A conversation with therapist and infidelity expert Caroline Madden

Dr. Caroline Madden

I'm pretty active on Twitter these days and enjoy the conversations I have with others who tweet about infidelity and healing and how to get through this thing called life with our hearts mostly intact. 
I'm often intrigued by Twitter comments by Caroline Madden. She's a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles and also author of a bunch of books about healing from infidelity. She's smart and insightful but mostly she's got a way of reaching out to both the betrayer and the betrayed in a way that makes them feel seen and heard, like their story matters too.
I decided to read one of her books. I chose After A Good Man Cheats in part because I think there are fewer good books available for the betrayer.
I was gobsmacked by After A Good Man Cheats and I wished a whole lot that this book had existed back in 2006 when the bomb that is infidelity blew up my life. Gobsmacked because Dr. Madden gets it. It's like she read my diaries, removed all the angst-y woe-is-me and farewell-cruel-world stuff and wrote a book that addressed what I needed most: 
I am in the worst pain of my life and how do I make him understand that?
And then she put my pain through some sort of betrayed-to-betrayer translation machine and came out with things like this: 
"...the symptoms women experience after an affair are similar to the symptoms people experience after going to war or experiencing a significant trauma. They experience a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)." (from After A Good Man Cheats)
I can scarcely imagine how my healing might have been different if someone had said those words to me (or I had read them) early on. Rather than wondering what the hell is wrong with me that I'm such a mess?, I might have recognized that what I felt was reasonable, under the circumstances. It was normal. It was even expected.
And what a relief that would have been.
Relief is a key part of Madden's role. To offer relief to both partners. To assure each of them that infidelity doesn't have to be a deal-breaker, that they have options available to them and, perhaps most of all, that they will heal from this if they do the work. 
I recently called Dr. Madden where she lives and works in Los Angeles (lucky Angelenos to have such a therapist in their midst! Lucky the rest of us that she's written books to share her expertise). We talked about her work, her books and what she's both learned and taught.
She opened with this: "Reconciliation is not an entitlement. It's a gift."
Wow, huh? How would your marriage look different, right now, if you proceeded with that core understanding? That staying with someone who's been unfaithful isn't an act of desperation or wimpiness but generosity. Benevolence. A gift. Assuming, of course, that he wants to be a better man. That he wants that second chance and is willing to work hard for it.
Even then, she says, "men are stupid, and often say the absolutely wrong thing to their wife."
She's empathetic to them. "Stupid" is said with affection and, she says, in 20 years, "I haven't had a man disagree."
She offers them scripts in After a Good Man Cheats. Literal scripts. Not to put words in their mouths that are disingenuous, she says, but to help them decode their wife's pain, to "install empathy chips." She urges them to step into their wife's experience: Where is her pain? Why is she asking these questions?
To keep men focussed on their wife's pain, she urges her unfaithful clients to, whenever they find themselves feeling guilty or ashamed by what they did to think about what they can do for their wife that day, to become giving without any expectation of reciprocation.
Most men are stunned by the extent of the damage they've caused, she says, and at a loss for how to take steps to remedy it. 
"They are prepared for the anger,  not the devastation. They often believe that their wife doesn't really like them. They think their wife has [intentionally] been looking the other way."
She places at least some of the blame on our culture, which, she says, allows men to have three feelings: happy, angry, drunk. So when they're feeling lonely, or disconnected, or lost...well..."attention from another woman is like warm milk to a feral cat." 
This can be hard to hear when you're newly betrayed. We don't care that he was sad. Or lost. Or disconnected. We're all those things now too because they're big fat idiots! Maybe we were those things before but we didn't cheat!
Dr. Madden makes clear that understanding the cheater's mindset is in no way giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card. This isn't about exonerating them, it's about understanding them. 
"Cheating is in no way an acceptable response," she says, noting that it's not a therapist's job to be "neutral" about this. When she's counselling couples, the cheater needs to put his guilt and his shame aside, she says. 
"It's about her pain. He can deal with his feelings one-on-one."
To that end, she maintains that husbands need to accompany their wives to the doctor when they're tested for STDs. She normalizes the roller coaster of emotions that we so often experience, the up and down and all around. What did he expect? she tells him. Your wife is in the worst pain of her life. 
Those who cheat again? "If you can see this pain and do it again, you are a bad person," she says. But she says that with the same straightforwardness with which she talks about everything. No drama. No judgement. Just the facts, ma'am. With a huge dose of compassion.
Dr. Madden's books are widely read and well reviewed. No surprise. She offers a sane, realistic approach to rebuilding a marriage after infidelity. This isn't a quick fix and she doesn't promise miracles. 
But her books are easy to understand, even by men unfamiliar with the language of self-help and therapy. She brings her personality to every page – empathetic, funny and warm, with a steady approach to guide men, women and couples through to healing from the pain, whether or not they choose to rebuild their marriage. 
Healing from infidelity, she says, "is a process of humility and soul-searching." Despite a career spent largely helping couples who've experienced a fracture in their relationship, she believes in marriage, she says. "With all its ups and downs."