Last night John and I sat across from each other and marked twenty-six years married. We talked for a long time about what we have learned about ourselves inside this marriage. The upsets that kept showing up, the milestones, the love, the safety it takes to keep growing and keep changing with another person for this long.
Here is what we landed on.
Every relationship runs on three tracks at once. There is your combined journey, the place you hope to grow and go together. Then there are two individual tracks, yours and theirs, where your own hopes, desires, preferences, and inner work happen on your own terms.
When one person says I don’t want to keep going, they have stepped onto their own individual track. When the other person keeps walking their path of inner growth and spiritual development anyway, that becomes an invitation. The first person can join back in, or they can stay where they are for a while.
John and I have lived every version of this. There have been seasons where neither of us wanted to do the work anymore. Seasons where one of us grew in a way that rolled a boulder right onto our combined path, and suddenly we both had an invitation, to grow together and to grow on our own. We have done all of it.
And every time growth showed up, we each had a choice about how deep we were willing to go.
I have healed from abandonment in this marriage. John has healed from struggling to trust. We are all shaped by our own inner wounds, and our partner may carry something completely different. For me, everything used to feel like abandonment. A text that came back too slowly. John choosing a path of growth that scared me. A work trip out of town. That was the lens I saw my whole life through.
I have done a tremendous amount of work on this. In the beginning I only did enough to put the fire out. Whatever remedy would bring the flames down, I reached for it, but I never got underneath to the embers. So the next time something triggered that old abandonment wound, the flames came roaring back. I put the fire out again. And again.
Until I decided to go all the way in and shovel out the embers myself. Therapy. EMDR. A weekly group of women I listened to and learned from. Prayer. Church. The writing. I looked at each hot ember, felt what was under it, and faced it.
Now, when the same old moments happen, my house doesn’t catch fire. The embers are gone.
That is the work. Finding the embers underneath and clearing them out for good.
Where in your life are you still just putting out fires? What would it take to go find the embers?
Much love,
Gretchen
