this week I discovered my wife was having an affair I still love her despite the Betrayal how do I navigate this it's an easy one then so if if you came to me and as a client say of my clinical practice I would help you take that question apart this week I discovered that my wife was having an affair it's like did you discover that this week or were there Clues and hints for a very long period of time and I'm not suggesting that that's the case by the way to this particular individual I don't
know anything about the person who asked this question and so I would also ask whoever that is not to presume that I'm speaking directly to their concerns because I don't know that person well enough to do that I have to provide something approximating a generic answer in order for that to be rectified you need to know what ex what exactly happened here what what's the significance of this event and that's a one vicious question now the person asking the question also leaps to an immediate conclusion so there's a big problem here my wife had an
affair question mark what's going on but then they provide an answer I still love her and what's the next part of it exactly what you know how to how to navigate it right so the answer is I still love her and I need to know how to navigate forward it's like well I'm not so convinced of that by the way um are you are you not angry are you not upset frustrated disappointed anxious hurt betrayed traumatized or is there part of you who now knows the relationship is over and because it wasn't a very good
relationship you're thrilled because now you have the right to engage in the same sort of devious Pathway to hypothetical Freedom that your wife took because that can certainly be the case like when when a bomb like that goes off in the midst of your life everything is up for grabs and so to immediately say I still love her it's like yeah maybe and maybe not and if that's all you feel well then that in itself is definitely a problem and also might be a key to why it happened to begin with because you appear to
be the sort of person who can be stomped on pretty damn hard and not object and like I said to the person who asked this question I am not talking about you I don't know anything about you and I'm not presuming I'm just laying out the potential landscape what other problems do you have how long have you been married is the whole damn thing a lie is every relationship you've ever had a lie are you a complete doormat are you blind Beyond capacity have you married someone who's Psychopathic or narcissistic do you have a pattern
of associating with people like that those are all questions that are going to plague and should plague you in some real sense when something like that happens so the first issue is well what the hell happened and man that'll that can take thousand hours that should have been spent in discussion with your wife before this happened trying to get to the bottom of it people are often traumatized by that kind of Revelation and the reason they're traumatized is because well imagine you have a committed relationship with someone so you might ask what is the basis
of the commitment and there's a hierarchy of commitment in that some commitments are more fundamentally important than others and those are the commitments upon which all other commitments rely and so when you set up a household with someone and you move towards permanent intimate relationship and hypothetically in the direction of let's say having dependent children then you're doing all that based on the presupposition that the person is faithful to you because that's one of the defining attributes of the relationship itself and so when that axiomatic presupposition is shattered then everything dependent on that is now
questionable and that not only includes the present what the hell is going on now the future what are we going to do who am I with anyways but also the past itself because you were living let's say in something approximating a Fool's Paradise and nothing that you thought to be the case was the was in fact the case and so that's a dreadful problem and how you Cobble something like that back together is a very very difficult problem I would say the first thing you do is open yourself up to the admission of the magnitude
of the problem what's the problem who am I anyways that this happened to me who are other human beings that they could do this to each other right so those are fundamental questions about the nature of social relationships themselves or even about individual identity very very unsettling questions someone I loved has the capacity for that magnitude of betrayal that's a a dreadful realization not least in part because it also implies to some degree that you also have the same capacity um Dante Dante wrote a book the the Divine oh no I can't remember the name
of the book The Inferno and The Inferno it's from The Inferno that we derive many of our ideas about hell our poetic imaginative representation of the domain of the underworld domain of darkness and catastrophe and at the bottom of Hell Dante put Satan himself but one rung above that he put those who betray and betrayal is the inversion of trust right you can't betray me unless I've trusted you and trust is the precondition for all social relations and so to betray someone who deeply trusts you is to demolish the foundation of relationship itself and so
that's why Dante placed it way deep down in the substructure of hell and so when betrayal occurs then you're faced with all those problems in a therapeutic environment I would walk the person through their marriage it's like let's lay out the story and see if we can figure out where things went wrong and I wouldn't presume to know as a therapist at all because each person's catastrophe is very particularized and singular and all I would be able to do in that situation is to listen to the account of the past let's say and to ask
the person to clarify when I didn't understand and to see if I could evoke from them a coherent and plausible causal account of the pathway to the catastrophe that was differentiated and detailed enough so that once they understood it they would be less likely to repeat it and that's how you recover from something like this you recover from something like this by not being the sort of person to whom that will ever happen again and that might be it could be as I alluded to earlier that now and then people get unlucky and they partner
with someone who is fundamentally and malevolently unreliable and that's a re that's brutal if that occurs and you might think well there's no people that are fundamentally and malevolently unreliable and I would say well you're either naive and you better watch out because one of these Adventures is coming your way or you've been unbelievably fortunate and has just have just never encountered someone like that and so I would find out from the person just exactly what it is they think they've encountered and to try to characterize that they've certainly encountered this Spirit of betrayal no
doubt about that have they encountered their own capacity for naive willful blindness probably all of that has to be rectified before this shattered reality can be put back together and it has to be rectified and that's an extraordinarily complicated problem the the the answer to the problem is how do I now move forward knowing what I know about my own capacity for blindness and the ability of others even when trusted to engage in deep betrayal and that's are there general principles for that there are one thing you'll have to do to recover is to regain
your willingness to trust but it can't be naive because look where that got you it has to be wise and courageous and so to recover from this you're going to have to be able to trust again but that'll have to be trust will have to be predicated on something like courage rather than naivety and the courage is something like the courage all wise people have when they undertake a relationship which is something like I know perfectly well that you're chock full of snakes just like me but the best pathway forward nonetheless is for us to
extend a hand in trust to each other and see if we can build a valid and solid and sustainable and iterable relationship despite our mutual inadequacies and our proclivity for malevolence and there isn't a better way path there isn't a better pathway forward than that and that is pathway is predicated on the ability to adopt a posture of attentive Trust and so you it's frequently the case that someone in this situation has to mature past their naivety and that's a very painful thing to do and then to regain their footing now the final part of
this is can you do that with the person that you are now married to and the answer is well you didn't do it the first time so I wouldn't count on it does that mean it's impossible no but it's going to require a lot of courageous digging to get to that point a lot of admission of Rage too you know it's like I am so upset with you that it isn't obvious to me that I could ever forgive you I don't even know how I would do that can you help me figure that out well
then you have to trust the other person too convince you that they're now trustworthy well that's maybe they can do that and you can you know you can you can refer to your own resentment one of the pathways to forgiveness is to have the person who's wronged you confess right and to confess is to give a detailed and compelling accurate differentiated causal account of the Betrayal it's like here's exactly what happened here's the multiple instances here's my entire set of motivations this is why I was so angry with you that I thought that this betrayal
was acceptable here's why I was so impulsive and shallow that I believed that the affair was justifiable right that has to go all the way down to the depths to a depth that's as deep as the Betrayal itself and maybe once that confession has been made manifest and a plan has been put forward that is indicative of the willingness and ability to change that are re-configured relationship can be newly established and move forward on that basis but man it's a tough road to hold and it's highly unlikely so there's a rule in this book do
not hide unwanted things in the fog yeah well people hide a lot unwanted things in the fog in their relationships and sometimes the consequence of that is a deep betrayal and the medicine the medicine for that the necessary antidote for that is to reveal all those hidden things and God in a relationship that's gone spectacularly wrong that can be ten thousand things that weren't faced in the course of the relationship and every single one of them has to be resurrected and thought through so you know unfortunately in some sense that's fated as well because once
you've been hurt like that there isn't an alternative in terms of re-constituting yourself you have there isn't another option you have to face everything that made you vulnerable in that manner to begin with and that's that's a lot to face especially all at once especially when you've been avoiding it for maybe decades or maybe your whole life it's rough so good luck with it and don't pretend here's a piece of advice and as a therapist I generally don't give people advice because that isn't the rule of a therapist do not pretend to be better than
you are in this situation right you the fact that you're enraged let's say and you should be is actually that has to be fully admitted and worked through because otherwise you'll reconstitute the relationship on unbelievably unshaky grounds and some crisis will come your way that's not even very serious and blow you into bits again so you'll be able to forgive the person if they can confess and transform deeply enough so that your rage is actually genuinely eliminated and that's going to take that's going to take a lot of effort man and a lot of honesty
a lot of willingness to see that you are in fact that demolished and outraged that's a vicious pit to contemplate thank you
