Although the movie Top Gun is now over 30 years old, there are nuggets of wisdom in many of movie lines. Those nuggets cover a variety of topics. The line I want to draw your attention to today is ” your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”
Although you’re not flying multi-million dollar planes, or going head to head with Russian pilots, that line can change your situation, if you let it.
In dealing with your marriage situation and the affair, there may be times when you find yourself saying “It gets so bad, I just can’t think”. At such times you may feel overwhelmed. At those times, your pain overflows your capacity to handle it.
Such statements tell the world that the problem and the pain associated with it is bigger than you are. At such times, it feels like the pain continues growing in size and you continue shrinking. Prior to the affair you may have felt confident and capable, but now those qualities are long gone. You may even wonder if they’ll ever return.
During such times, you may find yourself functionally blind in seeing any options.
I want to challenge how you’re facing those times of ‘overwhelm’.
You can choose continuing with your focus on the pain and your helplessness. Doing so, will increase the amount of pain, and shrink your confidence even further than it is.
Maintaining that focus will eventually push you into making desperate, impulsive choices. Making choices when you are experiencing distress is never a preferred situation. Even the legal system recognizes that decisions made under duress are suspect.
At such times, you have the wrong focus. The problem is not the pain or your ability to handle it.
The complaint “It gets so bad, I just can’t think” is a symptom. It reveals that you’re thinking in an overly general manner. You are trying to ‘do it all and handle it all’. When that happens, it should alert you that there’s too much ‘overgeneralizing’ about your situation.
Your problem at that moment is not the situation you’re facing, but instead ‘How’ you are thinking about it.
Rather than handling your situation one step at a time, at some level, you’re taking it all on at once. As the line from Top Gun states, ” your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” The reason you’re overwhelmed is that at some level, you think you can handle it all or handling it too fast.
Rather than continuing thinking you can handle it ‘all at once’, or continuing wallowing in helplessness, start healing your marriage with the Affair Recovery Workshop today. Rather than overwhelm you with doing it ‘all at once’, it takes you through the different areas needing healing one at a time.
Your marriage didn’t get into the mess its in overnight, nor will the issues fix themselves on their own.
Best Regards,
Jeff
