237: Change Can Be (EXTREMELY) Strange

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or you’re the “other person,” or you’re engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  When you’re ready to start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s work together.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  Together we will find you some relief and a clear path forward.

All right, everybody.  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me say that major life changes tend to come with mixed emotions, including uncomfortable emotions.  Even if you really want to make a change, even if you are as sure as you can possibly be that you are making the “right decision,” you may still experience uncomfortable emotions when you’re living in, or with, the changes you’ve made.  You may have heard me say that many times.  And I talk about this often because I don’t think we acknowledge this enough in our society.  There’s this idea out there that if we choose to make a big change, like, we move, or we have a child, or we change jobs, or careers, or we form a committed relationship, or we leave a committed relationship that really wasn’t working out well for us, then we should like the experience of living in our choice, or with our choice.  And that we shouldn’t have any mixed feelings about the experience.  If we willingly make a big change, we should be happy about it, and that’s it!  Sometimes this idea is shoved at us rather forcefully and explicitly, and sometimes it’s much more subtle.  But this idea is out there.

What I see, over and over again, in my own life, and in my clients’ lives, and in my friends’ and casual acquaintances’ lives, is that even when we make a major life change that we truly want to make, living in that change or with that change may not feel entirely great!  At first, the change may just feel weird, even if it does end up feeling pretty good later.  Or it might feel good right away in some ways, but it also might feel very NOT good in other ways.  And our feelings may evolve over time, but they may remain mixed.  Even when we’re sure as we can possibly be that we want to make a big change in our lives, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to ONLY experience pleasant feelings, or comfortable feelings when we make that change.  And I want to suggest that that is totally okay, and totally “normal.”  I always use that word lightly, because the notion of normal can be and is weaponized in all sorts of awful ways.  The reason why I’m using it now is because some people really want to know if feeling mixed feelings after making a big life change is “normal,” and by that they usually mean, is it appropriate or acceptable for them to feel the way they’re feeling.  And my answer to that is, emphatically, YES.

To illustrate the extent and the intensity of the mixed emotions that may come with major life decisions, I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I’ve been feeling since I moved to Tucson a few months ago.  If you aren’t familiar with my saga of late, here’s the gist of it: last year my spouse and I left our longtime home in San Francisco and moved to Costa Rica, thinking that was going to be our next longtime home.  But that is not how things developed.  For various reasons, we decided to leave Costa Rica and return to the US, and we decided to move to Tucson.  I’ve said a lot about these developments in three previous episodes, namely episodes 224, 226, and 236.

And as I said in the most recent episode, our decision to move to Tucson was a great success in that it relieved us of having to deal with the many daily life challenges that we were dealing with in Costa Rica.  This was a clear-cut win.  And, as I mentioned in the last episode, I moved to Tucson with intention to consciously seek out things to like and enjoy and appreciate about Tucson.  And I have been doing that, and as such, I have found things to like and appreciate and enjoy about Tucson.  Does that mean I absolutely love it here?  No, I wouldn’t say that.  But that’s okay.  Absolutely loving it here wasn’t the goal.  The goal was to make the best of being here, and so far I’ve been doing a decent job of that.  So in a sense, this move has been a terrific success.  We have definitely accomplished our most basic objectives.

And, it is also true that since we have been in Tucson I have at times felt PROFOUNDLY untethered and unmoored and disoriented in a way that I have not felt in a long, long time.  I have, at times, felt abjectly depressed, and I don’t use those words lightly.  I’ve had the pleasure of living a fairly interesting life, and I’ve experienced some exquisitely high highs, and some pretty soul-crushing lows.  So I’m no stranger to the bleak depths of the human experience.  And thus, when I say that at times in the last few months I have felt lower than I have felt in years, I’m really saying something.

So the most basic point I want to underscore is this: more than one thing can be true about living in a major life change.  It can be true that moving to Tucson was and is a decision that worked out well.  And it can also be true that I have experienced a tremendous amount of discomfort as I’ve lived in this change, even though I am on the whole quite satisfied with our decision to move here.

I’m going to talk about some of the specifics of the discomfort I’ve been feeling lately, because the experiences I’ve been having are very similar to the experiences some of my clients have when they make, or consider making, big life changes in relation to their infidelity situations. 

For starters, in the last few months I have been feeling kind of home-less, or without a home.  To be clear, I do NOT mean that I am unhoused, or am having an experience that even compares to being unhoused.  I am most definitely NOT literally homeless.  But in the sense that home is just as much a state of mind as it is a particular place, or a particular dwelling, I do not feel at home.  AT ALL.  And moreover, I don’t know where home is, at this point.  San Francisco was my home, both in terms of where I resided and where I felt at home for the better part of the last thirty years, but do I consider it my home now?  I don’t know.  When I left, last year, I thought I was heading to my new home, meaning, Costa Rica.  Not just to my new house, but to my new HOME.  I’d been so invested in the process of moving to Costa Rica in general and our house there more specifically for so long that I’d come to think of that place and that dwelling as home, even if I only ended up living there for a few months.  And when living there didn’t actually work out all that well, I didn’t have a next home lined up.  Again, I mean home in the sense of how I think about home.    

So since I’ve been in Tucson I’ve been homesick for BOTH San Francisco and Costa Rica, which is interesting.  While we were in Costa Rica, I don’t think I missed San Francisco for even a minute, but I’ve missed it over the past few months, and on some days I’ve missed it a LOT.  Like, a lot a lot!

This is something that a lot of people I work with are really afraid of.  They’re afraid that they’ll leave their committed relationship, and leave their longtime home, and miss their home intensely.  And when clients tell me about this fear I say, “Yeah, you MIGHT miss your home.  You might miss your spouse.  You might miss your old life.  But if that happens, it doesn’t have to be a problem, and more specifically, it is not necessarily an indication that you actually WANT TO GO BACK to your old life.”

I know that no matter how much I miss Costa Rica, I don’t want to live there right now.  I know that no matter how much I miss San Francisco, I don’t want to live there right now, either.  Will I choose to go back to either or both of those places someday?  Maybe.  But those are decisions I’ll make in the future, if or when it becomes appropriate to consider those options.

I really want to drive this point home because I talk about what it means to miss something with clients so often, and in so many different ways.  It is possible to really miss something or someone that you left for clear reasons that you liked and still like.  And while it may be painful to miss something, or someone, or some place, that doesn’t mean that going back is the solution.  Feeling pain because you miss something is not necessarily a problem that needs a solution!  It’s reasonable to miss things that we cherished that are no longer a part of our lives, or are no longer a part of our lives in the same way.  The sheer fact of missing whatever we miss is not an indication we should go back to the thing we miss.

Lately, along with feeling homesick, I’ve been feeling a lot of feelings related to starting over in a new place, for the second time in mere months.  There’s a lot of novelty in getting to know a new place, and sometimes I enjoy that.  But sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes the unfamiliarity of a new place is intriguing, and sometimes it’s not particularly appealing.  There’s a certain amount of work that goes into setting up shop in a new place, and at times, I’ve been able to approach this with curiosity and good humor.  And at times, I’m not all that enthusiastic about, for instance, looking for a new vet – AGAIN.  Or finding a new dentist – AGAIN.  Or trying three dry cleaners and all of them being really shitty, and not wanting to look for a fourth. 

There’s also some uncertainty about matters big and small in the air.  My spouse and I committed to staying a year in Tucson and making the best of it.  And making that choice was great for a lot of reasons which I described in the last episode.  But, after we made it to Tucson, and got ourselves reasonably settled, and had enough bandwidth available to start thinking about things other than moving and getting ourselves reasonably settled in, the question of “What will we do at the end of the agreed-upon year in Tucson?” started to come up.  Because, like humans so often do, we want to know what’s next.  We want some certainty to latch onto.  We want to know what the plan is.  We want to do the things we can do now to prepare to execute whatever the plan is.  And, for me anyway, knowing whether we’re planning to leave Tucson after the agreed-upon year or planning to stay here for longer would inform some choices I make in the present about how I use my time around here.

But here’s the thing.  We just don’t know whether we’re going to stay here beyond the one-year mark or not.  We don’t know because we have not decided yet, and we don’t WANT to decide yet.  We may not love the feeling of uncertainty that comes with holding off on that decision, but we also know we do not want to make a decision at this time!  We want to get to know the place better and make it through a full summer before we make any choices.  We are SURE about that, but believe me, there have been many days when one or both of us just wants to call it right then and there, and say “We’re staying for sure!” or “We’re totally leaving!” because we just want to feel certainty instead of uncertainty.  Perhaps you can relate.

Fortunately, though, we’re tolerating the uncertainty without doing anything rash to relieve ourselves of the feeling.  We’re dwelling in this state of not knowing what the longer-term plan is, even though the uncertainty feels a little icky at times.  And the benefit of tolerating the uncertainty is that we aren’t rushing into any decisions that we know we don’t actually want to make right now.   

So that’s an overview of the stuff I’ve been experiencing lately that’s easier to articulate.  What’s harder to articulate are the ways I’ve been feeling TOTALLY unmoored and untethered and disoriented lately.  This is related to feeling like I don’t know where home is and not knowing what our longer-term plans might look like, but it goes beyond that, too.

I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing right now.  I have gone from having a very clear vision of how the next chapter of my life was going to unfold to not having much of a vision for what I want the future to look like.  Moreover, my sense of myself, and who I am has been disrupted.  It would be an exaggeration to say “I don’t know who I am anymore,” because in many respects, I absolutely do know who I am. 

But the surprises that life has handed me recently, and the way I’ve been handling them has me reformulating my sense of who I am, or my sense of identity.  For a while there, I was a person who was going after their dreams and making an international move!  And occupying that identity felt good!  I got to be a person who was being faithful to their deepest desires and highest priorities!  Being that person felt pretty awesome!  And now I am getting to be a person whose big plan didn’t work out the way they thought it was going to, and made hard pivot, and is navigating a lot of unanticipated changes, and is, well, living in Tucson.  And, as I’ve started to settle into this new role, or this new identity, it has started to feel okay.  But at first I was like, um, this feels very, very strange.  Being a person who is picking up the pieces of a dream that didn’t work out feels very, very odd.  Luckily, I was pretty okay with embracing this particular bit of oddness.  I didn’t make leaving Costa Rica and moving back to the US mean that I had failed, I didn’t see the pivot as a sign of deficiency, I didn’t consider this plot twist a humiliation.  I chose not to see the story in terms that I would consider negative.  If I had, I would be suffering immensely, and I’m glad to have spared myself that particular bit of torment.  But even so, the change in who I have been being has been an odd adjustment.   

I have also been feeling deep grief and profound disorientation as I digest the abrupt end of a dream that I had nurtured so earnestly for a long time.  I had SO much hope for how I thought my life in Costa Rica was going to turn out.  I truly believed that in moving to Costa Rica, I was beginning what was going to be a wonderful and lengthy chapter of my life.  And to hope for something in that way is not a small thing.  To want something as badly as I wanted a life in Costa Rica is not a small thing.  To invest the time and energy and money into making that dream into a reality that my spouse and I invested into moving to Costa Rica is not a small thing.  To allow myself to go all-in on something, emotionally, mentally, financially, logistically, and otherwise in the way that I went all-in on the Costa Rica move was not a small thing.  And to then walk away from the thing I went all-in on was not a small thing, either. 

Some folks have said to me, “You must be really disappointed that living in Costa Rica didn’t work out,” and I think I have been feeling a little disappointment, at times.  But what I’ve been feeling a lot more of is disorientation, or bewilderment.  The plot twist that I have been living for the last however-many months it’s been was one I did not see coming.  In some ways, I appreciate this.  I appreciate being surprised by life.  I appreciate being reminded that sometimes things do NOT work out like we think they’re going to, or like we hope they’re going to.  I truly believe that there is SO much to be gained from surrendering to life’s surprises and being willing to learn from them.  All of that is true.  And, it is also true that at times over the past few months, I’ve felt like I have fallen into an abyss.  I have felt totally destabilized and discombobulated and lost.  At times, I have felt really fucking bad.  And even though I’m pretty skilled at tolerating uncomfortable feelings, that doesn’t mean that feeling the uncomfortable feelings I’ve been feeling lately has been fun.  It has not. 

But here’s the thing, people.  I don’t see any of what I’m experiencing as a problem.  Even when I’ve felt completely lost in the abyss, even when I’ve been extremely bothered by the fact that I don’t know when I will emerge from the abyss, I’ve also trusted that it is totally okay for me to be right where I am.  Even if I don’t know where that is!

Many approaches to understanding the human condition recognize the need for us to die, metaphorically speaking, so that we may continue to live, and so that we may evolve, rather than stagnate, as we do so.  Many great thinkers recognize that if we are fully embracing the human experience, there will be times in life when we need to surrender to our own dissolution, so that we may be rebuilt, or reorganized, or renewed in a manner that is faithful to our own personal evolution and to our collective evolution.  This happens in nature all the time, and we think it’s cute.  The caterpillar has to turn into a chrysalis and completely liquify into mush in order to recrystallize into a butterfly.  The pretty little egg in the nest has to be broken open and more or less destroyed by the baby bird within it in order for that new life to emerge into the world.  Decay creates the fertility necessary for growth.  Things come into being, die, and decompose.  We see this all the time in nature – if we look – but we don’t like to see these kinds of cycles of transformation within our own human lives because they seem so damn scary.

And, speaking from my recent and still-current experiences, significant transformation CAN be really scary.  When we say goodbye – voluntarily or otherwise – to a known version of ourselves, or a known way of being and living, and we don’t know what’s coming next, we are, more or less, a caterpillar that is melting down into goo and doesn’t yet know what’s coming next.  Knowing that we aren’t going to continue living in the way we used to live, but not yet knowing how our new life will shape up can be really scary.  We tend to celebrate big transformations when they’re more or less complete, and everything looks finished and nice, but we don’t do enough to acknowledge the strangeness of being in the portal from one known state to another.  We don’t often acknowledge how strange – and sometimes awful – it feels to be in that state where we’re no longer who we used to be but aren’t yet who are becoming.  Collectively, we could do a lot more to acknowledge the profound weirdness – and TERROR – that we may experience in this liminal state. 

Fortunately, there are thinkers and traditions of thinking that have named this sort of metamorphosis, and talked about what it’s like to experience this as a human, and why it’s so valuable for humans to be willing to go through this kind of transformation, even if it is QUITE uncomfortable at times.

For instance, the Tarot.  The Tarot is not means of reading fortunes and telling the future, as some people think, but rather, a representation of archetypal aspects of the human experience that have been recognized across cultures throughout the ages.  The Tarot recognizes joyful elements of the human experience.  It recognizes the human capacity to bring forth the best that is within us, and make worthwhile use of our efforts, and to realize fulfillment and success in all arenas of our lives.  And it also recognizes the inevitability of transformations within the human experience, some of which may seem like our world is coming to an end, or seem like we are dying.  The Tarot assumes that the purpose of the challenges we encounter, or the metaphorical deaths we die isn’t to punish us, but rather, to help us grow.  To help us shed what no longer serves us, however painful that process may be, so that we can become the truest, fullest version of who we are evolving into being.

Then there’s the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which tells us that to live is to die a thousand deaths.

The mystical, philosophical tradition of alchemy – actually, it might be more accurate to say traditions of alchemy, plural – recognized a period they called Nigredo.  In a Nigredo phase, important aspects of your life may fall apart – or perhaps, pretty much your entire life falls apart.  The Nigredo is considered a season of decay, in which internal and external aspects of your life may change dramatically, whether you desire these changes or not.  And this process can be full of doubt and disorientation and despair and overwhelm and fragility and vulnerability.  But this experience isn’t a punishment.  It’s a purification.  A Nigredo period prepares you for reorganization and renewal and, some might say, rebirth.

Carl Jung called this sort of experience the dark night of the soul.  He viewed it as a process of dying and becoming.

Somebody else – I can’t remember their name at the moment – talks about times when we are compelled to walk through the swamplands of our soul.  I love that language because it is so evocative of wading through muck, which is exactly what you may feel like you are doing when you are in the midst of a major, uncomfortable period of transformation.

And this is big stuff, people!  Feeling like you are liquifying into goo can feel like an existential crisis.  Feeling like you are dying without any sense of what might happen after your metaphorical death can seem like an existential crisis.  And that’s exactly what these kinds of experiences are.  And that is not a bad thing.

So what do we do?  Well, we can try to resist what’s happening.  There might not be any way to do this without making our predicament worse than it already is, but we can try.  OR we surrender to the strangeness of change.  We can turn and face the strange, just like David Bowie told us to.  Still tells us to.  We can allow ourselves to be the caterpillar who completely dissolves in order to re-crystalize into a butterfly.

Going through an existential re-organization alone can be pretty tough.  Or maybe EXTREMELY tough.  You may want a good guide to help you through this kind of process.  And I am one such guide.  There are others, too, of course.  Just pick yourself a good one, and get the support you need because going through a metaphorical death, or a Nigredo, or a prolonged dark night of the soul, or whatever you want to call it is hard enough even WITH excellent help.  Don’t make it harder than it needs to be by trying to do it without adequate support.

I hope I have adequately described how extremely bleak and strange and existentially challenging the experience of a major life change can be!  But even as I want to underscore and normalize the sometimes-excruciating nature of transformation, I also want to emphasize something else.

Even though there have been days in the last few months when I have felt VERY BAD, I have also been, in many key respects, okay.  Sometimes when we feel emotionally terrible we think that our world is ending, and in a metaphorical sense, it might be.  But in a more literal, material sense, it also might NOT be.  And what I can tell you is that even as I’ve been finding my way through the strangeness of change, some aspects of my life haven’t changed AT ALL.  I still have two young, energetic, life-loving dogs who wake up every morning as soon as the first hint of sunlight peeks through the curtains and are immediately ready to rumble.  Which means I have to be immediately ready to rumble, too. 

I’m still extremely enthusiastic about and dedicated to my work, which keeps me plenty busy.  I still put my pants on one leg at a time.  My spouse and I remain devoted to each other in many ways that I cherish.  So even though a lot has changed and is still changing, some things have not changed.  Even if there are a lot of things that are uncertain right now, there are also things in my life that are NOT uncertain.  Even if I do at times feel like I am very much in the goo of transformation, I am also well aware that I haven’t literally dissolved into formlessness. 

And this may be really important for you to recognize, too, if you’re contemplating a major life change, or you are in the midst of one.  Some things in your life may change in very significant ways.  You may feel uprooted and unrooted.  You may feel unmoored.  You may feel disoriented.  You may feel lost.  You may feel grief for what is over, or what is changing.  And it may not feel good to feel this way!  But you can choose to embrace the experience of transformation, uncomfortable as it may be, as part of the richness of the human experience.  AND you can also recognize, repeatedly, that there are probably some things in your life that are not changing, and probably will never change, no matter what.  There will probably always be some things that you are completely sure of, even if many things are uncertain. 

More than one thing can be true at once, people!  You can be in the liminal state between who you used to be and who you are becoming but haven’t fully become and you can feel EXTREMELY strange in this state, and you can also notice the constants in your life.  You can navigate the experience of feeling unstable and you can also draw support from what is stable.  The good news on that front is, no matter what else may or may not happen today, gravity probably isn’t going to let us down.  Or perhaps I should say, gravity probably isn’t going to let us UP.  We are going to remain tethered to the earth, even if we feel pretty untethered in our lives. 

If you’ve been listening to this episode and you’re thinking, wow, I don’t ever want to experience anything like this, I don’t ever want to wade through the swamplands of my soul, thank you very much, I get it.  But the point of being willing to turn and face the strange instead of trying to resist it or avoid it or deny it or otherwise not have to deal with it is to become available to more of the beauty and richness that life has to offer.  It’s to give yourself the opportunity to evolve, rather than stagnate.  It’s to develop the depth and quality of wisdom and peace that can only be gained from experience.

I DO want to make it clear that if you are experiencing a degree of difficulty that you do not think you can adequately handle, you may want to seek out resources beyond the kind that I offer.  For instance, if you are feeling suicidal, look up your local suicide hotline and call that number right now. Turn off the podcast, find the number, and make the call.  If you are feeling depressed to a degree that you do not know how to handle, it might be a good idea to check with a medical or mental health professional. 

It’s very important to me to illustrate, within and beyond this podcast episode, that we do not necessarily need to pathologize the bleaker aspects of the human experience.  We do not always benefit from viewing the experience of feeling very, very low through a medical lens.  But sometimes we do!  So if you have been feeling abjectly depressed for a while and you think it might be time to make an appointment with your primary care provider, take that inclination seriously.  Different tools are helpful at different times.  Sometimes we need to learn how to skillfully, consciously, and deliberately relate to our most uncomfortable feelings.  And sometimes we may need a little pharmaceutical support.  Or other forms of medical support, or other forms of support that falls outside of the realm of what I do. 

I can’t help you with the pharmaceutical support, but if you want to learn how to relate to your discomfort more skillfully, let’s work together and I will teach you.  Being able to skillfully relate to discomfort is one of the primary ways we can improve our quality of life.  Because, for starters, life is going to be uncomfortable sometimes.  And since there’s no getting around that, we benefit a LOT by learning how to deal with that.  AND because when we aren’t making decisions that are driven by a fear of discomfort, or a desire to avoid discomfort, so many more options become available to us.  We gain the ability to create the lives we want to be living, instead of living a life that is constrained by a never-ending effort to attempt to avoid discomfort.

I’m glad to say that at the time of this recording I do not feel as terrible as I did a month ago, or two months ago.  Some of those days and weeks were pretty rough, and I’m glad I’m not feeling that rough at this particular moment.  One of the really cool things about feeling awful is that when you start to feel less awful, it’s amazing.  Emerging from a bleak period is a uniquely cool thing.  I’m totally serious about that.   

But even though I’m not feeling awful at the moment and even though I’m pretty excited about that, I still don’t know where the hell I am within my journey of unbecoming and becoming anew.  I have no idea what sort of chrysalis I’ve found my way into, I have no idea what sort of liquification and recrystallization process I’m currently in the midst of.  I have no idea how long this experience will last, or what’s on the other side of it.

But that’s okay, because I am willing take this process one step at a time, no matter how crushingly painful it has been at some points, and because I trust that this sort of experience is a worthwhile part of living a full and rich life.  I trust that evolution is always worth it, even when it is profoundly disorienting and extremely painful! 

If your infidelity situation is giving you the opportunity to walk through the swamplands of your soul and you need some help wading through the muck, let’s work together.  Change can be extremely strange.  But when we learn how to relate to the strangeness of change, experiencing the strangeness of change can be profoundly generative.

If you want my personalized support, let’s work together one-on-one via Zoom.  If you want to work through my most powerful teachings and assignments at your own pace, enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  Once you sign up for the course, you can access it anytime you want, and it’s yours forever.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening.  Bye for now!