Guest Post: How Changing the Question Can Change Everything

by Laura S.

Founder & Director

Infidelity Counseling Network

www.infidelitycounselingnetwork.org

The week after my husband told me he had had sex with someone else, I threw a teacup. Granted, I went into the backyard to do so (thinking I would damage my kitchen if I threw it indoors – can you believe a part of my brain was so logical). I hurled it out the back door onto the brick patio where it smashed loudly into green and white china shards. A few days later I pounded on the hood of his car (ah, the sacred BMW), over and over, trying somehow to dent the cold gray metal. All I got for my trouble was a) a broken teacup and b) bruised hands.

Okay, so I was throwing things. But really I was throwing a tantrum. As if I could stop his actions and his choices by my physical anger. As if he would somehow be afraid of me – me, five inches shorter and 60 pounds lighter – and get that I really meant it. As if the damaged property would bribe or blackmail him, somehow, to stop. To stop seeing this woman. To stop fucking her. To stop thinking about her. To stop telling me he loved her and didn’t want to be married to me anymore.

Not married anymore? Who did he think I was? Being married was it. We’d been married for decades. We’d known each other for even longer. Like a fairy tale.            

How could this happen to me, I thought. I am a well-educated middle-class girl, raised precisely to be smart (which I am) and nice (sometimes) and funny (yup) and to have a career (well, sort of) and to get married and have a house and kids. All achieved. Just go down the list and check off the items. Everything seemed to be so pleasingly in place. A complete story. 
I never expected to have entered suddenly, shockingly, some kind of sleazy daytime talk show, the “Laura and Her Husband Show”, occurring in regular painful installments, in which HE has an affair, HE rips her heart out, HE's not sure he wants to be married anymore. SHE wonders what the hell happened to the story.

Maybe I threw things because the fairy tale was shattered. Maybe I tried to damage things to mirror my rage. At times the rage would consume me – I thought about suicide, I pictured driving my car into a wall, I considered running away and never looking back. Once I did run away – drove to another town about an hour away – and spent the day walking, eating, and thinking. Of course I returned.

It was only much later, after I had truly begun my journey of personal recovery (and as we were rockily rebuilding our marriage, which is beside the point really) that I could begin to ask “Why did this happen?” instead of “Why did this happen to me?”. Turns out that the altered wording makes all the difference in the world.

To ponder why this happened to me simply drove the stake in deeper. It made me believe it was my fault. That I must have done something very very wrong. Changing the question served powerfully to change my entire lens on my husband’s choice. Because it was in fact his choice, born out of a variety of tangled emotional reasons and reactions deep within him, not within me. Later I began to read books and websites about the factors that cause infidelity, further proof that neither I nor the marriage was to blame.

The couple’s therapist who suggested that I reframe my question was giving me a way to stop torturing myself, to cease feeling ashamed, and to start assembling the pieces of my own recovery. Part of me wanted to keep throwing things – maybe a saucer to match the cup? – and part of me still wanted to punish my husband. Yet part of me ached to take myself and my ego out of the entire painful mess. “Why did this happen?” is a question that can make us breathe more slowly and think more clearly. Throwing things was reactive; understanding the infidelity was, eventually, reassuring. I could let go of trying to “make” my husband do anything. If I had not created the problem, then it was not my job to fix it. All I had to do was repair my own self, along with the teacup. Krazy Glue is good for that.

             

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Getting Tired of Your Own Bullshit

Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love and the more recent novel The Signature of All Things, as well as survivor of heartbreak if not infidelity) knows plenty about picking herself up and dusting herself off. And then, of course, moving forward. 

She had this to say yesterday on Facebook:

Dear Ones:
Yesterday I wrote on Twitter, "I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit." 
(My own life transformation MOST DEFINITELY included.)
Can you think of an example of anyone who ever earnestly changed themselves without first doing an honest accounting of their own mess? Or without taking accountability for their own dysfunctional behaviors, their own self-inflicted dramas, their own role in the dreadful storyline, their own lies, their own manipulations, their own willful blindness, their own enabling, their own addiction to being the victim, their own addiction to aggression, to fear, to blame, to never being wrong, or to always being wrong?
I don't mean to say that transformation begins with sitting down and whipping yourself into a hot froth of shame for all your horrible faults. (Addiction to self-abuse is just another garbage storyline — another way of delaying your own transcendence and dragging attention and energy away from your destiny.) 
But I've never seen any sincere transformation that didn't start with somebody sitting down and being soberly, calmly, bravely honest with herself.
...
Don't let your ego or your damage con you into thinking that change is possible for other people, but not for you. 
Don't be seduced by your limitations. They have nothing to offer you but stagnation. 

So often women post on this site about feeling trapped. How their lives have been "ruined". I know those feelings really well. I felt trapped for months, if not years. I felt like my life had been sacrificed for my husband's happiness and that I was helpless to do anything about it. I was so, so angry. And felt so, so powerless.
And then, I smartened up. I realized that if my life was a mess, then it was up to me to clean it up. Not up to my husband (he could either stay and participate in the clean-up or he could take his mess elsewhere), or my parents, or my children. Me. I may not have made it, but I was living in it.
It's the same for all of us.
In the early days following discovery of a spouse's affair, this can seem overwhelming. And sometimes you need to just take the time to breathe. 
But when that moment comes when you're sick of your own bullshit (not to mention HIS!), you know what to do.

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Excuses, Forgiveness and Cynicism

A BWC member recently posted this:

It seems so simple to label the affair as fantasy and the cheating spouse as addicted; in a fog and damaged people who looked outside of the marriage for fulfillment. That all makes it almost palatable. It allows us to stay in the mariage to understand and excuse and forgive. Right? When I look at the person he was or was capable of being,I question all of those excuses and explanations we use to help us get by and through; to try to forgive. There is something inside of me that just cannot accept the way he treated me. The deliberate abandonement and manipulation and deceipt. It was'nt a made for tv movie discovery-one day I find out and the affair ends or maybe it doesnt end right away but eventually without all of the carnage. I allowed myself to hold on to save the marriage, to save this poor, addicted, needy person from making the biggest mistake of his life. Ha! In the meantime, I laid down and sacraficed so much of myself under the guise that I was gonig to save my marriage. He did eventually come around-out of the fog. He promises to make it up to me-whatever that means. How do you make up for murdering someones soul? Where do we go from here? How do we reconcile all of the damage?

How do we reconcile all the damage Where do we go from here? Haven't we all asked ourselves those questions? Haven't many of us wondered if, by extending forgiveness, we're giving our spouse an easy out? A way to avoid the consequences of their actions? That we're the ones paying the price for their crime?
We're left with a hole where our heart used to be, while our husbands got to have this exciting affair. That we were dragged through the mud, while they come back to an intact family. That they don't have to pay for their mistake the way we do.
Which, I suppose, is kinda true. And if we're approaching our post-betrayal lives as accountants, then it never will be even. The ledger will never really balance.
So what do we do?
We can rage and wail and scream that it's not fair, which is something many (I am, of course, referring to myself) do. We can kick him out and file for divorce, which seems reasonable under the circumstances. 
Or we can, as our writer says, come with up excuses or explanations for our spouse's behaviour and try to piece together what's left of our marriage in the hope that it can withstand the storm.
The choice is always ours. What we don't get to choose is that it happened at all. 
We have been betrayed. And that will never be "fair".
We can choose to feed our sense of injustice. We can become cynical and tell ourselves that we've created "excuses" to help us get by. 
But there is a cost to approaching it that way. 
I believe that examining the reasons behind my husband's cheating gave me a deeper understanding of and compassion for him. I could look at it as creating palatable excuses that allowed me to stay in the marriage. It might be technically true. 
But it isn't helpful. 
Even if I wasn't going to stay in the marriage, looking at his behaviour as simply the actions of a deplorable human being doesn't take me where I want to go, to a deeper understanding of human nature. To a place of compassion for my children's father. 
Nor does it take me to a place of deeper compassion for myself. By recognizing that my husband's behaviour was the result a deep wound inside himself, I was able to extend that compassion to myself. I was able, for the first time in my life, to recognize that I didn't have to be perfect to be worthy of love. Aspiring for perfection didn't protect me. It kept people at arm's length. In other words, I allowed myself to heal. 
You ask how we "reconcile the damage." I don't think we do. I don't think we ever get where we want to go by cataloguing the damage and figuring out which column it goes in. 
If we do any "reconciling", I think we take a long hard dispassionate look at what our spouse is doing to make up for what he did. Not what he did then but what he's doing now. 
If he truly deserves a second chance (and not all guys do...not by a long shot), then you get to decide if you're the one who gives it to him. You don't have to. You're completely within your rights to say, "nope" and move on. 
But if you do decide to give him a second chance, then really give it to him. Set up your boundaries around what you need to move forward and then give him the chance to show you that he can become that better person. You may be disappointed again. Life, unfortunately, doesn't offer guarantees. 
But the alternative is to be disappointed again no matter what he does. To live your life in a state of disappointment because of what already happened.
I write this as much to remind myself as anyone else. My one big lesson, that I seem to need to learn over and over, is that people can disappoint me...and still be worth loving. That they can disappoint me and still love me as well as they can. And that I can disappoint myself...and still be worth loving. 
I know it feels like he "murdered your soul." I know how deep and dark that pain is. But let your soul light the way out. It knows the way.

His Cheating Can't Be Your Trump Card

Marriage is tough.
Even marriages that haven't been marked by infidelity face their share of challenges.
Even those people can be guilty of dredging up past transgressions to shame or guilt or otherwise manipulate their partner into better behaviour.
But for those of us who've survived betrayal, our spouse's cheating can feel like something of a trump card.
No matter what WE might have done – told a friend something about our spouse we shouldn't have, overridden him when he tied to discipline the kids, secretly applied for a credit card that we then racked up to quadruple digits – it's never as bad as what HE did.
In other words, we can sometimes use his massive betrayal to minimize our own.
Which might, in the short term, kinda get us off the hook. But certainly does nothing to help us rebuild a marriage based on honesty and respect and consideration.
Thing is, betrayal does loom large, at least at first. It seeps into every interaction, every altercation, every assumption.
Perhaps you're having a garden variety argument about how maybe, just maybe he could help out a bit more around the house, like do the dishes now and again, or take the kids to swimming lessons for a change, or... And then he says, "I do plenty around here. You just don't see how much I do." To which you reply, "You're damn right you do plenty. And you're damn right I didn't see it." At which point, you either fling a cellphone at him or dissolve into tears or storm out of the room.
Or his lateness becomes a huge issue because "what if... no, he wouldn't....but what if he is?!" So by the time he walks in the door ten minutes late muttering about the "damn train", you've mentally filed divorce papers and are shaking with anger and fear.
Overhearing him tell his mother that he can't visit her this weekend because he's busy when you know he's got nothing planned becomes huge because "he's dishonest about everything. Can the man even say One Single Thing that's not a total lie? What am I even doing with this idiot?"
See what I mean?
There are times when our spouse's cheating should absolutely be on the table for discussion. His lateness might be (probably is!) a huge trigger for you and needs to be addressed. His little white lies might be a pattern of dishonesty that allowed him to deceive with ease. So bring it up. Make it a goal to introduce radical honesty into your lives (which goes for you, too -- no more, "I'm fine" passive-aggressiveness). And division of labor is an issue in every single marriage I know, and the fact that so many of us were up to our eyeballs in diapers and Lego while our husbands were the ones doing the playing just ramps up our anger.
It will take a Herculean effort to bite your tongue when it's so tempting to toss his cheating in his face. And so much in the days following D-Day feels like more effort than you can -- than you should have to! – muster.
But I speak from experience. I played my trump card often. And, frankly, I never felt better. There was a momentary "so there asshole!" feeling of triumph. But it vanished quickly, leaving my husband locked in self-loathing, and no longer able to hear a word I was saying over the sound of  his own internal shaming. And it left me feeling weak and defeated. Lose-lose.
If your goal is to rebuild your marriage, then you need to be able to address issues apart from his infidelity. Using his cheating as your trump card is the marital equivalent to throwing a match on a pile of dried tinder.
It might shut him up or shut him down...but there won't be much left worth saving.

The danger of outsourcing our happiness

One of our BWC members recently wrote that the best her husband could come up with, to her question of "why...", was that, "it felt good."
We'll file that response under "Duh!", right beside any of the zillion tomes currently on bookshelves promising us how to maximize our happiness.
Happiness has become an industry and we're convinced that there's some secret formula that will unlock our own. 
And yet, in this great New York Times piece, author David Brooks notes (and I'm paraphrasing here) that situational happiness doesn't lead necessarily to, well, happiness. And though suffering is in no way to be confused with happiness it often leads to growth. And growth can lead to, you guessed it, happiness.
In other words, that which does not kill us can, with time, make us happy.
It's important, of course, to understand how we define "happy". Happy that comes from the outside – in the form of money, status, material things, sex, even people – will be fleeting. Money comes and goes, status can slip, things lose their lustre and people, even those we love deeply, disappoint us. Happiness built on that is the proverbial house built on sand. If, however, our "happy" is built on a deep sense of who we are, work (whether paid or not) that makes us feel useful and purposeful, a wisdom borne of experience, compassion for ourselves and others, it becomes less a feeling than a way of being. 
The first path is outsourcing our happiness; the second makes it an inside job. 
It flies in the face of everything our culture holds dear, especially around love. "You complete me," Tom Cruise famously said in Jerry Macguire and we all swooned. Renée Zellweger should have replied with, "only when you can feel complete within yourself can you offer me the type of partnership that will survive all the crap that is no doubt coming our way." 
Similarly, I cringe a bit when I watch the happily-ever-after storylines that books and movies offer our kids (and us adults). Or when I listen to the I'm-nothing-without-you song lyrics that saturate pop music (and I'm not even talking about the "let's get drunk and dance naked on tables" lyrics, though there's that too). My 11-year-old daughter, who resents boys for taking up half the planet, nonetheless thinks Pink's "True Love", in which she sings of a beloved whose neck she'd occasionally like to wring but also notes that "life would suck without you", is nothing like real love. Actually, I tell her, it's pretty bang on. She makes it clear that she prefers her romantic education from Disney Channel. 
I don't want to raise cynics. But I also don't want to raise fools who think that happiness is something we achieve when he thinks we're pretty. Because of course that means it can be taken from us when he thinks our friend is even prettier.
MBS, who frequently shares her insight with others here, had this to say in response to our poster's husband's "it felt good" comment:

Something we all should ask ourselves is whether we expect others to make us happy. I think we are all guilty of that. I think it is a common belief we go into marriage with. I think it is the root of most marital dysfunction. Maybe that is the lesson to be learned from infidelity and we can dismantle the myth of "true love" and "happily ever after."

...

For marriage to last, it means accepting each other's imperfection and still showing up with love and kindness for your spouse. He couldn't do that so he is the one who failed at being a partner. The next woman he is with will also reveal her flaws and fail to live up to making him happy and he will go looking again. The cheaters who haven't learned their lesson will endlessly repeat this cycle.So rather than dwell on how you could have made him happier, think about how you can be compassionate and kind to yourself. That also will ultimately make you a better partner.

That, my friends, is how to achieve happily ever after.

Ruin=Transformation

"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."
~Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love

We frequently reject what's behind Gilbert's quote above. And many readers did. Here's the response she posted on her Facebook page.

Dear Ones -

OK, so I don't usually quote myself on this page, but a reader asked me today if I would take a moment to further explain this idea that ruin can sometimes be a gift in our lives.

*takes a deep breath*

Let me begin by saying that the ruin I'm talking about here is not something I would encourage anyone to ever deliberately seek. I've seen people who chase darkness and destruction on purpose (sometimes for the glamour of it, sometimes for the romance of it, sometimes for the sheer self-hatred of it) and this is not a path that I am capable of endorsing for anybody.

No, I'm talking about the ruin that happens to you, without you ever seeing it coming. The chaos that sneaks up on you.

Because sometimes the bottom falls out of our lives. People leave us. Precious certainties are yanked away. We lose our health, our money, our gifts, our faith, our familiar surroundings, our trust. All the truths that we thought we could believe in forever suddenly depart us with no warning. The ground that we always knew was solid under our feet turns out to have been nothing but a trap door all along. (And then there's another trap door under that one.) We disappoint ourselves. We are disappointed by others. We get dead lost. We are no longer longer recognizable to ourselves when we look in the mirror. It all falls to ruin.

And that, my friends, is when things start to get really interesting.

This is the chapter of life that Joseph Campbell called "The Dark Night of the Soul" — and it's a necessary step in every hero's journey. It's also the hardest thing in the world. Nobody ever chooses to stand in this place; it just happens to you. And you will often see later that it needed to happen to you, if you were to ever become more than a mere passenger on Earth. Because this dark place is where you must decide whether to die or live. You cannot go back to what you knew, because what you knew is a pile of smoking rubble. You cannot stay where you are, because where you are is a bleak shroud of despair. You can only move forward into the absolute unknown. And the only way to move forward is to change.

Change, to put it simply, is the suck.

Nobody wants to do it — not real change, not soul change, not the painful molecular change required to truly become who you need to be. Nobody ever does real transformation for fun. Nobody ever does it on a dare. You do it only when your back is so far against the wall that you have no choice anymore.

Or, rather, you do have a choice — you can always die. As Sartre said: "Exits are everywhere." But you don't want to die, so you discover that you have no choice except to find a new way to live. Which seems next to impossible, but somehow, if you fight hard enough, isn't. Because you know what else is everywhere? ENTRANCES. The task then becomes to find your entrance — to fight your way through the tunnel, into the dim hope of your own light.

The other day, I asked my dear friend Rayya Elias (who wrote the memoir "Harley Loco" about her years of heroin addiction) if — looking back on the pain and suffering of her life — she could imagine any scenario under which she could have gotten clean and sober earlier. I was imagining that maybe if she'd been sent to the right rehab, or had found a more kindly therapist, or had been told just the right words of encouragement by a wise former junkie, or had been rescued by the right family member...maybe she could have spared herself years of addiction and pain. Rayya's answer initially shocked me, and then made perfect sense. She said: "The only way I could've quit drugs sooner would have been if everyone had abandoned me sooner."

She explained that, as long as she was protected from total ruin by everyone's love and care and support and enabling, she never had to completely face her own darkest place. So she lingered in the murk, hovering just above rock bottom ruin for years, barely getting by on scraps and crumbs. It was only when she had destroyed every relationship, only when everyone had left, only when she had been banished from everyone's homes and lives, only when there was nobody left who would pick up the phone anymore when she called, only when she was dead alone with no money and no good will and no second chances left…it was only then, at the loneliest bottom of her existence, that she could finally hear the question that echoes at us constantly through the universe: "Is this really how you want to live?"

Her answer, to her own surprise, was "No." And when that answer, loud and clear, becomes NO…that's where our transformation always begins.

The changes in your life from that point forward will not be immediate and crisp. They never will be. Transformation isn't easy. It isn't pretty. (Ever watch a bird hatch? It's fucking exhausting.) You don't ascend from that lowest place of your life in a tidy straight line, moving a few inches upward every day. No, it's a messy and jerky and unpredictable trajectory. But it is a trajectory. And the general direction — from the moment of your decision forward — is always going to be UP. Up and out. You will shed whatever (and whomever) you need to shed. You will find whatever (and whomever) you need to find. You will crawl and bawl. Until eventually you are standing, finally, on your own two feet in your own shower of light. Until you are the person you never would have been, had you never met your own worst darkness face-to-face.

And that is the gift that ruin offers us.

Onward,LG

My Letter to Husbands: Just Talk About It, For F&%#$ Sake

I get letter upon letter from women who are desperate to be heard in the wake of your betrayal. And over and over again they tell me that you won't talk to them about, won't go to therapy with them, don't understand why they're not "over it."
You want to know why we want – why we need – to talk about it? Because you shattered our faith in you as a decent honest man, and the only way we can reconcile our desire to stay with you with our knowledge that you lied and cheated and violated your vows is to try, as best we can, to understand just how you could do that and still be someone worthy of our love. We're begging you to help us love you again. And the best most of you can do is ask, aloud, why we aren't "over it."
There isn't a woman on this site who doesn't desperately wish she could be "over it". We're not a bunch of masochists, revelling in our pain, compulsively picking away at the wound. We are women who are experiencing more pain than we ever imagined.
A lot of us had, perhaps, wondered abstractedly what we might do if our husbands cheated. I always thought I'd just be pissed off. I figured I'd get angry, show him the door and that would be the end of it.
I never ever imagined how emotionally crippled I would be by the realization that my husband had cheated on me. I just never imagined it. Anger? Hell yeah. But a pain so deep I could hardly breathe? Wasn't expecting that.
Psychologists and marriage therapists aren't surprised. They've seen how damaging what they term "trust violations" are. They've seen what a deep primal wound it causes. It's no coincidence that children who experience trust violations, if they aren't given help to heal, go on to experience the world as a terrifying place. In fact, many therapists insist that often what they see in partners who've been betrayed are symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Free-floating anxiety. Fear of what could happen. A lack of trust in our ability to handle things. A feeling of numbness. Sudden rage or terror. Sounds an awful lot like your wife after learning of your affair, doesn't it? And though many of us get better at managing those emotions, the best way to eliminate them is to process them.
And we do that by telling our story. Sometimes over and over again. And we need you to listen. To answer our questions, even if you've already told us (it's amazing how foggy our brains are post-betrayal).
I know it's hard. I know it requires you owning up to, over and over, just how shitty you feel. We know you feel shitty. But that doesn't change how we feel. It just makes this about you and your feelings instead of about us and our feelings. It requires a really brave man who can admit his shortcomings.  Who can face that he made a choice that devastated the one person he promised never to devastate. In means doing the hard work of figuring out just what story you were telling yourself that made cheating okay. And figuring just what part of that story still needs addressing. You don't feel heard in your marriage? That's legitimate. Talk to her about it. You feel like little more than an ATM? Not uncommon. Talk to your wife about it. But talk about it after you've dressed her wound, so to speak. She can't hear you and your pain when she's metaphorically bleeding all over your floor.
Tell her that nothing she did made what you did okay. That you hate that you were that guy. That you are doing everything you can to never be that guy again. That you know how hard it is for her to give you a second chance but that you are going to spend every day of your life deserving it.
Hold her, if that's what she needs. Listen to her, if that's what she needs. Pour her a bath, if that's what she needs.
And know that you may need to do that again tomorrow night. And the night after that.
But please also know that, the more you do this now, the stronger she'll become. It's like depositing into a bank account now and letting the interest accrue so you can simply enjoy it later.
Now will be hell. I get that. Just when you want to forget about this, she wants to go over it. Again.
She's not doing it to punish you. She's not doing it to hurt you. She's doing it because her brain is trying to process something confusing and excruciating. She's doing it to figure out what little clue she missed so that she can be sure she never misses it again. Sometimes she's doing it because she saw something that day that triggered her pain in that deep, deep place. And she felt vulnerable and scared.
She's doing it to heal.
So please, don't dismiss her pain. Don't insist that she should be "over this by now."
The good news? It seems counter-intuitive but the more you talk about it and validate her pain, the more quickly she'll move through it. She'll be better able to replace those fears with the assurance that you're there for her. Maybe not then...but now. Now you are.
Betrayal changes everything. And while you can't undo what you did, you can take steps to show that you've learned from it. That you're a better man than that. That she's worth going through hell for. And that so are you.