213: Beginnings and Endings

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are 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 good about, there are two ways you can have me as your coach: you can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains all the teachings and tools you need to empower yourself to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you.  Or if you want my personalized attention devoted to all of the specifics of your unique infidelity situation, we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  To enroll in my course, or to start working with me one-on-one, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  Together we will find you some relief and a clear path forward!

Okay people, let’s cut right to the chase.  I’m pausing production of this podcast.  Indefinitely.  Now, just to be really clear at the outset, the episodes of this podcast that currently exist will continue to exist.  I’m not killing the whole thing off; I’m not deleting all of the past episodes, I’m just hitting the pause button on producing new episodes.  This might mean that I’m done creating podcast episodes forever, but it also might not.  I could decide to come back to doing this.  But for now, the very clear decision is to take a hard pause.  So for the rest of this episode I’m going to refer to ending the podcast or stopping the podcast, just because it’s easier to say that, even though there is some chance I might re-start it at some point in the future.  For now, I have no plans to produce additional episodes, and that’s the important point.

And I’m not doing this because anything is going wrong!  I draw a lot of satisfaction from creating the episodes that I share with you, and a lot of my clients come to me through having found the podcast, and I get lovely emails from podcast listeners telling me how much they appreciate hearing what I have to say, and some former one-on-one clients check in with me from time to time to say they still listen to every episode.  So in a sense, everything is going great.

But I’ve also been feeling the itch to explore new forms of creative expression.  I’ve also been kind of quietly starving for the opportunity to experiment with new formats.  And several months ago, I decided that I was going to start up a YouTube channel, and although some people have a podcast that shows up on YouTube, or a YouTube channel that’s also a podcast, I knew I didn’t want to do that, for a whole list of reasons.  I’m not going to get into the specifics of my reasons, but it is important to note that I was really clear on not wanting to do that.

And at first, I thought, well, I’ll just keep doing the podcast AND I’ll start up the YouTube channel.  Which seemed like a pretty logical thing to do.  If the podcast is working, why not keep it going, and start something new, too?  It made sense, in a sense.

Until I realized that I just didn’t WANT to do that.  For one thing, I didn’t want to allocate the time and effort that doing both things would have required.  And, I also wanted to allow myself the opportunity to set down the old thing and devote myself fully to a new thing.  I wanted unencumber myself from my allegiance to the past.  Because sometimes there is inherent value in letting yourself evolve, and move forward, and leave old things behind.

And what I really want to emphasize in today’s episode is how legitimate it is to want to be free to completely move onto something new.  Maybe that means we completely break from the past, or maybe that means we radically, but not completely break from the past.

Sometimes we just want to go in a different direction, and we can’t simultaneously go in two different directions at once.  And sometimes we could technically keep doing the old thing while also doing the new things, but there would be a significant cost to doing that, and we don’t want to bear that cost.  And I want to suggest that this is perfectly okay.

Now, as I say this, I’m thinking about many other things in life, not just ending a podcast.  And I know that some of you listening will say, well, there’s a big difference between ending a podcast and ending something more significant, like for instance a marriage, especially when there’s money and property and kids and family and all the rest of it involved!  And of course that’s true, to an extent.  But what I see, over and over again, is that the logistics associated with any major life change can be handled.  The emotions associated with any major life change can be handled!  But if you don’t give yourself permission to make the change in the first place, the whole thing is over before it starts.  Meaning, you may not give yourself the opportunity to even seriously consider making the changes you know you have the desire to at least consider making.

And this is a really big deal.  That point of choosing whether you’re going to allow yourself to consider what you might want – even if it’s scary as hell to do that – or you’re going to try and squelch your desires out of sight and out of mind is such an important one.  And what I encourage you to do, if you feel the itch to make a change in your life, is to take that itch seriously, and give yourself the chance to deliberately and systematically consider what you want.  Even if it’s terrifying to consider the changes you desire, giving yourself the opportunity to just CONSIDER what you want is an act of profound fidelity to yourself.  And nobody can be faithful to yourself but you, so you might want to take the opportunity to do that very seriously.  And, if you consider what you think you might want, you might come to the conclusion that you don’t want it anyway!  Or you don’t want it enough to pursue it.  So all of the things that you fear might come with allowing yourself to honestly consider the changes you desire might never happen.  So give yourself the chance to explore that desire for change before you decide you aren’t even going to consider making the changes that you think you might want to make.

And allowing yourself to believe that it’s legitimate to want to change and it’s legitimate to want to try new things and let old things be done with is often a big part of giving yourself permission to consider what you want.

But getting back to the difference between making a change that seems relatively small and making a change that seems relatively big – like, say, ending a podcast vs. leaving a marriage.  What I really want to help normalize, by talking about my experience of choosing to end this podcast is that it can seem like we’re doing something WRONG if we choose to stop doing something that we have been doing for a while, or for a very long time.  It can seem like we’re doing something WRONG if we choose to stop doing something that has been going well, or well enough, because we want to do something different.  It can seem like we’re doing something wrong if we depart from behavior that others expect from us, or that we have come to expect from ourselves.

And what I also want to suggest is that even if it SEEMS wrong to depart from old ways of doing things is that it ISN’T necessarily wrong.  It may seem wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it is.  If you decide to break from the past, do you want to handle your transition skillfully?  Sure you do.  Or at least, you sure might!  But there’s a big difference between saying, okay, I want to make some changes, and I want to handle those changes as well as I can, and saying, if I want something different in my life, I’m going to have to make changes, and I’m not allowed to do that.

And I’ve been grappling with all of this myself over the past few months, as I’ve considered ending the podcast, and then decided to go ahead and end it, and gotten my YouTube channel up and running.  At first I was like, “Wait, can I really just end my podcast?  Can I really just stop doing it?” and of course the answer is yes, of course I can do that – but it actually took me a moment to come to that conclusion!  For all kinds of reasons, I’ve felt somewhat beholden to doing this podcast.  I’ve felt committed to doing it in ways that I like, but I’ve also felt a little beholden to it at times, too.  And for a long time I didn’t really question that – I just kept on doing what I was doing.  Because if it wasn’t broke, why fix it?

And the answer, in case this isn’t already clear, is that I want to do a new thing, and I want to do that new thing without continuing to do the old thing.  And that, I decided, was not only a legitimate answer, but a sufficient answer.  Why change anything?  Because I want to be able to do the new thing without continuing to do the old thing.  It can be that simple, and that can be the end of the matter.

And we see nature letting transitions be that simple ALL THE TIME.  We see that tadpoles turn into frogs, and we see that as they do so, they exit one way of being and commence a new one.  Or they move out of one form and into another form.  And although there’s a transition that happens, once they’re a frog, they’re a frog, and they aren’t a tadpole anymore, and that’s OKAY!  Same thing with butterflies.  They start out as caterpillars, but at some point, they turn into something completely different.  They don’t get to be a butterfly AND a caterpillar.  To the best of my knowledge, anyway!  Maybe there’s something I missed in biology class that says otherwise, but I am pretty sure that once the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it isn’t a caterpillar anymore, by any measures.  It has evolved into something else that is completely different.  And as far as I know, butterflies don’t sit around saying, “Gee, was it really okay for me to leave my caterpillar state?  Should I have fought that, tooth and nail?”

But humans tend to make transitions, or evolutions a lot more complicated than other forces of nature do.  And on the one hand, that’s fair enough, because we have built a social world that we have to contend with, and that social world is more complex than the world that tadpoles and frogs and caterpillars and butterflies deal with.  More specifically, you don’t have to deal with the logistics of divorce if you’re turning from a caterpillar into a butterfly.  You don’t even have to CHOOSE your metamorphosis!  Nature just impels you to it.  That makes things pretty straightforward.

But we humans CAN make change simpler and more straightforward for ourselves!  We don’t have to make change as complicated or excruciating as we sometimes make it!  And we can simplify things by recognizing that change is part of life.  Transition from one state of being to another is part of life – and death.  And we can work with that recognition, to the best of our ability, rather than against it. 

We can also decide that all of the specific stuff that sometimes comes with change that humans like to make complicated doesn’t HAVE to be as complicated as we sometimes make it!  Dealing with an infidelity situation may be a significant bit of life business that you want to carefully attend to, but you don’t have to regard your infidelity situation as a major problem that’s impossible for you to solve.  We can deal with the challenges that come with being human, without letting these challenges become insurmountable obstacles.

The other thing I want to say about ending this podcast that I know applies to aspects of many people’s infidelity situations is this: I feel like I’m ending the show with business left unfinished.  I had a whole list of episodes I planned to create.  I had a bunch of notes on episodes in the works, and I had a few episodes that I was just about ready to record.  And I could have decided to finish everything I had started, or everything that was already in progress, and I was kind of tempted to do that, for a moment there.

But I knew that if I decided to do that, I would set myself up to start sliding down a slippery slope.  I would have to make all kinds of decisions about where to draw the line.  What exactly would count as finishing up my business with this podcast?  That got complicated in a very yucky way very quickly.  And so I decided: I’m done with my business with this podcast when I decide I’m done with my business with this podcast.  And for me, that’s now, because it’s more important for me to explore new avenues of creativity than it is to finish everything I started.

A lot of people tell me they’re reluctant to end a relationship because it feels like there’s still good left in it, or if they end the relationship, they’ll always wonder what they had missed out on by doing so.  This topic could DEFINITELY be a whole, long episode in and of itself, but what I want you to consider is this: from a certain angle, it’s fair to say that you’re ALWAYS missing out on something.  Or more accurately, there are always experiences that you are not having.  And I think it’s so much more helpful to ask yourself, “What is it most important for me to pursue in my life right now, and what am I willing to do in the service of that?” rather than asking yourself, “What am I missing out on?” or “What am I afraid I might miss out on?”

Sometimes when a relationship seems good, or at least, pretty good in some ways, and not bad overall, it seems like a mistake to give it up – or, to echo my earlier point, it might even seem WRONG to give it up.  But it all depends on what you’re going for.  It all depends on what it’s most important for you to pursue.  And it might be important for you to stay in your good-enough relationship for reasons that you really like, but what I so often see is that people cling to their good-enough relationships for reasons they DON’T really like.

So what I want you to consider is that if what you want is to evolve and grow in new directions, you may well have to give up something that’s good enough, or more than good enough, in order to do so.  If you want to explore new challenges, or opportunities, or if you want to create new things, you may have to leave the old things behind, with some business left unfinished.

None of this is to say that if, for example, you think you want to leave your marriage you should tell your spouse you’re going out to get a pack of cigarettes and then never come back.  Even if you want to efficiently change course, you can still give people some kind of notice.  Like, I’m letting you know that this is my last podcast episode.  At least for the foreseeable future!  And if you want to leave someone or something behind, you may well want to let them know, too!  You may want to have some kind of a transition period, as you move from one state of being to another.  And that’s great, and if you want help figuring out the details of how you’re going to transition from one state to another, I can help you with that.

But know this: you really do have permission to let things go in order to take new things on.  You really do have permission to transition from one state to another.  You are not beholden to the past.  And sometimes, the only way to go is forward.  And that’s okay.

All right, folks.  I’m going to start to bring this episode to a conclusion by saying that I am still very much around!

You can continue listening to all of the episodes of Your Secret is Safe with Me.  You can get yourself on my email list by going to my website and signing up if you have not already done so.  You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook or Medium or LinkedIn – and my handle for each of those platforms is @mariemurphyphd.  And you can follow my new YouTube channel, which is also @mariemurphyphd! 

And of course, we can work together!  You can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  In this course I teach you things that go beyond what I cover in the podcast, and I teach you how to apply my teachings to a much greater extent than I do on the podcast.  Listening to a podcast can be great.  But actively engaging in my course will take your learning to a whole ‘nother level.  Or if you want my personalized attention and support, we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  When you have me as your personal coach, I’m your biggest cheerleader and your biggest supporter – and I also call you on your BS when necessary.  If your evolution is a high priority for you right now, let’s get to work and resolve your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about.  To enroll in my course or start working with me one-on-one, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

As we’re wrapping up, I just want to say that you get everything you need from listening to this podcast, that is fantastic – but I really want to encourage you to consider engaging with me in a more active way if you listen to my episodes but don’t feel like you’re able to put my teachings into practice in the ways that you would like to.  Sometimes all we need is a new perspective and a little bit of guidance.  But sometimes we need more structure, and more assistance to live our lives in the ways we want to – and if you think that might be you, and that you might benefit from working with me, what are you waiting for?  Dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that is truly right for you frees up so much of your time and energy and bandwidth to be more available to your life as a whole.  And what could be more important than that?  So let’s get to work.

Okay everybody, I thank you all for the honor of your attention.  There are millions – literally – of other ways you could be spending your time and energy, and I thank you for devoting some of yours to listening to this podcast.  Thanks for being a part of this journey with me, and I hope to see you around, one way or another.  Please stay connected to me in other ways!

I’m sending you all my good wishes through the interwebs, or the airwaves, or whatever.  Lots of love to you.  Bye for now.