Infidelity Counseling Network: Peer Counselling

Infidelity Counseling Network is a peer counselling service that pairs a trained counsellor who has experienced infidelity with someone seeking support and guidance. It's a real person at the end of a phone line (or Skype connection) who knows the pain you're in and has been equipped with the tools to help you navigate your way to more solid ground. It's not a substitute for a therapist nor is it a crisis hotline. Think of it as a wise, been-there-done-that friend who can support you in the worst pain of your life. 
Well...I was just notified by the incredible Laura S., who created Infidelity Counselling Network, that seven recently trained counsellors have been added and they're ready to take on more betrayed wives who need support.
They've shifted their model to a sliding scale so it's essentially pay-what-you-can.
And, from everything I've ever heard including women on this site who've used the service, it's worth it.
Check it out: http://www.infidelitycounselingnetwork.org

Guest Post: The five things I want you to know about being cheated on

by StillStanding1

“Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.” – Brené Brown

Sometimes I read things on the internet and social media. Most of the time I should know better. Recently, I scanned the comments section of a post sharing how various people discovered their partners had been unfaithful, how they dealt with finding out or apocryphal stories of sweet, sweet revenge. Rather than bite the clickbait, I looked at the comments. I am more interested in the ways people process infidelity and how we, as Western society, discuss it, than I am in the “once a cheater, always a cheater” rants, which I believe is false or the “kick him/her to the curb” chorus, which I believe is short-sighted. One young woman was absolutely 100% sure that if your partner loved you enough, he wouldn’t cheat.  It’s that simple, she said. And she got into a long comment war with people who questioned that, stating over and over her premise, that where there is enough love aimed at you, there will not be cheating.

And I found myself, with a not small degree of jaded superiority, shaking my head and thinking, Honey, you have nooooo idea what you are talking about. And I hope you never get to have your theory proven wrong. “Short sighted.” “Naïve.” Her comment stayed with me for a few days, under my skin a bit, until I realized that it bugged me so much because I used to believe it too, but with this twist: that if I had somehow been more lovable, that if I had been “enough” then my partner would not have cheated. There was a lot I didn’t know at d-day. One is that his cheating was never about me. Two is that I have always been lovable and always been enough.  Three is that I am not responsible for other people’s crap, emotional or otherwise. Four is that I can take what comes (I’ve got a 100% success rate so far) and be OK. Five is that when I am kind to myself, the whole world is kind to me too. The list goes on (#36 is that I am permitted to take naps). But most importantly, it was never about whether or not my partner loved me “enough.”

Where I finally landed was that we were both close to the truth, this commenter and I. The idea that people cheat when there is not enough love is quite accurate. But it’s not that our partners and spouses didn’t love us enough, or that we weren’t lovable: it’s that they didn’t love themselves enough. In many cases, (where they are not a sociopathic narcissist) they were running from themselves, medicating long buried pain or otherwise responding to a deeply rooted unease that they are not quite as lovable as they ought to be.

I believe this to be true because I grew up without the strong sense of love and belonging that operates in people with healthy self-esteem. My being lovable was conditional, often depending on how sober my mom was and if I did my caretaker job as required. I grew up and became an adult (sort of) with this ravenous black hole of doubt and self-loathing inside me. I was responsible for making everyone happy (an impossible job).  Until I looked those childhood wounds in the face, I was going to keep repeating them. (I always picture the computer W.O.P.R. from the 1980s movie War Games – where it keeps playing tic tac toe and then war simulations over and over, virtually destroying the planet thousands of times, until it learns to do something different – in this case that nobody wins at tic tac toe so you just don’t play the game anymore.  We keep re-enacting our childhood wounds until we wake up and realize we don’t need to play those games anymore either.)

It wasn’t a long time after d-day that I arrived at this realization: no one is ever going to love me enough until I love myself. No one else is ever going to make me feel enough: only I can do that for myself by recognizing that it is true right now, right this second. Until I accepted myself and all my imperfections, I was never going to feel whole.  It was my job and my job alone to do that work.  Scary.

So many of us wash up here at BWC in the middle of the storm, dripping in family and relationship dysfunction. We don’t even recognize that the beach we are standing on is one where we need to start drawing some lines in the sand. We are lost, dizzy, sick and bewildered. Please remember that each of us is already enough exactly as we are. Each of us deserves love and respect based on the simple, beautiful fact of our existence. Start loving yourself. Be your own cheerleader. Don’t wait for anyone else to do it for you. You have so much more power than you ever knew. Each of us is infinitely lovable and infinitely worthy of belonging.

Wednesday Word Hug: Rest

This is what self-respect looks like after betrayal

We need to talk about self-respect. Lately I've been reading so many comments from women struggling to figure out how to talk to their partners about porn use, about contact with the OW, about attending events solo, about employment where the OW works too.
On the whole, the women who come to this site are amazing. Compassionate, supportive. And oh-so-giving. They give wonderful advice to each other, they give heartfelt "me toos!" to each other But they also give the benefit of the doubt to the husband who refuses to disclose his passwords. They try to be "reasonable" with the husband whose job keeps him in regular contact with the women he cheated with. They give until it hurts. By which I mean, they give even after it hurts themselves. They just keep giving.
Until there's almost nothing left of themselves. Or at least nothing they recognize.
And then they berate themselves for being "weak" or pathetic.
They are neither of those things.
They are empathetic and want, desperately, to be able to believe in the people they love. In many other situations, that would be wonderful – a great way to connect open-heartedly.
But this is not any other situation. This is a situation in which this person they love has shown he cannot be trusted.
It's that simple.
It doesn't matter if he says he's learned his lesson, or he didn't mean to hurt you, or he was lost and now he's found. None of that matters.
What matters is that he has shown – clearly – that he cannot be trusted.
Hopefully, the day will come when that can be said in the past tense. That he could not be trusted...but now he can. That day comes after he walks away from the job in which he has regular contact with the OW, when he doesn't mind when you look at his e-mails, when he makes it clear that he will not go anywhere without you until you feel okay with it, when he seeks treatment for porn addiction, or substance abuse, or because he cheated on someone he's terrified to lose.
But that's not now. Now, he cannot be trusted.
And so you have absolutely no choice if you are to respect yourself but to respond in a way that keeps you emotionally safe.
You cannot go to an event in which I'm not also invited.
You cannot stay in a job in which you have regular contact with the OW.
You cannot continue to access porn when it is clearly a problem.
You must give me access to any and all devices/accounts.
You must attend therapy.
You must attend a 12-step group.
You must accompany me to couples counselling.
What you are saying with each of these statements is NOT that you are difficult or suspicious or unsupportive or demanding or unreasonable or not understanding of just how difficult it is for this poor beleaguered cheater.
No, what you are saying is this: I respect myself too much to remain in a situation in which I don't feel emotionally safe. 
You are saying that you are willing to give him the chance to show you, day by day, week by week, that he has learned his lesson, that he was lost but now he's found.
But for now, you will operate on the information you have: That he cannot be trusted.
You will hear all sorts of "woe is me" stuff. It's hard – no, impossible! – to find a new job. It's humiliating when you scroll through my texts! It's unfair to expect me to say 'no' to social events just because you feel uncomfortable! We can't afford counselling! And on and on and on. And on.
Puh-leeze.
Cry me a goddamned river.
He created a situation in which he made it brutally clear that HE CANNOT BE TRUSTED and now he's upset that you're responding as if HE'S SOMEONE WHO CANNOT BE TRUSTED?
Wow. Poor guy. Life's rough when you have to deal with the consequences of your choices.
But that's, ummm, life. We teach our five-year-olds that.
We also teach people how to treat us. And if we've spent a lifetime (or at least a marriage) teaching our partner that it's okay to disrespect us, in ways large and small, then it's time to write a new script.

Wednesday Word Hug: Starting Over

Betrayed Wives Club: A Community to Help You Grieve

"Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame."
~Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Did you imagine the profound grief that came with betrayal? I, for one, did not. I'm not sure it's a failure of my imagination or an overestimation of my emotional fortitude but I always imagined betrayal, if it happened to me at all and I was pretty sure it would not, would be met with my anger. I would throw him out and that would be that.
Anyone who's read much on this blog knows that, instead, I responded like so many others. Anger, yes. I screamed and said horrible, cruel things. But more often, I felt pinned beneath the weight of my pain. I found it hard to breathe. I had trouble forming coherent thoughts. Somehow my young children survived. I got them to and from school. I fed them and put them to bed.
I participated in hysterical bonding, struck by a lust that would have made 20-year-old me blush.
But, mostly, I ached. My pain was so bad that I even wondered about taking my own life in order to be rid of it. I couldn't imagine coming to point of not feeling such pain. Which is what depression does, right? Convinces us that what we're feeling right now is what we will always feel. It lies to us.
And I won't lie to you now and tell you that I felt hopeful. I didn't. I was sure I would never, ever feel happy again. But because I couldn't leave my children without a mother, I decided to live, resigning myself to sacrificing my own life for theirs. Melodramatic, I know. But, again, depression thrives in absolutes. Always/never.
How I wish I'd stumbled on a community like Betrayed Wives Club when I was in such a dark place.
Not because this site would have protected me from experiencing the darkness but because it reminds us that darkness is necessary but not permanent.
Which is what Francis Weller, above, is telling us.
We fear sorrow and grief because we have such little experience with it. Our culture hides it away. Sorrow, we think, implies weakness, a lack of determination to be happy, a refusal to buck up. We celebrate victors and vanquishers. Those who go inward to tend to their hearts? We avert our eyes. Pain is private and we like it that way, the better to give ourselves permission to ignore another's sorrow. We tell ourselves we don't want to make the other person uncomfortable, that it's none of our business. But the truth is it makes us uncomfortable. Better to pretend we don't notice.
And then it happens to us. And we discover that sorrow and grief aren't weakness at all. We discover the courage it takes to stay with it, to walk through it, to hold it and not numb ourselves with distractions or delusion.
I wish I'd know this then. I wish I'd trusted that the pain I was in was temporary and that I had the strength I needed to get through it. I'm convinced it isn't the pain itself that cripples us, it's the misguided belief that it will never lift. And most of us discover something else too that's paradoxical: The more we face our pain and tend to it, the more quickly we move through it. And the more others are able to be with us in our woundedness, the more quickly we heal.
This community exists so that you will know these things to be true, sooner rather than later. It exists to provide a community of people who aren't afraid of this pain and who can help you shoulder your grief. We can't make the darkness lift but we can remind you – we can promise you – that the light will return.
We can remind you of your courage. We can salute your strength. And we can put our arms around you and sit with you in your sorrow.

Our Stories Can Save Us

"According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience.... However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience."
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

We all have our D-Day stories, don't we? We all go back and pore over the days, weeks, years that led up to D-Day. Was he cheating when we were visiting our sister? Was he cheating when we were pregnant? And on and on.
We beg for details to help us fill out our stories. What we don't know, we invent. The Other Woman was a gymnast in bed. She had long legs. She laughed charmingly at his stupid jokes.
The mind movies are devastating. We lie in bed playing them over and over again. Or they ambush us when we hear a certain song, drive past a certain restaurant, notice a certain time of year.
Thing is, we weren't there. We will never ever know what it was really like. Nothing is ever really as fabulous as we think it is. Not the celebrity lives we envy in magazines. Not the other moms' lives with their kids who never seem to whine. Not the Other Woman with her imagined sexual sorcery.
Which is why we need to tell our stories with ourselves cast as the heroine. Maybe a tragic heroine, but a heroine nonetheless. Our stories can save us, if we let them. I'm not talking about creating a fiction, necessarily. But as Lidia Yuknavitch notes, there's a ton of brain science about the value of stories in healing trauma. It's why rape survivors need to tell their stories. It's why plane crash victims need to tell their stories. Over and over and over.
And it's why betrayed wives need to tell their stories. It's how we make sense of what's happened to us. And it's how we re-insert ourselves back into a narrative that we've been written out of. Our husband might have conveniently ignored our role in his life, the OW might be able to pretend we don't exist or that we shouldn't exist. But we don't have to buy that story.
No way.
Our story begins and ends with us – fighting like hell for our bodies, our hearts and souls. Yuknavitch's book, The Chronology of Water, is about a resurrection, a rebirth. It's about a woman who refuses to give up on herself, who refuses to accept others' stories. She is whole, just as we are. Not bit players in another's story but stars in our own.
Tell your story. Tell it as many times as you can to anyone who will hold it in their own hearts, without judgement, without flinching at your pain. Tell it until it fits your life and resolves the past. It is your truth and it will be your rebirth.