Guest post: Time – and you – can do amazing things

by StillStanding1

Time can do amazing things. A deep wound scabs over, and the scab becomes a scar, and then one day you look for the scar and it’s barely visible. ~Neil Gaiman

I’ve been noticing a theme in some of the comments lately, where many of the warriors here are feeling like they should be able to let go and forgive or their partners are pushing them to “get over it” and they feel badly for a) not being over “it” yet, or b) bringing “it” up all the time, or c) not feeling ready to forgive, or d) for still being triggered unexpectedly.

As if there is a timeline for healing. As if there is a set path that we all must follow to get “better” (i.e. healed). As if we are not allowed to feel our feelings. As if we are not allowed to grieve.

So many of us, in the wake of betrayal, rush to forgive. We want the pain to go away. We want this to never have happened. We think, “If I can just put this behind me, if I can just forgive, everything will go back to the way it was. Everything will be better.” But what does putting it behind you really look like? What does that even mean? And what is forgiveness?

I think there are some mistaken assumptions out there about what those things are. That once you get there everything will get and stay fixed. Destination. End. No more worries or pain. We get fed the same ideas around happiness. It’s just not how those things work. Happiness and forgiveness are not destinations. They are choices and places you pass through again and again. The past? This stuff we need to put behind us? Well, it already is in the past, but we will carry it with us until we deal with whatever unfinished business we have back there.

Before we get to forgiveness, there are some other stops we need to make first.

Grief. 

I mean goddamnit, we just had the rug pulled out, our lives were turned upside down, the person we most trusted completely and utterly failed us, broke our trust. When, exactly, should we magically be over that? It’s one of the most traumatic things that can happen to you. So much so that the trauma response gets its own acronym (PISD – Post Infidelity Stress Disorder). When someone gets a cancer diagnosis, we don’t walk around saying they should be over it already. So why should you be over “it” before you’ve processed your grief. You’ve experienced a loss. You get to grieve.

Anger. 

F#@k this sh!t. Amiright? What has happened in our lives, the hurt, the shame, the disappointment, the fear, the loss of safety, the health risks, all that garbage and our partners’ crappy choices are a big steaming pile. Be. Mad. About it. You are allowed. Sit with your anger. Let it rise and pass. You need to have it and then get it out of your body.

Acceptance. 

(Wait. What?) One of the most important tools that came my way early post d-day was the practice of radical acceptance. Because when you stop fighting reality, you suffer less. For me it took the form of accepting the conflicting feelings I was having and stopping the war inside myself. Accepting doesn’t mean agreeing, minimizing or letting our partners off the hook. It means moving from “this isn’t fair”, “this should not be happening” to "this is what happened". It is the first step in healing. In the early days I had to say things to myself like “I accept that I don’t want him to continue contact with the OW AND I accept that I have no control over whether he does or not.” “I accept that I don’t want to deal with this AND I accept that I am doing my best to deal with this.” “I accept that I love him AND I accept that I hate him.” “I accept that I am afraid AND I accept that I don’t want to be afraid.” I did this over and over until the list was exhausted. And I found that after I engaged in this practice, I felt less stressed, less pain.

Radical acceptance takes practice. You can start with little things AND you can begin to target your conflicts and ruminations around betrayal. Little things: sitting in traffic. Late for a doc appointment. You can rage against the cars, the people in the cars, the red light, but none of that changes your situation, doesn’t get you to the appointment any faster. All it does is increase your stress and pain. But if you tell yourself “I accept that I really don’t want to be late AND I accept that I have no control over this traffic that is making me late,” you’ll arrive less stressed. (This also ties in to the practice of compassion for self. You are doing the best that you can to get to the doc on time.) Around betrayal it could be: You are having an epic internal battle. “I will never trust him again… but I want to trust him.”  “He has hurt me so much… but I want him to make me feel better.” “I always thought I would leave if he cheated and now he has I don’t know what to do.” The next step is to accept your inner reality, that all these things are true.  “I should leave him AND I don’t want to leave him.” The reality is that it is OK to be feeling ambivalent.

You’ll pass through grief, anger (and depression, sadness, exhaustion, FTS) and acceptance more than once and not in that order. It’s different for each of us and such a personal process. Don’t worry whether you are doing it right. If you are breathing, you are doing it right.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. ~Lewis B. Smedes

A word on forgiveness. There’s a lot to it. It is complex and deserves its own post. What I will say here is that you have a lot of places to pass through before you even need to think about forgiveness. Forgiveness may happen, may eventually be something you do for yourself, but there’s a mess to sort and some healing to do first. Whether or not your partners can see that, support that or understand that. They do not get to decide what is best for you or where you should be emotionally at any given point. (Perhaps they, too, need to practice some radical acceptance. “I wish I didn’t have to see how much my choices have hurt my partner AND I need to support her healing, so I will have to witness how much I’ve hurt my partner.”) You are allowed to focus on you, what you need and your own healing process and not be beholden to their expectations or wish to avoid dealing with the harm they have done. Be kind to yourself. Accept not only that you are where you are but that you are exactly where you need to be.

Time. 

It can be a four letter word, especially when it comes to grief. But it can also do amazing things. Time on its own will not heal you. It’s what you do in that time and for yourself that heals you. But I promise, if you take care of you, in time you won’t feel like this. In time, you will have a day where betrayal is not the first thing you think of when you wake. In time, you will feel joy. In time, you will feel ready to let it go, to forgive. Just don’t rush to those things before their time.