acceptance opens up opportunities to grow and become a better person.