Today, I’d like to share a blog post with you by a friend, Carol Grever at Straight Spouse Connection. The post is The Fight Inside Me and in it, Carol retells a story of two wolves. It’s a great story that provides a way of looking at internal conflict. Well worth the couple of minutes it would take you to visit.
After I read the story, I was reminded of the time when I was considering leaving my marriage. Up until then, I’d never thought of divorce as being an option even though I’d been unhappy for some time and we’d been through several rounds of marriage counseling. There were a couple of incidents that made me start to think, maybe, just maybe, divorce was an option. As I started to talk about this with a counselor, I realized one of my obstacles was financial. I had always been the breadwinner and at the time I’d had just taken a severance option and we were living off my hard-earned savings. A divorce would mean dividing those financial assets and adjusting my lifestyle. My being the breadwinner had been a contentious issue since the beginning and we never really addressed it. It made letting go of the financial assets very hard.
About the same time, I was at a meeting for a non-profit board I was serving on when one of my fellow directors, Mary, shared with the board that she was getting divorced. She had also been the breadwinner. She had decided that if she had to support her husband for the rest of his life then she wanted to be happy. That meant getting a divorce and living apart.
That had a profound affect on me. My situation was different but she gave me a clarity I’d been missing. I realized that I was facing a choice – did I want to be happy?
I chose to be happy – it wasn’t an easy road to travel and there were lots of situations along the way where I, like anyone going through divorce, had a conscious choice to make about how I wanted to react to particular situation. I learned that it was often best not to react right away but to take some time and think about what was really important to me. Now I have the wonderful visual of two wolves to help guide me.
How about you? Do you have two wolves you been fighting?