Don't Build the Same House

If a house is levelled, don't build the same house.

~Dr. Debi Silber, PBT Institute

If there is one fundamental misunderstanding by those who don't see the inside of our marriage (but who think they do, and yes, I'm talking about the other woman), it's that our marriage post-infidelity is pretty much the same as our marriage pre-infidelity. I've heard the wails: "He gets to go back to his wife and his marriage and I'm alone." As if we welcome them back with open arms. As if we aren't shattered by betrayal. As if...

But it's a mistake that, sometimes, gets made by those of us inside the marriage. We're so desperate to get past this, to have our marriage back, that we build the same house, as Dr. Debi Silber puts it. We recreate the same marriage with the same dynamics with the same guy and then expect everything to be different. Or at least one thing to be different: That he doesn't cheat again.

It's lunacy, isn't it? Even if we thought our marriage was great – even if he's telling us that our marriage was great, that his cheating had nothing to do with us, that he never stopped loving us – even with that, we still need to build a new house. Cause the old house is gone. The trauma of betrayal blew that baby to bits.

But the thing with trauma is that it can help us lay down an entirely new foundation. This is, in no way the same as saying that trauma is "good" because it helps us grow. (In some cases, it does exactly the opposite as Lisa Arends so beautifully described in a recent blog post on her site.) But trauma, when it hits us as adults, is lay bare all the cracks. In my case, the trauma of my husband's betrayal forced me to look at all the ways in which I'd been abandoning myself. I brought childhood trauma into my marriage. I was the capable one, the responsible one, the "fixer". Which left my husband the role of errant teenager, which fed into his family dynamic that, without an adult telling him what to do, he was likely to get it wrong. And so I seethed with resentment that I had to do everything. And my husband seethed with resentment that he was treated like a child. 

Enter the trauma of betrayal. I had the choice to either build the same damn house or build a new one. And though I still slip into that old house – my default as fixer shows up every single time I'm stressed – I nonetheless built a new one. One that required my husband to be a partner to me. One that required my husband to work through his own childhood stuff while I addressed mine. 

As Dr. Silber tells us, the problem isn't trauma, it's staying there. When you heal from it, you learn that even though it was done to you, it wasn't about you.

I had to learn that. And I don't know how else I would have learned that if I hadn't had my metaphorical house blown up. We betrayed wives tend to spend a lot of time playing "what if". What if he'd never cheated, would I be happier? What if he'd never cheated, would I feel more secure? 

It's a fool's game. He did cheat. And we are left to rebuild a new house with the same husband (or rather a husband who'd damn well better not stay the same), or to rebuild a life without him as our husband. Either choice is a perfectly reasonable one. But if you choose to stay, you cannot move back into that old house, no matter what the other woman thinks. That house is gone.