Why Shame is the Wrong Tool to Deal with Infidelity

Here are some of the things I said to my husband after D-Day:
You're a liar.
You disgust me.
You are nothing but a cheater and a liar.
Why would I ever believe you because you are incapable of telling the truth.
The list goes on but my memory has grown fuzzy.
Pretty horrible, huh?
I'm not saying he didn't deserve my wrath. He did. He most definitely did.
What I am saying is that that those words not only did nothing to create the possibility for healing, they also weren't true (well, except for the disgust bit. I was pretty disgusted at that point).
But they hurt him. And that was really my intention. I wasn't capable of thinking more long-term than the next five-minutes. I was in the midst of survival mode – fight, flight or freeze. And I was fighting like hell. I wanted to hurt him like he'd hurt me. I wanted him to know that I would never forgive him for what he'd done. Which also, as fate would have it, turned out to be untrue.
But more to the point, if I'd been able to stop and think, to determine what my goal was, I might have realized that what I was doing – shaming my husband – wasn't going to help me achieve it.
Which is the great misunderstanding of shame.

We think shame makes people change their behaviour. But famed shame researcher Brené Brown gives us the bad news. It doesn’t. If anything, shame makes people double down on their bad behaviour (we’re seeing this shame-and-name culture online right now and it’s ugly).

What happens, Brown explains, is that shame hijacks our limbic system – we go into survival mode. That’s our primitive brain, our reptile brain. Shame, she says, “corrodes that part of us that believes we can ever be different.”

Sadly, a lot of us grew up being shamed. More than likely, our partners did too. It’s a frequently used tool by those in authority. But shame drives a lot of bad behaviour. Shame doesn’t urge us be better, it tells us we never will be.

You’re never going to be anything but a loser, we might have heard.

Why can’t you do anything right?

Or, my husband’s father’s favorite: You’re nothing but a quitter.

And here I was, post D-Day, shaming my husband, albeit unintentionally. I was doing to him exactly what had been done to him as a child. And what he’d done to himself ever since.

Shame drives bad behaviour, Brown reminds us again.

So much of my husband’s acting out was rooted in his childhood shame. Shame kills intimacy. Shame kills empathy. Brown puts it this way: “It’s much more likely to be the cause of harmful and destructive behaviours than the cure.”

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of infidelity lately. I’ve long thought that our culture, while it loves a redemption story, loves a consistent narrative more. While we hold the possibility that people can change, we’re suspicious of it. That “once a cheater, always a cheater” mentality leaves no room for redemption, for reinvention.

Why do we make it so hard for people to redeem themselves? Why do we insist on labelling people rather than labelling their behaviour? It might seem like semantics but it’s rooted in shaming. That’s not, of course, to say that bad behaviour shouldn’t be called out. It absolutely should, especially cheating, which causes so much damage and pain to partners and kids. But there is a world of difference between expecting someone who cheated to figure out why he did and how to ensure he never does it again, and labelling them a cheater. The first allows for change. The second…does not.

I’ve long believed that my willingness to give my husband the chance to change stemmed from having grown up with an alcoholic who got sober. I had seen someone, who everyone else had given up on, choose a better path. And I had watched her not only get sober but get wise about it. I knew people could change because I’d seen it. Might my perspective have been different if she’d never stopped drinking? Probably.

We need to see that change is possible to believe it. What’s more, if we’re going to give our partners the opportunity to change, we need to see that they are willing to do the hard work that change requires. We need to see them doing the work, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them. Without that, we’re just clinging to hopes and dreams.

It must be a careful dance, between wanting to believe our partners can change and being realistic about whether they will. Change is not a straight trajectory. It zigs and it zags but someone truly intent on becoming better will self-correct.

As Brown reminds us, when you see someone making amends, apologizing, doing better, that’s about guilt not shame.

But if they do not make amends, if it becomes clear that their words are not backed up by actions – if they refuse counselling, if they resist giving you passwords, if they push back against boundaries you’ve set in order to feel emotionally safe with someone capable of cheating, then that’s important information. And all the shaming in the world isn’t going to create that change if it isn’t coming from a reckoning within.