"There it is again." When trauma just keeps showing up at your door

I have a friend that I've been running with this past year-and-a-bit. Our pandemic ritual has been getting outside three or four times a week and, with each foot hitting the pavement, we sort through our lives. She is brutally honest with me and has incredible, rare insight.

I recently confided to her that I was struggling with my eldest, who had unleashed on me the day before. My daughter, as longtime readers know, struggles with mental health issues, although to the world she is beautiful and smart and a high achiever, although perhaps a bit moody. She is all those things to me too but she is also more than a bit moody and, far too often recently, suicidal. My mother, too, attempted suicide. A few times.

Despite plenty of therapy and trauma work, any mention of wishing to be dead remains terrifying to me. I’m not sure I can ever “therapize” myself out of the trauma it induces.

Which surprises me. I thought I was long past the trauma of my childhood, of my mother’s addiction, her suicidal ideation. 

And so, when my daughter stopped taking her medication for bipolar, when it was clear to everyone that she was spiralling despite declaring that she felt "great", when I felt myself tense whenever I didn't know where she was, or who she with, or what she was doing, I got angry with myself. Because there was nothing I could but wait for the inevitable crash. And doing nothing but wait is, for me, the worst feeling in the world. 

My urge is always to fix. 

To find the right  book. To find the right course. To find the right expert. To find the right words. If only I can do that, my distorted thinking goes, I can fix whatever is wrong.

My friend reminded me that I was acting out a trauma response. She pointed out that my daughter always always reaches out when she’s in crisis. Your job, she said to me, isn’t to fix your daughter, it’s to love her. And it’s to learn to manage your own emotions.

I’ve come to learn that we’re never “fixed”. We simply learn to acknowledge the boulder that lodges in our gut when we come across a trigger. “There it is again,” we learn to say. 

If we’re lucky. If we’ve done the work.

If we’re not so lucky, if, despite the work we’ve done, we still get blindsided by our response to a trigger, we’re more likely to react. To not recognize the boulder but rather to act out our trauma response. Each of us likely has our favorite. Fight. Flee. Freeze. Fix.

There it is. For me: Fix.

My daughter is struggling? I swing into fix-it mode. I call doctors. I Google. I buy books. I make suggestions.

My husband cheated? Fix it. Therapy for both of us. Google for online help. Buy books. Occasionally realize that I'm not actually fixing anything and collapse in grief. Rinse. Repeat.

You can imagine just how annoying I am. Cause despite my best intentions, I can't fix other people. Not my husband. Not my daughter. Each is responsible for themselves.

I am responsible for myself. And I need to learn how to manage my response to my daughter's health issues.

That includes stopping trying to fix it.

Or, more to the point, stopping trying to fix her. 

I can see just how awful my response is when I put it in print. Fix her. As if she’s a broken vase. A car in need of repairs. But she’s a human being. Not to be fixed.

My task is the exact same as it was when I first learned of my husband’s infidelity. To learn how to heal myself. To learn how to manage my own feelings so that I respond from a place of self-love and self-compassion, as well as compassion for those around me.

Don’t get me wrong. Responding with compassion for your partner is never to be confused with tolerating his hurtful or abusive behaviour. Responding with compassion is acknowledging his humanness. His flaws. And then taking steps to keep yourself emotionally and physically safe. The two responses are not mutually exclusive. They complement each other. Compassion. Boundaries.

I know this. And yet…I fix. Or I try to.

I’m learning. 

To take a breath before I react. To trust my daughter to ask for help from the experts when she needs it. To acknowledge that I am not, in fact, an expert.

It isn't easy for me. So much of my childhood wired me for the trauma-response to fix. Parents fighting? Step in and referee. Mom's drunk? Put her to bed. 

Husband cheated? Calmly tell the other woman to stay out of our lives then give my husband an ultimatum: Either get your act together or get out. 

Inside, of course, I was terrified. Terrified of being abandoned. Terrified that he would, in fact, take the option to leave. Terrified that I would wind up destitute, that my children would suffer. Terrified of so many vague things that basically amounted to the fear that had governed my life: That I was not worthy of being loved and loyal to. That I was not enough. That if I couldn't fix people, that I would lose them.

That continues to be my work. To push back against that belief. To stop myself when the impulse is to fix. To not act out the trauma but to learn to say, "There it is again. Hello."

On Karma and Liberty

 It doesn’t matter what other people say or think, it only matters what you do.

~Marcus Aurelius, The Daily Stoic

A woman came to this site recently talking of "karma". Her husband was with the Other Woman and she was still hurting. She wanted some sort of universal justice, some indication that right wins, that cheating will be punished.

I'm 56 years old and still cling to my fiercely held conviction that life should be fair. Should, yes. But it's not.

And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move on with living our own lives rooted in our own values and letting go of the outcome. What's more, the sooner we do that, the sooner we'll realize that's enough. That though it's infuriating when the refs make the wrong call, when liars and cheaters get away with it, when the powerful hurt the weak, it doesn't change our fundamental responsibility to live our own lives with integrity, to refuse to get down in the mud, to accept that the only thing we can ever control is ourselves.

It sounds infuriating. I have a daughter, 22 years old, who's refusing to address a medical issue. What I want to do is drag her into a doctor's office and insist that she be treated. I won't. I can't. She's an adult. And what I'm learning is that the more I plead or cajole or shame, the more she digs in her heels. One would think I'd know this by now. I'm a slow learner.

But it's a reminder. That when we liberate others to live their own lives, we liberate ourselves. We are not responsible for whether he goes to therapy or his 12-step group. We are not responsible for whether he shows up to work on time, or whether he's too hungover to make that meeting, or whether he forgets to come to his son's soccer practice. He can bear the consequences of his own actions. We are only responsible for our own. My friend Betsy calls it "keeping my own side of the street clean."

Ignore the haters and the critics and the whisperers. They aren't living our lives. They'd do well to focus on their own. As my mother, a longtime 12-stepper used to put it, what others think of me is none of my business. So hard, I know. I often try to think of myself at my life's end. Will I really care what some mother of my kids' friend said about how I raised my children? Or what some person on the Internet said about staying with someone who cheated? Or what some woman cheating with my husband said about my marriage? Pretty sure I won't.

But back to karma. Oprah once said that the problem with karma is that we so rarely get to see it work. And though I don't believe in karma per se, I do believe we reap what we sow. Which means, if you're a fundamentally dishonest person who doesn't honour commitment then that's who you'll remain in any relationship. So, if that's who he is, then that's who she got. It hurts now because you thought he was different than that. It hurts because you're telling yourself a life about how it has something to do with your worth when really it's about his. It hurts because it hurts when people let us down. When we put on our perspectacles, as Glennon Doyle calls them, and realize we weren't seeing clearly. But now we do.

And that's the key here. Seeing clearly. Really understanding that we didn't lose a great guy, we lost the fantasy. Whether or not karma catches up with him isn't the point. By the time the misery and dysfunction he takes into a new relationship reveals itself, we'll no longer care. We'll be focused on ourselves and the life we've created, surrounded by others worthy of being there. 

Here's How We Set Ourselves Up. Let's Stop

Because I didn’t feel like I deserved love. Showing up and asking for love without having anything to offer in return was out of the question. I would have to be of service in order to earn love. I would have to be sexy and funny and larger than life. I would have to dance on tabletops. I would have to win and keep winning. I would not be able to rest.
~Dear Polly, The Cut

If there was one overwhelming belief I had about my husband's betrayal, it was this: I was not enough.
He cheated because I was not sexy enough.
He cheated because I was not thin enough.
He cheated because I was not beautiful enough.
Smart enough.
Fun enough.
Adventurous enough in bed.
Succesful enough.
I was, clearly, not enough.
There was plenty of evidence to the contrary but that didn't alter my belief. Not one bit.
Because my belief – that I was not enough – was something I had carried around with me since childhood. Though I was barely conscious of it, I had built my life around proving to others that I could be enough, if they would give me the chance to show them.
Every friendship felt like an audition.
Every relationship felt like probation. 
Though I tolerated no end of others' bad behaviour, I didn't allow myself a single mistake. I made mistakes, of course. We all do. And then I would sink into shame so deep, I could hardly breathe. That's the problem with perfection being the only acceptable bar. It's impossible. And when we brush up against that impossibility, it makes us so incredibly angry that we're ready to just burn it all down. The system is rigged. 
Yes, it is.
But we're the ones doing the rigging.
We're the ones demanding perfection of ourselves.
We're the ones choosing the wrong people. And then blaming ourselves when it all falls apart.
And so when my husband admitted that, yes, he was having an affair, somewhere deep down inside was a voice that said of course, he was. Because you are not enough.
We talk a lot about our deep knowing here, on this site. It can be hard to discern which is our deep knowing and which is the voice of the critic. But let me tell you this: Your deep knowing will never tell you you're not enough. Your deep knowing is a voice of love. It is a voice of acceptance. It is, if you're religious or spiritual, a voice of divine love. It is, if you're not religious or spiritual, a voice that speaks the truth of every person's value. 
Your deep knowing will never tell you you're not enough. 
Your critic most certainly will. 
We've all had critics in our lives and, far too often, their voices take root in our bodies and chastise us decades after the actual speaker is gone. It might have been a parent, a sibling, your fifth-grade teacher who laughed at your dream. It might have been a boss, a friend, a bully.
But you have thrown the door open to that critic to move in with you, to offer nothing but reminders that you are a profound disappointment.
Critics are absolutely not the voice of truth. They speak nothing but lies. 
My critic insisted for years that I was not enough. Not matter how fast I danced, it was never fast enough. No matter what I achieved, the critic would move the finish line further ahead. 
The system was rigged.
But it was us doing the rigging.
Let's unrig the system.
If there is a silver lining to my husband's infidelity, it was that, with a whole lot of work and some new truth-telling glasses, I could finally see the flaw in the system. I could see that I was setting myself up. 
What I wish for all of you is that same revelation. 
He didn't cheat because you are not enough.
He cheated for any number of reasons that – and this is the truth – have nothing to do with you.
He cheated because he believes he's not enough. He cheated because someone paid attention to him and it felt good. He cheated because it made him feel young. He cheated because his moral compass is broken. He cheated because it distracted him from money woes, an empty nest, a special needs child, a sick wife, a dying parent.
He cheated, as Esther Perel reminds us, because he was looking for another version of himself.
Your work, in the wake of his infidelity, is to unrig the system that you've rigged against yourself. To refuse the system that our culture has rigged against us. The one that says we're not allowed to age, to soften, to choose for ourselves.
The good news is that we have everything we need for the challenge ahead. We have ourselves. And that is enough.

Guest Post: No More Participation Trophies

Yeah, that's right. Just stand there. 

by Lynn Less Pain

A participation trophy is a trophy given usually to kids who participate in something but do not finish in first, second or third place. Are giving your husband a participation trophy?
Let’s take a cheater: he lies, hides info, spends money on another woman, ignores his wife and kids. He may have developed ways to avoid helping around the house, including working on himself to save his marriage. He lacks empathy towards you.
He criticizes you. He believes he is 100% right. 
He uses you to serve his needs without showing any appreciation. 
He clams up. He leaves the room. If he says something to hurt you, it is your fault. He says you are over-reacting. He tries to control you by making you feel you have become unhinged. 
He hides cruel remarks by saying it was just a joke. Or, he says, "I never said that, you are imaging things."
What do far too many of us do? We give him a participation trophy for just showing up, not leaving us, taking care of us financially and not seeing the OW. He feels entitled, simply because he has stuck around. As nurturing women, we often carry the load of recovery. We hand out those participation trophies.
It's time to stop. It's time to make clear that we are no longer going to pull their weight as well as ours trying to heal a marriage. It's time to make it clear, calmly and firmly, that the rules have changed. He will test you. 
"I didn’t say I wouldn’t talk to her at work." "You never said I had to do that." "I didn’t see her trying to text me." Your bullshit meter will be going off.
But instead of asking why he's not supporting you in my healing and marriage, tell him your expectations about recovery. Don’t think you are doing something wrong. You’re not. I read all the time on this blog – "he just doesn’t act like he wants to make our marriage work." It isn’t because he doesn’t love you. It isn’t because you don’t exercise. It isn’t because you are too exhausted to wear anything else but sweatclothes.
It is because you have not told him this is not acceptable. It is hard and it is going to get harder when he pushes back. He likes the way things are. His system works for him, so he is not going to be in any rush. He may not want to try hard because he expects you to give him a participation trophy. Giving him a participation trophy devalues your own efforts to heal.
It is going to take him awhile to learn his past ways of not participating is not going to win him any more trophies. DON’T FLINCH, don’t bug off, shrug off, scare off and don’t even reach in your mind for that participation trophy. Your willingness to speak up about what you will speak volumes for you. Every moment you wait is a moment you don’t get the love, attention, respect you deserve from him or someone else. Participation trophies are for children not grown men. 
Love to you all. 
LLP

When Life is a Ghost Ship: Finding your power after betrayal

In time we will be given the opportunity to either contract around the old version of ourselves and our world — insular, self-interested and tribalistic — or understand the connectedness and commonality of all humans, everywhere. In isolation, we will be presented with our essence — of what we are personally and what we are as a society. We will be asked to decide what we want to preserve about our world and ourselves, and what we want to discard. ~Nick Cave, musician and creator of Red Hand Files

"We will be asked to decide what we want to preserve about our world and ourselves, and what we want to discard," says Bad Seeds lead singer Nick Cave, who also happens to be a voice of sanity and kindness on the internet.
He's speaking of the pandemic that's sweeping our world right now. He's speaking of the wholesale inventory that so many of us are undertaking as we huddle in our homes, anxious and isolated from so much of what gives shape to our lives.
He's not speaking about the impact of infidelity but he might as well be.
Because that's exactly what happens to so many of us in the wake of the tsunami of betrayal. We look around and what seemed familiar just hours before is no longer. Our partner is a stranger. Our home feels too small, too suffocating. Our minds can't be trusted. Our hearts are shattered. 
A "ghost ship" is what Cave's friend called our world right now. A ghost ship, still afloat but emblematic of death and loss. Direction-less. 
It has been years since my own D-Day. And I have many many days when I hardly think about it. Yes, I continue to post on this site and yes, I moderate comments. But it has become something that happened so long ago. A part of my history the way that certain furniture in my current home was part of my childhood. The way I recognize an old song. It no longer stings.
Except for the occasional time when someone posts something and it resonates so deeply in my heart's memory that, under my breath, I emit a "yes". Or the occasional time when I stumble on a phrase and I recognize it as a secret message for me.
Ghost ship.
Yes.
That was what betrayal felt like for me. A ghost ship. Afloat but barely. Alone. Lost.
Yes.
I drifted that way for a year. Two.
But somewhere in there, I did what Nick Cave says we all must do. Somewhere in there, I paid attention to my essence, to who I was personally and who I wanted to be. I recognized my own agency, my own ability to create the marriage I wanted (or leave), to be the person I wanted to be, and to insist that, if he wanted to remain married to me, he become the best version of himself. 
I determined what I wanted to preserve and what I wanted to discard.
There's so much power in that. 
It's power we all have, even when we don't yet recognize it. So many letters from all of you come from a place of powerlessness. You don't – I didn't – recognize the power that we have.
To decide what we want to preserve and what we want to discard.
I get it. In those early days, it's a challenge to wash our face, to get out the door, to stumble through our days. 
There are days, weeks, months when the best we can do is rest. Shore up our strength. Prepare for the reckoning.
But when that reckoning comes, when we have outgrown the cocoon, please know that you are strong enough for that moment. That you have the power necessarily to make those choices. You may have to put some things in place: Save some money. Meet with a lawyer. Work outside the home. Create an Exit Plan. Insist on therapy. 
But you decide: What to preserve and what to discard.
Yes.