https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VzUqeuvAcC8
This week I discovered my wife was having an affair. I still love her despite the betrayal. How do I navigate this? That’s an easy one, huh? So 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. 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 exactly happened here. What’s the significance of this event? And that’s 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’s know 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. Are you are you not angry? Are you not upset? Frustrated, disappointed, anxious, hurt, betrayed, traumatized? Or is there a 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. 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 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 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 love has the capacity for that magnitude of betrayal. That’s a dreadful realization, not least in part because it also implies to some degree that you also have the same capacity. Dante wrote a book, the Divine… Oh, now 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 just walk through the person’s story. And the best way to do 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. 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 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 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 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 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… This pathway is predicated on the ability to adopt a posture of attentive trust. And so 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. No, 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 to convince you that they’re now trustworthy. Well, that’s… Maybe they can do that. And 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. 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 a reconfigured relationship can be newly established and move forward on that basis. But, man, it’s a tough road a hoe 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 of unwanted things in the fog in their relationships and sometimes the consequence of that is a deep betrayal and 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 10,000 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 reconstituting yourself. There isn’t another option. You have to face everything that made you vulnerable in that manner to begin with and 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 role of a therapist. Do not pretend to be better than you are in this situation. 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 a lot of effort 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.