How to Stay Without Shame

~tweeted by Dr. Caroline Madden @cmaddenmft

It irks me still that I have been called an affair apologist by those who think there is only one response to infidelity and it is the one that involves divorce lawyers. To them, staying is pathetic. To them, there are no cheaters worthy of a second chance. There are no reasons worth trying again. There is only wishful thinking, pain delayed. Cheaters, as far as they're concerned, don't learn from the consequences of their horrible choice, they only wait until the coast is clear so they can cheat again.

This blog is, clearly, not for them.

Which is not to say that some cheaters don't deserve a second chance. Anyone unwilling to acknowledge the pain they've caused and commit to doing whatever it takes to rebuild their marriage is a risky bet, at best.

And it's not to say that, for some of us, a divorce lawyer isn't the best path. I don't know what's best for anyone who comes to this site. My goal is to offer comfort and some guidance towards healing ourselves, no matter what happens with our marriages. To urge every person who comes here to take care of themselves, to recognize that betrayal is traumatizing, and that each of us has to prioritize our own healing above everything else. 

But...

I still, much more rarely than when I created this site, get told I'm an apologist for infidelity simply because I don't think that the only, or the smartest response is to kick him out. 

But staying has its own challenges, it's own pain, it's own...shame. That's the kicker, isn't it? Shame. Even if we determine that staying is what we want to do, no matter how remorseful he is, no matter how much sense it makes -- emotionally, financially, family-wise -- there's often a voice that tells us we're schmucks. Pathetic. Weak.

And though I, and so many others, have nothing but admiration for you, though we all know how much courage it takes to stay, that voice persists. As Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it, shame slaps its label on you and makes you wear it. Hello, my name is Betrayed Wife and I am a schmuck.

So let's figure out how to rip that label off, shall we? Let's figure out how to stay without shame.

Where did your shame first put down roots?

For a whole lot of us, this latest dance with shame isn't our first. Shame was a longtime companion of mine, thanks to growing up in a home with addicts. Shame had long ago slapped a nametag on me: Hello, I am a child of alcoholics and if you knew what really went on in my house you would want nothing to do with me. I had battled it and thought myself victorious. But when my husband cheated on me, it was like shame sidled up to me with the words, hello, old friend. Remember me? 

So it's important when we feel that sting of shame for being cheated on at all but, moreso, for choosing to stay, to consider whether this is our old childhood shame rearing its very ugly head again and whispering those same old messages: You are not loveable. You are not worthy of loyalty. You are not enough. And, if that's the case, then it's time to rally your resources and fight back. Because the one thing we know about shame is that it doesn't speak a word of truth. 

Your marriage is not the betrayal

What so many don't understand about those of us who choose to stay in a marriage with someone who cheated on us is that our marriage is made up of a zillion moments, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the affair. But what our culture does with regards to infidelity is it takes that event and makes it emblematic of an entire marriage. So the question becomes: How can anyone stay with a cheater? 

And framed like that, pretty much all of us would say...we can't. We shouldn't. But we can stay with someone who cheated but is doing the work to become a better man. We can stay with someone who's grappling with a horrible choice and trying to make amends. In other words, it's a whole lot easier to forgive someone, or be willing to give them a second chance, when we don't see them as nothing more than the biggest mistake they've ever made. And so our shame, instead of coming from our own ideas around infidelity and second chances, is dictated to us by an unforgiving culture.

Don't hand your choice over to those who don't have to live with the consequences

"Don't take criticism from those you wouldn't ask for advice" goes the adage. I had three young children when I discovered my husband's infidelity. Choosing to stay included what I thought was best for them. Choosing to stay included the option to change my mind if I discovered more infidelity, or if he stopped working at our marriage, or if I simply felt I wanted to leave. I was the one who had to live with this choice. To make it based on what others thought I should do seemed ridiculous. 

But people have strong feelings about infidelity. Especially those who either haven't experienced it, or haven't learned from it. They're the first to tell you that there is one and only one way to respond to it and that is "don't get mad, get even". The same people who claim they've never felt more empowered by leaving their unfaithful exes are often the angriest people you'll ever meet. And though I support anyone's choice of how to respond to infidelity, I get sad at those who remain so pissed off, years, sometimes decades, later. Because that's not healing, it's fomenting. That's not growing, it's growling. Yes, infidelity is excruciating. And sometimes we don't get to choose whether our marriage survives. But we do get to choose how WE survive. 

And finally,

Shame might have something important to tell us

It's possible that shame is pointing out something that requires your attention. It's possible that you feel shame not because you've chosen to stay with someone who cheated on you but because you aren't holding him accountable for what he did. Maybe it isn't his betrayal that's shame inducing, it's your betrayal of yourself.

As Dr. Madden said in her tweet, it's possible to feel compassion for someone's suffering while still holding them accountable. In other words, you can feel badly that your husband screwed things up so badly while nonetheless insisting that he make things right. That's not punishing him. It's treating him like an adult. It's respecting boundaries. It's respecting yourself. By doing that, you're also going a long way toward reducing your own shame for staying. Because there's little that takes more courage than facing the person who hurt you and giving them the chance to show you they can be better than that. 

 

A conversation with therapist and infidelity expert Caroline Madden

Dr. Caroline Madden

I'm pretty active on Twitter these days and enjoy the conversations I have with others who tweet about infidelity and healing and how to get through this thing called life with our hearts mostly intact. 
I'm often intrigued by Twitter comments by Caroline Madden. She's a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles and also author of a bunch of books about healing from infidelity. She's smart and insightful but mostly she's got a way of reaching out to both the betrayer and the betrayed in a way that makes them feel seen and heard, like their story matters too.
I decided to read one of her books. I chose After A Good Man Cheats in part because I think there are fewer good books available for the betrayer.
I was gobsmacked by After A Good Man Cheats and I wished a whole lot that this book had existed back in 2006 when the bomb that is infidelity blew up my life. Gobsmacked because Dr. Madden gets it. It's like she read my diaries, removed all the angst-y woe-is-me and farewell-cruel-world stuff and wrote a book that addressed what I needed most: 
I am in the worst pain of my life and how do I make him understand that?
And then she put my pain through some sort of betrayed-to-betrayer translation machine and came out with things like this: 
"...the symptoms women experience after an affair are similar to the symptoms people experience after going to war or experiencing a significant trauma. They experience a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)." (from After A Good Man Cheats)
I can scarcely imagine how my healing might have been different if someone had said those words to me (or I had read them) early on. Rather than wondering what the hell is wrong with me that I'm such a mess?, I might have recognized that what I felt was reasonable, under the circumstances. It was normal. It was even expected.
And what a relief that would have been.
Relief is a key part of Madden's role. To offer relief to both partners. To assure each of them that infidelity doesn't have to be a deal-breaker, that they have options available to them and, perhaps most of all, that they will heal from this if they do the work. 
I recently called Dr. Madden where she lives and works in Los Angeles (lucky Angelenos to have such a therapist in their midst! Lucky the rest of us that she's written books to share her expertise). We talked about her work, her books and what she's both learned and taught.
She opened with this: "Reconciliation is not an entitlement. It's a gift."
Wow, huh? How would your marriage look different, right now, if you proceeded with that core understanding? That staying with someone who's been unfaithful isn't an act of desperation or wimpiness but generosity. Benevolence. A gift. Assuming, of course, that he wants to be a better man. That he wants that second chance and is willing to work hard for it.
Even then, she says, "men are stupid, and often say the absolutely wrong thing to their wife."
She's empathetic to them. "Stupid" is said with affection and, she says, in 20 years, "I haven't had a man disagree."
She offers them scripts in After a Good Man Cheats. Literal scripts. Not to put words in their mouths that are disingenuous, she says, but to help them decode their wife's pain, to "install empathy chips." She urges them to step into their wife's experience: Where is her pain? Why is she asking these questions?
To keep men focussed on their wife's pain, she urges her unfaithful clients to, whenever they find themselves feeling guilty or ashamed by what they did to think about what they can do for their wife that day, to become giving without any expectation of reciprocation.
Most men are stunned by the extent of the damage they've caused, she says, and at a loss for how to take steps to remedy it. 
"They are prepared for the anger,  not the devastation. They often believe that their wife doesn't really like them. They think their wife has [intentionally] been looking the other way."
She places at least some of the blame on our culture, which, she says, allows men to have three feelings: happy, angry, drunk. So when they're feeling lonely, or disconnected, or lost...well..."attention from another woman is like warm milk to a feral cat." 
This can be hard to hear when you're newly betrayed. We don't care that he was sad. Or lost. Or disconnected. We're all those things now too because they're big fat idiots! Maybe we were those things before but we didn't cheat!
Dr. Madden makes clear that understanding the cheater's mindset is in no way giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card. This isn't about exonerating them, it's about understanding them. 
"Cheating is in no way an acceptable response," she says, noting that it's not a therapist's job to be "neutral" about this. When she's counselling couples, the cheater needs to put his guilt and his shame aside, she says. 
"It's about her pain. He can deal with his feelings one-on-one."
To that end, she maintains that husbands need to accompany their wives to the doctor when they're tested for STDs. She normalizes the roller coaster of emotions that we so often experience, the up and down and all around. What did he expect? she tells him. Your wife is in the worst pain of her life. 
Those who cheat again? "If you can see this pain and do it again, you are a bad person," she says. But she says that with the same straightforwardness with which she talks about everything. No drama. No judgement. Just the facts, ma'am. With a huge dose of compassion.
Dr. Madden's books are widely read and well reviewed. No surprise. She offers a sane, realistic approach to rebuilding a marriage after infidelity. This isn't a quick fix and she doesn't promise miracles. 
But her books are easy to understand, even by men unfamiliar with the language of self-help and therapy. She brings her personality to every page – empathetic, funny and warm, with a steady approach to guide men, women and couples through to healing from the pain, whether or not they choose to rebuild their marriage. 
Healing from infidelity, she says, "is a process of humility and soul-searching." Despite a career spent largely helping couples who've experienced a fracture in their relationship, she believes in marriage, she says. "With all its ups and downs."