Couple
You've been thinking about it for years and the fear of doing it is bigger than the unhappiness of staying.
You’ve been thinking about it for years. You’ve imagined the conversation. You’ve calculated what it would cost. You’ve thought about what to do about the kids, the house, the in-laws, your shared friends. You’ve imagined being on dating apps in your forties or fifties. You haven’t done it. The fear of doing it is bigger than the unhappiness of staying. So you stay another year. And another.
The fear of leaving is what’s running the marriage now.
The decision still hasn’t been made.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up watching the adults in your life stay in marriages they shouldn’t have, and you absorbed that staying is what people do regardless of how it feels. You may have grown up with parents who divorced and you remember what it cost the kids, and you’ve vowed to never put your own children through it. You may have built your adult identity around being the kind of person who keeps their commitments, and divorcing would mean dismantling not just the marriage but who you’ve decided you are. You may have lived through a stretch of believing things would change, and the years of waiting have made the cost of leaving feel bigger than the cost of staying.
The thinking-about-divorce has become the thing you do instead of divorce. It releases pressure. It provides imagined rehearsal. It substitutes for the actual decision. As long as the thinking is doing those jobs, you don’t have to act.
The fear is also being trained by avoidance. Each year you stay, the imagined alone gets bigger because you’ve spent another year telling your system that staying was the right call. The next attempt to leave will be against an even larger fear.
If you’ve been thinking about leaving without doing it for years, see I think about leaving but I can’t . If staying is mostly about being afraid of being alone, see I stay because I’m afraid to be alone .
The thinking-about is the system that’s keeping you from deciding. Stop the thinking-about and you’ll have to decide one way or the other.
Strategic therapy treats the thinking-about-it as the symptom, not the problem. We work on what you do the moment the divorce thought arrives, because that loop has been performing a job. It releases pressure, it rehearses, it substitutes for action, and as long as it does that job you don’t have to act. With the substitute gone, deciding becomes the only thing left.
You’ll know what you’re going to do. You’ll do it.
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