What is possible for you today?

 ...the trick in life is not to try harder but to resist less.

~From a conversation with Anne Lamott, Washington Post

I am the queen of trying harder. I have a daughter who's the princess. When she was young, I posted a quote on my fridge that read something like: Reasonable people adapt to suit the world. Unreasonable people try to change the world to suit them. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable people.

It was my way to put a positive spin on my daughter's "spirited" personality. It was my way to put a positive spin on my own personality. Somewhere, perhaps before birth, I became wired to believe that I could make anything happen simply by trying hard enough. That I could change my world through sheer force of will.

It's a tough lesson to unlearn. And living with addicts, both as a child and an adult, didn't do much to change my mind despite overwhelming evidence that I was changing nothing except myself, and not in a good way.

The lesson eventually stuck, however, and I am now convinced that our happiness, or at least our peace of mind, depends on learning the new lesson. Depends on accepting that no matter of trying can change another person uninterested in changing. No matter of trying can unbreak a heart. What's more, I've come to understand that so much of my own healing, my own growth, has come not from trying but from releasing: Expectations. Perfection. My breath.

There's magic in release. Almost instantly, our bodies relax. Our hearts soften. Toward others definitely but also towards ourselves. Which is what prompted me to write this to one of our secret sisters who is working so hard to forgive her husband and herself:

I sometimes think that our valiant attempts to forgive ourselves and him can exhaust us. I have come to believe that rest is at least as important. To give ourselves a chance to just breathe. To take it moment by moment. To stop looking ahead in the hopes that we see a rosier future than our current present. I think aiming for acceptance is wise. "Today, I am fine. Today, I choose to be here." To focus on cherishing and nurturing our best selves but in a gentle way, not a striving one. We are such a culture of strivers. And yet, I think healing from the trauma of betrayal is learning how to just comfort ourselves in healthy ways as our bodies and mind adjust.

The brilliant Kate Bowler puts it this way: Somewhere between "anything is possible" and "nothing is possible" is the question: What is possible for me today?

Putting it that way changes everything, doesn't it? What is possible for me today? It takes the pressure off. It gives us a break. It allows us to nap. To be angry. To sob into our pillows. It accepts the truth that today is just...today. It is not forever. It is not necessarily predictive of anything other than what we can manage right now. What a way to live our lives – moment my moment. Hour by hour. Day by day.

I'm often asked how I got through those horrible early months post D-Day. And it was like crawling over broken glass. But broken down into those moments, it was manageable. Not pleasant. Often painful as hell. But manageable.

We get through not by trying harder. We've done that, haven't we? It didn't work out so great. But by resisting less. By being easier on ourselves because healing from betrayal is, perhaps, the hardest thing we've ever done so we deserve some kindness, some gentleness, some nurturing, some, yes, forgiving. We get through by unclenching our jaw. By letting the house be messy. By letting our kids watch TV for the 24th day in a row. By screaming all our lost dreams into the pillow. 

What is possible for me today? What's possible is to try, just the tinest bit, to release yourself from having to feel better. From having to forgive either him or yourself. Release. Try it. 

Thursday's Thought

 

Thursday's Thought

 

What Anne Lamott Can Teach Us About Forgiving the Other Woman...and Ourselves

Writer Anne Lamott tells a story in her recent Dusk Night Dawn about the time she came face to the face with the Wife of the man she'd had drunken sexual encounters with before she got sober.

Lamott began by reaching out by mail. "I tried to make amends to her," she writes, "for having a drunken and sporadic affair with her husband."

Lamott did not expect forgiveness. She writes that she understood the damage she had caused to this Wife and, she says, her children. She wrote not expecting forgiveness, noting that "sober friends" suggested that whether or not the Wife could forgive "was her business."

It's advice I've given to Other Women who've come to this site looking for direction on whether they should contact the wives they've hurt. Only if you can do so without asking them for anything, including forgiveness, I've told them. Only if your intention is to acknowledge their pain and your role in it. 

Many can't do that. The same self-absorption, moral ambiguity and emotional immaturity that got them into an affair with a married man (who, incidentally, shared those characteristics) gets in the way. And so they reach out to us trying to explain themselves, to defend themselves, or to ask for some sort of absolution for the pain they've caused. In far too many cases, they're centering themselves and their experience. 

Lamott didn't do that.

The Wife responded by letter, telling Lamott that, as a Jew, she was compelled to forgive. She told Lamott that she had already forgiven her. "She hoped that I was able to stay sober and that, because my guilt had alienated me from humanity, God, and myself, over time I could forgive myself."

Lamott wept.

Lamott tells us she was, with time, able to forgive herself. That she wanted a life that was "lighter...with looser chains." 

Years later, she tells us, "the craziest thing happened."

Imagine. You come clean, thanks to the 12-steps and a small church community (and no small amount of determination). You write to the Wife you hurt, in part because the 12 steps require that you "make amends". You become a bestselling writer. And then, one day, in a class you're offering to aspiring writers, a woman shows up. The same women whose husband you had an affair with.

They hugged.

Yes.

They hugged.

Imagine. 

"You can't get there from where either of us was," writes Lamott. "This is no straight route."

I can vouch for that. While I have not hugged the OW in my situation, I have let her go. She never wrote me a letter. Never apologized. She never asked for my forgiveness though I, like the Wife of Lamott's affair partner, hope that my husband's OW got sober, gained an understanding of why she sought intimacy with other wive's husbands, and eventually forgave herself.

Because I believe that in true self-forgiveness there is more than just loosed chains, there is a refusal to again hurt others. Only when we can look directly at the ways in which we harmed others, and therefore hold ourselves accountable and do the necessary work through that pain, can we put ourselves on an alternate path.

This is no plea to Other Women to write letters to us Wives. For one thing, they're not likely the ones reading this.

It is, however, to remind all of us that forgiveness is possible. That a true apology can soften hearts. And that, whether or not the Other Woman asks for our forgiveness, it is still in our power to give it. That by extending compassion to others, even when they are at their least deserving, it reflects back to us and allows us to extend compassion to ourselves too. 

Lamott's story reads, to me, like a parable. It has been more than three decades since she cheated with this Wife's husband. Decades since she got sober. There has been much time for the messiness, for the pain to heal. For the story to become myth.

But it nonetheless shows us what's possible. It shows us how we can heal when we center ourselves and our experience. When we refuse to let the bad behaviour of others alter our own humanity, our own moral compass. When we see it as the product of damaged people, rather than looking at ourselves as damaged.

"The experience left me longing to be more like her, to evolve toward deeper goodness and courage...," writes Lamott.

To feel whole. To feel worthy. 

In the wake of infidelity, that is often our job too. Not to make them feel that way but to remind ourselves that we already are.

Thursday's Thought

 

If we are not to give ourselves away

There must be those among whom we can sit and weep, and still be counted as warriors...

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away. 

~Adrienne Rich, "Sources"

As I write this, news is reverberating about Simone Biles, that superhuman gymnast, has withdrawn from Olympic competition. There are plenty of "how dare shes", as if her body exists to perform for others, while wearing the American brand; but there is also a loud chorus of cheers for her courage. Because, sadly, it takes courage to prioritize ourselves over what others expect of us. It takes courage to prioritize our own wants over what others want from us. What Biles did was demonstrate for us what it looks like when a young woman refuses to give herself away. 

Betrayal was an awakening for me. And oh yes, it was also traumatizing and devastating and crippling. But once the constant ache subsided and I was able to take stock of where I was, what struck me was how little of me seemed left. Strip away all the ways in which I made myself useful to people and all that remained was...who exactly? Without a doubt, I had spent many years giving myself away. A piece here to a friend who never reciprocated. A piece there to a husband who couldn't be bothered to be home for dinner. A piece there to a brother who only valued me when I agreed with him. I gave away so many pieces of myself because I believed that my value lay in being useful that there was nothing left. And it was that realization – that long before I discovered my husband's betrayal, I had repeatedly betrayed myself – that was, perhaps, the most painful of all.

Which is why, when I began to imagine what healing from betrayal looked like, I had to center myself. I had to reclaim myself, to reassemble myself. I had to learn to act as if I had value  without giving any of myself away. I had to learn how to be in a relationship that allowed me to expand rather than shrink, that gave me a voice rather than asked for silence. 

It was profoundly uncomfortable. Often it still is. But not as uncomfortable as betrayal, whether by myself or someone else. 

It's why this community continues to matter. We must be among those whom we can sit and weep, and still be counted as warriors. I am convinced that it is among each other, who know the pain of betrayal, where we are reminded of our worth, where we are counted as warriors, where we are urged not to give ourselves away. 

No response to betrayal is more right than another. We each get to chose our path out of this hell. But one thing must be consistent across responses: We must not give ourselves away. We must reclaim ourselves, find value in who we are utterly independent of how others expect us to perform.

Simone Biles, a young woman who has already endured so much betrayal, is showing us how it's done. By centering ourselves. By refusing to give ourselves away. By refusing to wrap ourselves in anyone else's brand. By recognizing that we are so much more than our ability to perform. 

From the Vault: The Strength It Takes

This post was first published in August, 2017

There's a pervasive cultural myth that strong women leave cheaters and weak women stay. Staying is for suckers, for chumps, for women too pathetic to demand respect.

Thing is, I don't know a single woman who has stayed in a marriage after infidelity who fits that description. Quite the contrary. The women I know who've stayed do so for a lot of reasons, none of which are that they're too weak to leave.
At first I stayed because I was exhausted and knew that I couldn't create the calm and stability that my three children would have needed to deal with their parents' separation. Being able to consider my children's needs isn't weakness. It's a mother's strength.
I stayed in part because I had made a vow to my husband – "in good and in bad". This fell firmly under the "bad" category. It isn't weakness to stay true to wedding vows, even when a partner has failed to. I took those vows seriously. And I knew that, at points in our marriage, we'd be tested. To honour those vows takes strength.
And I continued to stay because I could see my husband working hard to figure out why he'd risked everything that mattered to him, to find a way through this mess to redeem himself, to learn how to be a better man when he was lost. To be patient, to allow trust to regain a foothold takes strength.
But perhaps, most of all, I used that time to begin to heal. To do the hard work myself of figuring out why I had lost myself to some extent in my marriage, why I had failed myself. With no healthy marriage as my blueprint (my parents' marriage was marred with addiction and infidelity), I had thought that my job was to be supportive, to compromise, to accommodate myself, to, I dare say, abandon "me" in pursuit of "us". To untangle my healthy ideas of love and marriage and carve out a place for myself in this "new" marriage took determination and patience. And a whole lot of strength.
Thing is, those on the outside have no idea what's going on within the marriage. I hear it a lot from Other Women, bitter because the guy whose words they believed goes back to his wife and his marriage and, they're convinced, suffers no real consequences for his behaviour.
I hear it from people who know the rumours about someone's infidelity and yet see the couple at social gatherings, sitting together, laughing together. Together. "Why does she put up with that?" they've whispered to me with no knowledge that I've "put up with that" too.
What people don't see is the work it takes to get there. What the Other Women don't understand is the effort that goes into rebuilding a marriage that has been shattered by infidelity.
I don't know a single marriage in which a guy who cheated (where his wife knows he's cheated) returns to the fold and is welcomed with no questions asked.
Recently, a man who cheated on his wife posted on this site, suggesting that it would be "better" for his wife if he simply walked away so she's not reminded of the pain he put her through. This guy wasn't interested in doing the work of helping her heal. He just wanted her to be over it already and, since she wasn't, he thought it would be helpful to exit stage left so she didn't have to think about it. Doesn't that strike you as cowardice? A guy who would rather not have to face his own moral failing every day when he sees the pain in her eyes? Sure sounds like that to me. She's not asking him to spare her the pain of his betrayal (a bit late for that, buddy), she's asking him to walk through it with her. She's strong enough to face it. Is he?
And that's the truth of a marriage after betrayal. It's about facing that pain, every single moment of the day. It's about working hard to keep your heart open when every ounce of your being wants to close it off to further pain. It's about showing up at events with your husband, possibly even laughing together, and then going home and sobbing into your pillow because everything hurts.
Don't tell me it doesn't take strength to get up each morning and fight your way through the day while he's at work, sometimes where the OW works too. Don't tell me it isn't strength that gets us to our own jobs, to parent-teacher meetings, to the grocery store. Or that it isn't Herculean not to openly flinch when every bloody song in the mall where you're shopping for rainboots for your kid reminds you of what he did.
And this, of course, isn't to say that leaving is weakness. Rather it is to say that doing what feels right for us – especially when the world has strong opinions about what we should do – takes incredible strength. To battle that inner narrative that tells us we've betrayed ourselves for staying, to fight a culture that insists that the only acceptable response to a cheater is to kick him to the curb, to ignore the cries of the "once a cheater, always a cheater" brigade, takes a strength that most of us never knew we had.
And until we realize that, statistically, most women choose to stay, we didn't know how much strength the women around us have. Strength we don't always see because women are so good at hiding our pain.
In the end, we have nothing to prove to anyone but ourselves. And what he have to prove to ourselves is that we followed the path that was right for us. Our reasons for taking one path over another are our own. But they are legitimate. They matter.
Weakness is letting others dictate our life choices. It's abandoning ourselves to be who others want us to be.
Strength? It's what you see every day in the mirror when you straighten your shoulders and turn to face a world that thinks it knows what you should do and decide instead to do what's right for you. Whatever that is.