Last week I started working with a client who is having trouble with her marriage as she is having an affair with a man who is her first husband. Trying to suppress the shock in my voice as I entertained the thought that I heard it all, I asked, “how did you get into this situation?’ “I have always let other people make big decisions for me,” my new client said.
As I continued to listen to my new client, I was told the countless bad decisions she had made because she thought her own input and opinion was worthless. She had been raised in an environment where her “no” was not respected and she felt she had no voice of her own. Even more so, my new client who has just turned 26 years old was still in relationships where she felt she had no voice of her own.
Things started change as she felt that confidence and backbone when she realized she was in a job she absolutely loved but was told by her family to change. From this point, she was able to pinpoint where she had gone wrong in making choices. My client could now clearly see what went wrong for her. “I decided to look into counseling when I realized I could not back out of these decisions and had to figure out a plan to move forward.”
Even though It is wise to seek counsel from other people in making large decisions, how do you figure out what is the right direction for yourself while taking into account what other people have said? Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut way.
Part of being an adult is gathering the information needed to make a decision. When you do not trust yourself, you will ask for input from other people, like your family. The surer you are about making a decision the less you will depend upon the input of others. In both cases, the decision could be a good decision or a bad decision. Growth happens when you learn from the fallout what turned out to be a bad decision and learn how to pick up those pieces yourself and prepare for another decision.
As an adult, you are still going to make mistakes. No one at any age is immune to that. When you make a decision where you have built that decision making based on what other people have told you and this decision does not work out, it is really easy to place the blame on them and carry none of the responsibility. When you make the decision yourself and the decision does not pan out like you would want, this is an experience where you have no one else to blame but you can learn from this experience to inform your next decision. It is absolutely okay to seek other people’s opinion about a major decision, but what is important is the degree that you own the decision.
If a bride is being pressured to marry the groom who is not totally on board to marry but her father is really pushing her to go through with it, the bride needs to take ownership of her decision. The father is not the one who has to be married, the bridge does. Even if this means putting the wedding on pause or cancelling it altogether, it much better to do this and own the decision that to go through with a decision you are not sure of that someone else is pushing.
In the case of my client who had put all of the weight of her decision making abelites on other people, either her family or friends, what she was not doing was trusting herself and what she knew to be true. This client was in her second marriage because her first husband was abusive, and she decided to marry her second husband out of the fear of being alone. “About three hours into the marriage I realized I made a mistake,” she said she realized making this decision out of fear of being alone was a really bad idea.
The process with this client this client is far from over. What she does have is an extremely empathetic spouse who is willing to work at this with her. Since this client has been discovering her backbone, she has started to have intentional conversations with her family who she felt did not give her the freedom to make her own choices.
Are you in the process of making a major decision where you are you balancing input from others as well as what you know to be true? What is working so far? Where do you find yourself getting stuck?
If you are looking for a therapist near you then a Google search is a great way of finding one. I happen to be a therapist in Charlotte, NC but am licensed to counsel anyone in the state of North Carolina. In Google, try looking for “psychotherapist,” “find therapist,” “therapy near me,” or even “counseling charlotte, nc.” If you feel like you have hit a wall you are not able to get past, call me at (704) 458-6298 or email me at jeffhelms@clearerthoughtspllc.com.
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