We Are Made Whole, of Broken Pieces

We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us. Yet only if we open to the fullness of the reality of what goes wrong for us, and walk ourselves with and through it, are we able to integrate it into a new kind of wholeness on the other side.

~Krista Tippett, The Pause, Jan. 16, 2021

Ah yes, the "other side". I felt certain that there was a line I would cross, a magical moment in time in which I would be "over this". On the other side. A place where I no longer felt the pain. Where I again felt whole. Normal. A place where I would feel kinda like my old self but somehow renewed. 

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is an "other side". There is an after, a time when you are not consumed with the affair, when you will go days, weeks, even months without thinking about it at all and if you do think of it, it will not make your stomach clench or your heart hurt. 

The bad news is it can take years to get there. And the neither good nor bad news is that it is not some magical moment but a process. You don't get there all at once but in increments. In steps. Sometimes you're aware of these steps, often you're not. Sometimes those steps are forward. Sometimes not.

It's the one thing I wish I'd known when I was in so much pain: This feeling will not last forever. 

The other thing I did know instinctually was that nobody was coming to save me from that pain. I was going to have to be my own hero.

It's a tough realization. That he can't save you. That whether he stays or goes has less impact on your healing than the work you do to save yourself. To remake yourself. 

We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us, says Krista Tippett. We know this somehow even as we wish it was different. We know this even as our culture often tells us that pain is to be avoided, that broken people are to be pitied.

Remaking ourselves is the work of a warrior. It is the work of finding our wholeness. On the other side.

There Will Be No Closure So Stop Expecting It

We're familiar with the five stages of grief and many of us can point to various stages as we recount our experience with D-Day. Shock. Anger. Depression. And a whole lot of us are, in some ways, holding our breath until we're done with this experience. We await the day that it's over, we're healed. We rhapsodize about closure. Closure looks different for some of us but it often includes giving the Other Woman a piece of our mind.
So a whole lot of us are dismayed to discover that, no matter what we try, no matter how far out we are from D-Day, closure seems to elude us. We're never quite there. We never feel "over" betrayal.
To which I say, of course not. Cause I've learned the hard way (is there an easy way through this? Cause I don't know of one...) that closure is a myth. Rather, thanks to the work of Pauline Boss, I've come to understand that, where betrayal is concerned (among other life challenges), it's what she calls "ambiguous loss". And there is rarely closure where ambiguous loss is concerned.
Ambiguous loss, a term Boss coined in the 1970s, refers to loss where what we're losing isn't clear-cut. It's death-like rather than death. A spouse lost to addiction. A refugee fleeing the war-ravaged country they love. A child born with special needs. 
Betrayal.
We've lost the marriage we thought we had. We discover a spouse who's different than the one we thought we knew. We even, often, find ourselves capable of feelings we'd never imagined. Rage. Despair. Hatred. We've lost so much but we can't quite put our fingers on what it is.
Our grief is complicated. Our husbands aren't dead. In many cases, our marriages survive.
But everything's changed, hasn't it? We've lost...something. Complicating it further is the silence we frequently adopt. To the world, our lives are intact. There see no signs of loss, ambiguous or otherwise. 
Reality itself feels threatened.
And closure is little more than what we can expect from our front door, keeping the world at bay while we wrestle on the inside with our pain.
Part of moving through ambiguous loss – part of moving through life itself – is releasing ourselves of any expectation that things should be different. Ambiguous loss will not deliver closure any time soon. Or at all. Release any expectation of that. Grief is normal, no matter that your loss might not look like loss to anyone but you. 
Allow that grief. Invite it in. Move through it. Move through it again, because it will return, each time looking a bit different. 
Until the day comes when grief knocks, again, on your door and you recognize it. You again, you think. I know you. And I can handle you. You're not nearly so frightening. I can become your friend.
Grief has much to teach us, if we let it. And its teaching begins the day we accept that closure will continue to elude us because there is no such thing. 

What Brené Brown and my crappy ex-friend taught me about pain

"It is so much easier for people to cause others pain than it is for them to feel their own pain."
~Brené Brown, On Being with Krista Tippet

I was driving along the highway listening to Barry Manilow. (No dissing of my musical taste allowed. Manilow was and is a musical genius/national treasure. Do not argue with me.) I haven't heard his music in years. Ever since the digital revolution made my LPs and CDs irrelevant. But a recent Spotify subscription is restoring my music library and giving me access to my youth via music yet again.
And so...Manilow.
Music, we all know, transports us, often to the past. I landed somewhere around 1984, the year that my best (ha!) friend, recently dumped by her boyfriend, began dating mine. Technically, my boyfriend and I had broken up a few days earlier. We were "taking a break" (yeah, I know). I was at school in another city and it just wasn't working. But I was heartbroken and he was heartbroken. Enter "friend" (ha!).
And so my friend (ha! again) made her move. First she told him what a crappy girlfriend I had been (which might have technically been true). Then she told him that I already dating. (I had gone on ONE date and I was sad through the whole thing.) I didn't find all this out until later. I knew she wasn't returning my phone calls, which was weird. And then, a week later, I show up at a party and the two of them are clearly a couple.
My heart shattered.
I give you this backstory because, over the years that have elapsed since 1984, this episode in my life has become something of a punchline, a sort of "wow, I was young and stupid and had really bad taste in friends" kinda story, punctuated with laughter.
But, with Manilow singing about heartbreak, I didn't feel like laughing when I remembered. I felt like crying. Because I suddenly remembered how painful that was. I was so young. And so in love with this guy who was completely wrong for me. And I had trusted both him and my friend (HA!). Not to never hurt me but to not intentionally hurt me.
Thing is, this friend (ha! ha! ha!) carried her own pain. Lots of it. She had done this to other friends. She fed on male attention. And so, even acknowledging so many years later, courtesy of Manilow, just how painful that was, I was able to see exactly what Brené Brown is telling us: It's so much easier for people to cause others pain than it is for them to feel their own pain.
Think about how often that happens in your life. A mother who can't apologize to you for something cruel she said. A friend who would rather sever ties than face your hurt, or her own. A husband who convinces himself that it's okay to cheat on his wife. That "nobody" is getting hurt.
It's psychological (not to mention moral) gymnastics, this ability to numb ourselves to our pain while hurting others. But it's as common as dirt.
All of us carry wounds. We cannot reach adulthood (hell, we probably can't reach first grade) without having suffered an emotional wound, some deeper than others, of course. And many of us learn to ignore it. In a culture where expressing emotional pain is seen as weakness, we pretend we're "fine", especially men. In a family in which our emotional pain makes us a target for more, we learn to hide it. We lie to the world. Nothing to see here. And then we believe our own lies.
But that pain doesn't go away just because we pretend it isn't there. It simply drives our behaviour in ways that aren't so obvious. We eat more than we should. We drink more than we should. We spend more than we should. We cheat more than we should.
And we refuse to accept responsibility for the pain that we're causing to others because we're so divorced from our own.
I've always been a sensitive person. "Too sensitive", if you ask the most wounded (but least aware) people in my life. When I was about 12, I came home from school upset about something a friend said. "Why are you crying?" my mother asked me, even after I'd explained. She was so removed from her own emotions that she, literally, couldn't fathom tears. Not surprisingly, she spent a decade at the bottom of a vodka bottle, numb to her own pain. It was only when she got sober that she got in touch with any feeling other than shame. There was a world of hurt waiting for her to face it. But until she was able to own her pain, she caused me a world of it.
That's the challenge as we deal with infidelity. And it's such a tough one. The challenge is to acknowledge our own pain at being cheated on, while also acknowledging the pain that drives someone to do something so contrary to his own moral code (if it isn't contrary to his moral code, then that's a whole other problem). Healing from infidelity isn't a zero sum game. It can be true that you are in the worst pain of your life because of what he did. And it can be true that he never addressed the pain in his life, which is why he did what he did. Your pain doesn't cancel out his and vice versa. Each of you must tend to your wounds. Especially so that you don't carry them with you in a way that allows you to hurt others without regard.
We cannot be whole until we are able to acknowledge our own pain and the ways in which we've hurt others. Only then does healing begin.