Times like this — not just a terrorist attack or a worldwide pandemic but also other big moments in life like childbirth, divorce, death — you have a feeling about what's right for you, just like people in my 9/11 support group did. It was very clear to each of us who felt passionate about going back to work and who felt going back to work was insane given the world's events. I remember the psychologists in the room saying there is no right answer — there is only the right answer for you. ~Penelope Trunk, blogger
They're called "turnover" events, according to the psychologists – events in which circumstances change everything. They can be happy, such as the birth of a child. Or they can be catastrophic. A car accident, a pandemic. Or, yes, betrayal.
Betrayal might be invisible to those around us but it shifts the earth beneath our own feet. It changes everything. It's different than marital breakdown because that often happens slowly. Betrayal blindsides us. Even if we knew something felt off, we never quite imagined this.
And so we face a new reality.
In the early days, of course, it's enough to get through a day. It's enough to brush our teeth, get dressed, manage to somehow care for kids or do a reasonable facsimile of our job.
But with time, we face different choices. If we have chosen to remain in our marriage, what is that going to look like? What do we need in order to stay? If we have chosen to leave, well, what does that look like? What I'm suggesting – what Penelope Trunk, a trauma survivor, and the psychologists she quotes are suggesting – is that these events hold an opportunity for us, if we're willing to consider it: To choose a different way of living in this world.
These choices don't have to be huge to the outside world. For instance, after discovering my husband's infidelity, I became completely intolerant of dishonesty. I had known that he tended to lie. About stupid stuff. I would hear him on the phone with his mother explaining that he wasn't coming to visit her because he was "swamped with work" or the "kids have so much going on". I knew that if he wanted to visit her, we could have easily made that work. But the truth was he didn't want to visit her. He hated visiting her. But that truth remained hidden even from him. And so he lied. And I let him.
After D-Day. Nope. But not only was I intolerant of dishonesty in him and others but in myself. I noticed that I, too, often chose dishonesty over discomfort. So much easier to tell a friend that I wasn't feeling well than say that I didn't want to attend her Pampered Chef party. So much easier to tell an editor that a source hadn't called me back than tell her that I forgot to send the email. I became as disgusted with my own dishonesty as anyone else's. And though that might not seem like a transformative change, don't be fooled. It absolutely is. Being honest with myself and others has utterly changed my relationships. Resentment has a much harder time taking root when we're honest with ourselves and others.
Of course, there are the far more obvious changes we make. The job we leave, the job we seek, the friends we edit into or out our lives. And while I am not, will not, even look at infidelity as a good thing, I can recognize that it offers us something, if only the freedom to make different choices. When it feels as though we're living in ruins, why not see what we can construct?
