As I go through the loss of my marriage, I’m tending to lean into pain rather than turn from it. Based on what my wife says, I hurt people’s feelings on twitter during the last election. I’m sensitive about that now and hold back what I share on Twitter, Facebook and my blog out of respect for her desire for privacy and because my primary goal is to be kind. Also politics is just about the least important priority in my life right now.

Last night the Tony Awards were on TV. I love live tweeting during award shows, but it’s inconsistant with the personal brand I need to build on Twitter. At the same time, it’s part of who I am, and I’ve gotten to interact with some really fun people, especially during the Oscars.

I was having a conversation with one of the coolest people on the planet and I had a thought I liked so much I tweeted it: “Broken people look for kindness wherever it’s available and share it whenever it’s possible.” @talasyn on twitter replied with two tweets: “I’ll have to disagree. Some broken people do. Other broken people only see the ugly in people. Those are the self-absorbed bkn” and “..cont… And pride is the wedge between broken and surrendered… Stupid pride. I hate you.”

Given my sensitivity, I assumed I had offended this guy. Since I’m leaning into pain, I DM’d him and asked him to email me. I told him I think I can learn from him, and if he hates me, I want to understand why. He did email me and explained that he wasn’t saying he hated me. He was saying he hated his “stupid pride.” He also said some very nice things about me being open about my struggle.

I could have assumed I made this guy mad for whatever reason, and now he hates me. I could have unfollowed him. Instead I asked him, and as a result, I found someone I’ll probably end up having a great meal with one day where we talk about life and God and who knows what else.

140 characters can get us in trouble online, but we don’t have to stay there. People are deep, and I’m learning to explore the depths rather than running away in offense. I can’t always do it. I won’t always do it, but I want to try.

I wrote a blog post February 2nd called “Life is a Forward Moving Force.” It’s about a river adventure that was out of character for me. As a student of Milton Erickson I believe we have the power to change what we don’t like about ourselves. In his therapeutic practice, Erickson brought about big changes in personality by suggesting small changes in behavior.

The part of who I am that I want and need to change the most is my need to be comfortable. Being comfortable in every way possible has been my number one priority in every situation since I was a kid. That need for comfort results in other things I’d like to change.

The very last thing that seems natural for me to do, is sell everything that isn’t essential and go live in a different country for a year. I’m thinking that is exactly what I SHOULD do. We have an offer on our house that will hopefully result in a sale by the end of this month. We have Dave Ramsey inspired emergency funds, and I have a novel that is about 70% finished. What if I sold everything but my MacBook Pro, iPad and 5D Mark II and traveled somewhere exotic to learn a new language and culture? What if I did the thing I fear most and risk comfort in exchange for adventure? The desire to do a Big Trip is still in my soul, so why not make that my next thing in life?

I’m throwing this out to the Internet to ask for advice. Have you done something like this in your life? How did it improve the person you are today? What are some things I would need to consider? What are some places I should consider (inexpensive so I can stay at least a year)? I don’t want to roam, I want an immersive adventure. What would I do with my dogs?!?!?!?

I don’t know if I can stretch this far, but it’s what feels right. It gives Luria freedom to not worry about me competing with what she does next. It gives me an opportunity to finish the novel, and I don’t think I will ever finish it without setting time aside to focus on it. This would cause me to grow in a way, I can’t fully anticipate until it happens.

If you’ve done something like this, I’d love to hear about it. If you know someone whose done something like this, I’d love to hear their story. If you’re uncomfortable leaving a comment, email me: neal [at] geekbrief dot com.

Right after we started GeekBrief.TV, we shot some video at a small boutique distillery just north of Chicago where a husband and wife made vodka and gin. The process was fascinating. We never used the footage because it seemed too far off topic for The Brief, but I often think about what I learned that day.

The distiller explained the process of turning water into a spirit. All kinds of ingredients are mixed into the water to add flavor (when it’s gin) and to innitiate fermentation. Through heat, purity is separated from impurity and alcohol is produced. Distillation is also used to purify crude oil and water.

I like distillation as a metaphor for personal growth in the midst of a trial. I’m going through the single most awful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, but pain isn’t without gain. I’ve grown as a person though out this process in a ways I never would have with only good things happening to me. Romans 5:3-4 says, “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character…”

My life, in just about every way I can think of is at a crossroads. I have dreams and goals to create something bigger and better than what we accomplished with GeekBrief.TV. I’ll need to find good people to work with, but first I need to take some time to go through this personal distillation process where everything that isn’t loving and caring in my life gets burned away. Another part of the personal distillation process has been to work toward the core reason I failed as a husband. That process has involved counseling, group therapy and study.

Pain in life gives us an opportunity and maybe even the responsibility to grow. It’s my mission to walk through this process and have people, even people who may not like me, say “Neal is a better person than he used to be.” The pastor at my church says when we are children, life is all about what we can get, “Give me, give me, give me.” With maturity, we stop just asking “What can I get?” and start asking “What can I give?” That second question is the one I want to spend the rest of my life answering.

I hope my story also reminds people to take care of their marriages. If it’s not working, get to work on it! Go to counseling. Go to church. Talk about it. Date your spouse. Look into each other’s eyes like you used too when you were falling in love. Don’t let your marriage die without working hard to heal it. Even though the growth that comes from the pain is good, you can always choose to grow when things aren’t so bad.

In life we try to have empathy for people when they go through hard times. In my life, if I heard about someone loosing a loved one to cancer, I felt bad for them. I hated it for them, but ultimately I feel like I cannot begin to even get close to understanding what they were going through.

In the last year, two men in new media announced their marriages were ending. I’ve admired the work of both men and the marriages of both men. When they each announced their divorces, I was deeply saddened for days. I didn’t understand the sadness. I know them both a little bit on a professional level, but not very well on a personal level so the depth of my sadness was unusual. Looking back, I think I probably had a sense that my marriage wasn’t making it either.

There is no way I could have ever guessed how painful the divorce process is. Friends help in amazing ways, but unless they’ve experienced the emotional trauma of divorce they can only help so much. They try their hardest and you’ll appreciate the effort, but I’ve found it really helpful to find people going through the same thing.

At first, I attended something called RE|ENGAGE at Watermark Church in Dallas. It’s a dynamic, ongoing Wednesday night ministry designed to strengthen and heal marriages. One of the most unique things about RE|ENGAGE is its group sessions. There are couples groups, like you’d expect, but there are also groups for spouses who are there to work on their marriage without their partner. There are men’s groups and women’s groups. There is something powerful about hearing a person you don’t know, express in words the exact feelings you’re experiencing. The realization that you’re not alone in feeling the way you do is the beginning of healing. At least it has been for me.

I still believe God wants to heal marriages, but I’ve lost faith that He’ll heal mine before divorce is final. I’m switching from RE|ENGAGE to another support system called DivorceCare. DivorceCare is something that takes place in churches all over America. It’s a support group kind of thing where you walk through the pain with other people who are experiencing it too.

I’m not really in a position to hand out advice to anyone, so this is really just about what’s working for me. Friends have been amazing. Friends have also been frustrating when they haven’t understood, but mostly they’ve been amazing. Ultimately though, it’s been very important to talk to people who personally know from experience what this is like. That’s what I encourage anyone going through this to do.

It turns out we’re never quite as unique as we think we are and that’s a very beautiful thing.

I was blessed to be married to Luria for eleven years. She left home in January and just announced on her blog that she is divorcing me. We’ve continued to produce GeekBrief.TV together and I’ve tried everything I could to save the marriage. She wants something different and I wish her peace and joy. I loved her because of her kindness and she has continued to be kind to me throughout this transition.

I’ve been standing with one foot in my old life with her and one foot in my new life without her. How I feel depends on the direction I’m looking. I’ve had time to cry, pray, go to counseling, go to church, read books, talk to people who have gone through this before, and by now, I’m doing pretty okay. Pray for us both if you pray.

That’s all I’ll say about the personal stuff. Follow me on Twitter if you want to know what’s next professionally. It’s much more shiny and much more happy than this.

Thanks for watching!

Neal

This is Tim Ross, Young Adult Pastor at The Potter’s House talking to the Young Adult Ministry at Gateway Church called Seven. This explains why I’m still believing in God’s plan for my life.

Our littlest Chihuahua, Zoe can do more than she thinks she can. She’s about six inches tall, but when she stretches out her body, she’s about two feet long. To make it easier for our two little dogs to get on and off our bed, we built two stairs out of two six-inch thick cushions.  That gets our dogs six-inches from the top of the mattress. Sitting up on the bed, it looks like we created an easy journey from the hard wood floor to the cushy comforter on the bed.

From Zoe’s perspective, it doesn’t look so easy. That first step is as tall as she is. She can barely see the top and sometimes she’ll stand on the floor looking at that first step and start to doubt herself. Once she starts to doubt herself, she’ll start to whine. It’s kind of like praying. She’s crying out for outside help to overcome a problem that just seems way to big for her.

There are times when we’ll reach down and pull her up to cuddle, but more often we don’t. We know she can make it. We’ve seen her do it hundreds of times, and the path we created for her was all about making her journey easier. She just can’t see the big picture. All she sees is that big stair and she’s worried about it. She seems to have forgotten all those other times she jumped up without hesitation. I know she just has to stretch herself and put some energy into it and after a little whining, she eventually comes to the same conclusion.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen social situations as a huge obstacle. Connecting with people you want to know better seems so easy for other people, but for me? I really have to stretch myself and put some energy into to it. When I’m focused on how hard it seems, it’s easy to forget all the times in the past when I did what was required and it worked out great. I assume Zoe thinks she’s going to miss if she tries to take that jump, but the thing she fears almost never happens. Same thing with me in social situations. The things I fear almost never happen, and even when they do I survive and I end up a little smarter than before.

I wonder how many times in life we end up not doing something that could turn out great, just because that first step is all we’re looking at and it seems way too big and way too scary. In reality the path is not the big, old, bad challenge we fear. The pathway has probably been setup for us in a way that makes it possible for us to win. All we have to do is stretch ourselves and put some energy into it. I learned that from a Chihuahua!

On the phone this afternoon, a friend told me about the concept of Future Tripping. Wm. Paul Young defines it as…

creating imaginations of what is going to happen and then actually take a mental and emotional trip to live there for a bit.  It is ‘what am I going to do if _________ (fill in the blank), what am I going to say if __________, what would our family go through if _____________.

I rarely Future Trip in a negative way. I typically focus on the pros and ignore the cons. As I plan a project, I anticipate all the success and happiness that will come our way once the project gets going. Imagining life is going to be all good or imagining all that might go wrong is not the best use of time and energy.

Future Tripping activates very real emotions. If you Future Trip about all that can go wrong, you experience much of the fear, sadness or anger that you experience when things actually do go wrong. If you future trip about all that can go right, you might experience hope and excitement but reality will likely bring disappointment.

We can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we happen to the world.

Not Future Tripping is all about ceasing the day, living in the now and taking no thought for tomorrow. It’s about intentionally controlling how you happen to the world.

When I was about 12-years-old, I got to see Zig Ziglar speak. Up until Zig, the only people I had seen standing on a stage talking were preachers. Zig is a motivational speaker. He’s funny and compelling. I wanted to grow up and do that.

The desire to become a motivational speaker persisted through college. I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand how people think. I started working on self-help book ideas around the time I fell in love with the Internet and learned HTML. The Internet won out over my dream to be a pop-psychology guru, but my first book was going to start with these two sentences:

Life is a forward moving force. There’s little to be gained by wallowing in the negative aspects of your past.

I was inspired by Milton Erickson in college. He demonstrated that big changes where accomplished when people made small changes in their lives. Start doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do and you’ll start to notice that everything else in your life will shift to accommodate the small change. Life is a forward moving force is a thought that came to me after taking a completely out-of-character kayak trip down the Buffalo National River in Arkansas.

Luria/Cali and I planned like crazy for the trip. We packed enough dried food and provisions to last a month. We didn’t have much money, so we bought inflatable kayaks and plastic paddles. My grandmother dropped us off on a river bank and we floated away. Before we were out of my grandmother’s sight, our paddles broke and the water pushed us right into a pile of brush where there were several water moccasins coiled up getting some sun. We used our hands and broken paddles to escape from the snakes and back into the flow of the river.

It took us about three days to get to a place where we could get out of the river and walk to a phone. We had to adapt to our circumstances in order to keep the boat moving. We made our way with broken paddles, our hands, and the natural flow of the river. The river was a moving force and nothing we could do would stop it. It pushed us into the snakes and we had to deal with that. We had to cope with whatever challenges the river threw our way and it didn’t matter that our tools were inadequate. We had to adapt.

Life is a forward moving force just like a river. Sometimes it’s relaxing and fun and just kind of carries us along. Sometimes the current is overwhelming and we have to struggle to get back on track. It may feel like changes we need to make are more than we can handle, but sometimes little changes can bring about radical transformation.

Our trip down the river changed my life in a lot of ways. It made me stronger, more outgoing and more willing to take risks. It was transformational because it was the kind of thing I would never choose to do. It’s good to remember the snakes and broken paddles were only a small part of the journey. It’s even better to remember how we made it through.

In life, we fall in to patterns. Something we do kind of works for us one time, so we do it again. It kind of works again, so we keep repeating that particular way of doing it until we get to the point where we don’t even think about it. It’s second nature.

Some patterns are helpful. When I was learning Final Cut Pro, the interface seemed overwhelming. I learned the basics, did them every day the same as the day before and soon enough I *knew* how to edit a video in Final Cut. I added skills every day, but the basic pattern or workflow was the same. After awhile, something that took me 3-4 hours started to only take me 1-2. An extra three hours knocked off a days work leaves time to go to a movie.

Other patterns turn out to be harmful. They still start the same way though. You do something and it works so you continue it. I grew up enjoying politics as a game. It involves strategy and debate, and if you get good at it, you get to play on the cable channels on TV. When I first developed an interest in politics, I guess the people around me shared it because I never initially experienced playing the game as a negative thing. Fun, lively and even aggressive debate was something that once only brought me positive experiences.

As an adult though, I’ve been surprised to discover most other adults do not pay attention to what is happening in Washington for hours every day. The Sunday Morning political roundtables may be the place I bonded to my grandfather, but they’re not on most people’s radar. In the past few months it has been a revelation to me to learn that chances are more likely someone won’t want to argue politics with me than that they will. Good to know.

The first step in overcoming a negative pattern is to understand it as a problem. If you don’t regard it as a problem, you won’t fix it. If you’re stuck, but are blissfully unaware that you’re stuck, why would you try? You’re in a pattern because it initially worked for you, but when you learn that it causes problems for people in you life, you begin to understand it wasn’t working for you after all and THAT becomes your motivation to get unstuck–to change.

Unless there is a physical addiction or emotional dependence involved, change isn’t really as difficult as we want to make it. Finding out it is a problem is a beginning, but understand how it is a problem for people you care about is the key to getting unstuck. You want to get unstuck because you care.

The way to change is to change. You set your mind to a different course and you follow it. You walk in that new direction and find new positive patterns that work for you AND for the people around you. It takes some time before you are not inclined to fall back into the old patterns, but you’ll find getting unstuck is almost always as hard or as easy as you expect it to be.