Betrayal Survival Guide: How to Find a Good Couples Therapist

Those of you who are regular readers know that I'm a big fan of therapy. No matter who posts what, I generally suggest that individual therapy or marital therapy can go a long way toward helping you heal. 
We're messy people. All of us, not just those of us dealing with infidelity. We're the product of our parents, our culture, our personality, our education, our friends. And inevitably there are some experiences in there that mess with us, whether a bit or a whole lot. Which means that there isn't a soul among us who can't benefit from the occasional tune-up – the chance to examine the thoughts and values we hold and determine how they're contributing to our mental health and our actions. However – and this is a big however – therapy is only as good as the person offering it. A bad therapist – and I've heard some stories of really bad therapists – can do some serious emotional (and sometimes physical) damage. One BWC member suffered a spinal stroke, rendering her paralyzed from the waist down. She and her husband sought therapy to help their marriage survive the incredible changes required of each...and the husband ran off with the therapist. I know, right? And we thought we had it bad.
I often get asked how to know if a therapist is good. Well, in the case above, it's pretty obvious. Another BWC member posted on this site that her therapist had suggested the OW join the therapy to clear the air. This, in case it needs stating, is nuts. 
A good therapist is one who helps each partner in the marriage become better able to hear and respond to the other. My husband and I knew just how good our own therapist was when we realized that he felt completely heard and respected by her...and I felt the same. She had created an environment where there was no good guy or bad guy. Just two people who wanted the same thing but hadn't a clue how to achieve it. Her role was to help us. 
Don't be afraid to walk away from a therapist who's making you uncomfortable. Sometimes it's just too soon. But ask yourself if the discomfort comes from feeling re-victimized or if the therapist is urging us to examine things we'd prefer to leave unexamined. In other words, is the discomfort shouting at us to back away (unsafe) or whispering to us to move closer (scary). I hear from a lot of betrayed wives whose husbands "refuse" therapy, insisting that they can solve their own problems. That's a red flag for me. If one of the partners feels the need to get marital counselling, I'm a firm believer that the other owes them to at least try it. Those who "refuse" therapy, in my experience, are the ones who need it most. They've spent a lifetime avoiding a deeper look at their own pain. 
But I'm no expert. So I took your questions to Valerie, who is. She's an individual and couples therapist who often helps those coping with infidelity. Her advice is straightforward and full of wisdom and compassion. 
Elle: Women often write to me noting that a therapist has insisted they take "responsibility" for the state of the marriage, which feels to them as if they're being blamed for their spouse's affair. What do you think about that?
Valerie: The therapists in question have abandoned a neutral-compassionate stance in favor of a moral perspective.  This is in fact "victim blaming".  In an age of Dr. Phil and the reign of social conservatism, people believe they need to find a therapist who will tell them they did wrong or defend them if they have been wronged. The therapist as judge and jury. That isn't good therapy. 
Elle: What about a betrayed wife's need to see their spouse accept responsibility for the pain they've caused by having an affair?
Valerie: The therapist's role is not to force accountability on either part. Accountability will evolve naturally in the course of therapy that is encouraging of empathy and compassion on both parts. For example, the betrayed partner cannot and will not move past hurt unless he or she feels that her partner demonstrates real empathy for the harm done. Similarly, the affair partner will not come out of the shadows and into the light (so to speak) unless he or she feels their partner can grasp what lies beyond the betrayal. We are not talking causality here – that is the proverbial chicken and egg question – but rather a relational dance that a good therapist will be attuned to and work with.
Elle: Should all couples dealing with infidelity seek therapy?
Valerie: Some couples will not be helped by therapy. It is a gruelling process, and each party must be prepared to go in with a view to self-reflection. If the hurt is still very raw, or too much damage has been done, the participation will only be about deflecting, blaming, punishing, hiding etc. A good therapist will tell a couple they aren't ready and that individual work around stabilizing and returning to self should be undertaken first. A good therapist will always help the couple set limits around damaging behaviours before proceeding, a process which involves both parties agreeing to work toward change.
Elle: So what should people coping with the aftermath of infidelity be looking for?
Valerie: Basically, what I am saying is: find a therapist who is relationally oriented with an understanding of family systems theory. (Virginia Satir is a good example of a therapist who worked beautifully from that perspective.) The therapist should show compassion and understanding for both partners right from the initial session. If an affair partner is saying "I feel judged by my therapist" what they are saying, I think, is "I have not been heard in my hurt." The therapist must help the affair partner to witness the hurt unequivocally and support the betrayed partner in letting the betrayer close enough to touch the hurt with his or her empathy.  Not an easy task.  If the therapist is preaching or wagging a finger in either direction, I would say run away!

Wisdom...

Happy Valentine's Day to you incredibly wonderful women. May you love yourselves with abandon today...and every day.

Judgement Day: When betrayed wives attack betrayed wives

Okay, so my title sounds like some sort of B-movie.
But just glance at the covers of tabloid magazines or newspapers for a quick education in how our culture views infidelity. "Cheater!" they scream. Or "It's over!" Or the straightforward "Betrayed!"
The betrayed wives are divided into two categories. Those women who dump the cheater? Brave. Strong. Those who forgive? Delusional. Wimpy.
What's particularly surprising, however, is that much of this scorn heaped on betrayed wives comes from...betrayed wives.
Forgiving a cheater and rebuilding a marriage seems a disappointment to our take-the-gloves-off culture. We want revenge. We want retribution. After all, the adage goes, "once a cheater..."
No matter that evidence doesn't back this cliché up. No matter that the majority (80% says a recent study) of marriages will experience infidelity. No matter that of those who divorce following infidelity, more than three-quarters later regretted it.
Our culture's judgement of infidelity – and those of us navigating it – is why so many of us choose silence even as we're experiencing the worst pain of our lives. It's why we hesitate to trust even our closest friends to support us.
It's why we find comfort in anonymous blogs where we can share our story without fear.
Betrayal creates deep wounds and triggers strong emotions. It's confusing to learn that the one person you trusted most has betrayed you. My immediate reaction upon learning about my husband's infidelity was to wander my house, wringing my hands and asking, out loud to myself, "what am I going to do?"
And it's perhaps that question that's central to this issue of judgement. What was I going to do? Sure I'd always said that cheating was a deal-breaker. But that was when it was a hypothetical. Things are always clear when they're hypothetical.
But now I had to figure out what, among my various options, I was going to do. And of course, I – like all of you – was making that choice with absolutely no understanding of infidelity and without a crystal ball.
It's into that uncertainty about our future, our deep pain at the betrayal and our recognition that other people are impacted by our choice (something our husbands neglected to note) that others cast their judgement.
"Well, I could never do what you're doing," one friend told me, just weeks after my D-Day. Within that comment was her deeper point that, really, I was a bit of an idiot. She'd left own marriage a few years earlier because of her then-husband's infidelity and she had no room for any alternative but to leave. I was stung by her dismissal of my choice. I struck her off my confidantes list, which was already pretty short.
And yet, a few years later, after this friend had been in a happy long-term relationship with another man, she wistfully told me that she thinks she and her ex could have actually made it work. But...who knows? My friend is now happily remarried. She made her choice.
And that's my point: We each get to make our choice. It's an excruciating one. Some of us will regret our choice to stay at which point we're allowed to change our minds. Some will regret our choice to leave at which point we're generally stuck with the consequences. Life isn't an exact science.
What we can do, however, is support each other in whatever choice we make. We can encourage each other to get as much information as we can and then make the best choice you can under the circumstances at the time. And we can then acknowledge that your choice doesn't make mine any less valid.
To those of us who've experienced that judgement, especially from other betrayed wives? Recognize that another's inability to tolerate your different choice speaks to her deep fear that she's making a mistake. We are frightened by those whose actions call into mind that there is another possibility. Seeing the world in black and white makes moralistic judgement so much easier...but it makes the world much less beautiful.
See her judgement as evidence of her own deep pain. And offer her compassion.

What the *@#% was he thinking?

It was 6 a.m. after a long night of me interrogating my husband. But why? I would ask, over and over in many different ways. What were you thinking?
"I wasn't," my husband finally said. "I wasn't thinking about you at all!"
Bam. There it was.
Though he'd said variations on that same sentiment – that his cheating had nothing to do with me – plenty of times, there was something about his candid admission that, as he left our house in the morning to drive to her house for a pre-work quickie, he simply wasn't thinking of me that hit me like a lightning bolt.
He wasn't thinking about me. This wasn't about him battling his conscience, torn between the pajama-clad wife at home wiping her toddlers' faces or the showered, perfumed Other Woman.
He wasn't thinking about me. At all.
It's crazy right? And crazier still that this made me feel good. In that moment, I got it. I finally understood that his cheating really had nothing to do with me. This was about a parallel world he believed in where he was free to do what he wanted. Where he didn't have obligations or responsibilities. Where it was all about him. He didn't care about her. Didn't even like her. She was escape. And escape was what he craved.
So often when women write to me within their letters is the question "why?" over and over and over. Why would he do this? What was he thinking? How could he ruin our relationship? What about our children? Didn't he think about them? 
Aren't I enough? they ask. How could he throw away five/ten/twenty years? Didn't he think about what he was doing?
I doubt it.
Cheaters become masters at compartmentalization. Some are so good at it because they're truly narcissists who simply don't care about anyone else. They aren't thinking about you because they never think about you except in how you can be of use to them.
But the others, like my husband, are garden-variety fuck-ups. They've got issues, often deep issues, that haven't been addressed. Childhood abuse or neglect. Emotional detachment. Mother issues. Unprocessed grief. An inability to recognize or manage their own fear – of growing old, missing out, failing.
And then someone comes along who offers escape. Someone in whose eyes they loom large and exciting and interesting. The someone is less important than what that someone offers. A parallel universe. Escape.
It's the reason so many of these guys are stunned when the affair is dragged into the real world and suddenly it seems so ridiculous and cliché and embarrassing. They can't believe what they've done. They're acutely aware of just what they have to lose.
It's not always immediate. Sometimes this parallel universe has such a hold on them that it takes them a while to shake it from their psyche. Like someone in the dark arriving, blinking, into the bright sunlight. They're not sure which one is reality, the light or the dark.
But a lot of guys know immediately that they've really messed up. That this escape has been a total illusion. That the price of this fantasy is going to be high.
They're the ones who insist that they're not that guy. That they didn't know what they were thinking. They don't want to talk about it. It's humiliating. It's confusing. They can't really explain what they were thinking because they weren't.
If they really think hard about it they might acknowledge that they were thinking variations on such things as nobody will get hurt. Or I feel young again. But mostly they just weren't thinking at all.

Let's Talk About Sex

Ugh. Sex after betrayal.
As if it's not enough that we feel as though our hearts have been plucked, still beating, from our chests and feasted on by the OW, we will sometimes sooner sometimes later be expected to bare our bodies to the person who betrayed us.
Double ugh.
Even after the hysterical bonding has cooled down, perhaps after a period of sexual anorexia, eventually – hopefully – we will want to respond to a physical need for intimacy and an emotional need for connection.
For some of us, the healing that can follow betrayal will easily make its way into the bedroom. For others, like me, the healing that has followed betrayal screeches to a halt outside the bedroom door. But, I'm increasingly forced to admit, that's a huge sign that there's still much healing to be done. And it needs to be done largely within myself.
My therapist calls it "sexual trauma" and for a long time I resisted that label. It made me feel damaged. But betrayal does damage us. Not irreparably, not all of us anyway. But profoundly. Betrayal, for far too many of us, is confirmation that we're faulty. That we're not enough.
Our path to healing involves understanding, truly and deeply, that is a lie. The "faulty" or "not enough" script comes from long before our spouses cheated. It's rooted in childhood or adolescence. It's a message we got from our parents, or siblings, or teachers or schoolmates or the culture around us. And then, just when we thought we found that person who sees us, truly sees us, as whole and that maybe, just maybe we can begin to believe it too, we discover the betrayal. "See?" we say to the universe. "I knew it. I knew there was something wrong with me. Why else would he cheat?"
The answer, as those of us further along the path to healing know, is that there was something wrong with HIS thinking. The answer lies in the stories he was telling himself about his own worth, his own needs. But that's not your stuff. Your stuff is about about ensuring that you don't build such a hard shell around yourself that sex becomes little more than scratching an itch, or becomes such a frightening prospect that you ignore it altogether.
Which brings me back to the point of this post. Sex, post-betrayal, is scary. But so are a lot of things worth doing.
My therapist, who I've recently begun seeing again for the sole purpose of helping me get my groove back, said something recently that resonated with me. She often takes groups to Kenya. Some clients take the trip more than once, and to those clients she says, "see Kenya through Zen eyes." In other words, she explained, no matter how many times they've seen the same things, she urges them to look at it as if for the first time.
My husband and I need to come together as if for the first time. We need to banish the baggage of betrayal to the basement (how's that for alliteration?) and come together as if we know nothing about the other. To find out what each other likes. To learn what each other doesn't like. To look at each other as if we've never really seen each other before.
Which, post-betrayal, is a really great approach but no less scary. We are different. Far different than the couple who clung together on D-Day as if we were drowning in pain. Far different than the couple who slogged through that first, and then second, year, wondering if we had the strength, the patience, to rebuild a marriage that had revealed a lot of holes.
And now we've fallen into a comfortable pattern. We talk more, we share more, we love better and more deeply. But I, at one point, drew a line around sex and put up a whole lot of Do Not Cross police tape around it. I became terrified at the prospect, despite a lifetime of loving sex. I wept at the idea of being naked in front of my husband – I felt so incredibly vulnerable.
He couldn't understand. "Because I feel hideous," I managed to finally say. His face measured pain and surprise. "But you're gorgeous," he told me.
No matter. I might feel gorgeous when I'm fully clothed. But take that armour away and I'm a woman terrified that he'll see I'm "faulty" or "not enough."
That's the old story, I know. That's the narrative I've spent years trying to erase or rewrite.
Sex after betrayal is where our wounds are laid bare. It's the arena in which we feel, perhaps, more vulnerable than anywhere else.
I'm learning though that it's an arena worth entering. That my vulnerabilities are also where my power lies. My strength is in letting my husband see those vulnerabilities, confident that I have built a strong enough foundation that no matter what anyone else says or does, I can know that I am enough. That I am not faulty.
That I am gorgeous.

Getting Past the Fear of Uncertainty

"In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do. ...even in the dullest marriages, predictability is a mirage."
From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel

I would have told you that my husband would never cheat on me. I suspect you would have said the same thing. With very few exceptions, every woman on this site was absolutely shocked when she discovered her husband's affair. Despite statistics that indicate that more marriages are affected by infidelity than aren't affected, we nonetheless think we're among the lucky few. Delusional, yes?
I've long thought that willful blindness is part of the problem around infidelity. It's what happens in other marriages, we believe. If we discuss it at all, it's in absolutes. Don't cheat on me or it's over, we tell our spouse (or our spouse tells us). But, as Perel also says in her fascinating book, "the most complex issues tend to polarize in a flash, and nuance is replaced with caricature."
Infidelity caricature tells us is that cheaters are low-life Casanovas who feel entitled to sex with whomever, whenever. It tells us that wives are frumpy nags who don't like sex. That the Other Woman is a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Glenn Close.
The truth, as too many of us know, is far different. But our culture's adherence to infidelity caricature makes it hard for us to push back...especially when we're reeling from disclosure of our spouse's affair. It makes it difficult to make our own choices within the context of the marriage we're in...rather than the one culture thinks we're in based solely on a spouse's infidelity.
What's more, we're also reeling from the recognition that our spouse, whom we thought we knew inside and out, had a life completely apart from us. It's unnerving. It threatens everything we believe we know about our world.
But, as Perel suggests, it shouldn't. It should be simply understood that we can't ever completely know another person. It's something that I've come up against when I've responded on another Web site, one that purports that all cheaters are narcissists and abusive, and that the best remedy is to cut them from our lives. A one-size-fits-all response to infidelity reduces it to caricature. It disallows nuance from the conversation.
And God knows, we need a conversation around infidelity. We need to acknowledge, publicly, just how rampant it is – and we need that acknowledgement within the context of a non-judgemental conversation. Not a conversation that says, necessarily, that infidelity is okay; simply a conversation that says it is. That says all people who cheat are not bad people. All women who stay with their unfaithful partners are not doormats. And all cheating isn't remedied by throwing the cheater out. Infidelity caricature implies that, by removing the cheater from our lives, we'll somehow be protected from future pain. Or that, by removing the cheater from our lives, we won't have to deal with the pain of healing. We won't have to cope with the  uncertainty of will he do it again? True, perhaps. But the only way to completely protect ourselves is to close our hearts to not just our cheating spouse...but the world.
Life is uncertain. It's messy. It's a truth writ large when we're healing from betrayal.
And by acknowledging that our spouse has parts of him that we don't know, we not only face the possibility of infidelity (again), but we also open ourselves to the pleasure of "new". As Perel writes, that compromise we believe we must make in a long-term monogamous relationship – that in order to have the safety of fidelity, we must give up the excitement of the "new" – isn't necessary. It's possible, she proposes, to have both fidelity and the thrill of "new" by recognizing that our spouse is constantly evolving. That we don't know everything about him.
It's something a lot of us learn post-infidelity but few understand before: healing from betrayal can include the reinvention of the marriage into something exciting and fulfilling. Rather than sounding the death knell, infidelity can be the spark that ignites a new passion. We can see our spouse in a new light. Not always flattering, at least at first. But if we're open to it, we can rediscover our spouse in a way that encourages the rebuilding of our marriage.
That's not to say I'm an advocate for infidelity. The pain it creates is simply too devastating. The cost to families is just too high.
What I am saying, however, is that if we could open ourselves to the recognition that long-term monogamy can be stultifying, that even good spouses can feel deadened by the day-in, day-out demands of marriage and parenthood, we could have that difficult conversation – beyond "if you cheat, I'm outta here" – with a deeper understanding. We can't inoculate ourselves from pain by trying to frighten our spouse into good behaviour.
Being tempted isn't a sign that the marriage is dead. It's a sign that we're alive. Temptation is a warning to turn back toward our partner. To ask ourselves what we can do to make the long-term partnership more appealing than the lure of a new partner. To make the choice, again and again, to work on what we have rather than risk it for what we don't.
To do this is to face our fear of abandonment, a fear that runs deep in many of us. By talking about infidelity, we don't make it more likely, we make it less likely. Pretending we're immune to it doesn't make it so.
Let's agree that we can't possibly know everything about our spouses. And let's allow that to make us curious about them, not frightened. It requires a leap of faith. But choosing to stay with a spouse who has betrayed us is all about faith. In him, yes. But more importantly, in ourselves.
Having that faith in myself, though, is one of the gifts that arose from the pain of my husband's infidelity. I learned, the hard way, that the only person I can ever really trust is myself. At first that struck me as sad. But a deeper look made it clear how liberating that is. I can be the rock upon which I build my life.
And I can open myself to the unpredictability that is everyone else.

The Woman and The Child: Which Am I?

The truth is I'm both.
I'm a woman when I'm able to trust myself and my ability to handle whatever comes my way.
I'm a child when I feel frightened and small and threatened.
And only recently have I become really aware that I can control which "me" arrives to face whatever situation has arisen.
This past week, for example, I've been cranky. The holidays have been long and, since I work from home (a generally silent home), I've been getting little done. I missed working. I missed quiet. I missed my own company, which felt drowned out by my husband's larger-than-life personality.
I resented him and began counting the days before he would return to work.
But in the process of recognizing that I was looking forward to him NOT being here 24/7 was the recognition that he might feel the same way. And that is terrifying. It's one thing for me to admit that I've had enough of him…but quite another to acknowledge that maybe, sometimes, he's had enough of me. My "child" is triggered, fearful and anxious. Abandonment seems imminent.
In the past, I might have been aware on some level that my fears around abandonment loom large. I've long known that I hate being left…I far prefer to do the leaving, even for something as innocuous as a trip to see a friend.
This time, however, I understood on a deeper level just how much my "child" distorts my thinking. Something as normal as a husband getting on my nerves gets blown out of proportion and I convince myself that our marriage is doomed. Or more to the point, that I will be left.
I've learned, albeit slowly, that this is old stuff. This is my "child" curled in a ball, feeling powerless and scared.
So I tried something different. I imagined myself being left. I imagined that, even though there was absolutely no evidence that my husband was planning to file for divorce rather than simply returning to work after a long holiday, I was being abandoned. I imagined that he was having another affair and I would be blind-sided.
My heart beat faster. My breathing became shallow.
And then…I realized that I was not a child. I was a woman with all the resources available to me that women have. I could contact a lawyer. I could lean on friends. I could access whatever I needed to get myself through a challenging time.
I've done it before…and I can do it again.
And in that moment, I realized how often I relinquish the floor to the child I was instead of the woman I am.
I hear it sometimes in the letters you send me. I hear the fear of abandonment. I hear the anguish of those who feel small and powerless. I hear how betrayal triggers our deepest fears -- that we're unlovable, that we're not enough, that we will be alone.
But within those letters, I often also hear something great. Strength. Determination. An ability to rise to the occasion. Some will say they take heart in others' stories of survival because that means that they, too, can survive.
Acknowledge that scared part of yourself that is triggered by betrayal. But be sure to remember too that we women are a force.