The Incredibly Slow Painstaking Heaviness of Healing from Infidelity

It's taking a l-o-n-g time, isn't it? You thought you'd have been over this agony months ago. Years ago.
But here you are, sobbing in the bathroom because your husband said something thoughtless over dinner. Or you're hyperventilating in the condiment aisle at the grocery store because, for a minute, you thought you'd spotted the Other Woman pushing a cart of groceries. Your heart is pounding because your husband is a half-hour late getting home.
What the hell, right? This shouldn't still bother you so much.
After all, you've done everything humanly possible to move past this:
Therapy. Check.
Establishing clear boundaries. Check.
Reading every book about infidelity ever written? Check.
Devouring web sites and blogs. Check.
Watching videos by marriage counsellors. Check.
Self-care, including the occasional massage. Check.
So why? Why can a forgotten photo bring tears to your eyes? Why does a certain song, one you haven't heard in a long time, suddenly transport you back? Why is this so goddamned hard?
I'll tell you why.
Because betrayal is an injury that calls into question everything we thought we knew about ourselves, about him, about our future. It shakes us to our core.
There's a saying about football, that it's a game of inches. Well, my secret sisters. That applies to healing from infidelity too.
We heal from it inch by barely perceptible inch.
I know, I know. We want dramatic finishes. We want healing to be like smashing through the ribbon at the finish of a marathon. Applause and accolades. The incredible high of having done it.
Yeah. Doesn't work like that.
There is no chorus of angels singing hallelujah. No miracle cure. No trophies. Not even a certificate of completion.
There is only a little by little lightening. As if you've been lugging a sack of rocks and someone is removing them, one by one, so that each day the load feels just a teensy bit lighter. There are days when you'll be convinced someone is actually putting rocks back in. Those, perhaps, are the days you check her social media account, or your husband seems evasive and you wonder if he's lying, or you can't shake the bitterness. Days when your arms and heart ache from the strain. Days when surely you're actually being pulled backwards.
That, my dear warriors, is when you rest. That is when you respond to yourself not with recrimination (What's wrong with you! Why aren't you further along by now?) but with kindness and tenderness. The way you'd respond to a friend or child. An afternoon ignoring the messy house in favor of a good movie. An early bedtime. A visit with a friend. A perfect piece of chocolate cake. A romp in the woods with a four-legged friend. Anything that reminds you that you are worthy of attention, that your pain matters. Anything that gives you permission to tend to your wound.
It isn't magic, of course. You might still feel sad. Or lost. You might feel mired in the worry that you've made the wrong choice. If it was the right choice, wouldn't it feel better than this?
Probably not.
Cause the right choice isn't always the easy choice.
And there is nothing easy about healing from infidelity, no matter what choice we make.
Inch by almost invisible inch.
But only if we continue to do the work.
Like enforcing clear boundaries that keep us safe and are rooted in self-respect. Like ensuring that we only allow those into our lives that treat us as if we have value. Like taking care of ourselves, both out outsides and our insides. By prioritizing our healing.
Just as we can't outwardly watch a wound heal, inward wounds also heal imperceptibly.
But I guarantee you that healing is happening.
Inch by barely visible inch.

Wednesday Word Hug

On backsliding, emotional labor, resistance and pie. Plus the two questions you need to ask

M'mmmm...pie. That somebody else made.  It's holiday season, the unofficial time when our secret sisters run themselves ragged trying to model perfection while inside the conversation goes something like this: I thought I was further along than this. I've completely slid backward. I am so triggered and so mad at myself because I need to get nine pies baked. (Seriously. Nine pies. That's a LOT of pie.) Am I never going to get over this? What's wrong with me? Why can't I handle this better? Let me tell you something. It's a full-time job just wading through the devastation wrought by infidelity. And yet, I don't know a single person who was able to just focus on working through the pain. Instead, we're also raising children (which, I might add, is also a full-time job), tending to elderly parents, working our paid jobs, volunteering at the goddamn bake sale to fundraise for Cub scouts, grocery shopping to ensure our family doesn't starve... And baking nine freaking pies for Thanksgiving dinner.  What the hell is wrong with us that we think that's not enough? What is so toxic about our culture that no matter how many balls we have in the air, we're beating ourselves up for not being able to juggle more? Where did we learn that if we're not able to keep everything running smoothly while looking great and simultaneously dealing with the most devastating betrayal in our lives that we're failing? Oh wait...I know where we learned it. In a culture that tells us our worth is directly related to our pants size and our ability to hold onto a man. In a culture in which women's emotional labor is invisible. In a culture in which our visible pain is not to be shown in polite circles. The only correct answer to "how are you?" is "Great!" though "So busy!" is also acceptable as long as it's said with a smile.  But here's the thing, my secret sisters. We don't have to buy into this toxic and insidious bullshit.  Nobody can simultaneously heal from the pain of betrayal while keeping her life running smoothly without sacrificing something crucial: Yourself. How does this sacrifice take place? Piece by excruciating piece. Why can't I be more like her? Why aren't I further along in my healing? Why do I get triggered so easily? Why can't I get over this? Why am I so angry at everyone? Why do I keep screwing up? Why am I so tired? I'll tell you why. Cause this is exhausting difficult painful work.  Want to know the real question you should be asking yourself when you notice that you're tired and frustrated and agitated and angry and sad and numb? What do I need right now? And the next question: How can I give that to myself? Cause there's nothing wrong with you that you're tired and frustrated and angry and agitated and sad and numb. Nothing wrong at all. That is the appropriate response to betrayal. It is the appropriate response to the recognition that your emotional labor – not just healing yourself but taking care of everyone else and making it look easy – is a rigged system. Of course, you're angry. Of course, you're agitated. Of course, you're frustrated and sad and numb. The system is rigged against you. But you don't have to play along. What do I need right now? How do I give that to myself? That isn't letting others down, it's showing them that you recognize your own worth. Which also communicates to them something amazing. That they're worthy too and that they get to value themselves. It gives them the space to ask the same questions: What do I need right now? How do I give that to myself? There's nothing wrong with you that you're still being triggered two years out, five years out, seven years out. There's nothing wrong with you that the holidays are really really hard. There's nothing wrong with you that you're freaking exhausted at even the thought of baking NINE pies. Or one pie, for that matter. Pies are a lot of work! There's nothing wrong with you. Full stop. Nothing. What do I need right now? How can I give it to myself? Two questions. And the answers are so often simple.  Harder is silencing the resistance to those answers. I need a nap. (Oh, but resistance says you don't have time to nap. You need to tidy up, set the table, buy presents.) I need to cry. (Oh, but resistance says crying is pathetic. Besides, you should be over this by now.) I need a few days alone. (Oh, but resistance says how selfish of you to take time away when there are kids who need feeding, dishes that need washing. That Christmas tree isn't going to put itself up, you know.) It's so hard to fight back against that resistance. But that's our work. To value ourselves. To value others enough to take care of ourselves so that we can show up for them as our best selves. To understand that we're not doing anyone any favours by dragging resentment along with us. I'll say it again for those in the back. There is nothing wrong with you. Healing will take longer than you think. Even with healing, you will have triggers. There will be times when you think you're backsliding. There will be times when you think you've made the wrong choice, no matter what that choice was. There will be days (weeks!) when you wonder if you've made a horrible mistake.  What do I need right now? How do I give it myself? Life has a way of sorting itself out if we just keep showing up as best we can. With our armour put away because we don't need it. Trusting ourselves to keep ourselves safe. With our hearts open. Not necessarily with nine pies. Or even one.  Unless baking pie is what you need right now. For the rest of us, that's what bakeries are for.

May I Have Your Attention

Feline family feast

"Attention is the most basic form of love." ~Zen koan

Before my mother became an addict, she was a really great mom. And one of the things she insisted upon was family dinner. No television, no radio. Just four people sitting around a table eating and sharing our day. My brother and I, of course, did everything we could to make my mother abandon her commitment to family dinner. Farting noises, outlandish stories, complaints about what was on our plates. She was steadfast. Family dinner proceeded and my brother and I eventually gave up our protests.
And – whattaya know – it's something I insisted upon when I had children of my own. For years, when my husband was cheating on me and I hadn't a clue (I believed him when he said he was "working" and, some nights, he actually was), I would sit down with my three young children. I enjoyed the ritual. The setting of the table, the preparing of food (sometime enlisting small hands to help me), the sharing of our day.
Not long before D-Day, my husband asked me if the kids missed him at dinner. "No," I told him. "Their memory of you will be an empty chair at the dinner table." After D-Day, I demanded that my he start joining us for dinner. He did and has continued to for 12 years. 
My eldest, now 20, is back at home again after returning to university in our city, and routinely tells me how grateful she is for our family dinners. 
The only thing that our family dinner is serving that's truly of value is attention. For roughly an hour each day, we pay attention to each other. (And it's not every day. There are things that get in the way – night school classes, hockey practices, volunteering – but most nights we are gathered around our table.) 
I'm grateful to my mom for setting that standard. Because many of kids friends who've joined us for our meals tell us they never sit down with their families for dinner. What my brother and I considered punitive, these kids relish. 
It's not easy to find time in a day to pay attention to each other. For a whole lot of us, unless there's a crisis (hello infidelity!) or drama (hello teenagers!), many of us remain focussed on just getting through. It's enough to put food on the table, or pay the bills, or, at the end of our day, to relax in front of the television. We check in with each other – "how was your day?" to which we hope to hear "fine". Job done, we can turn on Netflix or crack open a novel. 
Our 24/7 world is constantly pulling our attention somewhere. Fires in California! Another election! Parent-teacher night! Black Friday sales! Book club! Yoga class! Weekend conference for work! The list, as we all know, is endless.
And, trust me, I'm as guilty as the next mom for just wanting some quiet a lot of the time. What's more, plenty of our dinner conversations lately (god help me, teenagers!!!) are about sex vs gender, drugs, misogyny, the economy... Gone are the days when we talked about something funny that happened on a school trip, or shared facts about sharks or dinosaurs. The stakes are high right now.
But, I absolutely know that the single best thing I can be doing right now is paying attention. Listening. (I'm working hard at learning to listen more and talk less. Not easy!)
What I'm even guiltier of lately is ignoring my husband. When he retreats to our basement to watch his favorite shows, I never follow him. I tell him it's because the basement is freezing (it is!) or that I have to bake cookies for a cookie exchange (I do!). But it's also because I'm often exhausted by that point. I have little attention left.
Which is dangerous. 
He invited me to lunch the other day. I had mentioned that I was craving a particular meal from a particular take-out place that's a block from where he works. I hadn't made a big deal about it, just noted in passing that I had a craving.
The next day he called me to suggest we meet for lunch at this place.
And the most amazing part of that wasn't the meal itself.
It was that he had noticed. He'd been paying attention. 

Wednesday Word Hug

The Thorny Nature of Forgiveness

"...it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft." ~David Whyte, from Brainpickings

Forgiveness remains a thorn in my side, though one that I'm scarcely aware of until someone asks me outright if I've forgiven my husband. My answer usually is something like "it's complicated."
But though I've never said to my husband the words "I forgive you" (I suspect I'd choke on them), reading David Whyte's description of forgiveness, I think perhaps I have.
Whyte's description of forgiveness is beautiful, isn't it? I love the notion of a more mature me, a "larger" me, putting an arm around the injured me and my painful memories and, in essence, saying "it's okay. You will get past this." And then this larger me also figuratively saying to my husband, the betrayer, "I will get past this. You hurt me but my capacity for healing is greater than the injury."
And that's the truth. My capacity for healing, which I couldn't imagine when betrayal first body-slammed me, is bigger than the injury. I can see that now, looking back from this distant shore. Yours is too. 
"Forgiveness is a skill," Whyte reminds us. Forgiveness, he's saying, doesn't just happen. It requires our participation, our attention. It requires that we want more for ourselves than to sit in our bitterness, that we are willing to "shape our mind to a future we want for ourselves."
Shape our mind to a future.
Easier said than done, isn't it?
The future can feel terrifying when we're in the muck of betrayal. It hurts to think about because we no longer trust it.
Thing is, we're putting our trust in the wrong place. It isn't the future we're trusting, it's ourselves. It isn't the betrayer we're trusting, it's ourselves. And it's trust in our ability to shape our future into one that includes forgiveness for ourselves. We "reimagine ourselves," as Whyte says. It's such a beautiful promise, it holds such possibility. To reimagine ourselves not as the weeping, aching, pitiful mess in a heap on the bathroom floor that we are right now but as someone who knows the larger story. The larger story includes our resurrection. It includes transcending the pain. Not denying it or forgetting it but incorporating it into a bigger story that includes healing from that pain. To be gifted by a story larger than the story that hurt us. 
I say it all the time, don't I? Our stories can heal us. Or they can hurt us. 
Forgiveness, even accidental forgiveness like I seem to have stumbled on, gives us the larger story. I can see now that I have extended that comforting arm around myself, the weeping agonizing injured me who can't possibly imagine that she will arrive at the place I am now. I have extended that comforting arm around my husband who couldn't imagine that he could forgive himself, nor that I might forgive him. 
I have incorporated that first story into larger one that includes – wow! – forgiveness. 

Betrayal Trauma: When Infidelity Damn Near Destroys You

It's becoming increasingly clear that refreshing Twitter every five minutes and logging on to the New York Times home page to read the latest assault on good sense, decency and human rights is not good for my health, emotional or physical. I'm agitated. I'm unproductive. I'm miserable. 
Which is why a weekend spent in my reading chair, phone and iPad tucked in their charging station, slowly reading through the pile of magazines that has accumulated, was just what the (metaphorical) doctor ordered.
I was reading September's issue of O, The Oprah Magazine when I came across a story about post-traumatic stress disorder related to infidelity.
There's a term, though it's not in wide usage: Post-Infidelity Stress Disorder, which sounds almost too quaint for what actually happens. "Stress" barely scratches the surface.
Because the key for understanding just why we're so shattered by infidelity is in the word trauma. Betrayal is trauma.
Trauma, according to Oxford Dictionary (which, incidentally, declared "toxic" its official word of 2018, edging out gaslighting and thereby giving official status to betrayed wives everywhere), means "emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may lead to long-term neurosis."
Shock. Injury. Neurosis.
That's more like it.
It took me a long time to come across any reference to what I was experiencing as trauma. It may have been my therapist who first mentioned it, though I too often discount what she says because I think she's too easy on me. After all, I hadn't been dodging IEDs in Afghanistan. I hadn't experienced a brutal rape. 
But when I read about betrayal trauma, when I saw the words written across a page, the idea came with an authority that didn't allow me to dismiss it. Because I had been dismissing my pain. I was sure that other women going through infidelity weren't as shattered as I was. They were out in skinny jeans and stiletto heels slashing his tires, or gathering around a bottle of chardonnay with other betrayeds and plotting comical revenge, or at a spa transforming themselves into a woman so desirable, he would experience such profound regret for what he'd done and lost.
Cause that's the thing with infidelity. The only role models I really had were my mother, who'd descending into a decade of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction (not a path I wanted to take) and the women I saw in movies or country music songs or books. Those women didn't seem traumatized, they seemed motivated. 
Which is why it was such a relief to have a word for how I was feeling. 
Shock. Injury. Neurosis.
Trauma. 
"We see symptoms of shock, negativity, and emotional arousal – as you might see in somebody coming home from war – manifesting in committed relationships," says Kevin Skinner, a licensed marriage and family therapist who's quoted in the story. 
I spent my days fighting off panic attacks.
I routinely considered veering my bike into traffic. 
I felt like a caged animal, trapped by circumstance.
The mind movies made me crazy. 
I couldn't stand being away from my husband. I couldn't stand him close.
I spent countless hours poring over VISA bills and receipts, rifling through his drawers, looking for...what exactly? I already knew he cheated. I knew with whom. But trauma drives us to neurosis. To hyper-vigilance. 
If you're not reacting your news of your partner's infidelity the way women in movies or songs or books are – if, instead, you're reacting the way I did, with tears, with vacant eyes, with panic and terror – you're experiencing trauma and you need support.
There is nothing wrong with you. It is not a sign of weakness. Rather it is a sign that you are  human and that you have experienced a shock that has completely destabilized you.
Betrayal is trauma. There it is. In print.
The truth.