I have similar experiences with an ex-girlfriend. We had been distant for a while, but have recently gotten much closer. I was and in some ways, still am in a bit of a difficult situation myself, but I often felt that she wanted to more of a mother and less of a girlfriend, or potential wife. I always felt we bonded so much more when I was struggling, her knack for mothering and caring gave her so much comfort that she couldn't let go when I felt better. We talk a lot now, but there is still this sense that she gets upset and often a bit angry when I know I am closer with the way. While I feel greatly connected to her, she becomes distant and will not just let me be.

I love her, and try greatly to explain to her what is happening, but she sometimes just can't or won't see. I believe she is attached to a certain quality of myself that I am trying to let go of, and when it is gone, she wonders why I become like I do.

Anyhow, my advice is that helping others is always a truly gratifying experience, but one must not let go of what is important in their life in order to please another. If it is myself changing that someone cannot accept, it may be best to move on. Honesty and talking will always yield better peace of mind. I talk with my girlfriend about all of this, and and hate keeping these thoughts at bay. But only you will know what works for you, and don't let that go. Well, I suppose Taoism would imply we should let that go too...

Thus, rather than "embracing the hurt", learn the lesson embedded within it. Your need creates your hurt. It is totally within and has nothing whatsoever to do with the outside world. Of course, our biology strives to hoodwink us into seeing it otherwise. We are tricked into feeling that holding on to what we need will make us happy. The reality is just the opposite. Mother Nature is a ruthless rascal.

Thanks for that clarity, Carl.
The discomfort of maturing seems to be defended by our biology, just as you say. Even worse it's still only our choice, the mind and heart do what we tell them to.

I sometimes see that big, reliable pain of holding on to what i 'need', as the pounding of waves against my ship as the sails of te pull me along smoothly but insistently.
My attention wants to look at nothing but the waves and feel nothing but how much they hurt. That's a false loyalty, an immaturity as you point out, that just doesn't help anybody, me or the ones I love.
So far when reality hits my fan, I only mentally understand that I have no choice but to 'learn from the hurt' and grow from the learning. My stubborn loyalty to my stagnations, and the resulting TV-quality drama of those waves and me smacking each other around, won't change the givens of living. Those aren't going to go away, or hurt any less until I shift my attention.

What a ruthless, precise device we find ourselves in! The Old Gal nurtures us with an iron hand. Or so I make it seem before I let anything in me change. A real bad habit that one.

More of that rascally accuracy out of you! You do way too good a job of pointing out the knife edge hidden in that light-hearted 'hoodwink' name you put on this.

Heart and mind certainly act like they're of the man-made, illusory side of the real reality line, even though their basic mechanisms are of our biological yin. Mirrors to show us ourselves perhaps, but even if only that, why would the world bother to build such a circular-information entertainment in the monkey flesh? While we overly-trust in and rely on them, we do seem built to be unable to see much of anything else of the world or ourselves.

So maybe we fake having the option of having any real control, by taking distracting pride in re-arranging the deck chairs in mid-catastrophe, then hiding the irrelevance of that with trying to believe magical presumptions that our arrangements, if done 'just right', will convince the ship to stop sinking. Human-naturey and dim-witted enough to base a religion on, or maybe all the religions. Better to take some deep breaths and get ready to swim, I suppose.

Faced with death, divorce, disappointment or any of the rest of that ilk, we set about whipping up a nice comforting quilt of understanding and 'maturity' for ourself. Which doesn't change a thing, does it, just postpones our acceptance of that nasty-ass puppet/puppeteer situation, (the situation between the tao and us, not between us and any other person).

Living as creatures in an environment that both seem to operate on attachment and desire, those two relationships seem to be quite absolutely unacceptable in our perceptions of the harmony that manifested our given situation in the first place. The Great Hoodwink in action, no doubt.

It's almost nice to think that cleaning up our perception of any of this is worth so much to the eternal setup that all the details of our life reliably and painfully dramatize the tiniest of our misperceptions. At least it gives the refinement of our perceptions, whatever that may mean, a place in the scheme of things more important than the details of our illusory worlds, external or internal.
Such an extensive, intrinsic and rock-hard process, almost affirms that we have the potential of someday seeing things more clearly, or is that a matter of deck chairs, too? How does growth exist in the timeless, anyway? What could it matter?

Much as I prefer heresy, and agree with much of yours, I do have some differences.
Somewhat shockingly in any human conversation, these will bring me BACK TO THE TOPIC OF THIS THREAD!, which should probably be retitled as 'Four Taoists and their Divorces'.
I'm in the first separation in a thirty year marriage, which, with my cooperation(?), is tearing big parts of me to bits. Quite a few other overlaps with Eegad and Mr. Minor's stories, too.

Carl said:

heaven = reality = death = question =contentment = ebb = return
hell = illusion = life = answer = need = flow = growth

I disagree with some of this. First I'm not a big heaven and hell guy, those being too Holy Whichever Empire, Confucian and/or Disney for me, so let me change those two to harmony and disharmony (te & pu te) to start with. My version of your correlations then:

harmony = reality = life = question = contentment = ebb&flow = growth/return
disharmony = illusion = dying = answer(?) = fear = stagnation = clinging

Answers can be resonant with the flow, so I'm not sure they always belong in the disharmony area. Granted they're necessarily near-lifeless cartoons (verbality) of best-fit rationalizations (right brain story telling) of best-fit emotional tones (memory and mid-brain filtering) of whatever gets in through our tiny little empathy circuits and sensory reductions, but they can reassure, and inform and even improve the accuracy of how we react to the big flow around, amongst and within us. ( I sure would like to hear of the neuropsych basis of question generation.)

I think we do have free-will choices in the area of how our actions, attitudes and affections resonate with the shared te harmony in our worldly ways: the 'how you're walking' of the path. Our affection for anybody or thing feels to be an expressed form of the deep harmony we share. Such active affection helps us feel good; we respect it socially and internally.

There's no finality or withdrawl for me in the ebb of a wave or a life, no loss of identity, only a transition, not a regret.
The only 'pain' involved in waves is to resist it, to be stagnant against its flow, sinking your toes into the sand and getting stubborn against it. The water then effortlessly pushes and pulls tons at you, while easily changing to a new lesson of dancing, resonant current and spray around you. And you get tired, and maybe dragged out to sea. All I see growing there is knowledge of disharmony.

Marriage, of any kind that is heartfelt, is an affirmation, social, emotional, volitional, devotional, and on and on, affirming that two (or more) have come to see and share deep harmony, with all its marvelous splashings and breakings and recedings, in their personal connection. Belligerantly against a static culture that claims life is only of separated, contentious outer shells, the married joyfully, calmly and powerfully announce that their shared inner lives are very real to them. Together they become an expressed manifestation of the truth we all live within us, and love having affirmed.
Separation and divorce declare that deep awareness defeated, rejected, released, leaving shallow lives of egos in conventional contention.

Accepting such an emotional death as fated, accepting stagnation in a world of balanced flow, seems to be where divorce begins and ends, not how we should react to it or any other real thing. I know in my marraige the stagnations left in us from our childhoods, that we then did nothing about, were what objected to the trust and love we had become. If we don't choose to address them, then our marriage will end.

What's to learn from forced separation from shared harmonies: maybe the cost of unresponsive stagnation in our dynamic inner lives, or that a paired view requires both to move along somehow in a way that continues to share perspectives.
How to weather the unwanted changes without massive, deep disharmonies: find new harmonies within or without us, I guess. For me now that answer is only of abstract design and hope.

Hard-nosed maybe, but reeking of and radiating reality.

Heresy becoming recognized as a better description of things would seem to describe the experience of improving one's view of things.

To me every one of your comments are clarifying, thought inviting and intuitively worthy of trust. I don't see that I disagree with a one or them, mentally, emotionally or in my understanding. They offer a couple of new looks at things, that I'll be thinking about a while. Articulations, not so much alternatives.

In some thread or another I claimed that we're always about knowing the unity to be found just beyond the distinctions our perceptions use to see and communicate. This conversation has done a lot of just that for me.
Thanks for these useful responses.

I am so happy to be where I am right now!

And I wouldn't be at this stage in my life if I hadn't gone through some rough patches, I'm sure of it.

I, too, went through a divorce recently. 15 months ago my wife said she wanted a divorce. She was seeing another man. I felt helpless, blind-sided. I stayed living in the same house for 3 months (a hellish limbo I'd strongly advise against), and then our divorce was finalized about 6 months ago and I've been on my own for a year now.

What really helped me was that about 25 years ago I got into Aikido a little bit, just enough to learn some of the basic concepts (e.g.- circular motion, that your opponent is actually your partner in the 'dance', embracing non-violence).

Also, about 6 months before my breakup someone introduced me to the writings and work of Byron Katie. I highly recommend Byron Katie's approach, which is to examine what is bugging you and completely accept it.

So I saw that I could not change my wife or anyone else, and that I had to accept fully what was happening.

A few months into the split I picked up the Tao Te Ching for the first time, and completely fell in love with it. I am currently studying only the TTC. I am taking my time, chapter by chapter, soaking it in.

Would I have found such a wonderful peace if I had not had my divorce, and subsequently found the TTC? I don't think so. I think I needed what happened. Obviously I did, because that's how it happened!

But I also have to give credit to Aikido and Byron Katie for leading me here. Both of them have been themselves heavily influenced by the Tao Te Ching!

Egadd, how are you doing now?