Why Shame is the Wrong Tool to Deal with Infidelity

Here are some of the things I said to my husband after D-Day:
You're a liar.
You disgust me.
You are nothing but a cheater and a liar.
Why would I ever believe you because you are incapable of telling the truth.
The list goes on but my memory has grown fuzzy.
Pretty horrible, huh?
I'm not saying he didn't deserve my wrath. He did. He most definitely did.
What I am saying is that that those words not only did nothing to create the possibility for healing, they also weren't true (well, except for the disgust bit. I was pretty disgusted at that point).
But they hurt him. And that was really my intention. I wasn't capable of thinking more long-term than the next five-minutes. I was in the midst of survival mode – fight, flight or freeze. And I was fighting like hell. I wanted to hurt him like he'd hurt me. I wanted him to know that I would never forgive him for what he'd done. Which also, as fate would have it, turned out to be untrue.
But more to the point, if I'd been able to stop and think, to determine what my goal was, I might have realized that what I was doing – shaming my husband – wasn't going to help me achieve it.
Which is the great misunderstanding of shame.

We think shame makes people change their behaviour. But famed shame researcher Brené Brown gives us the bad news. It doesn’t. If anything, shame makes people double down on their bad behaviour (we’re seeing this shame-and-name culture online right now and it’s ugly).

What happens, Brown explains, is that shame hijacks our limbic system – we go into survival mode. That’s our primitive brain, our reptile brain. Shame, she says, “corrodes that part of us that believes we can ever be different.”

Sadly, a lot of us grew up being shamed. More than likely, our partners did too. It’s a frequently used tool by those in authority. But shame drives a lot of bad behaviour. Shame doesn’t urge us be better, it tells us we never will be.

You’re never going to be anything but a loser, we might have heard.

Why can’t you do anything right?

Or, my husband’s father’s favorite: You’re nothing but a quitter.

And here I was, post D-Day, shaming my husband, albeit unintentionally. I was doing to him exactly what had been done to him as a child. And what he’d done to himself ever since.

Shame drives bad behaviour, Brown reminds us again.

So much of my husband’s acting out was rooted in his childhood shame. Shame kills intimacy. Shame kills empathy. Brown puts it this way: “It’s much more likely to be the cause of harmful and destructive behaviours than the cure.”

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of infidelity lately. I’ve long thought that our culture, while it loves a redemption story, loves a consistent narrative more. While we hold the possibility that people can change, we’re suspicious of it. That “once a cheater, always a cheater” mentality leaves no room for redemption, for reinvention.

Why do we make it so hard for people to redeem themselves? Why do we insist on labelling people rather than labelling their behaviour? It might seem like semantics but it’s rooted in shaming. That’s not, of course, to say that bad behaviour shouldn’t be called out. It absolutely should, especially cheating, which causes so much damage and pain to partners and kids. But there is a world of difference between expecting someone who cheated to figure out why he did and how to ensure he never does it again, and labelling them a cheater. The first allows for change. The second…does not.

I’ve long believed that my willingness to give my husband the chance to change stemmed from having grown up with an alcoholic who got sober. I had seen someone, who everyone else had given up on, choose a better path. And I had watched her not only get sober but get wise about it. I knew people could change because I’d seen it. Might my perspective have been different if she’d never stopped drinking? Probably.

We need to see that change is possible to believe it. What’s more, if we’re going to give our partners the opportunity to change, we need to see that they are willing to do the hard work that change requires. We need to see them doing the work, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them. Without that, we’re just clinging to hopes and dreams.

It must be a careful dance, between wanting to believe our partners can change and being realistic about whether they will. Change is not a straight trajectory. It zigs and it zags but someone truly intent on becoming better will self-correct.

As Brown reminds us, when you see someone making amends, apologizing, doing better, that’s about guilt not shame.

But if they do not make amends, if it becomes clear that their words are not backed up by actions – if they refuse counselling, if they resist giving you passwords, if they push back against boundaries you’ve set in order to feel emotionally safe with someone capable of cheating, then that’s important information. And all the shaming in the world isn’t going to create that change if it isn’t coming from a reckoning within.

The Shame of Secrecy. The Secrecy of Shame

If your family kept secrets and never talked about hard things, you grow up feeling a lot of shame and loneliness about struggling. 
Healing comes in relationships with people who don't live like there's shame in talking about hard things. 
And don't pretend not to struggle.
~notesfromyourtherapist, Instagram

The first person I called was my mother. And like good mothers throughout history she immediately and completely was in my corner. She expressed empathy, support and a rock-solid faith in me. She didn't vilify my husband but held him accountable. She held me, she listened to me and she was always, always on the other end of that phone when I needed her.
I was lucky.
Others, not so much.
I hear often from you about how abandoned you feel. Your mothers won't talk about it or you're afraid to tell them. Your siblings take sides or cast judgement. Your friends, in the interest of supporting you, insist that the only way to respond is to file for divorce. 
And that's if you tell anyone at all. Far more often, we don't. We hold our secret close. And it poisons us. 
It poisons us because secrets carry shame. Even if we know, in our heads, that we are not the reason he cheated. Even if we understand that people don't cheat because there's something wrong with their spouse, they cheat because there's something wrong with them. Because they're lost or afraid or lonely and they don't know how to feel those feelings and so they avoid and they distract and they lie to themselves and others. 
Their secrets have poisoned them. 
My family kept the secret of my parents' addictions. And because I was young, I learned that I should be ashamed. Why else would I not being able to talk about what was really going on at home. It must be shameful. It must be kept hidden. Nobody had to tell me that, of course. It was understood. And that silence, that secrets poisoned me for a lot of years.
When my mother got sober and began telling her story (she took her 12 steps seriously and wrote letters of apology and shared her story far and wide), I slowly began sharing mine. I was leery. In my twenties, at a time when there wasn't nearly the cultural conversation around addiction that there is now, I knew I was opening myself up to judgement. But what I've learned since is that no-one's judgement was harsher than my own. Nothing anyone ever said to me matched my own feelings of shame, that I still needed to wrestle with.
It has been a similar experience with my husband's infidelity.
I told my mother but very very few others. One of those others cast judgement, which sent me scurrying back into my silence. 
And that's mostly where I stayed. Silent. And filled with shame.
Until I began telling my story here. And, over years, began opening up to friends. I was (am!) still careful about who I tell. Trust is earned, not assumed. And though I no longer feel shame about my husband's infidelity, there are parts of my life I keep private. And there's a difference between secret and private.
For instance, I don't widely share (except on this blog, in which I remain relatively anonymous) about my daughters' mental health challenges. There are people in my life with whom I'm close who don't know my eldest was hospitalized. I don't hide that. But I respect my eldest's wish to keep it, mostly, private. That's a choice rooted in healthy decision making. Not shame.
Similarly, though plenty know about my husband's infidelity in our city, many more do not. It was long ago. He has done much work. It isn't what defines him or our marriage. And so we, mostly, keep it private.
We haven't told our children, not out of shame but for many other reasons. We keep it private, something some experts such as Caroline Madden, a family therapist, supports and encourages. Others do not. Our choice.
I share my story when I think it can do some good. Either for me or for the person on the other end of it.
And that's where I hope you can all get to. I wish you an army of people in your life who can love you through this pain. Who can listen to you, without judgement. Who can see your pain and run toward it, not away. Those people are, sadly, rare. But their fear of your pain is rooted in their own shame and secrecy. It's a consequence of their own inability to talk about hard things. 
Life is a marathon of hard things. If we never learn how to talk about them, we fail to learn how to really life. Authentically. Deeply. And too often, we don't heal from those hard things. We don't grow from them.
You get to choose what's private and what's not. But secrets? Exorcise those. Be honest about them, at least with yourself. Cultivate relationships with people who don't operate from fear but who are honest about their own struggles. 
Find your family, built on honesty and a willingness to hold each other up. 

Shame on Me? Not Anymore.

Shame strengthens our identity with our most harmful relationships because we believe we have something to hide and it is always what remains hidden that has the strongest hold over our lives. ~Wendy Strgar, Good Clean Love

So there's this serial adulterer in the news who has decided it's clever strategy to attack the wife of another serial adulterer for being an "enabler" of her husband's affairs and being "too stupid" to even realize the affairs were going on.
I don't know about you but my shame sensor is going off big-time. Because, really, what is this guy saying that we don't say to ourselves? And if I hadn't done a whole lotta work over the past decade to challenge my shame, I just might be swallowing this bullshit whole. Instead I'm able to recognize misogyny with a hefty dose of delusion.
In other words...nope. Not buying it. 
Not anymore.
Thing is, too many of us do.
We believe that smart women don't get blindsided like we did. We think that women who are able to "please their man" don't get cheated on. We believe that strong women throw him out. That men cheat when they're not getting it at home, that women must know on some level what's happening, that true feminists don't ever disparage the Other Woman, not even in a private e-mail to a dear friend.
Shame of those of us who get cheated on. Shame on those of us who didn't know. Shame on those of us who give our marriages another chance.
Shame. Shame. Shame.
Nope. Not buying it. Not anymore.
Shame is toxic. Shame is that sinister whisper at 3 a.m. that we let ourselves get too fat. It's that stomach-clench when we imagine how much sexier she must have been than us. How much more fun. How they must have laughed at our ignorance, our blithe conviction that, no, he wouldn't do that. 
Shame keeps us small and quiet. It keeps us – and our pain – hidden. 
It lies. 
The way out of shame is to tell our stories. Here. In our journals. To our most trusted friends. To ourselves. Tell our stories over and over again. Not the lies about how we should have known. Not the lies about our weight or our age or our depression or our career or...or...or.... That's not why he cheated. 
He cheated because he was broken somewhere deep inside and he didn't know how to heal himself. He cheated because it's easier to find something new and shiny to distract ourselves than it is to feel old and dull. He cheated because our culture encourages us to discard what isn't working rather than fix it. He cheated for any number of reasons, none of which are that there's something wrong with us. 
That's shame talking. 
Pull shame out of the shadows and examine it. It will likely look pretty pathetic in the cold light of day. It will sound like your mother or a teacher or a coach or whomever else in your life convinced you that you weren't enough. It will look like a culture that says beautiful women don't get cheated on. It will echo like a sexist old man who cheats on his wives as he discards each for the next and blames them for his empty soul. 
Nope. Don't buy it. 
Not anymore. 

Vulnerability is a Doorway to Happiness

Lately I've become aware that, though I don't feel the heavy sadness I felt in the weeks and months following D-Day, I also don't feel that great joy I felt in my life pre-D-Day. Sure I knew my marriage had its share of problems. And I struggled with motherhood some days – particularly with my first child who was, in popular parlance, "spirited."
But most days – really! – I felt joyful.
Now? Not so much.
If I'm lucky, I get glimpses of contentment.
Most days, however, I feel...flat.
I've written before about the "plain of lethal flatness" or "The Dead Zone." It can be a welcome reprieve from the agony of D-Day, and excruciating highs and lows in the weeks that follow. But it's a place to catch your breath...not unpack your boxes and move in.
And yet. Here I am. Again. Four YEARS later.
Why? Well...if you believe Brené Brown (and, frankly, I do), it's because I've closed myself off from vulnerability. Afraid of feeling that searing pain of having my soul lit on fire (and NOT in a good way), I've chosen, on some level, to simply not feel at all.
Makes sense from a pain-avoidance stance. Not so much for a joy-seeking one.
I've attached Brené Brown's YouTube TedX talk. Watch it. You might just recognize yourself in her words. What's more, you might find within her words and within yourself, the courage to embrace your vulnerability again. To cast off shame and regret and, instead, to reclaim yourself from the detritus of your former life. I plan to try. Join me.