How To Grow Your Own Heart

Would you erase your memories if you could? Not all memories, of course, but painful ones?

There was a time when I would have signed up for that without hesitation. I longed for some sort of lobotomy that kept me functional but stripped of trauma. Or a fall that would render me amnesiac, like a soap opera character. 

However, with technology on the horizon that promises (threatens?) to do exactly that, I find myself far more ambivalent. 

Do I really want to forget everything associated with my husband's infidelity?

I'm far enough out from D-Day (closing in on the 13th anti-versary) that the sting is long gone. I sometimes have trouble remembering the OW's name, a name I thought was seared into my brain. 

Sometimes, when one of you amazing warriors shares your story, there are details that make my own heart quicken, my stomach sink and my eyes well. I'm right there with you and, oh man, it hurts like  hell.

But mostly, I'm left with the life I've built since that horrible day, the lessons I've learned, the appreciation I've gained. 

And I wonder, was the pain the price I had to pay to get where I am? 

I hope I don't sound cavalier. Because I know just how acute that pain is. I have some sort of muscle memory that takes me back to the hyperventilating, the bizarre sense of falling without a net, the abject terror of another day in which, it seemed, anything could happen but it would probably be bad. 

But I've got the long view now. It's a view I never imagined. So intense was the pain of betrayal that I couldn't conceive of it ever receding. Dulling perhaps but persisting. Like an arthritic knee on a rainy day.

It isn't like that, at least not for me. It's more the memory of pain than pain itself. Like a diary in which you know you felt that way – after all, it's right there in your handwriting – but it feels like someone else.

How did I get here?

Good question. Because I certainly didn't have a plan, nor a map, which is what I wanted. And which is why I wrote Encyclopedia for the Betrayed because if there's a shortcut, a blueprint for getting the hell out of the darkness even a tiny bit faster, then bring it on, right?

But it began, honestly, with growing my own heart large enough to include myself.

Simple, huh? 

Not for me. So deep was my own shame that learning to make space in my heart for myself felt Herculean. It felt selfish. I didn't deserve it, I was certain. My lack of caring for myself left me particularly vulnerable to the pain of betrayal because somewhere, deep deep down, was the belief that my husband's infidelity was almost inevitable. I was fundamentally unlovable.

I had covered it well for a lot of years. 

But betrayal stripped me of my armour and laid my heart bare. And it held no room for me.

"When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That's why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Understanding someone's suffering is the best gift you can give to another person. Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love."

Those are the words of Thich Nhat Hanh. 

"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love," he says.

Sound familiar? It's a paraphrase of something else we say often on this site: Hurt people hurt people. 

And though it usually refers to the betrayer rather than the betrayed, I've come to understand the ways in which I hurt myself because I was hurt, the ways in which I shrank myself to accommodate others, was quiet when I should have been loud, accepted crumbs because that's what I'd been taught to accept. 

All of which is a long way of saying, I'll keep my memories. Yes, they were excruciating. But within them is the memory of a me who deserved my compassion but received my scorn. A me that I can retroactively nourish and a heart that I can continue to grow to make room not only my own flawed self but the flaws of those I continue to love, suffering I can much better understand.