Cultivating Hope When All Feels Hopeless

Hope can kinda stupid in the face of betrayal. It can feel naive. Weak. Passive.
And yet, what do we have when we discover that the person we trusted most has betrayed that trust? What do we do with the pain?
We can become brittle with anger and bitterness. We can become numb from self-protection. We can turn that anger inward and become depressed and anxious.
Or we can hope. 
Not a passive cross-your-fingers kinda hope but a rolling-up-your-sleeves hope. The kind of hope that spurs us to seek help for our pain, that pushes us out of comfort zone to ask for support, that gives us the clear-eyed understanding that his bad behaviour doesn't define us. That his betrayal is not our shame to bear but his.
Hope that we will not only survive this but triumph over it, to become stronger and wiser. 
"What I’ve observed from my own struggles and those of others is that in order to be hopeful people, we must constantly work at it," wrote Robert Hardies recently in The Washington Post.  "...hope is like love. It’s not a once-and-for-all cure, it’s one of the most important ongoing spiritual projects of our lives. Hope is a journey. A difficult path through a beautiful and broken world."
Hardies, a Unitarian minister, goes on to offer up lessons he's learned in cultivating his own hope. And while they apply to our larger world, they work for us in our private pain too. To help us recognize the courage inside each of us to ignite a spark of hope. 

1. Start where you are and take one step at a time. Hopeful people, says Hardie, "take concrete action to make a difference, even if it’s a small difference."
What might this look like in your life. Does it involve making an appointment with a therapist? Maybe it means sharing your pain with a trusted friend. Perhaps it's a daily commitment to walk, trying to notice the beauty around you and remembering that all things are temporary, including pain. 

2. Cultivate a spiritual practice.
For some of us, this means a formal religion but it doesn't need to. A spiritual practice includes anything that takes you outside of your experience and reminds you that you are part of something large and mysterious. You might find your spirituality in a grand cathedral with stained glass windows, you might find it on a yoga mat, your might find it in a basement following the 12 steps. You might find it in literature or music or in handing out lunch at a soup kitchen. The important thing is to connect yourself to something bigger than you, something that reminds you that you are only a small part of this world but that without you, the world loses some of its lustre. 

3. Don’t make the journey alone. "We need companions for the journey of hope," says Hardie  "The hopeful people are the together people. We’re on this journey together."
It's no coincidence that so much healing takes place in this rag-tag club of betrayed wives. It's because hope is contagious. When hope is extended to others by way of affirming each other's pain, through sharing hard-won wisdom, through laughing together, through crying together, through rooting for each others' healing, it grows in each of us. If she can do it, we come to believe, then I can too. If healing is possible for others, then it's possible for me too. 
And it is possible. It is even probable when you practice roll-up-your-sleeves hope. When you refuse to accept defeat as an option. Betrayal will bring you to your knees. Rest there as hope takes root. And then rise again. 

Our post-dragon lives

Anyone can slay a dragon
he told me, but try waking up
every morning & loving
the world all over again.

That's what takes a real hero

(From Traveling Light by Brian Andreas)

The crisis is over. The dragon is slain. You've got the details. The decision is made to either stay or go. You've told anyone you're going to tell and hidden your pain from anyone else. All that's left now is...the rest of your life.
Scary huh? The rest of your life. Carrying the knowledge of just how deeply you can be hurt. Understanding just how wrong you can be about your own life and the people in it. But knowing too that maybe you did sorta kinda did know. That maybe that dragon had been circling for a while and you didn't want to see it. Or maybe that damn dragon really was cagey and clever and cunning.
No matter. It's slain.
And now's the time for heroism because it turns out it's not enough to just slay the dragon. We need to carry on, careful to strip ourselves of armour so that our hearts are exposed, but knowing that dragons are real. And that one might show up again.
The rest of our life can seem like a long time when it's dark. When we can barely make out what's around the corner let alone what's far ahead on the road.
And yet, thinking we could see decades ahead was a lie. A delusion that made our world seem safer.
It's not just us whose future is uncertain. None of us really knows what's coming. And for those of us who've been blindsided by any pain, including betrayal, that's particularly terrifying.
And yet, we have our toolbox. The same one we've always had. The one that can hold what we need to get through the days and years ahead: Compassion for ourselves. Boundaries. Self-care. Self-respect.
If we lack those tools, then now is the time to discover them. If we've lost them, now is the time to recover them.
We need them. We've always needed them. If we weren't using them, it's probably because we were relying on somebody else's tools. But somebody else can't build our lives. Only we can do that.
And we do it by being the heroes poet Brian Andreas refers to. By slaying the dragon, sure. But then by waking up every morning afterward and walking forward into our life. By removing the armour that protected us short-term but shields us from open-hearted living. By loving the world even when we know the suffering it can hold. By trusting ourselves to hold that love and that suffering in the same wide-open heart.
Anyone can slay a dragon though I take issue with Andreas' suggestion that it's easy. I think we do it simply because we have little choice when a dragon picks a fight with us but to battle like hell. And it's tempting to reach for our armour rather than our toolbox. To close ourselves from pain rather than arm ourselves with boundaries and self-care and radical compassion.
But the hero isn't the one who slays the dragon so much as the one who lives with the knowledge of them in the world and loves anyway. 

Your Kindness is No Small Thing

I just finished responding to Phoenix and Still Standing over on the Separating or Divorcing (Part 2) page. There's so much pain there as these incredible women come to terms with a loss they hadn't predicted. But there's hella resilience too. 
There's also much gratitude for this site as a place where women feel supported, no matter what they're going through and how things are unfolding. While I created this site to make me less lonely as I worked to rebuild my marriage (and to assure myself that I wasn't a complete doofus to believe that it was possible to rebuild a marriage after betrayal), I didn't intend it to be only for reconciliation. For one thing, I wasn't sure just where my marriage was going to end up. I had one foot out the door for a long time. Besides, however things turn out, we're not so different. It's the experience of betrayal that marks us. And the women on this site, without fail, have responded to that most painful of experiences by reaching out to others and lifting them up.
It's incredible, really. To think that, at our lowest point, we are still able to acknowledge pain in others and reach out. It speaks to the courage of all of you here. It speaks to the depth of your compassion, the reservoir of kindness that you each still have, even when life has served up betrayal and cruelty.
I'm convinced though that it's in that reaching out, that lifting up of others, that ability to take in another's pain and hold it for them, that opens the path to our own healing. In keeping our hearts open to others, we keep them open to our own lives.
In feeling each other's pain, we are able to process our own.
We heal together, bound by compassionate hearts.
Our healing won't take us all to the same place. Some of us will rebuild marriages, others will dissolve theirs. But as long as we're able to see in each other the beauty, the strength, the courage and the integrity with which we're responding to our hearts shattering, then we can acknowledge it in ourselves. And that mark of betrayal will become a badge of honor for having not only survived but having kept our hearts open to the suffering of others.
There are days that what I'm saying will seem impossible. Days when it's all we can do to breathe in, breathe out, when we need to put our hearts under glass. Those are the days when others can remind you that you will survive this. That there are days for giving and days for receiving.
That the grace we show each other isn't a zero sum game.
And that ability to offer or receive grace, to experience a life-changing kindness, is no small thing.

Wednesday Word Hug: Be Her

Happy labour day (and some words to get you through)

My kids go back to school tomorrow – I'm trying not to cheer too loud in case they can hear – and I promise I will be more present on this site. Thank you to so many of you incredible betrayed warriors who've stepped up and offered comfort and compassion and wisdom to each other, even as you still struggle through your own pain. Every single day I am grateful for this community of women (and the occasional man) who show me what real strength looks like: Just showing up for each other.

Wednesday Word Hug