Justice is a fantasy. Surrender instead

"We have this unconscious fantasy that if we just hang on to our justified rage and we hang on to our suffering long enough, then the other person will finally get it. They'll somehow magically see the light and they'll realize how they've harmed us and they'll feel as bad, better yet even worse, than the've made us feel. So when we leave the anger behind and we stop clinging to this angry internal dialogue, we also give up the fantasy of obtaining justice. And we give up the false hope of a wished-for future but what we gain is the ability to live in the present and to move on."
~Harriet Lerner, author of many Dance Of... books, and guest on Dear Sugar

We want justice, don't we? Even more than we want healing, I think, many of us want justice. And justice looks a wee bit like vengeance. We want the Other Woman to get hit by a truck. We want her to lose her job. We want her to be diagnosed with syphillis and die a lonely death. We want our husband to wake each morning to a dark day of misery for the pain he's caused. We want him to never know another moment of peace again. Ever.
It's only fair, we think. After all, we're miserable. We wake each morning to a dark day of misery. Surely if they felt, really felt to their very core, the depth of the pain they caused, that would balance the scales.
That, we think, would be at least a bit of justice.
There's no true justice, of course. True justice would be for them to have to experience the gut-punch of discovering a partner's infidelity. And not only discover it but have never been guilty of it themselves so that being cheated on truly feels unfair. And that, my friends, is impossible. Because even if we cheat on them right now, with the first sexy pool boy we can find, it's still not the same pain as we experienced. It's not the same shock. It's not the same. Not at all.
And so there really will never be true justice.
Obtaining justice is a fantasy, as my mystery writer above refers to it.
And chasing that fantasy isn't getting us any closer to justice. It's only keeping our eyes locked on a future that will never be. It's keeping us stuck in false hope.
But letting go of that fantasy can be frightening. I hear it all the time, in fact, a woman tweeted it to me the other day: "If I let go of the anger," she wrote, "isn't that the same as saying what he did was okay?"
No.
But it wasn't always that clear to me either.
I was certain that if I released the death grip I had on my anger, my husband's cheating would be relegated to the past. The metaphorical slate would be wiped clean. As if we were starting over, fresh.
And there was no way in hell I was agreeing to that.
Instead, I was determined to keep my husband in purgatory. Not quite hell but certainly nothing like a fresh start.
What I couldn't see then and what my Twitter friend can't see yet is that holding onto that anger, that fantasy of justice keeps us in purgatory too. It binds us to our pain, which is the past. I'm not saying it doesn't still hurt today, right now. I'm saying that the injury is in the past. And injuries heal. Sometimes invisibly but they heal, unless we keep picking at them, preventing the scab from forming.
Refusing to release the anger or our desire for vengeance-slash-justice won't magically make others suddenly get our pain. It will just keep us miserable. It will just keep us looking backward in one direction only, at our injury.
There is an alternative.
It's a scary one but here it is: Surrender.
Surrender to the truth that there will be no justice. Even if you divorce him and take every single cent he's ever made. Even if she's cast out by society and spends her days wandering dark streets in rags.
Surrender to the truth that you don't know what's next. Clinging to your anger doesn't protect you from further pain, it doesn't make it more likely that your husband will remain faithful. It only makes you unhappy and unpleasant to be around.
The alternative is, as our mystery writer puts it, "the ability to live in the present and move on."
Move on. Live in the present.
The present might still kinda suck. You might still cry a lot. But it's not yesterday. Or the day before. Chances are, if you look for it, you'll see that healing is taking place. I know you're not out of the proverbial woods yet. It takes a really long time. Longer than I ever imagined it would take.
But if you look carefully, if you release your death grip on anger, if you surrender your need for justice, you'll find signs of healing.
Tell us about them.
Maybe you cried a little less today. Maybe you laughed out loud. Maybe you noticed, for a split second, that something tasted good. Or looked beautiful. Or felt right.
Notice those things. They are signposts that are taking you out of the past and planting you in the present.
And that's where you want to be.

Control is an illusion: The key is surrender

"The world is a terrifying place. We manage it by believing we can control it. And when it hasn’t been controlled—when it doesn’t bend to our wills—we either look for something to blame, or we surrender."
from the essay SuperBabies Don't Cry, by Heather Kirn Lanier

My daughter had a favorite children's book we read often. Piggie Pie was a hilarious retelling of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One particular riff on Wizard of Oz had a wicked witch broom-writing above Old MacDonald's farm: Surrender Piggies!
No way were those piggies going to surrender. Not to Gritch the Witch. In fact, they were already disguised. They were undoubtedly going to outsmart the wicked Gritch.
Surrender. It feels a whole lot like failure, doesn't it? Like weakness. Giving up.
Especially in our amped-up fight-like-hell culture.
Indeed, dictionary definitions of surrender focus on defeat. Except for this one: "to yield oneself".
To yield. To make way for something else. To take your foot off the gas pedal and wait. 
In the wake of betrayal, we expect ourselves to act. Faced with our partner's choice, made without our input, beyond our control, we often compel ourselves to take control. And yet, for many of us, never has control felt so elusive.
Not only can't we control whether he continues his affair or not, whether he continues to lie to us or not, whether he stays and fights for us or not, we realize that the control we thought we had all along was an illusion. 
The world is a terrifying place. Ask anyone who's experienced a sudden tragic accident, a life-changing diagnosis, death, assault... And so many of us adopt the illusion of control because the alternative – accepting the randomness, the casual cruelty, the lottery luck of life – is too frightening. 
I did it. 
I believed that, after a chaotic childhood in which I controlled nothing, least of all my parents' addictions and consequent behaviour, I could control my adult life. And, of course, there were things I could control. Where I worked, for instance. Where I lived. Who I spent my time with.
But I bought the fantasy that there was a power that could prevent rejection or loss or failure or betrayal. I convinced myself that if I could unlock the secret formula that created a blissful life, it would be mine too. Perfection, I became certain, was the key.
And perfection was something I could control. It simply meant always looking good, always pleasing, always performing, always improving. It meant ensuring that everyone around me understood their importance, their value. It meant being available to them. It meant being whoever they needed me to be.
It meant sacrificing myself for some fantastical guarantee that they would never abandon me. 
And when it all blew up in my face (it blew up more than once. I'm a slow learner) with my husband's betrayal, I had one more choice to make. Was I going to look around and find someone to blame for what happened? Or was I going to surrender?
I chose blame for a year at least. I blamed my parents at first. My husband's betrayal unearthed some long-buried trauma that I enthusiastically excavated and flung in the faces of my parents who, to their credit, loved me through it. 
I moved onto the Other Woman. This was her fault. Her fault and the fault of every Other Woman who takes what isn't hers.
It was my husband's fault. Him with his missing moral compass. Him with his lies.
And persuasive arguments could be made that the blame for my situation lay at the feet of all of these people. Add in popular culture, add in social media with its click-to-get-laid technology, add in my husband's parents, the list goes on.
Ultimately though where did blame get me?
Absolutely nowhere.
Surrender though? Now we're talking.
Surrender wasn't failure at all. And it certainly wasn't weakness.
Surrender was yielding. Surrender was an acceptance that this was my situation and no amount of mud-slinging was going to change a damn thing. 
In a novel I've been reading, one of the characters gets in a physical fight and remembers something he learned in a martial arts class. Rather than continue to kick and flail when your opponent has you up against a wall, you go limp. You surrender. And in that act, you throw your opponent off. You become dead weight. Your opponent relaxes his grip.
When we surrender to our new reality, we're no longer expending our energy kicking and flailing at the universe, at our fate. When we're not railing against the injustice that this shouldn't have happened to us (and why not? awful things happen to good people all the time), we can focus on our injury. We can begin to heal ourself.