This morning I find myself struggling for ways of expressing the many emotions I am experiencing. In a letter, one reader shared “I must pick up the pieces of my totally now empty life“. Her statement sent emotional shock waves off on many levels inside of me. She is experiencing some serious emptiness on many levels.
One of the levels is that of the ‘existential crisis’. Back when I was in college, I was first exposed to this idea under the instruction of Dr. Carol Snyder. It was in a literature course where we were studying Jean Paul Sarte. This author used that term in describing when you question everything down to the foundations of what you believe. We all experience a crisis of meaning at some point in our lives. This can be situational due to loss or trauma. It can also be triggered by a particularly traumatic event that makes you take a serious look at the past and review your beliefs.
Not only did Sarte have trouble finding words that defined what an existential crisis was, but other writers have also woven that idea into many psychiatric diagnoses. Although writers and thinkers can’t agree on a precise definition of an ‘existential crisis’, what is agreed on, is that it hurts. When you are facing a challenge that shatters you down to your core, it’s an ‘existential crisis’. In my mind, ‘picking up the pieces of a totally now empty life’ clearly conveys the idea of an existential crisis.
In marriage, you often build your life around your spouse. That relationship gives you a reason to get up in the morning. For you, marriage was about a total commitment rather than a temporary one that is conditional on your spouse’s mood and likes. When one spouse is committed to the marriage and the other one views marriage as a ‘temporary status’, the two of you are not equally yoked together in your marriage. The Bible has a lot to say about this.
In loving relationships, when you love your partner unconditionally and give yourself completely, when they hurt; you hurt too. Unfortunately for many marriages, there is no such thing as unconditional love.
In such cases, when the temporary status spouse leaves, you are in a crisis. Your world has just been shattered on multiple levels. When you’re shattered like that, you’re not at peak performance. You can’t be. Such an event leaves you crippled in some areas. You need to take care of yourself at those times.
Knowing that you are in crisis, you need healing instead of ‘smashing you or your spouse further’ like many other affair recovery programs have you do as your first assignment. Those ‘other’ programs send you off on an assignment of finding what kind of affair it was, which amounts to deciding who to blame for the affair.
In my mind, when you are going through an existential crisis, your task is to pull yourself together and self-soothe, rather than forcing you to investigate “What kind of affair it was” and make life-changing choices based on your investigation. There is something illogical about forcing you to make choices when you can’t think straight.
When you’re facing an empty life, you need soothing and healing before starting an investigation that requires all your wits and capabilities. When its’ time for you to pick up the pieces, that’s what you need to do. Investigating types of affairs and sleuthing without you having all your pieces picked up will only give you a puzzle with pieces missing.
That’s why I take a different approach in the Affair Recovery Workshop. At first, you need to pick up the pieces. Emotional wounds need emotional healing. Using investigation and analysis is trying to ‘think’ your way out of the crisis. It’s applying an intellectual band-aid onto an emotional wound.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
