In the days when I worked at Rapha, I often used the ‘luggage story’ in confronting problems. The luggage story consists of sharing with clients that they have two sets of luggage or problems. There is the respectable problem and then there’s the ‘real’ problem.
The respectable problem is the one that is easy to talk about and discuss. The ‘real’ one is the one filled with shame, guilt and embarrassment. These are the problems that you continue wrestling with and keep you awake at night.
I often found myself confronting them with the question, “What is your REAL problem?” A few of my clients actually woke up at that point.
It made them start thinking about their situation differently. The real problem was different than the respectable one.
You hesitate discussing the real problems openly. They put you in an embarrassing light. The common practice was to discuss the respectable, yet secretly hope that you’d find an answer to the real problem.
The luggage story enabled me to open up the conversation about the real problems that clients struggled with.
One problem area where this kind of real versus respectable is that of blame. You blame someone or something for the affair. There is the respectable target of blame and then there is who you really blame.
Blaming gives you a false sense of cause and effect. Blaming gives you a false sense of control. It allows you to pin the cause on someone else, and by doing so say to yourself, “this is the cause of my problems” or “you are the cause of my problems.”
The danger is that in blaming them, you limit your ability to recover from the affair. True recovery involves you and the cheater each making changes. When you have someone to blame, you run the risk of using that as an excuse to not work on your own part of recovery.
Blaming easily becomes a bad habit. Like other bad habits, it interferes with your daily life.
Ask yourself “Who do you need to quit blaming?” When you have the answer, then what your next step in recovery is becomes clearer.
When you quit blaming, both of you can start growing and making real change.
At the membership site, Restored Lifestyle, you’ll find what comes next once you quit blaming. You’ll also discover other resources designed for helping restore your marriage to it’s potential.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
