"Vengeance is a lazy form of grief"

I am away on holiday and won't be responding to comments. A good friend of the site, however, will be moderating comments and ensuring that yours get posted so please don't hesitate to respond. I have scheduled some posts. I'll be back, with hopefully a spring in my step, by March 22. 

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Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge on someone, on God if they can’t find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There’s an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He’s taken out on the water and he’s dropped. He’s bound so that he can’t swim. The family of the dead then has to make a choice. They can let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they’ll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn’t always just… that very act can take away their sorrow.
~Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter

We sometimes talk in code. A few other infidelity bloggers and writers and therapists and betrayed partners say things like "they're so...angry" and "they kinda scare me". We're referring to a portion of the infidelity Internet that traffics in rage, that insists on one response to betrayal, that dismisses anyone who pleads for nuance. We don't want to name names but...
"Vengeance is a lazy form of grief."
I knew I objected to the black-and-white approach to cheating. It's a blessing and curse of mine to always ALWAYS be able to see the other's point of view. And I know how infuriating that can be when what so many of us want is to be told that we're right. We're right to think he's not worth our time. We're right to throw him out. We're right to file for divorce immediately.
And, thing is, sometimes we are. Sometimes.
But "sometimes" doesn't cut it. People want absolutes, especially when we're reeling from news of our partner's betrayal. We want certainty. We want a community that will assure us that he'll cheat on us again so it's better to dump him now. We want a mob that will call for his head. Only a fool would give him a second chance. 
We want his head on a stick.
I know. I did too.
Except that I also didn't. Yes, he had betrayed me in the worst possible way, for years. And yes, there were many people who thought me a complete fool to even consider rebuilding a marriage with him. How much proof did I need that he was a cheater, destined to continue cheating? 
But...
He was the father of my three small children. He was my friend. He was my husband. 
All of that remained true, even as I wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. 
It wasn't until I cleansed myself of that desire for revenge that I believe I began to heal. And healing began with grieving. 
We'll do almost anything to avoid grief, won't we? We'll busy ourselves. We'll stoke our own rage. It feels so much more productive, so much more empowering to plan a takedown of a villain than to grieve a loss. Grieving feels passive. It feels pathetic. 
And yet, I know of no other path toward wholeness and healing. 
Those who let themselves grieve eventually discover that it guides them to an exit door. Those who don't remain stuck. Ever talked to a friend whose divorce was finalized six years ago and she's still cataloguing her ex's faults? Or the person fired from a job whose hatred of his manager burns as hot as ever? That anger that feels like empowerment is an illusion. Rage doesn't fuel us, it eventually consumes us. 
None of this is to say that anger isn't warranted. Being cheated on can trigger the deepest fury. I don't think I've ever felt so angry. And, trust me, if a genie had arrived offering me vengeance, I wouldn't have hesitated.
Time, however, has tempered that fury. And, assuming you're not feeding your own rage, it will temper yours too.
Also...know this: Behind anger is usually a deep well of grief. But we're so afraid of grief that we never pull off its mask. 
Go ahead. Trust that you will not drown in grief but you might strangle yourself with anger. Beyond that anger, that masquerading grief, is peace. Reach for it.

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.

Time and Punishment

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
~Mahatma Ghandi

Okay, so it's a bit unfair to ask us all to model ourselves on Ghandi. After all, I spent much of the first year post-D-Day imagining all sorts of torture and humiliation for both my husband and the OW. The fact that I didn't act on any of my dark fantasies speaks more to my lack of energy at that time than a lack of intent.
It's hard to believe when you're simmering in your red-hot rage that you will ever feel anything other than fury and a desire for vengeance. And yet, most of us discover that it does abate. That we eventually do come to a place where anger doesn't consume us, that we aren't drowning in our pain. We come to a place where we can see that our marriage is growing stronger, that our husbands have changed.
But still...sometimes months or even years later, we have a sense that we didn't punish our husbands sufficiently for their crimes. That we let them off too easily. They our partners didn't pay. 
One of our secret sisters posted recently that her marriage has become wonderful, that her husband is remorseful and grateful. And yet, she's dogged by a regret that she let him come back home too soon. That he wasn't sufficiently punished for the pain he caused.
What's up with that?
Wanting to punish people is a human impulse. Punishment, we believe, is a deterrent (though it usually just encourages people to become better at not getting caught). But punishment doesn't always show up the way we think it does. Punishment comes from outside. On the other hand, suffering comes from an internal reckoning with our choices.
I could have kicked my husband out after discovering his betrayal. It would have punished him by no longer giving him the particular pleasure of a life with me. Thing is, I didn't want a life without him, at least not without trying to rebuild our marriage. So, while he would have been punished, so would I. And so would our children.
Punishment in and of itself shouldn't be the goal. Rather, it's the natural consequence. If you choose to kick him out because you cannot live with what he did and who he is, then even though you're punishing him, that's not your motivation. Your motivation is to get him out of your life so you can move on. It's about setting boundaries and taking care of yourself. Punishing him is a consequence not the motivation. 
Punishment wouldn't have come close to what my husband was doing to himself, which was suffering. He loathed himself for what he'd done. He could barely look at himself in the mirror. He could barely look at me because, as he said, he caused the pain he saw in my eyes. By kicking him out, he didn't have to look in my eyes. Kicking him out also let him off the hook for day to day childcare and home maintenance. I'd be the one 100% stuck with soothing distraught children, wiping up spills and cleaning the litter box. He was the sinner...but I'd feel pretty damn punished.
Punishment also feels bottomless. How much is enough? Do you cast him out for a week? A month? Until you see clear repentance (I don't disagree with this last point, though, again, I see it less as punishment than self-respect and self-care). Should he lose his job? His friends? Do you offer up a daily harangue about the ways in which he's a jerk who doesn't deserve you? (Confession: I did, frequently, do exactly that. With time, however, I realized that though I might be hurting him, I was hurting myself more. I hated who I had become.)
Ask yourself this too: Is punishment about looking strong to those around you (the same ones who might offer up their "I would NEVER put up with that" editorializing)? Or is it about making him hurt the way you're hurting? Because neither reason is really about you living your own truth. It's about appearances. It's about an eye for an eye. He can't hurt like you're hurting because it's different. Being cheated on is not the same as cheating (frankly, I'll take being cheated on). 
Justice is different. Justice is about not protecting people from the consequences of their actions. Justice, as Ghandi reminds us, is motivated by love (including self-love). It's driven by clear boundaries. Justice doesn't encourage us to make somebody hurt but does reminds us not to step in and protect someone from consequences. 
Operating from a justice model means that your husband might have to give up friends who participated in covering up the affair, not to punish him but to provide emotional safety for you. Justice means that he might have to abandon any notion of privacy on his electronic devices. Or give up overnight business trips. All negotiated on the basis of what makes you feel safe and supported, not what makes him feel punished.
Any decent guy will suffer for what he did because he will not let himself off the hook. He has to live with having hurt the one person he promised not to hurt. He has to know that he let down his family, that he revealed himself to be less of a man than his partner believed.
That's got to hurt.
And if it doesn't...then no amount of punishment you mete out will make any difference.