User Article: When Journaling Feels Impossible Check-in (AKA Bullet /Micro Journal)
“I don’t want to f***ing journal!!
This is the inner dialogue of my mind as I sit in a rupture between me and my wife, after multiple attempts at repair, and absolutely nothing landing.
The Internal Experience
This is one of those moments: I don’t want to journal. I don’t want to open the app, click the button, scroll the feelings wheel and have to feel these feelings of hopelessness, sadness, depression, and face the very real possibility that this will simply never get better, or even that the relationship will last.
Reconciliation is never promised just because she stays, or just because you’ve had a few good years. I’ve done, as much as I can see with my current pair of glasses, all I can do to submit to the posture of humble repair and empathy. The distance from my thumb to my phone and to the home screen feels like a million, kajillion miles away. I don’t even want to look at my phone right now. The inner workings of my own pain, hopelessness, despair, and frustrations are clouding the reality of the moment. Because of this, I would rather brood. Brood with contempt and resentment. Brood with the self-righteous indignation that it’s completely her problem, and I can’t do anything more on my end. But that’s not the truth. There is always something to own. Thomas Berry from one of trusted resources at Redemptive Living says, “There is always something to own.”
On Ownership
I broke my wife’s trust in many ways years ago. The way I manipulated her reality with the gaslighting, the misdirection, and the flat-out lying was atrocious. That doesn’t simply go away after a few years of recovery when it was present for so much longer. That’s reality.
The pain that she feels is real,
and visceral,
and acute,
and heavy.
It’s suffocating and at the same time all energy-consuming. It’s blinding in that it lets no other emotion enter to be experienced.
That is the pain that I have caused.
There is no family-of-origin wound that will hurt worse than what I did to the one person I committed my life to. I did those things. And I still do things. Things that definitely don’t have the same heart, intent, or effect, but have the same aura. Things like passivity, pride, and lack of intentionality. And while these things matter, they represent and feel much greater than they actually are because of what I’ve done.
And to experience that pain again? It must be debilitating.
What Really Matters
In this moment, I gut-check into asking myself, “What really matters?” here in a moment where I don’t want to sit and do the check-in. No one will see it. It will just be my words. I’m not being graded on it, and it serves no other purpose than that which I designate to it. And that’s the point. It’s for me.
And so I head to the check-in, or the deep journal, and I write. Not because I certainly want to, but because it’s good for me. It will help me. It will ground me and put me into a position to see more clearly. It will, ultimately, push me one step closer to who I am called to be:
A man of integrity. That’s the only type of man I want to be.
If you’re reading this, I encourage you to do the journal. Feel the emotions. We won’t die from emotions; it will be uncomfortable to sit in pain. But recovery has to start with us, the one who broke trust, the one who betrayed our spouse. It must start with us. And it can start here, by denying that inner sense that wants to frolic in the field of resentment, rather than look inward, own what I can own, and take a step toward release and restoration.
What really matters is showing up. Showing up for me first. Then for her. Because if I can’t show up and do what I need to do, the relationship doesn’t stand a chance.
