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Last edit of this page 24/07/08
Statistics, Size and shape of the problem.
A story of infidelity and healing.
Beyond the therapy ideology of trauma and betrayal.
Am I the last to know?
How people react to discovery or disclosure of an affair.
Why and how did this happen to me.
One path to healing and a Summary.
1.8 Trauma, safety and fidelity after disclosure
Intimate betrayal is humiliating. It assaults dignity. Sometimes it leaves a legacy of traumatic injury.
We mistake betrayal bonding for love, going overboard to help one who has been destructive to us or obsessing about them after they have left. We underestimate the cost of humiliated fury in personal and national history.
We have trivialized trauma in many ways. Everyday use of the term is synonymous with extreme distress rather than the neurological injury clinical psychologists understand by trauma. We report traffic accident deaths but not the years it takes the families, ambulance officers, witnesses and the injured to retrieve some quality of life from the wreckage.
If your lover had died, you could bury them. If it were a date rape or home invasion you could call the police and hopefully never see the offender again. But with intimate betrayal the wrong doer is alive and well, back from a big adventure. Always there, in your face.
When they hold you, you ask, 'is that how he held you?' and when they climax you ask, 'did you think of her'. When they talk about a new interest you ask, 'was that theirs?' When there is one of your anniversaries, what they did with their lover on that day or in your special place, is right next to your own experience.
It is impossible to get away from other everyday events, which come out of left-field and trigger distress, flashbacks and reliving. You could see your partner and lover together or fear that you might. It's impossible not to scan the environment for risk factors and plan how to avoid them or contain your reactions to them.
It's the same when you walk out into what used to be a safe world, not knowing who you will bump into or who else saw 'them' together some time ago and they ask you about 'them' in a knowing, conspiratorial way perhaps assuming that it is sanctioned by you or that you're just too dumb to know. If the affair is ongoing, then these effects are multiplied since once exposed, the fact of it cannot any longer be denied without significant damage to your own self-worth.
The only way to begin healing intimate betrayal is to build safety. For some it may be a safety they had taken for granted or one they never have had either in marriage or their family of origin. It is not safe if the unfaithful continues infidelity in any way either actual, threatened or symbolic.
'Toughing it out' is making claim to an invulnerability that breaches all we know about intimacy and is thus another kind of infidelity. Continued deceit and denial is infidelity. 'Managing' the disclosure continues the denial.
Allowing an illicit affair to continue demands more than most betrayed are willing or able or ought to give in return for what? A mad idea that they will eventually get used to it and come to appreciate being devalued and misused by their partner's ongoing betrayal? That they will become a swinger too?
More on betrayal trauma using EMD*R with couples counselling.
1.8.1 End the affair and finish the endings of the affair
This means a clear, unambiguous end of the affair; specifically defined contacts with the third party if they unavoidably work together or are a member of close family, friendship or neighbourhood group; pro-active disclosure of accidental meetings, of sms or email contacts or any other form of relating including their grieving the end of the affair and the 'just once more to say goodbye' thing. How many just once more's does it take to end it?
It helps to avoid a method of disclosing any of those kinds of contacts as if the wrongdoer were fronting the school principal or the family doctor. Hurt and shame stifle spontaneity anyway but when you are expected to report in like a prisoner on probation or an automaton checking in their time sheet without a real response back, it defeats intimacy. A counter intuitive approach to reporting becomes a necessity. The best approach is to say it as soon as practicable after the event. Each delay erodes a bit more trust.
Safety extends to the need to know - secrets are not safe. The betrayer would be well advised to open a window into the affair and pro-actively volunteer 'unsettling, guilt-producing and controversial' information so that the betrayed does not have to extract it by a process of threats, accusations and surveillance. Opening the window is making oneself vulnerable to hurt. An unwillingness to expose oneself can be another level of infidelity that betrays the wounded person's need for restoration of safety.
Plan for the future breakdown of these plans. Disclose and close any other re-entry points to the affair by predicting how the agreed boundaries might be breached in the future, which accidental meetings are likely to occur and then develop inner awareness to catch the process of re-offending before it takes off.
If you can't get to safety and security a couple of months after discovering and confronting the infidelity, read the web resources listed on bottom of Fidelity 2. Then if you continue feeling significantly unsafe get professional help as a couple as soon as possible. I recommend that for ones nervous system, because the longer traumatic reliving and/or humiliated fury continue, the more damaging to the body's capacity to heal.
It can take months to get in to a good couples or family therapist familiar with trauma and betrayal. All of us in this industry know if we catch it early we do our jobs better, but once it is entrenched the elaborations become problems in themselves - like reacting to reactions of reactions.
Self-help: writing about trauma following these guidelines can reduce its adverse effects; here are some tips about moving on from trauma.
The book 'I Can't Get Over It' by Aphrodite Matsakis is a good one to start with.
1.8.2 Self imposed punishment and help-seeking
Safety for the offended also includes a commitment by the offender to receive ethical help; to seek appropriate social supports so that the person or people whose trust they violated do not carry the burden of their own recovery as well as that of helping the offender understand how they did it, set goals to repair the damage and make amends. Reading and comprehending this material and that at the end of Fidelity 2 is part of seeking help.
The infidel may be well advised to initiate self imposed, appropriate and meaningful punishment. A voluntary loss of something or some activity highly valued by the offender can start to balance the scales. I'm not talking about giving up your bridge night or stopping Friday nights with the boys for a couple of months. Nor of self harm such as an amputation. Something of equal value to that which is betrayed is hard to find, but there are losses that can approach it and some that can exceed it. We don't need to go back to the middle ages for suitable punishment. Today's losses are just as meaningful.
One of my clients mistakenly believed they could just continue as before in their extreme sports commitments, traveling overseas twice a year. Another, that they could continue overnight business trips to the town where the third party lives. Another, that they could keep climbing the career ladder spending late nights at work. Another, that they could keep silent.
It is a mistake for the unfaithful to intend to minimize the damage in the rest of their life, maintain their freedom to play whilst the partner they betray lives with the consequences of that treachery for years to come.
You may be amazed how many betrayers don't get that. They remain unwilling to sacrifice their freedom of choice in order to regain intimacy with their partner of sometimes 20 years. I sometimes wonder if we're all on the same planet.
One of the recurrent tragedies in this field is the man whose only friend is the partner he betrays or who betrays him. Less often but increasingly the woman whose only friend is their partner. This is particularly anguished in rural and remote areas or where the couple lack meaningful community in an urban environment where the immediate neighbours are unknown.
1.9 Collateral damage to self-control and self-image
It's worth repeating: the betrayed can experience acute symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and these interfere with self-control. These disabling experiences are of hyper vigilance; hyper arousal; intrusive images or thoughts of their partner's infidelity. They may also develop symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Depression can be described as, fragility, brittleness, lack of resilience, a failure to heal, with a loss of any emotion but guilt, of any desire but to stop.
Everyday use of the term depressed is synonymous with lethargy, deep melancholy or profound sadness rather than with the clinical condition that destroys neurons leaving pock marks across the brain. Both PTSD and depression can outlast the end of the endings of an intimate betrayal. Both poke holes in the brain destroying nerve cells and leading to functional damage and both can be treated.
Treatment is an area not without controversy and contradiction.
The duplicitous offender may also have untreated symptoms from early or later life upheavals, which serial affairs or 'casual sex' may have been used to relieve, medicate or to get away from. Serial affairs can medicate through release of endorphins triggered by the rhythm of agony and ecstasy, bathing the brain in a morphine like drug (endorphins).
The experience of rejection itself interferes with a person's self control and self image. People who have been rejected become impulsive and self destructive. Rejection drops a person's IQ by about 25%, reduces their ability to reason and increases aggression. Crazy thoughts about body image or performance, which may have been an issue in the past resurface and aren't soothed by the usual reasoned self-validation.
The betrayed are not themselves. They are beside themselves, out of their minds with grief and do not respond to reason nor bounce back in the usual way. It is as if there is another, littler self embodied in the traumatic memory that lives beside them, triggered by actual or symbolic, external or internal events relating to the illicit affair.
The primary drive of this other self is fear and the primary motive is not to wound (though it may appear that way) but to re-establish safety in their own body and life space. The non-negotiability of this persistent injured self can be shocking to both. If there has been previous PTSD then this challenging process is likely to be entrenched as well.
1.10 Crisis and change
Discovery of infidelity is an uncalled for crisis, no one deserves it or asks for it, yet it is an opportunity for change and growth
A lot of dead wood is pruned in the couple's relationship world and this can re-invigorate growth in unanticipated ways. Friends and family who are quick to judge are soon cut out of the process. But at what a cost! You both may feel like the loss and pain will never end and the prosecution never conclude its case. But this too will pass and you will grow and hopefully with your primary relationship and with a wiser choice of family and friends.
Some things, however, are unlikely ever to be the same again. In fact some things cannot be the same again - remaining numb or emotionally closed to your self or your partner or giving up responsibility for your life are not sustainable options. Finding nothing of value or sacred in your life is either life terminating or a racket for denying accountability. Even in the darkest days those who survive and thrive have found some good within themselves and the world that pulled them out of the abyss and into the future.
Uncovering a clandestine affair and each week new facts of the extent of betrayal are revealed, is like being stripped, shaven, thrown out of your house and home and onto the street where no rules apply, nothing to cling to and nothing has meaning. The unfaithful may also feel some of this and yet, as the wrong doer, think they have no right to express it.
Discovery or suspicion of extramarital intercourse is the relationship implosion that on the upside, brings renewal and growth but on the downside leads to uncontrolled flight or fight reactions, depression, verbal abuse, domestic violence, divorce and in Australia and Canada, triple murder/suicides.
Sometimes it leads to or coincides with and continues an empty marriage without effective help where one or both partners are out of reach. Some give up because it is too hard to solve the backlog of issues that contributed to the affair and yet stay on in the marriage out of fear of leaving. This is particular so when the infidel has depended on their partner to look after them. Sadly that is often the guy who has depended on his wife as some kind of psychic nurse over many years and yet has betrayed her.
1.11 Disclosure
Secrets are a choice after the event as well.
Trust is built one connection and demolished one disconnection at a time. Every moment together is a chance to open up to the secret inner world, the other life or to close out your partner again.
After 35 years of working with this issue I have concluded with few exceptions, the best response to noticing a fleeting connection - a moment that might approach, begin or renew an affair, is to fess up as soon as possible to the frisson of attraction or the fantasy of re-engaging before it heads underground where it could curl up into a special friendship or a re-ignited affair.
That requires a willingness and an openness in the primary relationship, the lack of which may be part of the excuse for the affair - the 'my partner doesn't understand me', 'you're the only one I can talk to' lines.
It also requires inner awareness of building the performance steps to do the wrong thing.
This is a psycho-physiological response set, which may be experienced as anticipation or loneliness or desperation or stressed out or resentful or of loss of control or of vibrant lust. Then begins the self-talk that climbs the wall of fear, guilt and healthy shame that stops most people from jumping over into infidelity.
Alcohol helps; being alone in a hotel helps; being unhappy and blaming your partner helps. But still one has to build the series of steps up to a point where the resistance is down and choice is out the window enough to con yourself into thinking 'I didn't have a choice' or 'it just happened' or 'it was so out of character' or 'it doesn't matter' and finally the enemy is on the phone or through the door.
Affairs don't just happen. They begin in our body with our senses and our mind, which since the humanism of the Middle Ages we have believed is entirely in our control. I guess we could go back to witchcraft or spirit possession as an explanation. 'She/he/you made me do it.' 'I couldn't help myself'.
People with a compulsion to act out sexually or romantically tend not to notice those physiological and cognitive building blocks. They may also have a history of addictive behaviour or of running away from problems. They can say, 'I don't know why I did it'. That is truly the level of their self-understanding. They can't explain it to themselves in any greater detail. Some have covered that absent self-awareness ingeniously for years, much like the owner of a large business can hide illiteracy by appearing to read the paper.
There is much self awareness, expression of emotional intelligence and personal growth beneath the rubber of that apparent lack of awareness. I usually recommend a 10 day Vipassana silent mediation retreat as the starting point for developing body/mind awareness. Alone with yourself and 20 or so other people sitting in their own stuff and no-one to impose their idea of who you are or what you feel, dogma free.
Of course some 'I don't knows' are just another brain dead cover up.
1.12 Extracting clues in the dark
It's like trying to find a black cat in a darkened room. Most betrayed partners do not consciously notice shifts in their partner's endorphin levels or the presence of a third party's pheromones behind the recent shower, change of clothes or soiled undies. Some do and they mostly have something like a sixth sense; excellent smell or an acute, gut wrenching knowledge of being deceived.
Others sense the presence of nuances signaling something amiss or that doesn't fit. They may sense their partner is absent in a new way or unavailable in a different way.
Some betrayed partners know what is going on and turn a blind eye. This may be strategic - believing that by saying nothing they won't provoke a terminal crisis (for which they might cop blame) and the affair will die a natural death. Some affairs do die with nothing ever said.
A few of the betrayed can go back to the exact moment they first knew something was awry - a sense that something or someone had entered the back door of their home but couldn't put a finger on where exactly that back door was. Like the naming of it was just out of reach as if in a dream, as if they were demented.
Months and sometimes years later with physical proof of their partner's philandering, those dominoes fall into place, reconstructing the rhythm of their partner's affair with ease. Then they are doubly scorned, angry and bitterly disappointed for having doubted themselves and believing their partner's protestations for so long.
And these folk may already be traumatised by the process of discovery before they have the proof, by having gone through that hideous and humiliating process of searching; smelling; following; listening; spying, investigating everything to find some clue that explains what they know at one level but at another level doubt themselves and wonder if they are going crazy.
The numerous ways in which extra marital relationships have been discovered by my clients remind me of the rarity of a perfect crime. A secret liaison takes discipline and practice to secure before, during and after. It requires the complicity of others in keeping the secret. Some involve extended family and children in the cover up.
Most people slip up sometime. The forbidden pushes for air, as if some part of us wants to get caught and be relieved of the burden of a deadly secret. We are only as sick as our secrets and most of us want to be well.
Sometimes it's the scorned third party ortheir outraged partner and even their children who blow the whistle. Once it was a dog, a territorial Ridgeback who distrusted strangers but seeing his master's lover coming the other way, strained at the leash to say hello and when they were alongside, wanted to play. Everyone laughed, uncomfortably, but the lover's husband later couldn't leave it alone and the questioning began. 'He couldn't have been a perfect stranger, his dog knew you, he knew you.'
1.13 Catastrophic extraction has the poorest prognosis for recovery and growth
Having to extract the facts from a protective, unwilling and guilty offender in the first place is a revolting part of the process.
It is the cruellest game of 20 questions. Just tell me the truth or kill me, screamed one of my clients. Others, unable to come to a resolution of the issues with their unfaithful partner, have told me they would rather die than divorce. Rarely, some of these go on to 'coincidentally' develop a terminal illness.
Whilst most sensing the risk to life itself and with incredible determination, fear and tenderness would let go and live on.
Once the secret has gone underground and you, the betrayer have been confronted, the worst approach is to deny it or put the needs of the third party ahead of your partner and your primary relationship.
Then, when the evidence is incontrovertible the zombie thing to do is to minimize it or to claim that you're the victim or to go on the attack when found out. DARVO - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender - is more common as the reaction of sex offenders being caught. You might as well throw another grenade into your partner's lap and run for cover. If the relationship is to survive both of you have to sit in the mess you have made in your backyard, attempt to unravel it and not run away from that process out of fear of what you might uncover.
Withdrawing into silence; disconnecting emotionally; threatening the end of the relationship if your partner continues to respond to your withholding the facts by their doubting you, or even threatening suicide or murder if the betrayed doesn't leave it alone, all are just more of the same callous wounding of trust and dignity.
Since your credibility, trust-worthiness and integrity are already shot to pieces (having been caught and probably destroyed your partner's belief in you and the values you stood for, and maybe you have lost all respect for yourself as well) the next biggest error is to further undermine your standing by progressive leaks of pivotal bits of information often and in direct proportion to the pressure or escalating threats applied by your partner or the third party or both.
Each new disclosure or discovery of withheld information takes the process back to the beginning again. It is death of a thousand cuts. You have a choice - come clean and get 'killed' for it or slowly murder your partner. Read Emma's beginning interrogation on Fidelity 2
Pro-active disclosure is usually the best direction even knowing that once having told the whole story, your partner won't feel better, may feel more hurt and angry, behave with less self-control and not stop agonised doubting, questioning, excavating and obsessing with what each of you thought had been resolved yesterday. That is the expected response of someone who has had their foundations demolished, traumatised by their partner's disregard for the consequences of a failed gamble with betrayal.
Sometimes it is the lack of that window of disclosure into their world, into who they are that allows a window to open to a third party and the walls to close out the primary relationship. Even after years in this game I can still be almost heartbroken when I hear the aloneness of both the faithful and of the unfaithful people in a long term relationship and how life, rich glorious juicy life, right under their noses, just passes over the top of their defence against living and feeling. In that sense we are the poorest of the poor surrounded by waste.
1.14 Personality Disordered
Once confronted with a undeniable and independently corroborated fact of infidelity some folk lack the capacity for genuine contrition and empathy; are primarily self-centred and narcissistic, having so little trust in the world or themselves that they are unable to put themselves in the shoes of the people they have wounded; possessing a character disorder in which everything that goes wrong in their life is somebody else's fault or who find lying is more natural than the truth telling. For these folk resolution, redemption and personal growth are not a happening thing.
They may also be serial bullies at home and have pursued their partner with unfounded suspicion, abusive vigilance of their lives and accusations of infidelity. Some of them are the special people who advance to become the captains of industry, control freaks in government and politics where their ability to finesse accountability is in high demand.
Others have been in a load of trouble in their heads for a long time. Sometimes this is one who identifies with borderline personality.
1.15 Pay Back Time
Some part of you, the betrayed, may want to hurt the fornicator or fornicatress as much as they have hurt you. To take away all their security, dignity, sense of belonging, of purpose and of self-worth. You may want to strip them bare until they have as little left to believe in as you now find yourself.
Wishing to inflict a tsunami on the offender is best spoken but not acted upon. That path leads to becoming an offender yourself and betraying your own values. A pay back affair though it may be tempting, is also a self disintegrating plan.
However, if your values are supported by a religious 'eye for an eye', you can immediately relax into self-righteousness because you have sanctioned violence for just about any unrighteousness - take a look at the world for a moment.
Going on the attack like a wounded predator or trying harder to make your perfidious partner happy are not the most useful responses in the face of a life changing event of this magnitude. It is okay (for both) to feel shame, anger, to grieve, to feel sick with disappointment with themselves, with their partner and with all those who collaborated in the code of secrecy around the affair.
It is okay to feel, it's what we do with those feelings that matters.
It is better for the heart's recovery to be clear, strong and willingly vulnerable than it is to harden your heart, tighten the pericardium into a steel plate across the chest and hurt back those who have injured you.
You will survive this, it will pass.
It is essential that you set limits of time and place to reach your partner, to search for more clues or to try harder to make them happy, if you must. These are like appointments to plead, to grieve, to scream and wail, to accuse, to please. Then take appointed time out to rest, reflect and rebuild your traumatised personal and spiritual resources and your support network, as you now see fit.
1.16 Toxic Shame
A few who have been betrayed tell me they deserved it.
This may arise believing they are bad or believing it's life paying them back for betrayal they inflicted on others - such as by having poached their partner from a previous 'stable' relationship.
The betrayer too can come to believe they are bad once they have witnessed the devastation wrought in their partner's life - believing only a bad person could hurt someone they love and who loves them.
It is unsafe to navigate the treacherous waters of betrayal with toxic shame as your guide.
Toxic shame is a belief that you are bad, defective or damaged to the core, that you should never have been born or that the world would be better off without you. Maintaining that belief only continues the damaging self-concept that may have driven the infidelity underground.
Sail with the good wind no matter how much garbage is thrown at you or you throw at yourself. No matter how bad you think you have been by violating your partner's trust or how much you think you may have contributed to your partner's betrayal by not keeping them happy, you are a good person who has done bad things.
You may have done some terrible, careless stupid things but you are a good person at heart.
One helpful attitude might be: 'I love myself unconditionally and I don't like what I have done or omitted to do.'
This is the difference between a human being and a human doing.
More on this in my forgiveness page and a brief note on an unexamined life.
This is a big leap in self-validation if you have come from a critical family or from feeling unwanted as a child or from a competitive marriage where no matter what you did you were never good enough and if you are your own worst critic and/or hate your life. Here's some ideas about negative self-talk.
Infidelity summary page with navigation or
- First steps in recovery
- Prediction and 'Prevention'
- Professional help for intimate betrayal
- Comprehensive external sites and articles
- Recommended Books
- Hiding behind secrets, privacy, ambiguity and vagueness
- 3.2 The other woman and long duration affairs
- 3.3 The 'other friends' and should I tell
- 3.7 A policy on secrets
- 3.12 Ultimatums
- 3.13 Reader's questions answered
On Fidelity 4 - the children involved, those conceived in an affair and how to help them cope if witnesses
On pre-marriage education. Who and when not to marry and 13 observations of spousal relationship.
GO TO the navigation page for my pre-commitment Relationship Education study cycle
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