Guest Post: The Life I Will Never Get to Live

by Chinook

Just a few days ago, in a comment on this website, one of the brave warriors in our ranks wrote something to the effect of: “Sure, I’ve made lemonade. But I don’t even like lemonade. I never wanted to make lemonade.”

I know that feeling so well.

Like everyone else here, I have days of terrible sadness. I am only a year out from D-Day, which, Elle kindly and wisely reminds me, isn’t very long on the calendar of heartbreak. 

On those sad days (and even on some good days), it is impossible not to think about the life I would have led if my husband hadn’t chosen the coward’s path out of his pain. It is so tempting to look at my friends whose husbands didn’t cheat and feel jealous.

But the truth is that I have no idea what that other life would be like. 

Sure, I can romanticize it. I can assume that the other, affair-free life would have been much happier and better than this one. But who knows? My marriage was headed for divorce when the affair happened and it had been for several years, despite my best efforts. My husband has admitted to me that because he was so messed up, he couldn’t have undergone the level of transformation he has without blowing up his entire life. 

Also, I can see now that it took a crisis to catapult me out of the deep fjord of self-sacrifice and suppression-of-my-own-needs in which I had been living for most of my adult life. I had been living in it for so long that I didn't even realize the extent to which it was holding me hostage and making me unhappy.

There’s something else, too. When I jealously compare my life to those of the people I know, I’m selective. I choose, for the purposes of comparison, people whose lives seem rosy. I don’t pick the friend whose child has a serious congenital disorder. I don’t pick the friend who is facing an excruciating divorce. I don’t pick the one whose husband just died in a tragic accident, leaving her widowed with three children.

Thinking that the path not taken (the path I can never take) would have been better is also just not helpful. It doesn’t matter. Because all I have is this life, this lemonade to drink. 

(As a side note, I’m trying to use that measure to evaluate all my actions and thought patterns in this post-affair, self-healing world: “Is this helpful?” If it isn’t helpful to… stalk the other woman on social media, drink lots of wine, continue to remind my husband of his mistakes… then why do it?)

I have always loved hearing it said, of life: “None of us is getting out of this alive!” I love how funny and irreverent and true it is. I love how it’s both incredibly dramatic and yet obvious and therefore sort of boring.

The same is true of living a life free of pain: None of us make it through our entire lives unscathed, not even billionaires or royalty. We are not meant to. Life isn't supposed to be a race to get to the end without anything bad ever happening to us. 

I am not a religious person, but I heard this quote the other day that has genuinely shifted my perspective. It somehow simultaneously makes me feel more powerful and also expands my ability to have compassion for myself. It even creates space for me to feel curiousity about this whole painful thing.

It’s from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a French philosopher and explorer and priest. 

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

What If You Shifted The Story You're Telling Yourself

Driving my daughter to march in our local Pride Parade this past weekend, I flipped on the car radio. Esther Perel's voice, one I recognize from long hours listening to her incredible podcast Where Should We Begin, filled the car. She was being interviewed about relationships (duh!). But she told more of her backstory than I've heard before. About how both of her parents were the only surviving members of their families after Hitler's reign of terror. About growing up in Antwerp, surrounded by other survivors of the Holocaust. And she noticed something that set her on the course of her life – helping us find connection with each other. What she noticed was that there were two groups of people (not neatly delineated, she pointed out) that each told a story. One group told stories of victimization – what had been done to them. The other told stories of survival – what they themselves had done. She noticed something else. For those who perceived themselves as victims, she said, the most you could say about them was that they weren't dead. But those who perceived themselves as survivors? They were alive.

Not dead vs. alive. See the difference?

Betrayal isn't the Holocaust. But, as Perel insists, trauma is trauma and all pain is legitimate. 

Of course, betrayal isn't the whole of our story. We bring plenty of baggage into all our relationships. Baggage about our worth. Baggage about love. Baggage about expectations. Baggage about entitlement.

But betrayal can also blow our stories wide open, it can give us the opportunity to re-examine what we've been telling ourselves. It can allow us to rewrite. Because stories are not set in stone. They are always ALWAYS a story, narrated by someone who has bias.
How might your story be different if you framed it as a story of survival, of triumph, rather than a story of being victimized. As Laura, the founder of Infidelity Counseling Network, told me: Her healing began the day the she changed the question from 'why did this happen to me?' to 'why did this happen?'
I have zero doubt that you can just as easily tell all of us here about the ways in which you're a hero. Getting out of bed, for a start. Not murdering your husband in his sleep. Taking care of children, sometimes children with special needs, when your heart is shattered. Checking in with elderly parents. Continuing to get yourself to work. Not risking your sobriety. Not spending money you don't have on temporary fixes. Making dinner. Doing laundry. Remembering your best friend's birthday.
Stories of your ingenuity, of your resilience, of your goodness and your integrity. Stories of carrying on even when it's so damn hard. Stories of survival. Stories that will move you toward feeling alive rather than just not dead.
Try it. Tell us a story of something you did that felt really really hard but you did it anyway. Let us all celebrate your aliveness.
And then, let's all of us make it a habit. I want to be more than just not dead. I bet you do too.

Guest Post: Put down the telescope

by Chinook

I had never known such desperation as I felt after I discovered that my husband had been having an affair. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t control my emotions even the slightest bit. My body and mind were in a state of such extreme anxiety that a single errant thought (about her, about the two of them together, about what this meant for our children) could provoke a full-blown panic attack. 

Between fits of racking sobs, I launched into doing the three things that I always do when I feel powerless:

(1) Research

(2) Figure out the story of what was happening

(3) Play out future scenarios in my head 

I did these things for every moment of every day.

Every.

Single.

Moment.

It was exhausting, and in the end only one of these coping mechanisms was useful. 

I’m surprised to report that even at the frantic pace at which I did it, research helped. My trusted inner community, in whom I confided right from the start, responded with great resources. On the advice of a friend, I was reading Mira Kirshenbaum’s book “I love you but I don’t trust you” within a day of finding out about the affair. 
On the advice of another, I started journaling. A third recommended that I exhaust myself with high-intensity exercise. “Sleeping pills,” said a fourth. In spite of my internet searching, it took a long time before I found the Betrayed Wives Club. (I think I eventually made my way here by typing something like “when will the devastating pain of infidelity ever end?” into Google.) But within a few weeks, I had an effective therapist, an informational session lined up with a divorce lawyer, other betrayed women to talk to, and a dozen great books to read.

The second coping technique — trying to figure out the story of what was happening — drove me and everyone around me crazy. My mind was racing, trying to compute WHY my husband had done this. (Was he a psychopath? Was he a compulsive liar? Was he a closeted misogynist? Did he have an attachment disorder? Had he even wanted kids? Had he even wanted to get married?) Talking is part of my figuring-out process, and I talked about it incessantly. At one point my father finally declared: “I don’t give a HOOT what he wants! What does CHINOOK want?”

This coping technique failed spectacularly. I was trying to control the situation by understanding it. But I had neither the information nor the hindsight necessary to understand it. Even if I could, understanding it wouldn’t make the pain any less excruciating. Also, to my father’s point, I was putting my attention in the wrong place: I was making my husband the center of the story when the real focus needed to be on me. 

The least useful of all my coping techniques by far was the last: trying to predict the future.

A very good, very wise friend of mine calls the practice “telescoping”, and if you’re doing it, I urge you to stop.

The danger of using a telescope to try and see the future (which is impossible) is that we miss out on observing what is happening right here, right now. And what’s happening now is key. The only thing any of us can do when devastated by a trauma is to pick the next right step, as Glennon Doyle says. (It’s a variation of the “one day at a time” motto of Alcoholics Anonymous.) And in order to choose that next right step, we need accurate information on exactly where we are right now. 

This very wise friend of mine also reminded me that I didn’t need to make any big decisions right now or for some time to come. The only thing I needed to do was gather information. Information on what my husband had actually done. Information from HIM (not from me trying to figure it out for him) about why he had done it. Information on what he was going to do next. Information on my legal options (and, if I hadn’t already had it, our financial situation). 

And, most importantly, information about how this all made me feel and what it revealed to me about what I want.

So, if you have just had your entire world upended, if your mind and heart are racing with the shock of it all, if you are trying to telescope your way into a future that feels safer than your present, please stop.

Put down the telescope.

You can’t see the future. None of us can. 

All you have is now.

Take the next right step. 

Then the next right one after that. 

Then the next right one after that. 

When you walk a path of next right steps, you can’t go wrong.

Thursday's Thought

How to Stop Doing Things That Feel Impossible to Stop

The shame might begin even as we boot up our computer and key in the words. Or we might feel nothing. Like we're on auto-pilot. Numbed by exhaustion and despair and terror.
But here we are again. Stalking the Other Woman's Facebook profile, checking out her Instagram. Our heart aching, our stomach in knots, our eyes rolling at the pithy quotes she posts about destiny, or scanning her face in photos for any sign that she's miserable or happy or is feeling remotely accountable for the pain she's wrought. What are we looking for exactly? We hardly know but that matters not at all.
And when we're done...here comes the hangover. The regret. The I swore I'd stop doing this, the I know this only makes me feel worse, the what's wrong with me that I can't control myself?
My D-Day took place before social media was as ubiquitous as it is now (be grateful for small mercies, right?) but that didn't stop me from driving past her apartment, Googling her name, casually listening at work functions for any mention of where she was and what she was now doing.
Even though I knew it would cause me pain. Even though I knew it did nothing to move me forward. Even though...
It gets a lot of us stuck, doesn't it? This obsession with...something. Rifling through Visa receipts, checking his cell phone messages, constantly alert for the threat, terrified of being blindsided again.
And we feel utterly helpless to stop it. Even when we know we should. 
A long time ago, Steam was terrified of flying. It's hard for me to even imagine as she's rarely in one place for long these days, constantly flying hither and yon. But her inability to just get on a plane was getting in the way of a lot of things – her career, for one. Her far-flung friendships. Her sense of independence and agency. She reached out to a guy who swore he could rid of her fear and she was just desperate enough that she went for it. Either the guy was a total grifter or it just might work. 
She told me this story one time when we were talking about getting unstuck from post-D-Day behaviours. And she'd been using a lot of what she'd learned that got her ON a plane to get her OFF stupid behaviour that was getting in the way of healing. 
So I asked her recently to share with me exactly what this guy taught her. It's deceptively simply, though a lot of behaviour modification techniques are (the elastic band on your wrist, the STOP sign). And so I share it here with the hopes that it gets you unstuck. That it gets you ON the metaphorical plane that takes you where you want to go.

It's all imagery, explains Steam:
In your brain, picture a photograph in your back pocket. It's a crumpled up Polaroid of you as an old woman sitting on your dilapidated porch in a rusty old chair. You have been so afraid of something that happened long ago that you've never managed to move on. You've remained there as life decays around you. You have nothing to add to any conversation. You stew in your sadness and bitterness. No-one wants to hear your story again.
Awful, isn't it? Painful.
Take out that mental photo periodically and look at it. When you feel paralyzed. When you're about to do something that you know isn't moving your forward but is rather keeping you stuck. Is that woman who you want to be? Forever? Didn't think so.
Now...
Pop a DVD in your brain and watch it as long as you want to. It shows you living after betrayal. You look incredible. You have people around you who love you. You've travelled. You've celebrated milestones. People enjoy being around you. They want to hear your stories, see your pictures. You've led an incredible life. 
Who do you want to be? 

Every day we make a bunch of choices. Eat this for breakfast or that. Put on these clothes or those. Take this route to work or that one.
Those choices apply to everything. Pour one glass of wine or another. Stalk her Facebook page or go for a walk. That's really all Steam's "Flying" guy taught her. To choose which woman she wanted to be.
Who will you choose today?

Guest Post: What One Year Has Taught Me

by Chinook

Exactly one year ago today, I found some texts on my husband’s phone that just didn’t make sense. That moment was a knife that sliced my life apart. Before. After.

Elle calls them “anti-versaries” and I have spent some time over the past few weeks wondering how I wanted to spend this terrible first anti-versary day. Champagne with girlfriends? Spa day on my own? Something romantic with the new guy I’m seeing? (Spoiler alert: It’s my husband.)

Then a few days ago, a woman in terrible pain left a message on this site asking for help, and it was like a dam bursting: Everything I had to say in response to the questions she asked came flooding out in a thunderous torrent. Today, my first anti-versary, I am posting it for you to read.

None of this is advice. None of this is prescriptive. I just find it sometimes helps to know what other people see from their side of the table. This is what I have lived through. These are the lessons it has taught me so far. May it be of use to you.

#1. ANGER.

When the shock wore off (which took about 12 hours), I didn’t just have anger, I had violent rage. Violent. Rage. A spirit animal — a bird of fire — came and inhabited my body. I packed a bag and walked out, leaving my husband with our two little children and with no indication of when or if I’d be back. My anger was so furious that separation was the safest thing for both of us. That’s when my husband realized just how catastrophic his choices were. That was his rock bottom.

Thank God for that anger. The anger is what carried me through. 

But in short order, anger becomes toxic. After three days, I could feel the rage starting to poison me, so I thanked the Fire Bird and invited it to go inhabit the next woman whose life had cracked open and who was in danger of falling into the abyss. I returned to my life to start sorting things out. The anger remained with me for a long time, and sometimes it did flare into rage, but from that point on, I made a conscious choice to not let it take root in my heart. 

Anger begets anger. And I did not want to become an angry person.

#2. PAIN. 

The pain was more intense than any pain I have ever felt. I gave birth without an epidural or any kind of pain control, and I swear, this was the same level of pain, but sustained. For weeks.

That pain shattered the person I was, which made way for the person I became.

#3. SURVIVING MINUTE TO MINUTE. 

In those early days, the book “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chödrön was recommended to me by a friend. It changed everything. It taught me that instead of running from my pain, I should sit with it and see what it had to teach me. 

I took Pema Chödrön’s advice and, when I suddenly looked up at a random moment to see a tsunami of grief crashing down on me, I entered the texture of the moment, and breathed. I noticed the color of the sky, the shape of the leaves, the texture of my child’s hair, the softness of the pillows at my side. I stayed in the moment. Breathed. Gradually, the pain would lessen. It was terribly difficult but I persisted. And every time the tsunami bore down on me anew, it was slightly smaller.

This is how I survived the pain.

#4. THE MOST TRAUMATIZING THING OF ALL.

In some desperate bid to stuff the genie back in the bottle, my husband lied about the extent of his affair every day for weeks. He would swear he had told me the whole truth (which was a lie), only for me to find some credit card statement that didn’t make sense, or some app on his phone with data that seemed off. Confronted, realizing he had no escape, he would cop to this new piece of information, triggering a panic attack in me. “But this is it!” he would swear. “I’ve told you everything now!” 

But he never had. It was like having the floor shift beneath my feet. Like vertigo. “Trickle truth” is the quaint term for this, or even “staggered reveal”. But really, it’s just ongoing betrayal and  it was far more traumatizing than the affair itself.

I had heard of the term “post-traumatic stress” before. I had not yet heard of the term “post-traumatic growth”.

#5. WHAT COURAGE LOOKS LIKE.

As a society, by and large, we only value loud courage, the action hero kind of courage. Punching. Shouting. Kicking him out. Calling a lawyer. Going it alone. 

We don’t value (or even recognize) the silent kinds of courage. The courage to find compassion for yourself and others. The courage to really feel the pain. The courage to use that pain as rocket fuel to power extraordinary growth. The courage to shield our children. The courage of grace. The courage to become our own alchemists, spinning our grief into golden wisdom.

I know so many wise women. Every single one of them has known deep pain.

#6. MAKING THE HARD, HEALTHY CHOICES. 

After the first few weeks of shock and body-shaking sobbing and furious anger, I realized that I would have to actively rewire my brain to prevent all my unhealthy thoughts and feelings from creating entrenched neural pathways. I knew the anger would poison me. I knew that trolling the other woman’s social media would make me hurt more. I knew that drinking a bottle of wine every night was just making things worse. I knew that the more I thought “poor me”, the more self-pity would feel natural.

And so, I forced myself to make the hard, healthy choices. When the angry thoughts came in, I actively blocked them. When angry feelings erupted, I deliberately calmed my heart rate. When self-pity gripped me, I forced myself to feel gratitude. When I wanted to check the other woman’s Instagram, I opened a fast-paced fiction novel instead. 

I forced myself to make these choices. Forced. It was an act of will. And for a long time, it felt like it wasn’t helping at all. I was still so angry. I was still so consumed by the injustice of it all. I still obsessed over the other woman. But I kept on doing it. 

Now, a year later, my mind and heart are peaceful places in which I want to spend time.

#7. WHAT HURT(S) THE MOST.

Unlike many women I’ve heard from, I knew — knew in my gut — that something was wrong as he was starting the affair. Our marriage was in bad shape despite the years of effort I’d been making but even at that, I felt something shift. I forced us into marriage counseling and it turns out that my instincts were bang on. He booked their first date, thus starting the affair, the same day as our first marriage counseling session. 

I even asked him point-blank one night if he was having an affair. He denied it all, vociferously, and used our therapy sessions to make me think I was imagining things. But I never gaslit myself. I knew something was wrong. 

His affair “only” lasted two months and the physical component was “only” a week long and, if he has finally told me the whole truth (will I ever stop wondering?), never quite made it to being sexual (and yes, I’m defining that term in the broadest possible sense). But it wasn’t the fact that he made out with her multiple times or came close to sleeping with her once. It’s the fact that he made dinner reservations for her, not me. That he sent joking emails to her, not me. That he invited her to go hiking with him, not me. And all the while I was staying home with the two kids, unwittingly facilitating his affair. 

It hurts even now. The hurt reminds me to keep my boundaries where they belong, and to value my preternatural gut feeling over the words of anyone else.

#8. WHO TO TELL.

I know this is unusual but I didn’t make a secret of the fact that I was going through the discovery of having been cheated on. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t advertise it. But I didn’t hide it for two reasons. The first is because I felt no shame whatsoever—my husband was the one who behaved abominably, not me. Why would I help shield him from being humiliated? Also, I knew I would need people supporting me, and that those people needed to know the truth. In the very, very beginning, I reached out to two women I barely knew that I knew had been cheated on, seeking their advice. I wouldn’t have had those people to turn to if I didn’t know they had been cheated on.

I also instinctively wanted to be a part of the ranks of women who destigmatize subjects like infidelity, which seems to disproportionately hurt women. And if I could help disabuse anyone of the bullshit notion that cheating is something they can do on the sly without hurting anyone, good. 

Now, maybe I can be that for someone else who is as desperate as I was.

#9. HOW MY COMMUNITY REACTED.

My friends were and continue, a year later, to be so supportive, which really speaks to their characters. The whole experience confirmed that I have surrounded myself with a network of extraordinary women who are smart and strong, who understand and embrace the sticky messiness of life, and who will respect and support me whether I stay or go. It also confirmed how remarkable the men and women who are spouses to these friends of mine are. They are people who value self-knowledge and are compassionate and kind.

I have one very close friend who seemed a bit bewildered by the notion that I might not immediately want to divorce my husband. She is the very definition of tact and support, so I could be wrong in my interpretation — she never said anything. But this friend has continued to support me with a very open mind and seems genuinely curious about the whole process. 

My extended family and his extended family were also remarkable. 

But my parents... When things fell apart, I literally couldn’t function. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, and could not take care of my children. I was in crisis. I really, really, really needed someone to physically come in and take care of me and my kids for a while. My parents could have done it but for reasons I am still struggling to understand, chose not to. (My very closest friends would have done it if they could, but they all have young children and jobs of their own to juggle.)

So, who did step up to take care of me when I was incapacitated? Here’s where it gets weird. It was my husband, the man whose selfishness put me in that state. 

Looking back on it, that was what first made me consider the possibility of staying.

#10. WHY DID HE DO IT?

Thanks to the work of feminists and relationship experts like Esther Perel (and Elle, although I didn’t know her work at the time), I knew long before I was on the receiving end of infidelity that affairs are 100% because of the cheater and their issues, and 0% because of anything that has to do with the person they are cheating on. I read somewhere that being cheated on is like getting mugged. The only person who causes a mugging is the mugger.

In our case, my husband had an affair because he wanted to escape the problems in our marriage. Ironically, those problems existed largely because of him. A whole lot of crap from his horrible childhood, which he had never had the courage to deal with, suddenly overwhelmed him for reasons I won’t get into. Instead of being brave and facing the crap and accepting that he needed help to deal with it, my husband chose a random opportunity to create a double-life. In that alternate life, he had no responsibilities and therefore nothing to deal with.

I had been working diligently and patiently for years to try and make our marriage better but it turns out that the more effort I put in, the less he felt like he needed to try, and the more he felt entitled to take, take, take. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth? When I discovered his affair, my boundaries came roaring back into place and my healthy sense of entitlement came roaring back. I could literally hear the roaring in my ears as they came back from wherever I had shoved them down to over the years of self-sacrifice.

Those boundaries are all still firmly in place. And they will never budge again.

#11. WHY HER?

Again, thanks to the work of relationship experts like Esther Perel, I knew from the beginning that my husband’s affair wasn’t because I lacked something. I’m an awesome catch. When I started to learn about the other woman, it became clear to me that she was inferior to me in every way I care about: she is less educated, less accomplished, less independent, less self-aware, less ambitious, less beautiful, less wise, less worldly, less well travelled, less confident, nowhere near as well-read… The only things she had going for her were youth (and the lack of obligations that goes along with it) and a higher fitness level (see above re: youth and lack of obligations). And that was the whole point for my husband. He WANTED someone inferior to me because he liked how it made him feel better about himself.

Was I making him feel bad about himself in our marriage? Hell, no. I thought he was awesome and sexy and a fantastic dad, and I told him so all the time. The voice that made him feel inferior wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from inside himself.

So, what did the other woman have? As Elle wisely says: nothing I want. She is damaged. She lacks confidence. She is willing to not ask too many questions about why the older guy she’s dating still seems to be living with his wife and kids despite his claims that they were separating. Do I want to be like her? Of course not. 

The other thing that made him choose her is convenience. She flirted with him. She was available. She was there. And would I ever want a man to choose me primarily because I’m there? Duh. No.

When I start to forget any of this, I picture the other woman as a bug that I am flicking off my sleeve.

#12. PITYING VS. HATING THE OTHER WOMAN. 

Some people say you shouldn’t hate the other woman but rather pity her. I say do both! She was instrumental in nearly effing up my children’s lives by wrecking their family. Of courseI hate that bitch. 

That pathetic, pitiable bitch.

#13. DOESN’T SHE CARE THAT SHE RUINED MY FAMILY?

I had a few fantasies of the other woman’s devastation as she realized how much damage she had done. But would she actuallyfeel devastated? Nope. Because if she did care, she wouldn’t have done it. 

Only a person who is completely messed up could justify damaging another person in this way. I take solace in the fact that although I may be in pain, I am not messed up.

#14. STAYING FOR THE KIDS. 

I am surprised at how rarely I read about kids factoring into people’s decisions to give a cheating spouse a second chance or not. Perhaps it is a rebuttal of the sexist mantra that women should stay in a marriage at all costs for the sake of the children. 

Had we not had children I would have ended things immediately. But we do. 

And it turns out I would do anything for my kids. Including explore the possibility of a new relationship with a man who hurt me but is truly remorseful, truly willing to atone, and truly wanting to become a healthier person.

#15. WHAT WILL OTHER PEOPLE THINK?

Personally, I believe they’ll think whatever you want them to. 

Here’s why.

Most people just don’t care that much about other people’s lives. So, you don’t have to worry about them. 

Some people want to think that other people are dumb and wrong because it makes them feel better about themselves. You don’t have to worry about them, either, because they’re going to judge you for literally everything. Unfollow them on Facebook, cross them off your Christmas card list, dust your hands off and move on.

Then there are the people who don’t know what to think. For those people, you take a page out of Beyoncé’s book and make yourself the hero of your story. Tell the story of your strength, your courage, your grace. 

Even if the only person you are telling this story to is yourself, when others meet you, they will feel that they are in the presence of a warrior.

#16. YOU GET TO CHOOSE THE WORDS.

As a writer, words are extremely important to me. The words “taking him back” make me feel really uncomfortable. They just don’t reflect my experience. Because “him” – the man who cheated on me – is more or less gone at this point. Instead, over the past year of rocket-fuel-pain-powered growth, my husband has become someone amazingly different. That’s why I prefer these words instead: 

I am seeing if the person I have become might want to have a new marriage with the person he has become.

Thursday's Thought