What if the back door is really just your awareness saying, hey, look over here, you don’t have to choose that?
What if we have a sense that the situation we are choosing isn’t in our best interest? What if we create the out for when the fantasy shows it’s facade, we have options?
I’ve been reading a lot of interesting thoughts on the back door and the desire to close it, no longer create it, what it means and more. I am really great at creating the back door, and for a good portion of my healing journey, that damn thing was the area I got the most flack. Once I was “really” healthy, I would close that door forever. hmmmm. That didn’t work out so well for me.
My childhood gifted me with supreme tools that I once labeled as survival skills and later tried to let go of under the pretense that they were somehow a disservice to living a healthy life. What if creating the back door is one of my strongest capacities?
I’ve always had a back door and I always chose something that didn’t contribute to me. Interesting.
Let’s have another look.
I unknowingly closed my back door with my first husband when I moved to Alaska with him and I cried on my wedding day before I walked down the aisle. Something inside of me knew that I didn’t want to make this choice and something inside of me wanted desperately for the fantasy to work out. When it didn’t, it took a very long time to create an out and it almost killed me.
How often are you in something, thinking about all the options you have for getting out, what you could do, where you could go, who could help you or save you? How much energy do you put into, if it doesn’t work, I can do…..? That is the back door and a clear sign that what you are choosing isn’t what you want to choose and you have some idea that something will change if you stick it out, change yourself, fix what’s broken, get better, be better and a million other things. Easy answer, choose what’s behind the back door and we are not always ready for that. Having a back door is a viable option, another choice.
The second go around, I wanted healthy, different and I was willing to do what ever it took. After five years in the relationship and on the other side of the hard stuff, I went all in. We married, bought a house and began our happily ever after and I had that damn back door open. Going all in meant letting that go, having a back door somehow meant I wasn’t fully engaged in the relationship.
Simultaneously to me closing the back door, my husband came clean with his secret life. Now what?
The minute I met him, I was all in, everything else was a trick I was playing on myself to say that I still had work to do. Not true. The back door was merely my awareness telling me that something was off, something I didn’t know was lingering and to keep an eye out and have another choice. Maybe closing the door smothered him into exposure? Maybe it called him to the table and maybe it just made it harder for me to choose anything else.
I like choices, I like options and when I am in, I am in. I’d like to consider that this whole back door thing is really just other choices. I mean, think about it, how great is it when we can open the back door of our home and get some air flow through our house, how much energy does that create in our space?
Where have you misidentified your capacities that cut off your creativity and halt your choice?
Michelle
