What a Weekend!

Status report: Halfway through Chapter Nine. Almost 25,000 words into the first draft. It's going a lot slower than I wanted it to, but it's going.

My wife and I started the rest of our life together this weekend. We attended a training program called Discovery! Relationship. You know, I thought we had a pretty good marriage--but this weekend, we took it to the next step. This weekend, we acquired the tools to go from good to great.

The idea behind the Discovery! training programs is simple: get into a big room with a bunch of people, strip away the excuses and lies we use to protect ourselves from the things we don't want to talk about, and start digging. It's thorough: you end up confronting issues you thought you were over. It's hard: you dig into yourself, uncovering places where you're still raw and bleeding, then you dig some more. And amazingly, it's safe: when you are in a convention hall full of people, all baring their hearts, many of which bear wounds deeper and more profound than your own, you feel a sense of security and cameraderie like none I've ever experienced. And you leave a different person--or in the case of this weekend, a different couple--than you were before, more secure in your own skin, having confronted your old issues and ready for whatever new ones life throws at you.

It seemed like a cult before I went, because no one who has been through it will talk about it and because no one has a harsh word to say about it. But it differs from a cult in a critical way: where a cult conditions its members to remain inside and avoid interacting with the rest of the world, this equips its trainees specifically to go back into the world--healthy and capable, finally able to become what they might without standing in their own way.

It was an amazing weekend. My wife and I are both exhausted, but excited. We accomplished more in forty-eight hours than we have in the last three years, and left there more in love than we have been in a long time.

I'm going to the first phase of the individual training in two weeks. I'm sure only of a couple of things: first, it will be hard, and scary, and exhausting. And second,it will be worth it.

HN