One man’s journey to forget, after living in “the dungeon of this sub-conscious torture chamber for 15 years.”
Begins…
I was yelling. Roaring. Hitting out in homicidal rage.
I can’t remember what words I was trying so shout in my sleep but animal sounds were coming out of my mouth and they simultaneously jolted me and my wife awake.
“What’s happening?” Laura asked, frightened, confused, turning towards me in our bed, in our darkened room.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was dreaming that you were Emma and that you had been with Maurice.”
“Huh!” she sighed. “Wrong woman.” She put her head down on her pillow, said “Go back to sleep” and was almost instantaneously asleep again. Next morning, there was no mention of this moment. She seems to have forgotten it.
But I lay there for some time, shaken and sickened, feeling imprisoned, possessed, ready to put a rope round my neck. How many more years must I be damned to go on dreaming and compulsively thinking about these people – my ex-wife and the former friend and neighbour with whom she had the affair that destroyed our marriage so long ago?
I got out of bed, slipped quietly out of the room and went to the kitchen, where the clock on the oven told me it was 2.53 on Thursday January 3 2013. What it didn’t say was that I have been imprisoned in the dungeon of this sub-conscious torture chamber for 15 years.
Emma and I separated in 1998. I moved to another country. I met Laura in 2000. Our first daughter was born in 2002. Laura and I married in 2004. Our second daughter was born in 2005. We have a successful, stable marriage and a happy family.
The last 13 years have been, incomparably, the best, the happiest and the most fruitful of my life. We have not only created the loving family I always wanted: we have also built a house and fenced and cultivated an acre of garden that was previously rough pasture. In this marriage, for the first time in my life, I have enjoyed financial security, with no mortgage and no debt of any kind.
Our greatest achievement – the one that gives me most pride out of my entire life – is that, before they went to school full-time, Laura and I brought up our little girls throughout their early years as a joint and mutual enterprise. We both looked after the children, in every respect; and we both supported them financially, fitting our work around our parental duties. It wasn’t easy and there were times when we were tight for money but we proved to ourselves that it was – as we had wanted to believe – possible for two parents to bring up babies cooperatively themselves and to enjoy their infancies fully.
With so much to celebrate – so much to be grateful for – why the hell (the word is completely appropriate) does my mind constantly churn with thoughts of those people who did me so much harm? Why does my sub-conscious dwell so darkly on the losses that I suffered rather than in the light of all that I have gained – not just in dreams when I am asleep but as a constant undertow to my daily, waking existence?
In “Some Thoughts on Forgiveness” – a moving and touching piece on GMP on December 28, 2012 – Rick Belden wrote: “Every wound has its own story and its own life, and many wounds are not healed simply by waiting and thinking happy thoughts. They have to be faced, entered, lived in, listened to, understood. They have to be cleansed with tears and shouting and shaking and all the other ways that the human body expresses and discharges the stored energies of fear and pain and grief. They have to be allowed to speak, to tell their stories in their own way and their own time. They have to be met and seen, acknowledged and accepted in all their painful glory as the wild, primal things they are.”
That is the kind of process that is going on my deranged head all the time. That’s what I am dealing with every other hour, even while I am successfully and happily conducting a normal family life.
For example, every afternoon, when I cook our family meal, I listen to Radio Heartland from St Paul/Minneapolis on the internet radio in the kitchen. That eclectic mix of acoustic, blues and country music constantly triggers thoughts of Emma and me and Maurice. I peel the potatoes to George Jones’s He Stopped Loving Her Today and I remember Emma telling me “I do love you but not in the way you want me to.” I check the oven while Ray Charles is singing Then I’ll Be Over You and I think of the times when Emma and I were in bed together and, after we had separated and gathered our breath, she had whispered “Can we do it again?” My lovely girls are watching television. One of them comes to the kitchen to ask for food. I tell her to take a banana. Meanwhile Bill Withers’ Who Is He and What Is He to You? is playing on the radio and I am remembering the time I asked Emma what was going on between her and Maurice and she paused a beat, looking scared (I would now say), and then answered – in tones that suggested that the question itself was unreasonable – “He’s nothing more than a friend who needs me as a friend.”
Is it necessary to exhume the detailed story of that affair and the destruction of the relationship between me and Emma? I would like to think not. As I said to Emma in the summer of 1998, after we had separated, “it’s a tawdry cliché, nothing more than the story of a classic triangle” and, at bottom, that’s about as much as anybody else needs to know. It could have cost a life or maybe more than one; but that drama occupies the pages of every local newspaper carries every other week. The deceits, the betrayals, the humiliations, the rages, the desperation, the despair – that all went on for years before we separated; but so what? As B.B.King once sang “That’s a story everybody knows.” I loved Emma passionately, devotedly, faithfully and found in her the union of sex and love I had always sought. But every other country music song resounds with that heartbreak.
What is extraordinary, unprecedented about the trauma of those years, in my experience, is the depth of the wounds that they inflicted and the soreness of the mental scars 15 years later.
In the first years after we separated – when the pain was so unbearable that I was in the most imminent, unremitting danger of doing away with myself – I went to sessions of cognitive therapy to try to dislodge the obsessions that occupied my mind, day and night.
Didn’t make any difference.
In my conscious mind, I actively forgave them both many years ago. I frequently repeat a mantra to myself “Forgive. Bless. Thank. Dismiss.”
It doesn’t work.
My head is full of mottos and slogans that are supposed to succour the wounded mind – such as “love like you’ve never been hurt.” I do try to follow that guide and it gives me pleasure that my children have never heard Emma’s name (still less Maurice’s) and that my wife Laura has no idea what goes on in my deepest unconscious mind. How could I ever tell her?
It doesn’t help for me to tell myself, consciously, that I have no moral right at all to condemn Maurice for fucking my wife, having several times had affairs with the wives and girlfriends of my own friends when I was much younger.
It doesn’t make any difference to list and give thanks for all the benefits and advantages that I have enjoyed since leaving Emma. I have got that list on my smart phone. I open it frequently. Reading it does remind me that, in my conscious mind, I wouldn’t risk my family’s happiness or well-being for a micro-second to be with Emma again. But the list might shift my sub-conscious preoccupations for – oh, half a minute.
Likewise, it hasn’t made a damn of difference to write out a list of all the reasons why I am glad that Emma, herself, is out of my life. I did that years ago. The document on my word processor is called Good Riddance. It runs to five pages. If I read it through – which I do maybe once a month – I feel utterly cleansed by the time I get to the fourth page, because it is so overwhelmingly evident that I am far better off without her.
Ten minutes later, however, I will probably be murmuring “How could you do that to me?”, thinking about the time I found Maurice’s glasses case on the table at my side of our bed; and Emma said that she had put it there, thinking it was mine, when she was “tidying up.”
What do you call this state of mind? Love? Madness? Satanic possession? Possessive narcissism? Injured pride? I search myself for answers. None comes back.
In my daily prayers, on my knees and facing East before my family is awake, I give thanks for the revelation that God may be apprehended in love; that – for all we know – God is love; and that love cannot and will not die.
That truly is an element of my religious belief and I try to live by that perception every day; but a love that cannot die sure has a peculiar way of making itself felt when it takes such agonisingly unbearable form.
I can only ask: Is this the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life? Will I be released only when I die?
But who am I asking? Does anybody have an answer?
…ends
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photo smabs sputzer / flickr
Time is the best healer. Bigger, deeper wounds take more time to heal. However, there will always be a stain / mark. It becomes difficult to ignore that.
Get really angry, and express it, don’t control and repress it!
Physical expressions of anger are best, take a baseball bat to a punch-bag or a tree. If you spend 2-3 days in a rage, you will calm down a bit. Make sure to do this in a way that doesn’t hurt or scare your wife and kids.
James…I’m sorry about your past hurts, but relieved to hear you have found a great woman and a new life together. I was betrayed years ago too. The lesson I learned is that there is a major difference between forgiveness and trust. Even the Bible distinguishes between forgiveness and trust. You did your job, you forgave her. She was the one who betrayed your trust and made you feel jealous. If you were like me, I felt unwanted and low self-esteem…infidelity is like the ultimate disrespect one person can do to another.
Her loss, your gain. Think about it the difference between forgiveness and trust and look at what you have now, it’s heals.
James, sorry to hear about that. 15 years is a long time to be stuck. I went through a similar thing a few years ago, and I found two things that helped.
First, I went to therapy for a long time, and got clear on what really pissed me off most about my ex’s actions. Mostly it was my own sense that I wasn’t “enough” for her, and that her choices were my fault. I came to realize that her actions had much more to do with her than me. That helped immensely.
Second, I was lucky to get into a very different kind of relationship. My new girlfriend and I are extremely honest about sex, and we have made a conscious effort to push the boundaries in our own sex lives. We talk about sex frequently and openly, go to sex-themed events, and occasionally bring in other partners. Most importantly, we acknowledge that we are sexually attracted to other people sometimes, regardless of how much we mean to each other emotionally. It sounds strange, but accepting (and even embracing) this has helped me see my ex’s behavior very differently, in a way that really helped me get over the hurt.
I posted a link last night to my Facebook Page. It was a TED video of Marilyn Fisher discussing her research on the brain in love. She ended the talk by sharing her conclusions after studying this in depth and her understanding after so much research that the answer was clear. Love can be as addictive as any street drug.
From my own experience, I would add that it is often a love for something that we created and attached to a human … not the human themselves that we feel long for the loss.
The best medicine? Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat. I suggest a youtube rendition from his current tour.
Thank you, James, for your very kind reference to my post “Some Thoughts on Forgiveness”. I hope something of what I said continues to be of use to you in the process in which you’re engaged.
Sexual infidelity on the part of my partner was an element of nearly every intimate romantic relationship I’ve ever had, from my very first girlfriend onward. It happened so many times, and so consistently, that I adopted the habit of telling my partners, early in each relationship, “Look, if things aren’t working out or you want to see someone else, just come to me and break it off before you do anything. That’s all I ask. Nothing you can ever do would hurt me worse than sleeping with someone else behind my back.” That strategy didn’t work for me either. They all cheated on me anyway.
The lying, the betrayal, and everything else that goes along with cheating all adds up to one of the biggest mindfucks one adult can inflict on another, so I’m not surprised that you or anyone else would need a significant amount of time and space to work through the aftermath. I’m very happy for you that you’ve been able to trust someone else and build a good life with her. That’s not always a given.
I’m at various levels of forgiveness with each of the women who cheated on me, farther along with some than with others. Sometimes I think I’m farther along than I really am, then something comes along to give me a reality check and I realize I have more junk to clear out about this one or that one. Overall I’m satisfied with my progress, but it’s hard when there are so many people and so many deeply hurtful incidents to address over so many years.
Rebuilding a sense of trust and safety around intimacy is another matter entirely. Most of the betrayals I experienced occurred at a point in the relationship when, to the best of my perception, we were getting closer and moving into deeper levels of intimacy. The legacy of experiencing that sort of injury multiple times with multiple women is something I have yet to resolve. I’m still working on it. Forgiveness, as challenging as it’s been around this issue, has proven far easier than convincing myself that it’s not going to happen again with the next woman, no matter how close we seem to be and how she presents herself to me.
A couple of thoughts on your process. First, I find myself wondering if perhaps, despite all the time and hard work, there are aspects of your wound that haven’t fully expressed themselves yet. I would encourage you to keep finding and trying new ways to give voice to your pain, which can also be thought of as a story that has yet to be fully told. We don’t just carry our stories in our minds; we also carry them in our bodies. Your body, or more specifically whatever it is you may not be allowing yourself to feel in your body, may be holding some of the information you need to move your healing process to another level. See http://rickbelden.com/blog/2008/12/14/the-body-is-the-gateway for some additional thoughts on that topic if you’re interested.
Second, I always ask myself, when dealing with a trauma whose lifespan seems to transcend its obvious origins in my adult experience, if it may be but one branch (a very large one for you in this case) of an older tree with roots that go much deeper in my life and history. I now know, for example, that there were elements of my childhood and family experience that set me up to be betrayed and invalidated over and over by loved ones, and I now understand that I can’t fully resolve the wounds I’ve taken as an adult from all the infidelities I’ve experienced without also addressing the many deep betrayals and invalidations I experienced as a child.
I suspect that you’ve already taken a big step forward simply by writing and sharing your story here. Externalizing one’s pain and allowing it to be seen can be a potent and highly transformational act of acceptance, of both the pain and of oneself in relationship to that pain. I hope that proves to be the case for you.
James,
You stated that you have forgiven your ex-wife and former friend, but have you forgiven yourself for any blame you took on for your wife’s infidelity? Have you forgiven yourself for your past indiscretions? Have you accepted that your current family is as lucky to have you as you are to have them? And here’s the really tough question: What are you getting out of reliving the events that ended your first marriage? You’ve already survived the pain. You’ve already come out better and happier than you were. It’s time to stop punishing yourself.
Best of luck to you and your family.
Hi James,
Thanks for sharing your story it made me realize and confirm to
myself that there are thoughts that we have not because we wanted to or that person is more important than those around us. it is something uncontrollable yet we dont like it. I would say i do feel that with my partner – that his past bothers him in his thoughts and like you he wants his present life with me. I am sure your wife gets affected as well and without saying anything she can feel it as that is what partners are you cannot hide deepest secrets she is just letting you deal with it by your own self because she doesnt wanna add more to that burden. Think about your wife how it affects her to stop yourself being so conscious about your own feelings. i would say its painful for you that you cannot still accept how other people can hurt you so much when you gave your best. so you doubt yourself maybe there is something you should have done more. and to think that why now you were able to have a better relationship. your mind is seeking that why? why it have to be that way?. just accept that people are all different and doesnt intentionally wanna harm us they are not just capable meeting our needs and accept it.
Hi James: I sympathize with your struggle and applaud your courage in writing. For myself, when I have thoughts spinning around in my head, I see it as unfinished business, energy that has not yet been released. Cognitive-based therapy has its limitations – it works for some people and in some situations only. Often, it is not enough for people of high sensitivity, deep passions and creativity. You have the right ideas, you know where you want to end up, but you can’t get there from here – not without backtracking a bit and continuing your process doing some type of non-cognitive work. Rick Belden has suggested work involving your body…I would add two additional elements. First, an emotion-focused component. There’s more to emotional work than just venting. Venting is kind of like an emotional dump, but unless the emotions released are connected to an inner truth you haven’t yet seen or owned, then what’s bothering you from the past is unlikely to go away. The second element has more of a spiritual flavor to it. You’ve probably got some lessons to learn from what’s still unfinished. I know how irritating and exasperating this can be. How many times do you have to go over a particular scene, a particular painful memory!!?. I’ve felt that way. But I know the mental spinning stops once I get to the truth I need to see. Its like solving a very complex puzzle.
I hope this has been a bit helpful, but if not, I trust you’ll disregard it. I wish you all the best in your journey.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you are lying and lying very badly. You see, you can say that you have forgiven Emma and Maurice; but that’s a lie. The really bad thing is it’s you you’re lying to not all of us.
Because you are still holding on to the anger and the hurt. Until you let it all go you will continue to hurt.
I was in a marriage that was so bad that I was diagnosed with PTSD and I’ve not only not been in the military, I’m 4F!
I can remember our first few months of marriage get horny and jerk off. No big deal because I let go of the all the anger and hurt. When you let it go then you’ll feel good.