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. 

From the Vault: The Desperate Plain

"A friend once called this sense of being too alone "the desperate plain," the looming desolate stretch of ground, no trees to shelter you, no water, no way to escape, nowhere to hide or find comfort, strewn with rocks and a few random snake holes. You are stripped down existentially, you are naked, you are nuts."
~Anne Lamott, from Small Victories: Spotting Improbably Moments of Grace

We've all been there, haven't we?  What Lamott's friend calls "the desperate plain". It's terrifying. We can't remember having ever felt safe. We can't imagine ever feeling safe again. Everywhere we look, we see threats. There is nowhere to retreat. There we are: naked, nuts.
I'm there right now. My youngest child is struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and I feel as though I'm in enemy territory. She becomes someone I don't recognize when she's having an episode. She screams that I'm "dirty". She won't touch certain items because they're "contaminated". She rails at me for "not helping" her and won't let me hug her because I'm "filthy and "something bad will happen."
And then, when the episode is over – 10 minutes if we're lucky, an hour if we're not – she's contrite. She sobs with regret, begs my forgiveness, says she wishes she could kill herself so that she didn't have to deal with this. She's 11 years old. A baby. My baby.
It's breaking my heart.
And though it has been a long time since I was in that barren wasteland – that desperate plain – I know that so many of you are still there. I'm back.
I'm reminded just how terrifying it is. How alone you all feel.
But I know that it is then, when we look over our shoulder and beside us and – oh no, did something move over there? – all around and see nothing NOTHING that can save us, that we need to say, in a squeak or a roar:

Help. 

We need to say "help". We need to say "help" to anyone in our lives who can offer it. We need to say "help" to someone who can take your kids for an hour so you can close your eyes or go for a walk or see your therapist. We need to say "help" to that therapist – who can give us a place where, for an hour a week (or more!), we can lay our heart bare to someone with compassion and experience who can help us mend it back together, stitch by stitch.
We need to say "help" to the women on this site, who've been where we are and can join us in solidarity or gently remind us that we won't always be in this place. That despite everything we feel right now, there is a place to move into that does offer safety and respite. That we'll get there if we can just hold on. If we can just trust that this desperate plain isn't a destination but a phase. A place we need to endure. A place where are not, in fact, alone.
Enduring can feel like surrender when it's actually a sign of incredible strength. And asking for help can be the most courageous thing you do today.
Right now my daughter needs my help. She needs me to remind her that she can endure. That this desperate plain isn't where she will always be. That she is brave and loved and suffering. But that she isn't alone.

Receive the Shattering

"I had always thought I would get to a point where I was "over" the trauma. Turns out, I was wrong. Cultivating resilience is unrelated to the clichéd notion of time healing all wounds; overcoming is not the end goal. Instead of moving on, it's about living with what has happened. A resilient person is emotionally and psychologically flexible enough to allow the effects of a traumatic episode into her life, to "receive the shattering,"... and use those effects for healing."
~from "How to Recover from Grief", Oprah magazine, May 2016

"Receive the shattering." I wasn't feeling particularly receptive on December 10, 2006, when my shattering arrived. I didn't so much receive it as get run over by it. And in the weeks that ensued, I fought like hell to give it back. 
It was months, a year if not more before I was anywhere close to receiving the shattering.
But at some point – time feels fuzzy when I look back and I have a hard time remembering exactly how long I was suspended in that state of shock and denial and profound grief – I recognized that the only way I was going to get unstuck, out of this lethal plain of flatness where I'd set up camp, was to accept what had happened to me. To receive the shattering.
In fairness, I didn't so much recognize it as my therapist pointed that out to me and I, finally, decided to agree with her. What she told me was this: You are numb, she said, because you refuse to allow the pain in. But by denying negative feelings, you prevent positive feelings too. It's like putting a seal on a bottle. Sure you keep the poison bottled up but you keep the thirst-quenching water bottled up too. 
She'd said similar things before. She's not a big fan of my approach to emotional pain, which basically amounts to numbing myself and carrying on, and then complaining about it. 
Just barely concealing her exasperation, she told me that happiness would come only when I opened the door to pain. You can't have one without the other. 
Which, frankly, is a glitch in the system, if you ask me. But which was the inconvenient truth for me. 
And, judging from how many of you post here about being stuck, seems to be the truth for you too.
We imagine a day, don't we?, when the pain is over and everything goes back to "normal". When we're "over" this. God knows, our husbands want that. "Aren't you over this yet?" they ask us, making it incredibly difficult to not murder them with our bare hands. 
Thing is, "over" isn't an option. We'll never be "over" this. My D-Day was almost twelve years ago and though I go days, sometimes weeks, without thinking about it (except for this site but, honestly, I think about what you guys are going through not so much what I did), I still wouldn't say I'm "over" it.
But I have learned to live with what happened. It has become a part of my history, something I went through. I have received the shattering and it has become a part of me.
And that, my fellow avoiders of pain, is how you get unstuck. 
I wish I could give you a shortcut. I wish I could provide some sort of infidelity hack that allowed you to jump right over the pain and the suffering and return you to joy.
But my exasperated therapist is right. Honestly, I tried it the other way. I tried to just open my heart enough to let the good stuff in and then quickly shut it again to the pain.
Didn't work. I felt...flat. Numb. 
No pain, no joy.
And so you must receive the shattering. Parcel it out, if necessary. Take a few minutes each day to journal the pain, or run the pain, or paint the pain, or share the pain here. And then, if necessary, put the barricades back up around your heart. But make sure that you're moving toward totally dismantling them. Make sure that you don't get so comfortable with numb that you forget to feel. 
Receive the shattering, live with the truth of it and then use it to help you heal, to remind yourself that you are strong enough to withstand it.
Because you are. 

Baptized in Tears: How your grief can reveal your truth

Grief is just so scary. Our grief and rage just terrify us. If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That’s what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn’t get dinner.
We stuffed scary feelings down, and they made us insane. I think it is pretty universal, all this repression leading to violence and fundamentalism and self-loathing and addiction. All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
~Anne Lamott in an interview with Salon

Wow huh?
She's right, of course. How often do we cry those tears and then feel ourselves cleansed? Our problem might still exist, the pain might still be there, but somehow it feels smaller. Somehow we feel as those we've paid respect to our pain. Acknowledged its legitimacy.
Unfortunately women's tears have had a bad rap. Men, having typically been told since they were toddlers that "boys don't cry" have long stuffed their sadness, expressing it instead in anger or addiction or affairs. We women were given a bit more time to get our emotions under control. It was acceptable for us to cry until our teens. And then, because it often made the males in our lives uncomfortable – our boyfriends, our bosses – we blinked the tears back. Otherwise we risked being called manipulative, "turning on the waterworks", too sensitive, emotional.
My mother, who cried booze-tears instead of the real kind, often looked at me, her hyper-sensitive child, like I was some sort of alien being. "Why are you crying?" she would ask me, genuinely curious. Why was I crying? Well...my mother didn't understand me, she drank too much, I felt lonely and, well, sad. But I got the message. Tears were weakness.
But those tears saved me. I couldn't have stopped them if I  tried, and frankly I never saw the point in trying. Consequently I felt my feelings instead of numbing them. My mom eventually unearthed her own pain but not before she'd stormed through a decade, cauterizing her sadness with alcohol.
Thanks but I'll take a cup of tears. A thousand cups.
The agony of D-Day and the subsequent weeks and months of anguish brought with it an ocean of tears.
My therapist, soaked to the knees in my tears, told me that some cultures believe that we have a finite number of tears to cry before we're cleansed. You, she told me, just haven't reached that number. In other words, let the tears flow and trust that the day will come when they will dry up.
That permission was crucial. Equally crucial was the understanding that, eventually, the tears would dry. Implicit in that is the recognition that the sadness will lift. But for now...cry.
The grief, as Lamott promises, won't wash you away. It will baptize you into this new world that holds pain but also love, sadness but also joy. Those tears will, if you let them, bring you home to the truth of you. That you are whole. That you are worthy. That you are sane and human and okay and sad. Right now, you are sad.

Bidding Farewell to My Fantasy Marriage

My husband would never cheat on me, I would have told you, more than three years ago. I wouldn't have said it arrogantly or smugly. It was simply a fact. Like his hair color. Or height.
Even as I would have been uttering those words, he would have been cheating.
He had, in fact, been cheating on me our entire relationship. When we dated, became engaged, got married, had children.
Stating this to you is bizarre. It's as though I'm talking about someone else. Because...my husband would never cheat on me.
Coming to terms with the total annihilation of my reality-turned-fantasy has been one of the hardest things I've had to deal with.
I felt safe in the world I had. I was married to someone who, though we might have our ups and downs, simply wouldn't jeopardize our marriage. Or so I thought. Believed. With every pore of my being. It was one thing that kept me moored, when life threatened to unmoor me.
So when I found out that my rock was actually nothing more than sand, it frightened me, to say the least.
But the past three years have forced me to face that my marriage was nothing like I thought.
Which, of course, completely alters my future. I can never be married to someone who's always been faithful to me...unless I divorce, marry someone else and he doesn't cheat.
I can never completely trust my husband to be telling the truth. Experience has shown me that he's capable of lying and will, if necessary, to protect himself.
So I've not only had to let go of my fantasy past...but my fantasy future too.
We can rebuild...and, in fact, are. We can create a better marriage, a stronger marriage, a more honest marriage. But I can never again have that sense of 100% certainty that my feelings are safely held with him.
It's a helluva compromise. And some days, it seems like one barely worth making.
Other days, when I watch him with our kids, when he sleeps beside me and I imagine life without him, it feels worth it.
The thing about betrayal is that nothing, afterward, is ever the same. Not me, not him...not our marriage.
Cheated, indeed.