Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

When Every Exit Feels Like a Threat

You’re lying there like a piece of driftwood, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of your partner’s chest. In this light, you love them, obviously. It’s a physical ache, the kind that gets laid down quietly over the years and only shows itself in the dark. You want to reach out, bury your face in their neck, and pretend the world isn’t currently splintering into toothpicks.

But then that cold, sharp stone in your gut grinds against your resolve, a constant friction that makes every choice feel like a loss.

It’s the “knowing.” The inconvenient realisation that while your body is lying between the sheets, you are currently shrinking at a rate of knots. Dishonesty weighing like a leaden mask.

If you stay, it looks like you’re signing up to be a professional liar. If you leave, it looks like you’re a domestic terrorist, blowing up the life of the person you love most.

Congratulations. You’ve built yourself a bear trap and walked right into it.

This is what minds do when the stakes are high. They wait for the “right” answer to descend from the ceiling like a holy revelation. They call it being “stuck,” which is a polite way of saying a logical paradox has you by the throat. They tell you the “angst” is a sign of a high-stakes life crisis that requires more thinking.

It isn’t. It’s the smell of ozone from a short circuit.

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And circuits can short for a reason. Life moves. That’s what life does. And you move with it. The shape you used to fit doesn’t quite fit anymore. What you’re calling agony or a short circuit is something gentler than that. It’s you, catching up with yourself.

Psychology calls this a double bind. As if life weren’t already complicated! I call it between the devil and the deep blue sea. My dad used to say it all the time. I didn’t really know what he was on about. I do now.

Threats stand guard at every exit.
Tell the truth, and you blow up a life.
Don’t tell it, and yours quietly closes down.

So the intellect LOVES a paradox. Two threats at once? Stand back; this is what I was built for. It treats it like a high-stakes maths problem. It tells you that if you tell the truth, grind your teeth and analyse the variables one more time, you’ll find a path where no one bleeds. You weigh staying against leaving until your brain is mush, certain that the correct answer is hidden just behind the next hour of agonising thought.

But it’s all friction. You’re giving full throttle to your psychological engine while the emergency brake is bolted to the floor.

So just pick one, surely? Stay or go and have done with it?
If it were that simple, you’d have done it months ago. The mind reaching for the answer is the same mind that drew the walls.

Sitting between a rock and a hard place only feels like a trap if you believe both walls are solid.

“I must be loyal” feels like a law of physics.

“I must be true to myself” feels like a command from God.

You’ve wired these two thoughts together and then sat back, wondering why the fuse keeps blowing.

But who is it that’s watching the fuse blow?

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Or think about it like this:

Picture your mind as a loom. When you’re in a trap like this, you’re weaving a straitjacket out of your own thoughts, thread by agonising thread. One thread is “Betrayal,” the next is “Erasure,” and you’re throwing the shuttle back and forth at speed. The fabric thickens with every pass.

Inside, you’re banging on the walls. Outside, your hands are still on the shuttle.

Every time you ask, “What if I leave?”, the shuttle flies faster, and the thread of betrayal bites into your skin.
Every time you think, “I have to stay," the fabric of erasure wraps around your throat.
The more you use your intellect to “solve” the trap, the more material you provide for the walls.

So who is it that notices the fuse? Who is watching the shuttle move?

Whoever it is, they aren’t tangled in the threads. They aren’t holding the shuttle. It is Mind that just noticed both. (Sorry for the tech language here, I didn’t know what else to call it.) Its that that part of you that sits there quietly within you and does its thing.

The walls aren’t part of the room. They’re being made, right now, out of the same thought that makes your dreams at night. If you stopped weaving, where would the straitjacket go?

See for yourself.

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Walk back with me a moment.

The trap feels solid. Look at what’s making it feel that way. Two walls. “I must be loyal." “I must be true to myself." Right now, they look solid, heavy, and real as bricks.

Look one step further back. What are the walls actually made of?

Thoughts. “I must be loyal” is a thought. “I must be true to myself” is a thought. Living, passing, moving thoughts dressed up in the language of certainty.

Look one more step back. Where do thoughts come from?

From the power to think itself. Thought, with a capital T. The creative agent that produces every thought you’ve ever had. It’s been doing this since you were born. It does it in your dreams. It does it now, as you read this sentence. The whole trap is a hallucination, generated by Thought, right now, in the moment you turn your attention to it.

And one more step back. Where does Thought come from?

From Mind. The formless intelligence behind all life. The same energy that grows trees, beats your heart and makes your dreams at night. Thought is the power. Mind is the source that the power runs on.

And one more step back. Where is all this happening?

Inside you. In the awareness that has been here all along, watching it. The same awareness that has watched every thought you’ve ever had and never once been any of them. Rested. Spacious. Outside the choosing. Watching the way it has always watched. Those walls we spoke about appear here.

This is what Sydney Banks pointed to. What every contemplative tradition has pointed to, in its own language. You can call it whatever you like. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s already here, in you, right now, and it has never once been caught in the trap. It can’t be. It’s made of awareness itself, the formless intelligence behind life.

You can please the devil if you want to. You can try to swim the sea. But pleasing the devil doesn’t drain the sea, and swimming the sea doesn’t quiet the devil. Whichever one you tackle, the other will be standing right where you left it, larger than before. Stay, and the lying gets louder. Leave, and the wreckage gets louder. The wall you didn’t choose isn’t going to make itself smaller while you deal with the other.

It’s like a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the tighter it gets. The self that’s caught between the walls is made of the same thinking as the walls themselves.

The way out is upstream. Back, and back, towards the awareness in which all of it is appearing.

Not picking, not deciding, not finding the third option. Following the thinking back to where it comes from, until the walls become thoughts, and the thoughts become Thought, and Thought is recognised as something happening in you rather than something being you. From that recognition, the trap has nothing to grip onto. There is no second self to squeeze. The walls were always made out of the same stuff, by the same hand, in the same room.

A trap doesn’t get solved. It is seen through. There is a real difference.

And from there, life moves. Quietly, on its own. Insight arrives the way it always has. In the shower. On a walk. Halfway through making the tea. Not when summoned. When the mind quiets enough to let it through.

You won’t know what happens next until it does. You may stay. You may go. You may have a conversation you couldn’t have had yesterday. Whatever it is, it will arrive from a quieter place than the squeeze did. From the awareness that has been here all along, watching the loom and the fuse and the bear with the sore head, and never once getting tangled in any of it.

You were the one drawing the bars on the air in front of you.

You’re the one who invented the lock.

So now, breathe. Sit with this for a moment. There’s nothing to do, nothing to fix. And everything to see.

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I keep a few spaces available every week for a one-off conversation. It is my treat. Bring whatever you are sitting with, and we will take a proper look at it together. Message me here if you’d like to.

PS — If any of this has landed and you want to sit with it a little longer, my short primer ‘What No One Ever Told Us’ is in the paid tier. It is a good next step for anyone ready to look at how all of this actually works.
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