187: It's Okay to Change Your Mind

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a relationship coach and I help people who are engaging in anything they think counts as infidelity to deal with their feelings, clarify what they want, and make decisions about what they’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.

Sometimes new clients come to me and they say, “I’ve listened to a bunch of your podcast episodes, and what you say makes a lot of sense, but I haven’t quite been able to figure out how to apply X, Y, or Z thing to my own life.”  Or, “I like the way you talk about dealing with uncomfortable emotions, but I still have a lot of trouble dealing with mine.”  Here’s the deal, people!  If you have not figured out how to make use of everything I talk about on the podcast simply by listening to the podcast, nothing has gone wrong!  There’s only so much I can convey on the podcast.  I can only take you so far with the kind of engagement we have via this podcast.  The point of the podcast is to offer you some new perspectives and new approaches that you can start to make use of, and start to get some benefit from.  Right?  But you may want to take your work with me further.  You may want to go beyond what we can do together – so to speak – on the podcast, and if you do, there are one of two ways we can work together.  You can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, which contains videos of me teaching you the most powerful tools and concepts and practices that I have to offer.  You also get assignments that help you APPLY my teachings to the specifics of your infidelity situation.  If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while and you think you just need a little more guidance in order to deal with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, then this is an excellent option for you.

On the other hand, if you want guidance from me DIRECTLY, if you want to actually interact and engage with me, and my very focused support, we can work together one-on-one.  When you are serious about making changes in your life, when you know you are ready to live out the love life/sex life/romantic life that you really want to live, working with me one-on-one may be the very best investment you can make.  When you’re ready to get to work, we can help you move more efficiently towards what you want to experience.

You can learn about both of these ways we can work together on my website, mariemurphyphd.com. 

Today we are going to talk about changing your mind, and as I promised to do in recent episodes, or at least one recent episode, I’m going to tell you about why I decided to put an end to the new group coaching program that I started just earlier this year, so soon after putting it out there.

In previous episodes, I’ve talked about making decisions with a managed mind, which entails, among other things, getting really clear on why you might choose to do or not do something, and making decisions about what you do for reasons that you like.  And I also talk about how when we make decisions with a managed mind, and when we commit to loving the decisions we make on purpose, we don’t need to fear regret.  We don’t need to worry that we’re going to make the WRONG DECISION and from there we’re going to be doomed to a life of misery.  And I also talk about how we are most likely going to have mixed thoughts, and therefore mixed feelings, about any major decision we make… and how we don’t have to interpret these mixed thoughts and feelings as a problem, or as a sign that we should have chosen differently.

Something else I’ve mentioned in more than one episode, but haven’t talked about at great length, is the fact that if we make a decision, and we really don’t like living in the circumstances our decisions create, we CAN choose again.  We’re never doomed by any decision we make.  If we make a choice, and we find that we really don’t like it, we can always change course.  And we can do this EVEN IF we made our decision for reasons that we really liked.  We can decide to change course even if we make the original decision with a very well-managed mind, or from the standpoint of really clean thinking.  Sometimes we choose something for reasons that we genuinely think are great for us, and then we try it out, and we realize we just don’t want to keep on doing the thing we chose to do.

And what I want to affirm today is that that is totally okay.  And I’m going to tell you a story about how I recently did this.  I recently made a pretty big commitment to move my business in a certain direction, and I did a lot of work to create something new, and then shortly after putting that new thing forth into the world, I decided to pull the plug on it.

And I’m going to tell you about this because I want to help illustrate that changing your mind really is an option.  I want to help illustrate that we are allowed to extricate ourselves from commitments, and even when we decided to do something for reasons that we thought we really liked, it’s okay to say, you know what, after actually doing this for however long I’ve been doing it, I don’t want to keep doing this for any longer.

Now having said all of that, I do want to stress that it is my FIRM BELIEF that we can save ourselves a lot of time and energy and angst and trouble and suffering if we make important decisions in our lives deliberately and systematically, from the place of having at least a relatively managed mind, and from the place of being able to relate to our emotions at least reasonably intentionally.  Right?  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, hearing me say those things will probably not be the least bit surprising.  But if you’re new to this podcast, let me tell you that you CAN learn how to manage your mind, and you CAN learn how to develop a conscious relationship with your emotions, and doing these two things reasonably well will change your life, and will make dealing with your infidelity situation a whole lot simpler.

So before I say anything more about how VERY okay it is to change your mind, I do want to reiterate that it is possible to learn how to make decisions systematically rather than haphazardly, and doing so will benefit you immensely.  For one thing, it’s really hard to know if you want to change your mind, or un-do a decision you’ve made, if you don’t really know why you made a particular decision in the first place.  Also, not being able to relate to your emotions in a reasonably conscious and intentional way makes it a LOT harder to know if you want to change your mind, or if you just need to get through some gnarly emotional stuff.  Sometimes even the best decisions come with some really challenging emotional experiences.  When we know how to deal with uncomfortable emotions, we don’t have to automatically interpret them as a sign that we made a decision we don’t like and we need to change something.  When we do NOT know how to deal with uncomfortable emotions, we’re a lot more likely to interpret discomfort as an indication that we made a bad choice and need to fix it – and that might not actually be what we need to do.  Furthermore, it’s hard to think clearly about how you want to pivot after making a decision you don’t like if you don’t know how to digest your emotions.

So, nothing I will say today eclipses the value of making decisions deliberately and consciously and for reasons that you like.  There’s tremendous value in that.  And, even when we do this, we do sometimes find that we really don’t like the choices we made, and we want to adjust our trajectory.

So here’s what happened with my group program.

In the coaching world, or at least, the corners of the coaching world that I dip in and out of, there’s sort of this idealized path of building a successful one-on-one coaching practice, and then moving towards creating some scalable offer, so that you can help more clients, and you can leverage your time differently, and of course, grow your income in ways that it can be hard to do when seeing clients one-on-one is the way you make money.  And I’d been aware of this possible path for years, and I was always kind of like, well, I guess I should probably go down that road myself.  That’s what I’ve seen a lot of sensible and successful people do, so that’s probably what it makes sense for me to do, too.

In addition to all of that, I’ve had plenty of people tell me that I really owe it to people who are engaging in infidelity to create some way that these folks can see that they’re not alone, and create some way for these folks to come together and create some sort of anonymous community.  People have told me things like, “Look, people who are cheating feel really isolated and alone, and they would really benefit from seeing that they aren’t actually alone in what they are experiencing.  This is a need that exists in the world, and you are poised to meet this need, and it’s important to you to be of service others in this way.”

And I carefully considered these various inputs for years.  I like working with clients one-on-one – and I’ll say a lot more about that later – so I was never in a huge rush to create some sort of group program thing, but I also recognized that doing so could have some very definite benefits for me, and for people who want to work with me, and that sounded pretty good.  

After a couple of years of considering starting up a group program, I decided last year that it was probably time to stop thinking about it, and time to actually do it.  So I thought long and hard about MY reasons for starting up a group program, and I made sure that I liked my reasons, and I did, so I began the process of creating it.  And creating it took a fair amount of time and effort, and of course some money, AND it required a fair amount of belief in the value of what I was doing.  In order to keep the project of creating the program moving forward on the schedule I’d set for myself, I had to get some fucking work done on it every day, or at least, several days out of the week.  And in order to get all that work done, week in and week out, I had to really believe in the value of what I was creating.  And I did that, very intentionally.   

Once we make a decision and commit to taking action in the service of that decision, it behooves us to actively think about why we’ve made a great decision, and intentionally think about the benefits of the decision we’ve made.  And that can take effort, even when we truly believe we’ve made a great decision.  Actively bolstering our belief that we’re doing something for reasons that we like is – wait for it – an active process.  And I’m pointing this out because a lot of times, we don’t WANT bolstering our beliefs to be an active process that requires effort.  We want to make a decision and feel great about it and not have to do anything else.  We want to make a decision and never feel any doubt.  We just want to make a decision and be SURE that what we’re doing is awesome, and we want to feel awesome all the time about it.  And sometimes that happens, but sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes we have to actively commit to generating enthusiasm or excitement or dedication to a decision we’ve made, or a course of action we’re taking.  And that doesn’t mean we’re trying to convince ourselves of something we don’t believe.  It’s just a reflection of the fact that our brains can do all sorts of weird things, and one of them is stir up doubt, just for the heck of it.  Or to try and convince us to NOT do something we want to do, just because it usually takes a lot less effort to do nothing than it takes to do anything other than nothing.   

When we don’t manage our minds, we’re a lot more likely to create results in our lives that we don’t like, and wonder how on earth we got to where we are.

So anyway, I was creating my group program, and I was thinking very intentionally about why I was so pleased to be putting it together and getting ready to offer it to the world.  And with this kind of thinking, I was about as excited about my group program as I could possibly be.  I was as genuinely enthusiastic about offering this thing as I could possibly be.  And that was great.

And then the group program came alive, and by that I mean, it was officially something people could join, and people did join.  And right away, there were some things I liked about running the program.  And there were some things that I didn’t like so much about it, but that didn’t surprise me too much, and it first, it didn’t concern me.  I was totally prepared to not love every single thing about doing this new and different thing that I was doing.

But then, pretty quickly, I noticed something that I knew I needed to take seriously.  And that was that I did not want to have the kind of coaching relationship with my clients that a group program allows for.

When I work with clients one-on-one, our relationship is consistent, intimate, and rigorous.  As you may or may not know, the way I currently work with one-on-one clients is, we have an initial session, and then if we decide to work together beyond that initial session, we start off with a package of ten hour-long sessions, which we do our best to schedule at a regular weekly time.  Now some people say to me, I don’t want to commit to ten sessions, can we do fewer than ten?  And my answer is no, because I know that we need a minimum of ten sessions in order to get you from where you are to where you want to go.  I know that from experience.  Once upon a time I tried to cater to clients’ desires to commit to fewer than ten sessions, and I quickly learned that I simply was not okay with doing that.  Because here’s the thing.  When we get into a coaching relationship together, we go on a journey together, and as the person guiding that journey, I am very committed to doing my best to avoid a situation in which I lead you into the forest, and then just leave you there, stuck in the woods without a path out.  When you want changes in your life, you have to be willing to walk into the forest and get a little lost.  That’s just part of the deal.  That’s part of the “normal” process of making changes.  But as the person who takes you through that process, I want to do the best I can to ensure that you make it OUT of the forest!  I do NOT want to guide you into the forest without being sure that you’re going stick with me for long enough for me to get you out of the forest.  In other words, I need a certain level of commitment and investment from you to ensure that I can provide you with the best version of my service that I can provide.  And ten sessions is what I have found is the minimum number of sessions in which I can help people successfully deal with their infidelity situations.  I work with some people for more than ten sessions, and in the future, I might move to a model in which I only work with people who want to work with me for a longer period of time.  But, for now, for various reasons which I like very much, I ask people to commit to ten sessions because I know that’s enough for us to at least make a good dent in whatever challenges they’ve come to me for help with.

Now, there are a lot of coaches out there who will say, well, you teach everyone you work with the same things, essentially.  So what you can do is put all of your core teachings into something that any of your clients can access anytime, and then you just give them short snippets of coaching in a group coaching program format, and everybody learns from everybody else in the group getting coached.  And I agree with this, to a point.  I certainly agree that this model works really well for some coaches, and for some participants in group coaching programs.  And I agree that some of these ideas apply to the way I work, too.  For instance, I do teach everyone I work with the same things insofar as the tools and concepts I work with are extremely consistent.  My core teachings don’t change from client to client, and to some extent, I’m totally comfortable with distilling my teachings into a product that people can purchase, and make use of as they see fit.  And that’s why the DIY version of You’re Not the Only One still exists.  You can go buy it right now and start making use of it right now if you want to.  It’s a great way to get more of my teachings than I can offer on this podcast, and more guidance of how to make USE of my teachings than I can offer you in the podcast format.

BUT.  What I quickly learned once I started actually coaching people in a group coaching format is that if I’m going to have a coaching RELATIONSHIP with you of any kind, I want it to be the kind of coaching relationship I have with my one-on-one clients.  I want it to be consistent, intimate, and rigorous.  The end!  I knew before starting the program that I wouldn’t be able to have this kind of a coaching relationship with clients within the context of a group coaching program, but I had no idea how much it mattered to me.  I had to try it and see before I realized that having the kind of a coaching relationship with my clients that a group coaching program allows for really didn’t sit well with me.

And, on top of that, I also very quickly decided that if I can’t have the kind of coaching relationship I want to have with you, I do not want to have a coaching relationship with you.  Anyone can be a consumer of my products.  Anyone can listen to my podcast, and do whatever they want with what they hear me say.  Anyone can purchase the self-guided version of You’re Not the Only One, and use it in whatever ways they want to.  That’s fine with me.  I’m okay with putting something static that I’ve created out there, and letting people make use of it in whatever ways they make use of it.  But.  If we are going to interact, or have the potential of interacting, within the context of you paying me money to be your coach, there’s only one way I want to do that.  One-on-one.

And that’s not because it’s inherently better to coach people one-on-one than in any other format.  That’s not because it’s necessarily less effective to coach people within the context of a group coaching program.  It’s not because of any of that.  It’s because this is the way I want to do my work, this is the way that I think I can be most true to what I have to offer my clients, and thus, this is the way that I think I can be of the greatest value to my clients.

Once I recognized this all of this, I was like, okay, Houston, we have a problem.  I was like, I KNOW that these concerns are a real sticking point for me.  This isn’t something I’m interested in changing my thinking about.  I have absolutely zero desire to try and talk myself out of liking one-on-one coaching less than I do, and I have absolutely zero desire to try and cultivate more willingness to coach people outside of the one-on-one client-coach relationship.  I just don’t want to do that.  

That part wasn’t the problem.  Recognizing, okay, this is where I’m at wasn’t a problem at all.  It was actually quite great to recognize what I wanted and what I didn’t want with such clarity and certainty.  But what seemed like it might be a problem was the fact that I’d just started this group coaching program up!  People had just joined it!  People could still join it!  I’d advertised it publicly!  How would people react if I pulled the plug?  Would people who had joined the program be mad at me – even if I offered them some sort of recompense?  Would people who had been listening to me promote this program think I was flaky or undependable if I announced that I was ceasing to operate it after only two months?  

And more importantly, I wondered what I might owe myself in this situation.  Sure, I’d recognized something that was important to me, but did I owe it to myself to try this way of working with people for longer for any good reason?  And if I did, for how much longer did I owe it to myself to keep going with this thing?  I wondered if I owed the program something, by virtue of having created it.

Now, I KNOW these kinds of questions and concerns will sound rather familiar to at least some of you, because many of my clients ask themselves these very questions about what they owe their relationships, or what they owe to themselves in terms of trying to make their relationships work – even when they’re pretty sure that their enthusiasm for the relationship in question is practically non-existent.

So here’s what I did.  I asked myself these questions, and I made myself ANSWER them.  And that’s something that I encourage you to do, too.  If you’re asking yourself what you owe someone, or what you owe yourself, answer those questions.  Don’t just keep asking yourself the questions without answering them.

What I initially thought was that I might owe my group program a year.  I thought I might owe myself a year of exploring coaching people in this manner for a year, so that I could make a decision about whether or not I wanted to continue coaching people in this way with more experience of actually doing it under my belt.  And from a certain standpoint, this sounded like a reasonable way of thinking about the situation.  Sometimes you have to stick with something for a while before you even have the chance of enjoying it, and sometimes it’s worth it to stick with something to see if enjoyment comes with more exposure, or more experience.  SOMETIMES.

But in this case, I very quickly recognized that I just didn’t WANT to do that.  Even if on some level, continuing to run the group program for a year before making a decision to shut it down seemed like a reasonable thing to do, I simply didn’t want to.  And from there, I had to ask myself what the consequences of keeping the group program up and running if I really didn’t want to be doing that would be.  What would the consequences be for me, and what would the consequences be for my work, and for my clients?  I came up with a LOT of answers to those questions, and I didn’t like ANY of them.  I quickly became quite sure that trying to convince myself to continue delivering my services in a way that I felt less than great about was not going to create any good outcomes for anybody.  

Could I have kept the program going and coached people adequately within it?  Yes, I am sure I could have.  I am confident that I can coach just about anyone more than adequately in any just about any context.  But that isn’t the POINT!  The point is that I want to deliver a service that I feel great about delivering.  I’m not shooting for adequate.  I’m shooting for much better than adequate.  Very important sidenote: sometimes, adequate is the best we can do.  And some days, we might not even hit that bar!  In work, or in our relationships, or in any area of our lives.  It's really important to me to point that out here.  But if I say anything more about that right now, I’ll take us off on a tangent that I don’t want to take us on, so that’s the end of the sidenote.

Back to what I was saying.  In addition to deciding that providing my services in a way that I was at best ambivalent about wasn’t going to do anything great for anyone, I also decided that I didn’t owe it to myself, on any level, to continue this thing that I’d started just because I’d started it.  Like I said a few moments ago, at first I thought, well, I created this thing, so maybe I owe it something, as the entity that it is, by virtue of having created it.  But ultimately, I decided that I didn’t.  I also wondered if I might owe myself, as the creator of this thing, anything in terms of seeing it out, to any particular point of development or maturity.  I seriously considered the possibility that I might.  But ultimately, I decided that I didn’t.  I DID however decide that I owed the program participants something, since I’d sold them a program as if it was going to continue for a long time and then closed it down after two months.  So I decided what I owed them, and I offered it to them.  I’ll say a little more about that later.

After I made these decisions, I felt a little sheepish.  I wondered if maybe I should have known before I decided to start a group coaching program that I wasn’t going to feel good about coaching people in that group coaching program format, or context.

Now, obviously, thinking this way did not feel very good, because should feels like shit.  Thinking “I should have known better” felt awful.  But I only entertained that thought for like, five minutes.  Okay, maybe it was more like five hours.  But it wasn’t long.  And the reason why it wasn’t long was because I actively dealt with that thought, instead of letting myself get sucked into the abyss by it.

And what I decided when I actively dealt with that thought was that I really don’t think there’s any way that I could have known for sure that I did not want to coach people in a group coaching format until I tried it.  I had thought A LOT about the differences between one-on-one coaching and coaching people in a group coaching program format before I started the program, and I certainly recognized that I had some doubts about coaching people outside of the framework of a one-on-one coaching relationship.  But I examined all of my doubts very thoroughly and very carefully, and I decided that none of them constituted reasons I didn’t want to try launching a group coaching program.  I decided that despite whatever concerns I had, I also believed that trying this new way of offering my services could be GREAT.  I was totally on board with the, “this could be great” thoughts.  

Sometimes we get to the point of, I think this could be great – whatever the “this” is – so therefore, I really want to try it, and I’m going to dedicate myself to giving this my best shot.

And so we give it our best shot.  And sometimes, it DOES turn out great!  And that’s lovely and nice and wonderful.

And sometimes, we give it our best shot and we DON’T love how things turn out.

And I want to suggest that that outcome is NOT A PROBLEM.  Not everything we try has to work out “well” in order for it to have been the “right” thing for us to do.  Not everything we do has to be a success in order for it to contribute to our overall success in life.  After shutting the group program down I was telling a friend who works in tech about what had happened, and he said something like, “Oh yeah, MOST of the things we create don’t work out.  MOST of the products we develop don’t end up being successes.”  That’s not exactly how he put it, but I think that captures the essence of what he said, and I think the essence of what he said is really important for all of us to keep in mind.  What if the point isn’t for everything we try to be “successful”?  Or to get away from the word successful, what if everything we try doesn’t have to work out well?  What if everything we try doesn’t have to end up being something we want to stick with?  What if everything we try doesn’t have to end up being something that we enjoy?  Rather, what if the point is for us to keep on trying new things, so that we may better learn what works and what doesn’t?  

The only way to refine our efforts in a particular capacity, or to refine our sense of who we are and what we want is to keep moving.  When we resist making choices and changes, when we resist moving forward – however incrementally – we keep ourselves stuck.  And stagnant.  And stagnation, in general, is not a good thing.  We all get stuck and stagnant in various ways at various times, and that’s just part of being human.  If you know you’re dealing with some significant stagnation in your life, this is not a criticism of you.  It’s just an invitation to allow the floodgates to open a little bit.  It’s an invitation to allow the energy of yourself and your life to move and flow a little more freely.

So often I see folks who get REALLY stuck on the fear of “making the wrong decision” in relation to their infidelity situation.  And this fear sometimes keeps people stuck from doing ANYTHING to change their situation for months upon months, or even years upon years.  And you know, if you’ve felt stuck within your infidelity situation for what seems to you like a long time, that this feels REALLY BAD.  So many of us know this, and yet we’re so afraid of taking a step forward because who knows, it could end up being the “wrong decision”!

In my own experience with shutting down my group program so sooner after starting it up, there WAS some weirdness associated with the decision – and at the time of recording this podcast, there still is some lingering stuff that I’m dealing with.  For instance, I’ve offered everyone who enrolled in the program something because I shut it down so much sooner than I told people I was going to, and although I felt great about my reasons for doing that, dealing with this piece of business has been kind of a pain in the ass.  And that’s not that big of a deal, but it has been a little bit of a deal.  

Furthermore, it was kind of a strange experience to put a whole bunch of work into something, and then say okay, I did that thing, but I don’t want to do that anymore.  I invested a whole bunch of time and energy into something that I’m choosing to disengage from.  I’ve had all kinds of thoughts about closing my program down, and thus, I’ve had all kinds of feelings about closing it down.  I’ve thought things like, “Oooh, maybe people will think I’m capricious and flaky.  I don’t WANT people to think I’m capricious and flaky.”  Thinking those thoughts does NOT feel good.  

Here's something I really want you to note, people.  What I’m describing here is the experience of feeling very sure of a decision I was making, and also feeling somewhat uncomfortable about making that decision.  Sometimes certainty feels like pure awesome.  But sometimes certainty doesn’t feel like pure awesome.  And that doesn’t mean you aren’t certain.  The way to be certain is to decide that you’re certain.

I also want to emphasize that I’d rather have done it this way than any other way.

And when I remember that the point of making decisions with a managed mind is not to never make a decision that I don’t end up wanting to stick with forever, I feel free.

Now, is shutting down a group coaching program that’s only existed for a matter of a couple of months a little different from, say, ending a decades-long relationship?  Of course it is.  Of course it’s MORE than a little different.  But the themes I’m talking about today apply to infidelity situations, not just to the specific experiences of mine that I’m describing.

We often think that it’s going to be “really bad” if we make a decision and don’t like it.  And then, if we think that often enough, we usually convince ourselves that it TRULY will be really bad if we make a decision and don’t like it, so the decision we make is to stick with the status quo, even though we don’t like it.  And by doing that, we often prove ourselves right in the most tragic of ways.  We end up making a decision – even if it doesn’t seem like a decision – and we really don’t like what we get from it.

I want you to consider that even if you made a decision and you ended up REALLY not liking the results of your decision, that might be better than sticking with the status quo.  Because you can always move forward, having learned what you learned from the experience of having actually made a decision and tried something out.

Now, sometimes people say yeah, but what if I make a decision to leave a relationship, and after I leave that relationship, I realize I shouldn’t have let that relationship go, and then I can’t get that relationship back, and I’m miserable forever?  Or something like that.  People love to pose questions of that sort.  And there’s a LOT I could say about questions of that sort.  If that’s where your mind is, there are a lot of assumptions embedded within that question that you may want to examine and perhaps shift your thinking on.  But for now, I’ll just say this.  If you get to the point of considering that you really might want to leave a relationship, it’s worth taking that just as if not more seriously than your fear of what might happen if you were to make a decision about the relationship that you later wouldn’t like, and that you couldn’t undo. 

Also, I think it’s really important to cultivate trust that your life can get better, and more importantly, YOU can make your life better.  That’s a really big deal.  Some of us have never trusted that we can make our lives better, even if only in really tiny steps forward.  

Sometimes when we’re unhappy we want things to either remain familiar and comfortable and safe – or we want to be transported to our perfect new life immediately.  We either want to stay in the safety of the known, even if we’re kind of miserable within it, or we want to have the process of change behind us, and we want to be living in a version of the future that we find 100% pleasing.  I’m sympathetic to this kind of thinking, but I also want you to consider that hoping that there’s a way to instantly get to our desired future without taking one step at a time to get there is a recipe for staying stuck where you are. 

And it may be scary to trust that change is possible, and that life can be better.  It can be really scary to trust that making a decision or two or ten that we don’t like may be part of the process of making our lives better.

But we CAN start to trust this.  We can PRACTICE trusting this.  And that may start with recognizing, intellectually, that when we don’t make ANY decisions, because we’re afraid of making the “wrong” decision, we don’t learn anything new.  If we choose to stay in our current relationship situation because we’re scared of making a choice and then coming to regret it later, we don’t figure anything out.  We don’t move forward.  We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to experience something better, and we also don’t give ourselves the opportunity to experience something that we don’t really like, and then LEARN from that.

I think it’s also important for us to remember that a) the worst-case scenarios we fear might come from making a “bad decision” or the “wrong decision” may never come to pass, and b) even if they did, they might not be as terrible as we fear they would be, and c) even if we WERE totally miserable living in the results of a decision we made, we would still have the power to do something about that.  Even if we make a decision that changes our life in a lot of ways that we really don’t like, we can still move towards circumstances we prefer if we are willing to keep on making choices that move us forward.

All right!  That’s enough for today!  If you are ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, I would love to help you do it.  We can work together one-on-one, or you can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening!  I’ll be back atcha in two weeks.  Bye for now.