Thursday Thought

Our Stories Can Save Us

"According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience.... However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience."
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

We all have our D-Day stories, don't we? We all go back and pore over the days, weeks, years that led up to D-Day. Was he cheating when we were visiting our sister? Was he cheating when we were pregnant? And on and on.
We beg for details to help us fill out our stories. What we don't know, we invent. The Other Woman was a gymnast in bed. She had long legs. She laughed charmingly at his stupid jokes.
The mind movies are devastating. We lie in bed playing them over and over again. Or they ambush us when we hear a certain song, drive past a certain restaurant, notice a certain time of year.
Thing is, we weren't there. We will never ever know what it was really like. Nothing is ever really as fabulous as we think it is. Not the celebrity lives we envy in magazines. Not the other moms' lives with their kids who never seem to whine. Not the Other Woman with her imagined sexual sorcery.
Which is why we need to tell our stories with ourselves cast as the heroine. Maybe a tragic heroine, but a heroine nonetheless. Our stories can save us, if we let them. I'm not talking about creating a fiction, necessarily. But as Lidia Yuknavitch notes, there's a ton of brain science about the value of stories in healing trauma. It's why rape survivors need to tell their stories. It's why plane crash victims need to tell their stories. Over and over and over.
And it's why betrayed wives need to tell their stories. It's how we make sense of what's happened to us. And it's how we re-insert ourselves back into a narrative that we've been written out of. Our husband might have conveniently ignored our role in his life, the OW might be able to pretend we don't exist or that we shouldn't exist. But we don't have to buy that story.
No way.
Our story begins and ends with us – fighting like hell for our bodies, our hearts and souls. Yuknavitch's book, The Chronology of Water, is about a resurrection, a rebirth. It's about a woman who refuses to give up on herself, who refuses to accept others' stories. She is whole, just as we are. Not bit players in another's story but stars in our own.
Tell your story. Tell it as many times as you can to anyone who will hold it in their own hearts, without judgement, without flinching at your pain. Tell it until it fits your life and resolves the past. It is your truth and it will be your rebirth.

B is for...Boundaries

"We cannot simultaneously set a boundary and take care of another person's feelings."
~Melody Beattie, author 

Boundaries continue to confuse the hell out of us, don't they? If there's one thing on this site that seems to trip so many of us up, it's boundaries. (Though I'm not commenting so much, I still read your comments and you warrior women never fail to make me proud to be among you.) Boundaries seem selfish. They seem dictatorial. They seem unfair.
They're not. And Melody Beattie, best known for her books about co-dependency (that's another term that a lot of us instinctively recoil from), makes it clear when she says that boundaries are about self-care. Nothing more, nothing less. They are about keeping ourselves safe.
My daughter's friend was recently kicked out of her home. She's 18. She did nothing wrong, unless you count forgetting to make her bed now and again. It's the second time she's been kicked out – the first time she was put in foster care at 12 with her twin brother because they fought too much.
This girl's mother deserves my award for shittiest mother of the year, however, I'm conscious of the fact that we love others the best way we know how. I'm trying hard to practice compassion. I don't doubt that this mother loves her daughter. It's just that her love is toxic.
And so this girl has the monumental challenge of reconciling her love for her mother with her pain at being rejected.
Boundaries.
That's where boundaries come in.
Somehow this girl needs to come to a place where she can acknowledge her love for her mom while still keeping herself emotionally safe. And she gets to decide what those boundaries look like. For instance, she might love her mother while at the same time deciding that she can't have her mother in her life right now. Or it might look like the occasional phone call. Who knows. But it's about this girl's self-care not her mother's feelings.
And that's your challenge too.
Your partner betrayed your trust. Setting boundaries isn't about penalizing him, it's about self-care. It's about deciding what you need to begin to feel safe in your marriage again. Maybe that looks like access to his phone and computer log. Maybe it looks like regular check-in calls. Maybe it includes his commitment to a 12-step program or weekly therapy. Maybe it's about physically separating.
Whatever it looks like, it's your decision. They're your boundaries. It's about your self-care, your safety, and your right to feel safe with the people you've allowed into your life.
It isn't about penalties, manipulation or selfishness.
He might not like it. He probably won't, especially if you've been someone who hasn't, historically, enforced (or even had) boundaries in the past. It can be hard for your partner to realize that things are going to be different.
But remember what Beattie says: you cannot set boundaries and worry about another's feelings at the same time.
It's not that his feelings don't matter. It's that they're not yours. His job is to take care of his feelings. Your job is to take care of yours.
A key part of boundary setting is letting go of the outcome. This isn't about controlling another, it's about ensuring your own safety. You might not like how the other person responds to your boundaries.
But that doesn't mean you should back down. It means that you're with someone who doesn't respect your boundaries, who prefers the old you who puts others feelings above your own.
Learning a new behaviour is tough, especially if you've been taught for years that self-care is selfish, that boundaries are manipulation.
But it gets easier with practice. And it's crucial to your emotional health, to your healing.
Safety. Self-respect. Self-care.
Boundaries.

Guest post: Awesome advice from a betrayed wife

"Steam" often comments to this site, offering up her experience as a guide to others, and supporting those who aren't as far along the path as she. 
She wrote this awhile back and it's so succinct and compassionate, that I requested her permission to re-post it so that more can read it.
I love that this site has become a hub for so many who feel isolated and confused. I love how respectful we all are of each other's experiences, always recognizing that we each need to walk our own paths.
Thanks, Steam, for helping make this such a great space.
~Elle


I was immediatly diagnoised with PTSD in our 1st MC session. Our counselor made it very clear to my husband that my reaction to his selfish and fucked up action was completely NORMAL, not that that makes you feel instantly better, but it was good to have a name for it. Reliving it over and over again is hard to avoid when you cannot stop thinking about it. I am 10 months out this week and I have done my best to "reclaim" the places and things that gave me joy, that he stole, that I thought he had stolen forever. Since most of his affair was online with only three in-person meetings – when they met (in another country) and two months later when they had sex twice (in another country) –  there is not much to reclaim. All I have asked is that he NOT take me to the place they had their one dinner. He said it was bad anyway and he would never go again, good I dont need to go there, it was never mine to begin with. I am starting to feel safe again, and although I cannot ever trust him again like I did when I was blind, I do trust him a lot more. I no longer hit every e-mail address and social media page of his every day or even every week, I no longer search for her online. But I watch the cell phone bill like a madwoman. Something I never ever checked which had all I ever needed to know.
I feel a lot more like a better me, and our relationship has changed so drastically it's almost a miracle. And the hardest part to admit? It was not just him who had to change. I had to do my part too.  

If you are brand new to this, don't think YOU need to do that immediately. You need to heal and he needs to help. It's only then that you can find a better version of yourself...she is in there, I promise. 

It's not your fault, it was never your fault, you are not the one who cheated. You are not the one who risked everytihng, so just take it minute by minute – don't rush it – go through it, not around or over or under it, and if you have a new relationship with your partner (we could never have found one without counseling, relish it. 
BTW, I had EMDR about 20 years ago and it was quite astonishing. If I was still living in the land of PTSD I would not hesitate, but first I wanted to beat my H up in counseling for a while. 
lol  
Look at that, I just laughed. You will too...you will get through this unless your husband is an absolute a-hole and you are with a bad man, not a good man with issues and mistakes. Hang in there if he is worth staying with – and he will show you if he is – and thrive.  

All I have wanted to do other than save my own relationship was to be able to help others who have been through this. The spark came while I was googling within hours of finding out on that horrible d-day. I was of the school "once a cheater, always a cheater" and "if anyone ever did that to ME, he would be gone SO fast".  

Arent we all?

But when he DID do that to me, I gave him an immediate (and I add, loud and hysterical) choice he had to make – her or me. When I saw the absolute devestation in HIS eyes, seeing what he had done to ME, seeing his tears, hearing his words, feeling his absolute remorse, sadness, and looking into an opening into his soul I had never ever ever seen before. When I locked myself in the bedroom and he sat outside talking to me through the window, I surprised mySELF when I realized that even though I could not touch him or look at him right NOW, I wanted him to stay.
I wanted to know if we could survive this.  
I wanted to know I would be ok (because how could I EVER be ok again??) 
I wanted HOPE. 
and this was the only place I found it.  

I hated the name "club" – lol. I thought it would be just another husband bashing site, but it was not. [Elle's] words, as someone who had been through this, gave me HOPE – her essays and her links and her answers to others – so much wisdom and compassion, smart funny and sarcastic, but not bitter – it gave me what I needed. I wanted to get "there" where [she is], and I am on my way.  

No one could have told me that I would ever get through this, but honestly, somewhere on this blog that very first day – [Elle] actually did.

~Steam

How Trauma Breaks Open Our Story

People usually only come to this frontier when they have had a terrible loss in their life or they've been fired or some other trauma breaks open their story.  Then they can't tell that story anymore... they hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact with the true circumstance."
~David Whyte

They hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact. Sound like you? It sure as hell sounds like me.
I hit the reality of my husband's cheating with such impact that I shattered.
And it's hard, when you're shattered, to recognize that this breaking apart might, one day, be exactly what you needed. It's damn near impossible to understand that it's only when trauma has broken open your story that you're able to write a new chapter.
From my stop farther down the road, however, I can see that my husband's cheating – the trauma from that betrayal – meant that I couldn't keep telling myself the story I had been. It meant that, once I was able to pull myself back together, I had to admit that my story wasn't entirely based on fact. It was up to me to begin writing my own rather than let others dictate it to me.
Until then, my story had gone something like this:

I married a wonderful, principled man who adored me. We had three wonderful healthy children. Life was good, better than I expected or, frankly, deserved. The end.

What I tended to ignore because it didn't fit with the storyline I wanted desperately to believe was that it disappointed me when he wasn't able to acknowledge the casual cruelty of his family towards me.
It hurt me when I felt emotionally abandoned after the birth of our first child.
I felt invisible when I would express fairly mundane needs (please walk the dogs in the morning, please have breakfast with me instead of sleeping in...) and he wouldn't. (His modus operandi, which he'd used for years with his own family, was to agree to whatever they wanted and then do what HE wanted. I, a firm believer in taking people at their word, took years to see what he was doing. Which might mean I'm either a) a hopeless optimist or b) kinda stupid.)
And it was confusing to me when, sometimes, I felt like a blow-up doll during sex. As if I – a fully present human me – wasn't supposed to be there, and certainly wasn't supposed to have my own needs.
But by not allowing those truths to be part of my story, I was living a fiction. The fiction of my adoring wonderful husband who would never-not-EVER cheat on me.

Shattered.
Broken Open.

In the wake of that breaking open, we begin writing our new story.
I realized fairly quickly that my marriage hadn't been quite so polished and perfect as I had wanted to believe. I could see just how broken I was even before his betrayal completely shattered me. One of the hugest revelations for me was to recognize just how much I'd already betrayed myself.
I had assumed that my needs were less important than everyone else in the family.
I had accepted that, if his family rejected me on some level, it was because I wasn't deserving of their love.
I had been living my long-held deep conviction that I wasn't enough.
I accepted love that was, frankly, not so great and told myself it was more than I deserved.

As I healed, I began writing my true story.
And in this new story that has emerged, I am learning that I am enough. Have always been. Always will be.
I am learning that, in a healthy relationship, nobody's needs trump another's. That we all matter and can negotiate a family in which that's the guiding principle.
I can now spot the myriad ways in which I betray myself. My clue is a spark of resentment (which, left unexamined, grows to a roaring house fire of anger). When I begin to hear the voice in my head muttering "look how much I do", and "I'm exhausted!", and "why doesn't he...", and "why won't they...", I know it's time to take good look at how I'm NOT taking care of myself. When you hear yourself saying one thing when your heart and soul are screaming another, you're betraying yourself.
But what's clear to me is that all of this stuff, these rich lessons that have shaped my life in wonderful ways and deepened my relationships to friends and family and my children, arose out of my shattered self, my broken story.
It can be hard to see when you're surrounded by wreckage. It can feel like warmed-over platitudes ("out of suffering comes wisdom") that make you want to bash in the face of anyone offering them up.
But it was through my broken story that I gained the control to change the narrative of my own life into something that is far more likely to give me a satisfying ending. An ending, of course, to be determined.

Healing From Betrayal: Why We Must Tell Our Story

Penelope Trunk, who was in the World Trade Center when the towers fell, knows a thing or two about trauma. 
We women, who've been betrayed by exactly the people we trusted with our hearts and bodies, also know a thing or two about trauma. 
[Before there's a pile-on about how being cheated on doesn't even rate on the same scale as 9/11, let me say that this isn't a pain race. Pain and loss is pain and loss. And all pain and loss deserves to be acknowledged and grieved.]

Here's what Trunk has to (brilliantly) say about trauma:
The way to deal with post-traumatic stress is to tell your story over and over again. The theory is that when you are in the moment of trauma, you have to turn off all your emotions to get yourself through it. After the fact, in order to stop having nightmares and panic attacks, you have to experience the emotions you missed.
And this is the step that cheaters, including reformed cheaters, just can't get.
We need to talk about what happened to us. We are desperate to talk about it.
It doesn't prolong our pain. It does exactly the opposite. It doesn't deepen our pain. It does just the opposite. 
By talking about our trauma, we are processing all those emotions that were stifled when we were going through the experience. 
How many of you describe your response to D-Day as "shock"? Or say, "I felt numb"?
I know that I somehow got myself dressed, out of the house and managed to make chit-chat with the other moms while picking up my kids. It was like some weird out-of-body experience. I could watch myself making small talk and smiling at the teachers and pretending with my kids that everything was A-okay. 
That, my friends, is a trauma response. That is survival instinct kicking in. And it's helpful. It's helpful to ensure that children get picked up from school, that dinner gets put on the table, that jobs get done, that life goes on. But, over the long term, it's not helpful, it's harmful. 
It produces post-trauma. It might show up as a numbness that simply doesn't go away even when it becomes safe to process feelings. It might show up as depression, or self-loathing (which is anger turned inward). It might be nightmares. It might be anxiety. It might be an out-of-proportion response to something seemingly benign. Like completely panicking when your husband is five minutes late coming home from work. 
I once went berserk when I couldn't reach my husband on the phone and he was at the grocery store. I went ballistic on him. To him, what was the big deal? To me, not being able to reach him was EXACTLY what had happened the morning I found out. This wasn't about him being unreachable at the grocery store. This was about me being totally transported back to that awful, horrible morning when my world fell apart. To that consistent 33-second wait while I listened to his phone ring until it went to voice mail. 33 seconds. I watched the clock. Over and over as my brain caught up to what my body had known for weeks.
This was about post-trauma.
And, as Trunk points out, the way to turn post-trauma into PAST trauma is to talk about it.
The key here is talk. This isn't about raging and screaming and dredging up every last unkind thing your spouse has ever done. In fact, that won't get you anywhere. It's about telling your story. It's about someone bearing witness to your fear and your confusion. It's about someone confirming that this happened. And it was horrible. It's about reminding yourself over and over again, that this happened...but it's not happening now. 
You survived. 
You survived to tell your story.
It can be really tough, however, to convince your husband of this.
You tell your story and he hears, over and over again, I'm a total asshole who did this. I'm a cheating, lying scumbag. No matter that you're not exactly saying that (though you might be thinking it), that's what he hears. And he doesn't WANT to hear that. He doesn't WANT to be reminded of what he did. Who would?
Though a therapist or good friend can also listen to your story, it's often those who created our trauma who we want to listen to our story. We want our husbands to listen to our pain and reassure us that we will never have to go through that again. That it's over. That they are doing everything they can to make sure they never walk down that same path. That they never want to hurt us like that again.
That's it. Most of us don't want our husbands to beat themselves up. We don't want the focus to be on them at all. This is about us. 
And the opportunity to tell our story, or part of it, each time we're triggered moves us forward. It helps us heal. And each time our husband is able to be with us in that pain, to listen without defending himself, or minimizing our experience, or telling us why we shouldn't feel that way, our marriage is strengthened. We're on the same team, trying to beat back trauma. 
But each time we're silenced, told we're "living in the past", told we're hurting ourselves, that we need to "let it go" and "move on", our trauma goes deeper underground and our marriage fractures a bit more. We're on opposing teams, each trying to nurse his/her own wound at the expense of the other.
The story of our betrayal is a key part of who we are, whether our husbands or we like it or not (and most of us...not so much). But sharing that story carries with it the power to heal, not only ourselves but our marriages.