Why Is it So Difficult to Recover From Being Cheated On?
Can You “Affair-Proof” Your Marriage?
Owning Your Ugly
I was tagged on Twitter yesterday as someone who “owns her ugly.”
It made me smile.
And then it made me reflect.
You see, I didn’t always own my ugly.
In fact, I engaged in all types of mental gymnastics to wall myself off from it and to distract others from looking at it (Hey! Look over here!).
I was afraid that by allowing others to see my ugly, I would give them a reason to leave me.
And abandonment has always been my greatest fear.
But that’s silly, isn’t it? Not the fear of being abandoned. That’s a very real monster. But the thought that I could somehow fool people (and I’m including my ex-husband in this category) that I didn’t have any ugly.
Because we ALL do.
We all experience motivations at time that are ego-driven. We all fail to fully listen to others at times and instead assume what we want to believe. We all can overreact to something in the present when it twinges on a nerve laid down in the past. We all can allow our insecurities to dictate our actions.
We all try. And we all fall short sometimes.
This particular group on Twitter has been brought together through the experience of infidelity. Some were the unfaithful partners and some are the betrayed. It’s easy when you’ve been cheated on to spend your energy pointing fingers at the unfaithful partner. It’s a lot harder to look at yourself, especially when your own ugly seems so minimal when placed next to something so horrific as an affair.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
In fact, it’s critical. At least if you want things to change.
I can identify three different iterations of ugly in myself that surrounded my husband’s infidelity:
Reactivity
In a purely hypothetical, if my ex-husband had come to me and revealed that a friendship with a woman had started to cross some boundaries, I would have screamed at him, cried until my face was purple and swollen and made him feel “less than” for even having an attraction to someone else.
My reaction would have been fear-driven (What if he decides he likes her more than me?), but it would act to intensify my husband’s shame as well as encourage him to hide things from me instead of bringing them out into the open.
Related: The Unintended Consequences of Overreacting
Righteousness
This was at its ugliest right after my husband left. I felt like I had some sort of moral superiority over my ex, yet under that guise of virtue was really a desire to punish and a need to be loved.
When he left, my ex was generous with his criticism of me, painting me as materialistic, negative and unaffectionate (none of which are my brand of ugly). And so I became defensive, needing to prove that he was bad and weak whereas I was good and blameless.
And yes, unlike him, I was faithful in my marriage. I never lied to him or withheld important information. But that doesn’t make me better than him. It just makes me different. For a time, I thought that admitting to my own weaknesses would justify what my ex to me. But that’s not the case. No matter my uglies, he’s still responsible for his choices. That part is all his to own.
Victimhood
“Look what he did to me!” I would cry out to anyone who would listen. “Look at these unjust wounds!” I would exclaim, detailing the exact nature of his betrayals. It felt good in the moment as others would rush to comfort me and condemn his actions.
But it also felt disempowering. As a victim, I was faultless, but I was also impotent, unable to change my situation. It was scary to let go of this guise because it meant taking responsibility for my own healing (It was WAY easier to insist that I needed something from my ex to make it happen).
Once you own your ugly, three powerful shifts occur –
1 – Nobody can use your ugly against you. Think of it like blackmail. Once it’s in the open, the blackmailer has no power over you.
2 – You are no longer threatened by the ugly in others. You understand that we all have our faults and you respect those that are willing to face and address their own.
3 – Before we own our ugly, we often try to change others. Once you own your ugly, you recognize the power you have in changing yourself.
Progress and Room to Grow
Because of the nature of my first marriage (conflict-less because of a deadly combination of his tendency to lie about everything and my inclination to avoid anything too anxiety-provoking) and the way that it ended (suddenly and without warning), I have struggled at times with my now-husband.
In the beginning, I alternated between being totally flooded and in a panic about being abandoned again at the slightest sense of conflict or withdrawal to an “I’m out of here” conclusion as my traumatized brain assumed the worst about a situation. Additionally, my f’ed up brain decided that if I wasn’t the “perfect wife,” I would again be dropped. Of course, that doesn’t lead to good things because I could never do enough to calm the anxiety and none of this was stuff my husband asked for (or expected) anyways. And then for the cherry on top, I had a hard time bringing up the difficult conversations, my years of avoiding anything anxiety-producing had trained me well.
It’s been years of work learning how to change these patterns. I can now initiate the difficult conversations and I’m more able to stay present during them instead of disappearing into an emotional whirlpool. I trust that my now-husband is in it for the long haul and that he is not a quitter or a coward. As I process a disagreement or issue, I’m finding less and less that it directly has more to do with my past than my present.
Which is good.
But of course, the past is still imprinted on my being. I still have a tendency to take everything too personally and respond at a level ten to something that should be counted on one hand’s worth of fingers. I get in my head too much, thinking when I should be being. And it’s a vicious cycle. Because when I get this way, I become more convinced that I’ll be left again. Which then leads me right back to where I started.
There’s obviously room to grow.
I think part of my recent anxiety is tied to my upcoming trip (I leave in the morning!!!). It’s been almost ten years to the day since I left to go visit my father in Seattle. On that trip, like with any trip, I expected to return to Atlanta and my life at its conclusion.
But that life disintegrated while I was gone.
There is nothing in my life now that suggests that scene will ever be repeated. But I think it’s there in my subconscious mind, softly whispering, “what if?” and making me more needy, more sensitive and yes, more anxious.
I’ve come a long way in the last ten years. But I still have a ways to go.
Why Do We Believe Their Lies?
In hindsight, it’s all so clear.
Unfortunately, we can’t preorder hindsight.
Looking back now, some of my ex’s false stories are absurd. One of my favorite has to do the phone line. Apparently, we were beginning to receive calls from creditors since he had decided that funding a second life was more important than paying the bills. And it wouldn’t do to have me inadvertently pick up one of these calls and learn the truth about our finances.
So he cut the phone line.
But it didn’t end there. Because of course, he couldn’t admit that he disconnected the service (which by the way, also meant the alarm system didn’t work while I was home alone when he was traveling), so he feigned surprise that the phone no longer worked. We went to radio Shack, where he bought a device that is used to diagnose issues in phone lines ($25) and pretended to try to find the problem for the remainder of that afternoon. Now that’s commitment.
My gut said something was off about the entire situation. After all, I had never had a phone line just suddenly stop working. And my ex never followed through with contacting the phone company, which seemed like a logical next step. His reaction was a combination of an initial flurry of action and then…well, nothing.
But I didn’t listen to my gut. I listened to him.
So why do we believe their lies?
The Truth is Too Scary to Face
If I saw the truth about the phone line, it would mean that I would have to face the reality that everything I thought I knew was a lie. It would mean that my husband was not my protector, that instead he had become my tormentor. That every ounce of security that I thought I had (financial, emotional, etc.) had evaporated and nothing could be trusted.
It was like a domino effect; if I saw through one lie, they all would tumble and reveal the hellish truth behind their facade. And I wasn’t ready to see that.
We believe the lies because we so desperately need them to be true. Because reality is too scary to comprehend.
We Don’t Want to Admit We Were Wrong About Them
I thought my ex husband was a good man. A generous man. An honest man. And to admit otherwise meant that I would also have to cop to my own shortcomings in selecting him and then for keeping him on a pedestal.
We believe the lies because we want to think that we made a good choice. Sometimes it’s hard to admit a mistake.
It’s Hard to Admit That We’ve Been Fooled
By the time my spidey-sense was trying to get my attention to tell me something was wrong, he had been lying undetected for years. So to see one lie in the present meant that I had to admit to not seeing all of those in the past. It was easier to simply stay in the dark and pretend that everything was okay.
We believe the lies because it’s embarrassing, shameful even, to reveal that we have been fooled. We want to think that we’re smarter than that.
We Want to Believe the Best About Them
In many of my ex’s stories, he painted himself as the victim of some unfortunate circumstance. He was the underdog, just trying to do the right thing in a world that seemed to be stacked against him. And since I loved him, I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe IN him.
We believe the lies because we take the side of the one we love and it’s easier to see them as the victim than the perpetrator.
We’ve Learned to Doubt Ourselves
Like many cheaters and addicts, my ex used gaslighting to keep me confused. He would outright deny something that I remembered happening and he would create documents that conflicted with the real ones that I had already seen. All of this uncertainty meant that I always questioned my own perceptions, often even more than I did his excuses.
We believe the lies because we have been conditioned to no longer believe ourselves.
And that’s exactly where healing begins – in learning to trust our own perceptions and instincts again and in believing that we ARE strong enough to handle the truth no matter what it holds.
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 