There's No Going Back to Normal: Infidelity Edition

It is a hard truth to swallow but: There won’t be a return to “normal.”

~Ekemini Uwan, "There's No Going Back to Normal", The Atlantic

I am awesome in a crisis. I am the one who takes stock of what's happening, calculates resources to deal with it, assigns responsibility to those available to deal with it. Later, I will weep. Later, I will curse the heavens. But now. Now, there's work to be done.

The crisis of New Year's Eve is receding. My daughter has support, both emotional and medical. My other daughter's lost cat, which seemed to amplify my sense of powerlessness in protecting my kids from pain, has returned home after five days of haunting my dreams. I can look around and admit that things feel mostly "normal".

But we all know that "normal" is an illusion, don't we? There is no "normal" after trauma, after betrayal, after such heartbreak. How things look to those on the outside simply doesn't match the change that has occurred on the inside. But it's crucial to remember: We have more control over the inside change than the outside change. Put another way, we don't control what happens to us but we have some control over how we respond to it.

I say some control because trauma sometimes takes the wheel. That heart-pounding tunnel vision "ohmygoditshappeningagain" is not easily controlled, at least not without therapy and strategies and practice.

Normal appeals to us exactly because it implies an erasure of what took place. Normal promises us that the pain is gone, that the threat has been removed. Which is why it's so deceptive. The threat was always there, even when we didn't recognize it. Not to sound sinister but ...people can betray us. We know that now. And there is no unknowing it.

But accepting that reality, as Ekemini Uwan writes, is not to be confused with approval of it. She's writing about our new Covid-colored reality of lockdowns, and Zoom meetings, and isolation. But it's just as true of the days following betrayal. We must grieve the loss of our old "normal" even as we accept that there is not going back to it. And, if we're honest, do we want to? Just as before Covid relegated us to watching life happen on TV, there were uncomfortable truths we were ignoring. Racial injustice, economic inequality. A frenetic pace that was making a whole lot of physically and psychically ill. Do we really want that again? Or do we want to build an intentional...something...in its place.

I chose the latter. Once I accepted that my old normal, which included me overlooking a lot of painful things, wasn't an option, I set out to create a marriage that felt better. It started with insisting my husband no longer schedule evening meetings with clients. It included my husband being home for dinner with me and our children at least five nights a week. It meant no more work trips without discussing them with me first. I looked at things I had been tolerating in the spirit of "partnership" and "compromise" but that were actually a betrayal of my own values, that were about poor boundaries disguised as being "easy-going". 

Uwan puts it like this: "...radical acceptance is not a call to stoicism. An array of emotions (anger, fear, anxiety, grief, etc.) may arise within you in response to reality. Suppressing these emotions can be tempting, but allowing yourself to feel whatever you feel without judgment is also a kind of radical acceptance. And I have found that radical acceptance can be freeing—accepting what you cannot change enables you to focus on what you can."

We cannot change that we're in the midst of a devastating global pandemic. We cannot change that our marriage has been injured by infidelity. But we can give ourselves permission to feel the pain around that reality while accepting it anyway. 

Only then can we focus on what can grow from the ashes of what's been destroyed.