Blog #6 – “How Could They Do This To Me?!?! Making Sense of Your World after an Affair
For the Injured Spouse:
“I never in a million years would have thought my husband would cheat on me. If you had told me this was going to happen, even six months ago, I would have laughed at you. Not my husband. We had a great sex life. When we were together, we would laugh and talk and do all sorts of fun things with the kids. Yes, he was gone a lot as a commercial airline pilot. Any pilot’s wife expects that her husband is going to have to be gone a lot. Maybe I would have been suspect of him if we didn’t seem to have such a strong connection when we were together. We even talked on the phone every single night.”
“So basically, I never saw it coming. He told me we needed to go meet with the pastor of our church. We both sat down. I smiled at both of them, wondering what this was all about. When I saw their faces in response to my silly, smiling face, my heart started pounding. Then it all came out. So many women, he’d lost count. It started over a decade ago. As he spoke, I couldn’t breathe. Like literally, could NOT breathe. And at the same time, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs,’SHUT UP ALREADY!! STOP TELLING ME THIS!!!’ It was like one of those nightmares where something awful is happening to you and you need to scream. You’re trying to scream—but nothing will come out.”
“I had to get out of the room. I said nothing, just left and the minute I hit the open air, the sobs came uncontrollably. As I sobbed, everything felt surreal, like it wasn’t me, like it wasn’t my life, like any minute I would wake up from this. Everything I thought I knew, everything that I held most dear was a lie. A complete lie. What a fool I’d been. I was so humiliated.”
So many of my clients express that it’s not necessarily the sex that hurts the most—No, it’s the lies, and the lies about lies. It’s realizing that you trusted someone and allowed yourself to be completely vulnerable with him or her, and they didn’t seem to give a damn about that. You built your world around them, only to find out it was not what it seemed. Their world was not equally built around you. Often the unfaithful spouse will try to minimize their sexual actions by saying things like, “I only got a blow job, it wasn’t full on sex.” Or, “I only made out with him several times. I had a firm boundary that we wouldn’t have sex.” Likely, how far your spouse went with his/her lover is hardly the point. The point is that it was hidden, rationalized, and deceptive to you–the person they had promised to love and protect.
One woman in an online support forum expressed these sentiments well:
“All he is worried about is that I don’t think that the incidents (sexting, a kiss, inappropriate flirting) were any more than what actually happened. I am FAR more hurt by the years of lying and betrayal and can’t seem to get him to understand that only he knows the reality of the situations and that I can’t take what he says to be the truth…“
Secondly, injured spouses often feel foolish. One person said to me, “It makes me feel so sick to know that he was having sex with her and then coming home and having sex with me. He was saying all the same things to her that he was saying to me. How could he play me like that!?! How could I let him play me like that?!”
Often, injured spouses feel like they should have known, they should have seen the signs and taken control. That feeling of powerlessness to protect one’s self against this betrayal only serves to pour salt in the wounds. When one feels blindsided and out of control, they may blame themselves for not “seeing things clearly.” This feeling of foolishness is a form of self-blame, as if you should have been able to be omniscient–reading minds, seeing through walls, or knowing where your spouse was at every minute of the day through some internal GPS tracker. Your logical side of the brain may know that is an unfair expectation to place on yourself. No one has those super-human capabilities. In fact, in most cases the only fault you can place on yourself is that you loved and you trusted your spouse and it was not reciprocated adequately.
This feeling of foolishness leads to a place of humiliation. This is a difficult place to be because it is not you who made the choice to step outside of the marriage. Yet, you still feel that there is some shame to be borne. Perhaps, you feel that others are going to judge you for not “keeping your spouse satisfied in bed.” There may be the fear that your spouse revealed secrets or spoke unkindly about you to the lover–and now who knows what the lover will say to other people about you? Or maybe the lover is in your inner circle or an acquaintance that you must face regularly. Seeing her or him triggers this humiliation and shame all over again. You may suddenly feel inadequate, and you may constantly question what s/he has that you don’t. Finding out about your spouse’s affair may shake you to the very core and create a sort of identity crisis.
I want to say, I am so sorry to those of you who have experienced this. It is truly traumatic—and I do not use that word lightly. I know that the colors of the world are no longer what they once seemed. Even for those of you who may have had suspicions that something was going on with your spouse, the reality of knowing for sure is still devastating (it can be relieving to some to finally know that their intuition was right—but it’s definitely not something one wants to be right about).
It is important to look at the pains of betrayal that elicit feelings of foolishness, shame and self-doubt. While they’re very normal experiences, they’re also very unnecessary and only serve to deepen the wounds that have been inflicted. (Later in the blog, I will more fully address this issue–how to forgive yourself and how to change your thinking–but for now, take a deep breath and know that you are not alone in this!) You have no reason to feel shame. This was not your decision. I promise you that time does heal wounds–but in the meantime, cut yourself some slack and know that you’re doing the best you can! Do not lose track of who you are in this.
DISCLAIMER: Throughout the blog I will be sharing stories to illustrate points and bring understanding to different aspects of infidelity. Client confidentiality is of utmost importance to me. For that reason, I have changed many details, brought in stories of friends and acquaintances, AND combined more than one account to make a composite experience. Many stories of infidelity and the experience surrounding it are very similar from person to person, but no one story used in this blog can be attributed solely to a single client.