“He cheated, Why do I have to do therapy!?!?”

 

After an affair, it’s hard to imagine that hope, healing, and trust could exist in any way in your relationship.  From a recovery perspective, the reality of the state of the marriage is different from the way you, as the significant other who was cheated on, see it. I have a bright, brilliant, put together couple who come in to heal their marital wounds from an affair every week. Each week is particular painful for the wife, we’ll call her Jenny.  She expresses her anger in outbursts in each session, but not until several minutes have passed. Her composure at the beginning of each does not reflect her deep pain and hurt about the affair. Her husband, we’ll call him Bill, is often surprised at her reactions, because in their private life, Jenny either wants to be with Bill, all the time, or emotionally cuts-off.

Her reactions are normal, understandable, and valid for what she has been through. The confusion she experiences is so chaotic, because she was in love with her husband before, while and after he cheated. She was unaware of how disconnected he was emotionally, how he was pulling away, how he was making a choice to be dishonest, seek comfort elsewhere, and remain lost as to how to handle himself in the marriage.  Jill was in the mind-set that they were “okay.” So when she begins her sessions as a couple, she is surprised at how much work she must do for herself even though HE had the affair.

Her husband, Bill, remains apologetic, remorseful, and has cut all ties to the affair per his wife’s requests. So why is it that in every session, she is the one doing so much work and not him?

It’s easy to assume that he is not working and she is working too much, and it’s not fair…however, this is not an emotionally mature perspective. What happened in this marriage is that Bill “broke open,” with an affair, what the hidden issues have been in the marriage. He comes from a broken place and so does Jenny. Jenny has many emotional issues and intimacy disconnect just like Bill and how they have been managing these issues in their marriage has been growing over the years. There was no other way this marriage was going to get into recovery, until something woke them up from the unhealthy habits.

Jenny and Bob still love one another, through the anger, through the hurt, through the betrayal, and know they are working on being in this grey place, where there are no guarantees and no assurances. But they both work, honestly, openly, and come together to marriage counseling to rediscover their inner child, rediscover how to communicate, and rediscover how to love each other and themselves, as individuals. They had each been self-abandoning, spinning in their daily lives, disconnected from intimacy. That’s why everyone involved must work on their individual issues. Jenny and Bill have a good chance for a loving marriage, because they are both willing to be humble and broken, to do the emotional work. Recovery is not about shaming the cheater, worrying about keeping score, being defensive, or figuring out what is fair. All is fair in marriage and in real life, that’s why it’s called real life.

Some steps you can take to begin your recovery after finding out about infidelity: 

(1) read “Surviving an Affair”

(2) connect with your partner, be honest about your feelings

(3) make an appointment for marital counseling

(4) commit to counseling, this is not something you want to manage alone

(5) begin building bridges for hope, trust, and love in counseling.

(6) do NOT enmesh for fear of being abandoned, this is a false sense of security

Since the issues are within your marriage, you’ll need guidance to address these issues.  You’ll need tools and different perspectives, outside of yourselves, to assess emotional barriers and to make healthy changes.  

Affairs, Cheaters, and Lies

What do you do after an affair? You are devastated, your spouse has cheated, he says he’s confused and doesn’t know what he wants. You feel more devastated. “What does he mean he doesn’t know what he wants and why is he hurting me this way!?!? This is my worst nightmare!”

A couple, who I’ll call Dave and Susan, are struggling through the first few weeks of surviving an affair. Susan is devastated and says that she never thought her husband would be a person who would cheat. Susan saw her husband as a good person, someone who is honest and able to handle their children, work, and life with integrity. Once she found out about the affair, her world fell apart. She didn’t know what to trust and worst of all she couldn’t trust herself. She and Dave have been working hard to recover from this painful event every week, by coming into Family Tree Counseling, discussing their pain with me. What has happened is two-fold. First, they both believed in the marriage myth, that if they behave in loving ways, they will be happy. The second thing is that they forgot who they really are as individuals. The marriage myth is believing that marriage, being married, or being in love, is easy, doesn’t hurt, and is built to make you happy. These are many of the marital myths people believe in before getting married and continue to hold onto for years.

 

Once married, people often say that the other person has changed, that the person is not same as before they got married. The truth is no one is changing, they are revealing more and more of who they are, how they feel and respond to the world, and how they were raised as children. They are behaving more as the individual person, based on their past life before you met as a couple. All the ways Dave and Susan learned to handle stress, lack of intimacy, pain, suffering, and loss over their childhood is showing up in their married lives. Susan has perfectionist tendencies, anxiety, abandonment, and shame while Dave is a lost little boy looking for affirmation, approval, and acceptance. As the marriage has ripened over time, Susan’s anxiety has influenced Dave’s feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and shame. When the affair presented itself, Dave found a tool to numb out the pain he felt in the marriage. Though Susan saw him as an honest person, Dave was able to lie, be deceptive, and withhold love. This drove Susan to dig into his life to discover that he had been having an affair.

 

Having an affair happen to you doesn’t mean the marriage has to end or that the marriage should continue…it just means it’s been a while since you looked at yourself and need to do a lot of soul-searching work to make changes so this kind of betrayal can become a learning moment in both your lives!

 

What do they do now? They each have to work on protecting their relationship by using boundaries to create safety for both of them from the outside world, to build trust inside their marriage, and work on their family of origin issues so they can have a stronger marriage. A marriage that is fulfilling and not based in insecurities. They work every week to make behavioral and cognitive changes and learn new tools to have real intimacy. Now they have real hope!

“Bullying, Gossiping, and the Devil’s Triangle”

Do you know someone who uses humor, gossiping, or backstabbing to address their inner anger towards someone else? Gossiping, judging, getting someone else to be angry with you towards a third-party is part of what is called “Triangulating” in the recovery world.

Triangling is when a conflict is being avoided between person A and B, but person A feels upset and does not address the conflict with person B. Person A doesn’t feel motivated or comfortable to talk it over with person B, so person A discusses it with person C. Now person C is carrying anger or irritation for person B, but person B has no idea why person C or person A is upset with them. Now the circle of conflict and discomfort has grown among more than two people. The relationship between person B and C is now negatively impacted without B’s understanding or knowledge.

Person A may feel some relief for the short-term, but will continue to struggle with person B until the issue is addressed. This behavior is indicative of intimacy issues. By avoiding conflict, person A does not have to be intimate and honest with themselves about their feelings about themselves or the other person. Person A can avoid the uncomfortableness of an honest conversation, which is part of intimacy.

So why does a person choose this behavior? It stems from being insecure or not trusting your inner self. Attempting to make someone else feel your anger can stem from shame,  abandonment, co-dependency and a childhood family systems model that says that conflict is not safe.

 

 

 

This is unhealthy for person A and B, not to mention person C. Person A

is self-abandoning by not learning to resolve the conflict directly with the source of their anger or frustration. This is how we learn about ourselves, so when person A does not use this opportunity to address the issue directly, person A does not understand themselves and their reactions. Person B also does not have an opportunity to learn from the issue or become aware of the issue. Person C becomes the “middle man” and is incorrectly inserted into the relationship between person A and B. The relationship between friends and family in this type of triangle can become strained over time and self-implode.

Triangling is also unhealthy as it allows for person A to not be responsible for their reactions to a given situation. The focus on the outside world for comfort can be self-abandoning and continues the cycle for person A of being unable to trust their judgements.  This can lead to relationships ending, affairs, and other intimacy issues of avoidance and cut-off.  This is not a skill to be used in any relationship. Address your issues!

Come into Marriage Counseling at Family Tree Counseling, serving the Indianapolis area, to learn how to stop sabotaging your relationship.  

The Godfather and Abandonment

 

 

 

 

Last week, I wrote about the Godfather and the parallels of his life of addiction and real people’s addictions, such as addictions that clients often suffer from who seek therapy. The addiction is not the only issue to address in someone’s life. Addictions point to deeper, underlying issues within a person and influences families and loved ones. The person who is suffering from addiction can still be intelligent, highly functioning, financially successful, and gain approval from peers.  A person does not have to lose everything to understand that they are suffering from an addiction or an addictive personality. Losing everything that matters to a person is simply part of the final stages of an addiction once it has taken over. Noticing the addiction at this time is very late in the game. Having denial about masking or pain killing real feelings such as abandonment, shame, guilt, and other emotional struggles allows the addictive behavior ro run out of control.

Once an addiction is unraveled, understood, and accepted, the process of understanding the feelings that trigger the need to pain kill can be seen and felt more clearly. The type of addiction, the details and frequency are critical to understanding yourself. Abandonment, shame, and guilt can create a cycle that feels unending, helpless, and hopeless. When the Godfather abandons his needs for real love that he feels for his girlfriend and trades this for approval from his father and his family, he does so out of guilt and shame. A client recently began unraveling his addiction to approval from other people and more poignantly, of other women. In last week’s blog, I shared the Godfather’s family influences that pushed him further into addiction. As he grew further and further away from his own identity, essentially abandoning himself, by abandoning his needs, his new life provided opportunities for him to latch onto activities that recreated his pain and fed his pain killing activities. Similarly, my client recreated a life that mimics his childhood, even though he consciously knew he never wanted some of those events to be repeated. But the little boy in him, that feels hurt by the losses he felt as a child is all too familiar with seeking out relationships that are empty and void of love and affirmation, feeding the beast even more into a cycle of shame and abandonment.

There is a scene in the Godfather during a family dinner, where the Don (Marlon Brando) and all his sons are eating together. The youngest son, Al Pacino, has no interest in getting into the family business. He had fallen in love with a girl, was disgusted by his father’s behavior and saw himself as different from his brothers. However, his conscious desire to have something different in life, different from a mafia family, wasn’t big enough to overcome his childhood woundings. Something begins to chip away at his ability to self-differentiate, his ability to choose to be himself, true to his needs and his gifts, to be different.  Each time he felt pressure from his family, such as the time he gets a call from his family to join them for a holiday. He ditches the family holiday to instead spend time with his girlfriend. This comes back to haunt him as he hears about his father’s illness and he is triggered by shame, guilt, and remorse for being so distant from the family, especially from his father. It is in these moments that he begins saying things to himself that pull him away from his own needs. Needs that are healthy and self-differentiating and he instead chooses to become closer to his family through guilt and shame. His desires are not based in a healthy honesty about himself and his experiences, they are built on a foundation of shame and abandonment. He learned this type of abandonment and shame from his father, played by Marlon Brando, who watches his mother be killed by a Don mafia leader in Italy. The revenge and power his father needs is built-in from the his real feelings of loss of power and abandonment of his family. His triggers were based in his young boyhood.

 

 

The sins of the father were certainly passed down, generationaly, in this family even if the events were never discussed or shared with the children. Guilt, shame, powerlessness, and severe abandonment are the triggers that drove the Don to  become such a power-hungry person. The addictions they both shared as the Godfather and the Don, were all a cover for losing family members and growing up without real intimacy. 

After his father passes away, we see the Godfather making different choices. There is a sudden change in character. He can no longer feel intimate with his wife, the woman he fell in love with, the woman he married. He changes his path in life to include everything his father wanted from him, instead of being his own person. Eventually, his life spirals out of control with affairs, power, and corruption. He loses his wife, his unborn child, and most of all, he loses himself. This is what abandonment, shame, and guilt can create and destroy in a marriage and in a family.

Sex Addiction and the GodFather: Part I

The movie, “The Godfather” is chalk full of family systems theory. What issue did the GodFather NOT suffer from! He seriously was void of a father figure that was accepting, caring, supportive, and nurturing. His mother was unavailable, too passive and too co-dependent to address the  her husband’s corruption and enormous ego. The Godfather’s  parents did not model a secure and loving marriage. Marriage was not about being real, intimate connections, and belonging. The Godfather’s father, the Don, was all about what soothed his lost little boy pain. He chose to gain vengeance against the man who killed his mother and brother. With so much loss, the head of the family was addicted to their lost little boys on the inside….addicts to greed, power, women, money, anything that could feed the moment. With the loss of a brother, mother, and loss of love and affection, and security, each man learned to feed their vengeance in the moment so they wouldn’t have to be real, and feel who they were becoming. The first Don became and identified with the event that changed his life forever; the death of his mother. This family has severe abandonment! Sexual addictions, affairs, pain killing, numbing, is what the first Don modeled for his son, the Godfather. He learned from his father, and he played out what he learned because that’s who he was naturally, even though in his youth he had every intention to be nothing like his father. There was other more powerful model than what he was taught by his family, by his brothers, and by his father. What he knew or wished for himself wasn’t strong or powerful enough for the challenging moments….This is why being in an intimate relationship with others parallels a painful childhood.

A client of mine recently began to unravel his sexual addiction to pornography. He could relate to the cycle of self-sabotage, shame, guilt, and self-abandonment that has continued in his life. He feels helpless to change as he watches his wife suffer from emotional disconnect. The Don and the Godfather continued to believe that their lives had no other way to continue other than with a heart for vengeance based in anger and resentment. If the Godfather and the Don had come to marriage counseling, their lives could have been less painful! Please continue reading next week for the best Indianapolis Marriage counseling the Godfather could have received at Family Tree Counseling! 

“You Are Controlling!”

Control isn’t about typical jealousy you see  in a “lifetime”movie. It’s  being over productive, doing pre-emptively what others are able to do. 

 

Being controlling doesn’t mean you try to control others in a direct way. It means not being able to trust others. Like not feeling you can trust that you’ll be heard, cared for, loved, known, get your needs met, etc. Being controlling comes from an internal anxiety that developed in childhood and solidified itself in adulthood.  It’s the constant worry about yourself and others, that dominates how you care for the people you love. It’s the opposite of self-differentiation.

 

Do you tend to task yourself with the care of other people’s responsibilities if you feel like they won’t do it? Do you say to yourself “well it won’t get done so I have to.” Do you say “well if I don’t do it all hell will break loose.” Then you’re being controlling to manage your anxiety. Soon passive aggressive anger is sure to rear its ugly head.

 

 

Controlling can look like a kind gesture or sound like a helpful suggestion. But you know you’re doing it to alter the outcome of a particular circumstance. What’s unhealthy is the opportunity that is lost for the other person to feel consequences, discomfort, pain, and eventually learn about themselves. Acting out the controlling behavior removes the opportunity for the controlling person to feel their anxiety and learn from it. 

 

Come in and talk to me to find out why your friends and family tell you to stop being so controlling!

Jealousy……But Why?

Why does negativity stick? Why, when something negative crosses your path, do you feel upset and why does it linger? It seems too often that people define themselves based on the negative things that happened in their lives and on a daily basis. The positive things just roll off their backs and are forgotten. It should really be the other way around! Self-worth is not based on what has happened to you, unless you have decided to base your self-worth on those events. So then why do certain events or people seem so negative anyway?? This is part of jealousy!

Recently a couple seeking marriage counseling sat down and started listing their grievances. The husband was having a tough time understanding why his wife felt so much jealousy towards other people in their lives. In twenty-five years of marriage, he has felt helpless to do anything to change her perspective and has been unsuccessful in stopping her constant concern about comparing herself to others. They often argue after leaving social functions. He says he never sees the conflict coming, that everything seems to be going well of an evening until the ride home or the next day, when his wife will complain to him that she had a terrible time. She would complain about not being able to talk as much as he did to people, or say that her husband didn’t take as many pictures of her as he did of family members. Either way, she said she would feel slighted and needed him to step up and defend her or make sure she was taken care of instead of allowing these “negative” things to happen. Needless to say, the husband is feeling pretty worn out and resentful after all these years and confused about what to do.   

What he doesn’t understand is that his rescuing of his wife’s issues has enabled her to remain stuck and trapped in the negative story she tells to herself. She isn’t able to process her pain and understand herself when her enabler steps in and rescues her from her negative feelings. She has been able to continue seeing herself as less than other people.  What story do you tell yourself and others about you? Do you feel like you have to explain yourself or defend yourself when you meet people? Do you feel shame, guilt, or anxiety around others? Are you constantly worried about being accepted or liked? Do you mask your anxiety with humor or being overly generous with yourself to be kind to others? Do you feel like you bend and reshape yourself to make other people happy? Maybe it’s because you aren’t being positive about yourself and that’s about your shame. If you feel like you are not being true to who you are when you interact with others, then you are not giving yourself permission to be yourself. This creates abandonment feelings and experiences.

If you spent much of your childhood feeling like your parents didn’t approve of you, if you rebelled against everything, or if you just felt invisible, then you could be feeling shame and abandonment when you are around other people. This client is experiencing childhood shame and abandonment, re-enacting her issues constantly in her family and at social functions. Her negative concept of herself is based on her childhood experiences and there isn’t enough her husband can do to alleviate that for her. She has to address her inability to feel love and acceptance as her issue and not make it about other people or the outside world. She is being a prisoner to her negativity about herself. She struggles to remember the love and support she has around her when she goes through these moments. When this continues for twenty-five years and everyone around her is tired of feeling like they walk on eggshells all the time, its time for wife to start looking into what this lack of trust and shame is about instead of bandaging it with other people.

Her issues are based on unresolved childhood relationships and experiences. She focused on the painful situations because they caused her pain and discomfort as a little girl.  The negativity sticks because this is her belief about herself and its been there a long time. What experiences dictate your self-worth? It’s important to know because these will eventually dictate your outcomes in life. Where do you invest your time? Are you constantly beating up on yourself and telling people all the things you do wrong or downplay your gifts in an effort to make other people like you? Do you try hard to be more competent so other people like you?  What you divulge to others says a lot about what you believe about yourself. You could be drawing more negativity to yourself without your realization. You could be stirring chaos in your life by causing chaos in your marriage and in your interpersonal relationships if you feel chaotic and don’t trust yourself on the inside.

Where does all this internal conflict come from? It comes from your belief about yourself. It comes from a core belief system that you installed the moment you decided that you were not good enough to be yourself because of something that happened or something someone said to you. This is stinkin’ thinkin’ and will continue to draw negativity and the opposite of what you desire out of your life. You are the one who has decided that this is your story. You have decided that there is a profound negative statement about your self-worth. 

If this is happening to you, then you need to get into recovery.

“He Didn’t Know Her”

 

Inspiration is everywhere in the work of a therapist. There is a fair amount of relationship pain that walks into my office. Many wish to have love, acceptance, and belonging….for the authentic self to be revealed, accepted, and loved. Not by what a person does or accomplishes……but to be truly loved. A dear friend of mine taught me this about intimacy: “It’s having the ability to sing the song of your beloved’s heart back to them.”  The need to be loved with unconditional regard is natural and normal.

 A poem for you……by the way, learn to sing the song of your heart to yourself, no matter what!

 

  He didn’t get to know Me

  The girl who needs to know you know

   The girl who sways in the wind

   Listening to her favorite songs

    Dreaming about you

 

He didn’t get to know Me

The girl who needs to feel you know

The girl who dances to her music, Singing her favorite songs

A slow, steady bluesy mix, a rough female vocalist

Dreaming about you

 

He didn’t get to know Me

The girl who needs to know you know

The girl who looks in the mirror

Playing with her hair, twirling her locks

Imagining he will love all of her

Dreaming about you

 

He didn’t get to know Me

The girl who needs to know you know

That She doesn’t want to be that girl

The girl who knows she’s been living a half-life

The girl who knows you know

That she needs you, your real love

Her heart flutters

When her songs play

When her friends sit with her

When she loves him

 

The music dances on her heart

Singing, She looks for you, She doesn’t see you

She needs you where She Is

And She knows He knows….

 

She needs him to know

She is Free

When She knows He knows Her heart

When He can sing Her Heart Back to Her

“Truth about Abandonment” Part II

 ”So, what happens next? How does my abandonment work in my marriage?” What happens next is our defenses kick into high gear. As adults, in our relationships, we can feel enraged, jealous, insecure, uncertain, anxious, and then blame something or someone outside of ourselves for our pain. Of course, people do a nice job of providing the abandoning trigger which becomes the focus. The spotlight is on the action or activity instead of on our feelings and our reactions. ”But how does this happen without our knowing?”  There’s a clever commercial about data backup for electronic files where a marriage is about to take place. The couple is bewildered, expressing looks of confusion and uncertainty. The back of the get away car says, “Just Lost Everything” instead of just married. Grandma and mom are in the bridal suite smiling away at the glowing bride as each one says to her, “You’re gonna lose everything!” Instead of saying, “You’re going to be happy!”  Finally, as the ceremony is about to begin, a man throws open the chapel doors and screams, “You’re gonna lose your FILES!”

 

As a therapist, I can’t tell you how many parallels I saw between this commercial and people seeking help with marital issues. I’m sure that was the intention from the creators. This commercial could have just as easily been about many of my clients who come in seeking help after feeling severely abandoned in their marriage!  Of course, the couple has no idea or connection to the concepts that lead the marriage to this path. How could they? They are enmeshed, in love, and could not imagine this could happen in their relationship. Now, I am not trying to kill the romantic idea of love, but I am attempting to have a healthier discussion about what is real, sustaining love for the long haul that endures and encourages personal growth.

 Unfortunately, for the person who believes they get a clean slate when they grow up and fall in love is in for the surprise of their life. Our lifetime issues follow us into intimate relationships. Fortunately, for those who feel disturbed by their past, there is a level of acceptance that there is NOT a clean slate when you grow up and fall in love. Either way, the truth of abandonment is that there is NO clean slate for anyone. Not until there is a true appreciation for where you have been and who you have become.

If you read part one of abandonment, you have a bit of an understanding of how abandonment feelings are created in your life. What this looks like in current life, as an adult, is different and varies for each person. How abandonment might be presenting itself in your marriage is through raging, projected anger, frustration, disappointment, jealousy, or insecurity. What happens next is emotional walls go up, because of the triggering of uncomfortable feelings. Couples may cut-off and distance themselves from one another due to the uncomfortable feelings or avoidance of conflict or pain. Walls are an interesting phenomenon. Again, these ”walls” can look different for different people. Someone might have a smile plastered to their face for fear of upsetting a family member. Nonetheless, the plastic smile is painfully visible to others.

 

Other family members may not say anything about the distance, just feel it, live in it, and go about their day. This re-creates some abandoning feelings. Other abandonment can be more visible if someone has an external way to express the disappointment, jealousy, or pain. This may look like questions about other people, other people’s intentions, lack of trust, and a general inability to feel secure within the relationship.

The person who is triggering the abandonment may very well have conducted themselves in a way that allows their partner to feel justification for mistrusting, feeling insecure, etc. People do a nice job of providing the abandoning trigger with affairs, addictions, and in some cases, actually abandoning the marriage by moving out.  Is the abandonment real and happening? Yes, it is absolutely happening! What is empowering is to remember that the abandoning feelings belong to the person feeling the abandonment and not the person triggering the feeling. The “guilty” party responsible for the trigger is responding to a situation based on their knowledge and emotional issues. They are unhealthy too in their own way. You happen to be in the cross-hairs, because you chose this person to be an intimate partner. This may not seem fair, kind, or loving. We are raised to believe that the goal in life is to avoid pain in life and negative experiences by being a good person and living a good life. This is unrealistic. This is not possible in life. If you are a good person, you cannot avoid life experiences where you are going to be betrayed. This thought process also teaches that it is okay to judge or blame your spouse for betraying or hurting you. This is how you justify emotional cut-off and more abandonment is created for yourself and the “guilty” party. The spouse who has conducted themselves in this abandonment triggering way is also suffering from intimacy issues and does not know how to be feel connected. Thus, this re-creates abandonment for yourself and others in your family.  

Affairs, emotional cut-off, addictions, shaming, blaming, controlling, are all triggers for the childhood abandonment to resurface at full force! If you are someone who has been expressing or experiencing these behaviors, then you can probably relate but never understood why or how this dance was happening in your marriage.

To break this cycle for yourself, your spouse and your children, get in touch with your childhood beliefs, feelings, and experiences! Unless the hurt is revealed and known, the pain cannot be healed. The issue cannot be addressed. You  cannot heal what you do not know about yourself. Without the healing, you will continue to recreate the painful experiences in the complex dance you do with the people who share your intimate world.

For fun and kicks, I have included a link to the commercial here for your enjoyment!  http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/love-god-dont-lose-everything-says-carbonite-138391 It really is a wonderful expression of our culture and the state of marriage today!

“Is He Worth Therapy?”

Dealing with someone you love who feels distant, uncommitted, and is possibly having an affair can be gut wrenching and painful. The sting of  betrayal, the lousy levels of intimacy, and the all around detachment is the last thing you thought you would end up with, especially when you told yourself you weren’t going to be one of those women “who got walked all over and abandoned.”  You told yourself that you would remain independent, support yourself as best as possible, because you knew all too well the pitfalls of a man who doesn’t REALLY love you. Or are you the more patient type, saying to yourself, “I was taught to love him through it and I will stay” but the whole time you’re feeling victimized, praying for mercy. This may have well been one of your greatest fears…. 

Does this sound like you? Are you relating to the situation? Couples going through scary and challenging times in their relationships often ask, “Is therapy   really worth it? Is he going to be worth all the work I have to do if he’s just going to keep cheating or remain uncommitted?”  One spouse states, ”I’m going to keep  coming even if she doesn’t, because I see the benefit  of what I’m learning here.” This particular case is around a spouse who is having a tough time allowing herself to feel the emotions of her painful and abandoning childhood, so she attends sessions more sporadically, while her husband attends regularly. The preceding case involves addictions with Internet porn, sex-ting, and emotional affairs. The husband’s vague and dishonest responses to his wife’s constant questioning about nude photos of his female friends drives his wife to the edge, leaving her further isolated, desperate, and void of affection, like a starved dog.

What becomes clear in the counseling sessions are the family backgrounds that have influenced the break of intimacy this couple and many couples come to face in marriage. What therapy provides is a clearer picture of truth about who each person is in the marriage, rather than just a “cheater” and a “victim.” The music and dance that the couple is performing is perfectly orchestrated by their childhood and current life situations. One desperate to get away and the other desperate to be closer. When each person in a relationship is resigned to desperation, feelings of abandonment, betrayal, cut-off, lack of affection, lack of being understood, and of belonging are fiercely triggered. Basic needs are not being met. Eventually, someone will respond as best as they know how, which may cause pain for the other. These basic, core needs are similar to our younger, childlike needs, which are crucial to our survival. So the painful dance between the two continues and progresses, however viciously and disconnected, recreating the feelings of our past and become expressed and real in our present. This is often followed with anxiety, panic attacks, shame, guilt, addictions, pain numbing behaviors, or emotional and physical cut-off, and sometimes abusive behaviors. Once these types of behaviors are occurring, gaining clarity in a nightmarish storm is almost impossible without some guidance. Without therapy, the dance becomes a way of life, both people lost in the shuffle, or should I say, “The Hustle….”

The real issues the couple is facing can resurface with therapy, with some guidance for a deeper understanding of truth. In the end, the real issues are not about the betrayal alone. The behavior is simply the dysfunctional intimacy revealing and expressing itself in a final act of desperation. The work is to continue looking deeper, to gain clarity about the motives and intentions that drive the behaviors. To remain focused on the pain experienced from the behavior is only the beginning. If each person in the relationship is dead set on blaming and pointing the finger at the other, then a smoke screen is being created by someone who is being motivated not to see themselves in the mirror of their relationship. Just saying “Stop doing what you’re doing because it’s wrong and you’re a terrible person” does not work.  True recovery begins when each person’s shame, guilt, low self-esteem, pain, anger, and lack of trust can be managed enough to see the other person’s flaws in a non-judgmental light. Without the reactive filters of severe pain, one can forensically see the other person with less judgement. The cheating husband is no longer a villain in a bad movie, but with a lot of patience and grace, each spouse can see the other for the broken, highly functioning dysfunctional person they chose. More importantly, each person can see themselves in a more truth filled light. An illuminated view that eventually becomes more empowering compared to the “Whoa is me, I’m a victim” stance.

Whatever the addiction, workaholism, approval seeking, sex, people relationships, gossiping, shopping, drinking….all create a lack of intimacy with others and worse, yourself. Treating the behavior is not enough. Once the behavior stops, the feelings that were being managed by the addiction will erupt. So the choice is to blow yourself up or seek therapy. Choose the latter, even if you are the only bloom in the desert, at least you have yourself. You will gain the most important person you lost, YOU!