Harnessing your suffering

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up. We may have been raised in the illusion that if we played our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.
~Anne Lamott, Almost Everything

It didn't. It doesn't. She speaks the truth, doesn't she? 
I fell firmly in the if-I-just-do-everything-right camp, then I'll sail through life. I never dreamed that the guy I married, the guy who wasn't the cheater that I dumped before I met the guy I married, would turn out to be a cheater too. I thought he was the most principled man I'd ever met. I was so certain of that. Not a doubt in my mind.
H'mmm.
My running partner, who's still reeling from betrayal and a husband who just doesn't quite get how devastating his emotional affair was, said that it was as if, in the midst of an argument, her husband had punched her in the face. Even if he somehow apologized, even if he felt terrible about it, there's no way to un-punch someone. And no matter that it only happened once. No matter that he just acted on impulse, that he didn't "plan" to punch her, forever after he's someone who just might punch her in the face. 
We all got punched in the face, didn't we? And not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up.
And it has nothing to do with whether we played our cards right. 
That's the thing with hope, with a naive conviction that life owes us ease and pleasure and safety. Eventually, all of us, every single one, faces a reckoning in which we come to understand that life will hurt us. And when your heart is broken, out of betrayal or loss or grief (which are all pretty much synonymous), it doesn't matter whether you're sobbing into a silk pillow or a gutter. 
But you know what does matter? What we do next.
Maybe not immediately. You're allowed to stay down until you've had a good, long cry.
But then...
Then it's time to consider your options.
And hopelessness – cynicism – isn't one of them.
It's tempting. It's so tempting to just decide that life equals pain and that nobody will ever love you and that you might as well just get used to being miserable. I see people like that all the time. They're angry and bitter and if they laugh at all, it's brittle and at someone's expense. 
I understand the impulse. It's wrongheaded, I think, but I get it. Just armour up and treat every relationship – from the grocery store clerk to your boss to your sister to your ex – as warfare. Better to hurt others than be hurt, right? Better to eat than be eaten.
But what if there's hope for something better that isn't just rose-coloured glasses to soften the truth? What if what we do next comes from a belief in our own goodness, in our own strength? What if our next step comes from a place of self-respect?
That sounds good, right?
Cause sure, life will damage us. Just ask my yoga instructor who's buried two children from suicide but who remains the most open-hearted woman I know. She's turned that pain into compassion for others. She has nursed her students through cancer and the death of a spouse and diagnoses or mental illness. She doesn't hide her pain, she harnesses it.
Not right away, of course. She honoured her grief. She cried a million tears. And then...she decided to keep living in spite of the damage life had inflicted. There's no glitter and concealer on her pain. She wears it. But she wears it in a way that's a badge of strength and resilience, not bitterness.
We can wear that badge too. We can harness our pain too.
It happens every single day here on Betrayed Wives Club. A woman comes aching with grief and loss and you all rush to her, using your own pain and your own stories to lift her up, to remind her she's not alone, to invite her to follow the light of those further ahead.
And that's the point of life, I think. Not to avoid the inevitable damage life inflicts but to wear it as a badge of strength, a symbol of our own resilience. 
None of us is spared. Maybe their pain won't be betrayal but it will be something. And maybe something that the rest of us know nothing about.
For the newly betrayed here, let yourself absorb the grief and the loss. Cry your million tears. Your next right step can wait for now.
Those of us further along, let's reimagine our pain as a badge of strength. Let it remind us to keep our hearts open because closing them won't prevent further pain, it will only prevent further joy.
And let us use our hope to create change in our lives. Hope that uses the tools the self-respect, self-care, compassion to build. 
Life rarely works out the way any of us think it will. But, as long as we accept our screwed up, damaged selves as nonetheless worthy of deep self-love, it will work out. 

Cultivating Hope When All Feels Hopeless

Hope can kinda stupid in the face of betrayal. It can feel naive. Weak. Passive.
And yet, what do we have when we discover that the person we trusted most has betrayed that trust? What do we do with the pain?
We can become brittle with anger and bitterness. We can become numb from self-protection. We can turn that anger inward and become depressed and anxious.
Or we can hope. 
Not a passive cross-your-fingers kinda hope but a rolling-up-your-sleeves hope. The kind of hope that spurs us to seek help for our pain, that pushes us out of comfort zone to ask for support, that gives us the clear-eyed understanding that his bad behaviour doesn't define us. That his betrayal is not our shame to bear but his.
Hope that we will not only survive this but triumph over it, to become stronger and wiser. 
"What I’ve observed from my own struggles and those of others is that in order to be hopeful people, we must constantly work at it," wrote Robert Hardies recently in The Washington Post.  "...hope is like love. It’s not a once-and-for-all cure, it’s one of the most important ongoing spiritual projects of our lives. Hope is a journey. A difficult path through a beautiful and broken world."
Hardies, a Unitarian minister, goes on to offer up lessons he's learned in cultivating his own hope. And while they apply to our larger world, they work for us in our private pain too. To help us recognize the courage inside each of us to ignite a spark of hope. 

1. Start where you are and take one step at a time. Hopeful people, says Hardie, "take concrete action to make a difference, even if it’s a small difference."
What might this look like in your life. Does it involve making an appointment with a therapist? Maybe it means sharing your pain with a trusted friend. Perhaps it's a daily commitment to walk, trying to notice the beauty around you and remembering that all things are temporary, including pain. 

2. Cultivate a spiritual practice.
For some of us, this means a formal religion but it doesn't need to. A spiritual practice includes anything that takes you outside of your experience and reminds you that you are part of something large and mysterious. You might find your spirituality in a grand cathedral with stained glass windows, you might find it on a yoga mat, your might find it in a basement following the 12 steps. You might find it in literature or music or in handing out lunch at a soup kitchen. The important thing is to connect yourself to something bigger than you, something that reminds you that you are only a small part of this world but that without you, the world loses some of its lustre. 

3. Don’t make the journey alone. "We need companions for the journey of hope," says Hardie  "The hopeful people are the together people. We’re on this journey together."
It's no coincidence that so much healing takes place in this rag-tag club of betrayed wives. It's because hope is contagious. When hope is extended to others by way of affirming each other's pain, through sharing hard-won wisdom, through laughing together, through crying together, through rooting for each others' healing, it grows in each of us. If she can do it, we come to believe, then I can too. If healing is possible for others, then it's possible for me too. 
And it is possible. It is even probable when you practice roll-up-your-sleeves hope. When you refuse to accept defeat as an option. Betrayal will bring you to your knees. Rest there as hope takes root. And then rise again.