How Did You Mentally Survive Infidelity?

Megameh
Just want to say that your eloquence, clever yet restrained snark, and brave insight is a total reflection of the whole Chump Nation as I’ve experienced it. Tone set by our brilliant Chump Lady. Put so well: “ The commentariat here is so unbelievably rich in emotional intelligence, insight and even humour.”

So much fantastic humour.

Ok, my answers, no particular order:
Art, gardening, walking in the bush (as we say in Aus), swimming in the ocean, a LOT of Pilates (mind/body I have found is so much better than mind/mind ie therapy), music, kitchen dancing, my dog and her love, obligatory alcohol-self-medication – good for kitchen dance partying. (Sorry but it’s true.)

i felt really stupid for a while. i found a great therapist. one day she told me,

‘this is not about you. you are a good, trusting person who doesn’t lie to other people so you don’t expect someone will do something like this. this cheater took advantage of that. a person who lies so easily and so well has been doing it a long time and is very good at it.’

hearing that helped me so much and made it easier to let go of beating myself up and move forward.

Mentally, I would have not. I found Chump Lady, and that was the action part.
I found Lundy Bancroft, and that was the psychological part.
But I felt the crux of it was beyond still.

And then I found Christ. And everything made sense to me spiritually. Christianity holds the answers to the big “Why do they do that?” Psychology would have only taken me so far.

Walkaway Woman is more than just my CN pseudonym, she’s like my alter ego (much like Tracy’s Chump Lady).
Chumpy me stuck it out in a long, cold marriage where I was devalued and emotionally abused. Like MegaMeh, my ex-husband claimed I was fat and ugly, and also super lucky he hadn’t left me, since no one else would ever want me. But Walkaway Woman enrolled in an experience-based self-help training program called Pathways, and over the course of 6 months dealt with all her baggage, found her backbone and her voice. Took her power back.
Still didn’t leave the marriage, because love and loyalty. That is, until I discovered ex-husband’s affair about a year after I completed the training. I told him he had to choose: her or me. (He wanted to stay married because if we divorced “the kids will lose more than we gain” and besides, AP was “just a friend.”) He chose his justafriend AP, and the Walkaway Woman walked away.
It was hard and scary. I lived on the edge of destitution. I hung a little lamp in the kitchen window of my second-floor apartment, and kept it on day and night. That way, when I came home from work in the evening and parked my car, I could look up and see if I still had electricity.
I stayed single for a few years, convinced that because of my training, my reading of all.the.self.help.books, and my general pluckiness, there was a “happily ever after” awaiting me somewhere down the line.
During this phase, I dated casually. It was before I discovered CL, and I had no idea (read, was stubbornly ignoring) that my picker was woefully broken.
Enter the Lying Cheating Loser, and a few months of love bombing followed by four years of hell.
At the end of four years, I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Fuckwit Studies from CN University, and the Walkaway Woman walked away. Again.
This time was much harder. But, thanks to CL and CN, I was much smarter. I knew about trauma bonds. I knew about a broken picker and spackling. I loved the LCL like crazy (and I use that phrase intentionally) but I left anyway. Because the Walkaway Woman walks away from things that aren’t acceptable to her.
I got a new little rental. Hung my same little lamp in the kitchen window, for the same reason. And just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
In the Pathways training, people say, “it’s ONLY hard.” It means it’s only hard, not impossible. It’s only hard, it’s not the death of me.
And this hard, this fuckwit-free, choose-my-own-destiny hard, is the right kind of hard.
So how did I deal with the mental room full of chumpy baggage? My Pathways training got rid of all the big clunky pieces too heavy for one human to budge. CL and CN (and all the rest of my reading) helped me declutter and discard old maladaptive coping strategies. And whenever I need to, I can transform from regular (no longer chumpy) me into the Walkaway Woman. She always knows the next right step.

First I floundered. I pined for what I thought I lost. I was barely functional because the discard came before D-Day and I had no idea what had happened and I blamed myself. I discovered the cheating as I was unraveling some of the life connections we had (e.g., my EasyPass was in his name).

At that point I started to read about infidelity and began to learn how disordered people carry on relationships. I found Chump Lady. I learned about lovebombing and devaluation and what a discard really is.

I crawled on the life-raft of “gain a life.” That involved journaling, lots of exercise, hot yoga, setting goals, making Pinterest boards as part of figuring out what I wanted for myself, who I was, and the shape of my new life.

Therapy is where I learned that Jackass was a distraction from a life of stoically moving from one crisis to another without the hard work of figuring out my own dysfunctional patterns and where they came from. That’s where I decided to take a hiatus from not only relationships with men but the very idea I was nothing without one. I started looking at who I was as a young girl, what I gave up to be in romantic relationships, and what I wanted to recover.

My best friend flew 2000 miles to spend 3 weeks with me right after D-Day. She saved my life.

Oh MegaMeh- thank you for sharing. The strength you found in yourself alone is incredible. The life you built after gives me hope and swells my heart.
I’m still in the process of recovering mentally (and the rest.) I’m over him but not the trauma from what he did to me.
But 6 months after DDay, I’m feeling stronger, calmer and more myself than I have for years.
I discovered CL and CN on the night of DD- frantic googling brought me here. And thank fuck I did! You all help me on a daily basis- what a stroke of luck.
Straight away I told my closest friends and family. I asked for help. I vented. I cried. I insisted that he tell his parents and we tell my daughter the truth (gently and age-appropriately for an 11-year-old). Because I have integrity- there’s no way I’d lie to her.
I bypassed shame. Sure I was humiliated but bone deep, gut deep shame- no. Not for me. Nights of nightmares, days of sobbing on the bathroom floor, yes, but shame, NO. Not my shame, that belongs to him alone.
I found out 2 days after starting a new job- so I worked. I told my boss after a few weeks as I was worried that turning up to Zoom calls red-eyed and lacking lustre would go against me. I was supported, listened to, cared for.
I got furious. For the first time I felt personal rage and it propelled me forward. I’ve still got shit to do but I am moving.
I cocooned my daughter. I walked my dog. I drank a lot of wine. In good moments I screamed or sang from my belly just to let it out.
Then 1 by 1, 3 friends from my distant past reached out to me in their personal trauma. Though our situations are different I could meet them in their pain. We consoled, and counselled, and now we are able to laugh sometimes on log calls from different time zones.
I may crumble still. But deep in me I feel love. For the first time in a long time it is live for myself.
Wishing those who need it, the fury to move you forward, the support and love from those who get it and you, the freedom to let it out, and strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And FUCK the FWs who brought you here

The LACGAL book and this site helped me tremendously! It was a revelation and so validating to learn that I was not alone and my situation was, sadly, not so unique. I had been gaslighted and devalued for so long, I believed it was my fault he left. He had me believe everything wrong in the marriage was my fault. It was amazing to me how similar so many of these fuckwits are. It is like they have their own cheater manual. “Be A Cheater, Ruin A Life” I am so thankful I found the book fairly early in my chumphood. I read it cover to cover four times. It gave me the strength to finally throw his slimy ass out, lawyer up, and get the best settlement I could in a no-fault state. When I felt my resolve waver, I read it again. I also went through DivorceCare through a local church. That was very helpful and I made a great new friend there.

I got the house. He was too busy blissfully shacking up with his massage girl schmoopie to bother hiring an attorney. I completely redecorated to suit my taste. Getting rid of the marital bed was especially satisfying. I had only been retired for two months before he left, so I had to go back to work. Throwing myself into the new job, where my experience and contributions were valued and appreciated, helped a great deal to take my mind off things and boosted my self-esteem.

My divorce was final shortly before Covid hit. It was rough being so isolated during that time while I was getting used to living alone after 30 years. But when things started opening up, I joined some Meetup groups. I’ve done some fun activities and met some nice people. I’m going to lunch and a musical this Sunday with a group. ????

Three years after D day and I feel I am getting closer to Tuesday.

MegaMeh you’re a true warrior! Thanks for sharing your journey.

Actions speak louder than words. Once I stopped listening to cheater’s words and looked at his actions the answer became obvious. I also came to the realization that love shouldn’t feel like this. Love doesn’t make you question your value and self-worth, love doesn’t make you question your sanity and leave you with a feeling of wondering what’s real, love doesn’t bully you or intimidate you or tell you you’re the problem or that you’re not enough. I hate the saying ‘you always hurt the ones you love’ because the reality is cheaters don’t love and chumps should never condition themselves to accept what a cheater gives as love.

For any newbies following this thread, I’ll repeat my usual spiel. The nearly five years I spent advocating for survivors of domestic violence were probably my salvation in many ways. For one, the awareness of cultural victim blaming mythology and negative bystander dynamics I developed in that arena made me very sensitive to those attitudes in other people so, by the time I needed support myself, my group of close contacts had been pretty much pre-filtered to only those who don’t make excuses for abusers or knee-jerkedly look for fault in victims. Furthermore some of my friendships were forged through the writing I did on those issues so a few were not only not prone to victim-blaming but were particularly well informed, knew exactly what to say to someone in shock, what resources I needed, knew better than to be patronizing, etc.

Like I learned in advocacy, the very first reactions that survivors get from others when first reaching out can make the difference between total emotional collapse or gathering strength. I was so lucky. When I finally opened up to a few contacts about FW’s increasing emotional abuse, one attorney friend gave me the same speech that I’d been trained to give survivors: “I can understand why you may not feel free to leave right now but here are a few ducks you can get in a row to lower your risks and prepare for the worst.” She also immediately guessed FW was cheating. Her response when I repeated some of the crap FW was accusing me of in the DARVO stage couldn’t have been more perfect: she just started chuckling uncontrollably and said sarcastically, “Oh yeah, sure, right, everyone’s going to believe THAT about you.” And by doing that she let the wind out of the most potent, unstated threat that FW’s behavior conveyed: that he would easily be able to character-assassinate me and thereby take my children away.

My friend understood that I wasn’t paralyzed from heartbreak nor “addicted to abuse/codependent” but simply paralyzed from fear. The fact that these fears were being induced by the person who knew my fears best just made the trap more extreme. As a lawyer she knew the nature of the serious threats that were probably underlying abusers’ blame-shifting. She knew those fears are blinding to the person being subjected to them and that it didn’t make me pathetic or dumb that I couldn’t at that moment see the bigger picture. Because of this, there wasn’t even a whiff of patronizing disrespect in how she spoke to me. She acknowledged that I was “damned if I did and damned if I didn’t” leave at that exact moment. She knew that if I shored up resources to protect myself from those specific threats that the feeling of paralysis would likely fade on its own. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better magical fairy supporter who could successfully break through my frozen mental state and get me into a more predatory, defensive mindset.

I found out first hand something I’d previously learned from books: that intellectual understanding of the dynamics of abuse won’t necessarily fully stop survivors from sinking into Stockholm syndrome and experiencing traumatic stress. Intelligence specialists who are captured by hostile forces and subjected to interrogation tactics go in fully aware of how captor bonding works, etc. That foreknowledge can help a bit with psychological resistance in captivity but not entirely. They know it really boils down to the tactics used by captors and that anyone– given the right stressors– will crack. That’s why intelligence operatives are never given whole parcels of state secrets and are automatically given deprogramming treatment on release from captivity. For me, that understanding helped reduce the natural shame someone feels as they find themselves weakening. Otherwise I think the extra shame of watching this happen to myself in spite of foreknowledge would have put me entirely under and made me even less able to resist.

FW in my case wasn’t violent but only if you go deep into the rabbit hole of DV do you discover most survivors report that it’s the coercion, manipulation, emotional abuse, psychological abuse that are most effective in paralyzing victims, even more than overt physical violence in many cases. That’s not to minimize the effects of violence and violent threat but to suggest that the most effective abusers may not even need to resort to direct violence or death threats because their tactics are so devastating. Another thing you learn in the rabbit hole is that one devastating tactic used by virtually all abusers is cheating.

But most DV victims learn never to talk about sexual betrayal to DA’s, therapists, courts, bystanders, etc., because it’s as if everyone’s already looking for a reason to discredit victims and drop the case or deny support. Assigning the motive of “jealousy” to victims provides bystanders with the alibi for abandonment and condemnation. So the fact that virtually all batterers cheat isn’t well understood even among specialized researchers. Either that or the DV researchers leave out that particular detail so that it’s not misconstrued by denialists. But I would even go so far as to say that battering itself is mostly centered on preventing victims from taking the same license to be “sexually free” as the abuser does. In other words, I suspect that’s the main underlying purpose of it. So when I was chumped and subjected to the usual blame-shifting and psychological abuse that comes in tow, I saw it in the framework of domestic violence. That’s the other thing that helped enormously. It’s what made me through RIC nonsense more quickly. Instead I sought resources for DV survivors. And I knew better than to tell my story to randos who would likely only flame me with victim-blaming drivel and drain me of even more blood. I only confided to my closest allies.

Back when I was working in advocacy and would tell random people what I did, a typical response from bystanders was, “If it was ME in those circumstances I would just leave. I’d never put up with it.” I used to waste my breath arguing with those types about captor bonding, traumatic stress, how the tactics of abusers hogtie victims and how it can happen to anyone. I eventually stopped trying to make people understand this when I learned that the view is part of some functional lie or delusion of safety that people cling to in order to, say, drive on the freeway to work every day without being paralyzed by the risks. Many people wouldn’t be able to make the trip if they considered that the risk of not only crashing but of dying in the crash is a whopping 1:107 if calculating the number of people on the road, the number of accidents and other factors. So most people have gymnastic mental strategies to avoid thinking about the risk, one of which is imagining that all those other people who died in crashes must have done something wrong to increase their risks and that the individual themselves doesn’t engage in those dangerous behaviors so is therefore safe. As CL says, this thinking gives people the illusion of control. There a degree of truth in it: texting or imbibing substances while driving are dangerous behaviors but the problem with knee-jerk bystander thinking is that it just goes way to far and assumes bad things can never happen to good drivers. In that way, victim blaming is an essential part of how most people manage to go about their lives without being paralyzed. And they can get very testy if you try to divest them of this safety-spellbinding.

But one part of fruitlessly trying to convince bystanders not to heap contempt on victims back in the day wasn’t a waste of time: by repeating it so often I seem to have gotten the message through to myself. Active counter-brainwashing is pretty much what it takes to resist internalizing persistent cultural myths. Nothing about it was easy when my turn came but at least I wasn’t burdened by the extra dose of shame that tend to drive victims back into paralysis and playing possum. I knew how abuse works and thankfully my supporters did as well.