After the Cheating Comes Reconstruction

I screamed horrible things at my mother after my husband's betrayal. Despite the fact that she was the first person I called, despite the fact that she was my absolute rock, I nonetheless said horrible things. The latent pain that my husband's betrayal awakened was there because of my mother's addiction when I was a kid. 
I couldn't separate the pain of my husband's betrayal with the old pain of my mother's. Both betrayals told me that I wasn't lovable, that I didn't matter, that I wasn't worth fighting for, that I was expendable. 
And so I screamed at my mother that she was the reason I married someone who would do this, that I never felt worth being loyal to, that she had taught me to settle for crumbs.
She listened to it all. And then, as she had so many times before, she held me while I cried and reminded me how sorry she was, how desperately she wished she could go back and do those days over, do them differently.
It's hard for me to disentangle the pain of my husband's infidelity with the earlier pain of my mother's addiction. Complicating things further, my mother died six months after my first D-Day and weeks after my second. Her loss left me bereft. Long sober, she was the person I spoke with daily, who knew my story. She was my cheerleader, my champion. She was fierce in her love for me but equally fierce in her belief in forgiveness, in the human capacity for change, in earning redemption. She had lived it herself.
And so I've taken particular interest in Richard Rohr's recent look at addiction and sobriety. Rohr is a priest of the Franciscan order and though I'm not Catholic, his progressive views about life (not just religion) give me lots to consider. 
Such as this, from Alcoholics Anonymous:

There is a long period of reconstruction ahead. We must take the lead. A remorseful mumbling that we are sorry won’t fit the bill at all. We ought to sit down with the family and frankly analyze the past as we now see it, being very careful not to criticize them. Their defects may be glaring, but the chances are that our own actions are partly responsible. So we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Higher Power show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness, and love.
The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to finally live it.

This is what so many cheaters resist, even those who genuinely want to move past this, who swear they'll never cheat again. They resist the period of reconstruction. They imagine they can put this behind them without really doing the work of reparations. They want us to "stop living in the past", to "focus on the future". But without the work, without the reconstruction, the past is our present, and will be our future. Because we're still living it. Every single day.
Imagine the difference if a remorseful cheater sat down with us and listened to our experience without getting defensive. Just listened and tried to understand what it feels like to discover that our reality wasn't reality at all. How crazy-making that is. How terrifying that is. How humiliating that feels. 
Imagine if a repentant cheater was willing to do more than mumble "I'm sorry", if he was truly willing to "clean house", to take an inventory of the ways in which he's harmed other people, to take steps to make amends, where appropriate.
Thanks to my mother's sobriety via 12-step meetings, I've long believed it's a powerful way of living, whether or not addiction plays a role. It centres personal responsibility, accountability. It includes plenty of mercy. But ultimately, it's about showing up in our vulnerability, heart and eyes wide open.
While healing from my husband's betrayal, I was able to also heal a lot of old wounds from my mother's betrayal. And those 12-steps, at which I'd rolled my eyes when my mom was newly sober, were a valuable guide. 
Both my mom and my husband were able to make reparations, to listen to my pain and take full accountability for their role in causing it. It's impossible to overstate how healing that is. To feel heard. To feel seen. To feel valued. 
Those unwilling to do that get in the way of our healing. Telling us to "stop living in the past" is not only useless, it's harmful. 
Instead, we need to enter a period of reconstruction, which includes a sober look at what got us here.