What nobody tells you
Somewhere in the middle of all this there's a surprise most men don't see coming. You expect the world around you to change, and it does. What nobody warns you about is that you change too, and you'll probably be the last one to notice it happening.
What shifted for me
There wasn't one big moment. Nothing dramatic I can point to and say that was when it turned. A few things just crept in over time, quietly enough that I only clocked them once they'd already been there a while.
The first was empathy. For myself, which I'd never had much of, and for the marriage, and for my own part in how the whole thing went over a lot of years. I don't think I'd been avoiding any of that before. I just hadn't needed it yet, not the way I needed it then.
The second one caught me more off guard. I started pausing.
Something would land, a comment or a message, the kind of thing that used to have me halfway into a reply before the other person had even finished, and I'd stop. Wait a second or two. It was almost like checking in with myself first, seeing whether there was something in there already winding up for a knee-jerk swing. Usually there was. I'd respond anyway, just slower, and it went better for everyone, me included. A year before that I wouldn't have paused. I'd have fired.
People say time heals. I'm not convinced. Time passes, and it doesn't much care what you do with it while it does. What actually moved me was what I did inside that time, and I've watched plenty of men wait the same stretch out and come through the far side exactly as stuck as they went in, only older.
Change isn't optional
This is the part men push back on hardest. You don't get to opt out of changing. It's already underway, whether you're taking part or dragging your heels the whole way down the road.
I understand why that's uncomfortable. The future's uncertain and uncertainty is frightening, and the familiar thing feels safe even after it's gone. So you hold on to the man you used to be and the way life used to make sense, because gripping that feels safer than admitting the ground has already moved.
The trouble is you end up measuring yourself against a version of you that doesn't exist anymore. It's like walking around with an old map of a place that's been rebuilt. You keep looking for landmarks where you remember them and they're not there. Nothing got knocked down, exactly. You just ended up somewhere else, and you're seeing it with different eyes now.
Another way to ask it
When a client's stuck there, trying to force a new situation into an old frame that won't hold it, I tend to ask him something plain. What else could you do here, given where you actually are right now? Or is there another way to look at this? Sometimes I'll drop a completely different scenario on the table myself, just so he can see there's more than one road out.
It's a small question. I don't argue with the resistance, because arguing with it never gets anyone anywhere. More often than not he'll go quiet for a while, and then he starts talking about one of the other roads on his own.
Once you stop fighting it
It doesn't get easy. What changes is that it stops feeling like a war and starts feeling more like weather, the kind that was always going to arrive whether you'd made your peace with it or not.
You're not the man you were before this started. Some of that is loss, and a fair amount got taken from you along the way, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. A lot of it is just what happens to a person who goes through something this size.
From here
Everything around you has changed. You know that much by now. You've changed too, whether you've caught up with it yet or not.
If you want somewhere small to start, try the pause. Next time something lands and you feel the old reaction winding up, wait two seconds before you do anything at all. Just see what's in there.
I’m not sure what's changed in you, or where to start making sense of it? The Which One? quiz can help you find out. Take it here: treeoflifejourney.co.za/which-one