Got Triggers?

Dear CL, thank you. Your wonderful snarky writing has helped me weather the turbulence of the last 2 years since d-day, one year since divorce. Married 29yrs, found out was chumped entire time (and before)….another story…
Chump nation, you are an inspiration, and have helped keep me sane. My gratitude to you all.

My triggers:
1.Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits” specifically the lyrics “My bad habits lead to late nights endin’ alone, Conversations with a stranger I barely know, Swearin’ this will be the last, but it probably won’t, I got nothin’ left to lose, or use, or do…”. From the moment I met the ex-husband (in college, 40yrs ago) he said he had “issues” winding down of a night time. Turned out all those nights he played games/computer games/emailed “friends”/”updated” facebook – while I collapsed exhausted in bed (10pm) from demanding job/cooking/cleaning/kids/laundry etc., which he never helped with – I now know he was looking at porn/emailing other women/tracking them on Facebook/trawling through eHarmony/Match.com from 10pm-2am. In the early days after d-day, when we were still talking, I told him this song was written for him and he actually GIGGLED and said yes, it was his song. Turn this awful song off whenever I hear it.

Boy Scouts. The night I caught him he was reminiscing whilst facetiming with (one of) the OW (subsequently found out there were many others) about their weekend in the (big mid-west) city the previous month (during covid/not vaccinated). As the village Scout Master he’d arranged an “extra” Winter Campout weekend as the boys were down on their camping hours due to covid…always had a lie ready to roll out of his mouth. The Friday of their tryst he’d primped in the bathroom for 2hrs, put on his Scout uniform, kissed me and, as he turned and walked away, left a trail of aftershave in his wake.,,a first for winter camping. Knew something wasn’t right, that and the phone glued to his hand. Caught him 3 weeks later. He and the OW were on a call planning another “Scout” trip for his birthday weekend, and another for a few weeks later when I was flying out to meet daughter and drive the 1300 miles back home from college for the summer. Our kids are Eagle Scouts/Girl Scout Gold Award recipient (equivalent of Eagle Scout). I was the Girl Scout leader. All Scout related things trigger me now.
Can’t bear hearing “it’s a joke” or “what’s for dinner” or “I’m entitled”, which he said all the time

Just made it through 2 college graduations (two different states). Both kids told him the latest OW (#10) was not invited. He brought OW to one kids’ college (degree conferring) ceremony…said he was “entitled” to bring her. Kid was fuming. Other kid revised approach and said he could bring OW to commencement (outdoor stadium) ceremony (they didn’t turn up cos it rained!) but OW was not invited to the college (degree conferring) ceremony. He agreed, turned up by himself to college ceremony, took kids photo/added to Facebook, said he could no longer take her out for a celebratory meal and walked off. Kid brushed it off and we (boyfriend/kids and me) went to a different restaurant, ended up by chance sharing a table with another kid from her class (and family) and had a fantastic time together!

Setting boundaries and moving on… 🙂

So many triggers. Endless it seems. CL, I appreciate you saying that there’s not much space for “getting over it” when the cheaters are actively hurting the children (like the particular cheater I was once married to, rekindling his relationship with the AP/my ex-friend – and trying to explain it away to our kids – their tears/pleas that he not pursue a relationship with her, not HER – and him proceeding anyway). Current worst triggers for me – being within eyeshot of him, her, or all the mutual former friends who bounced. It happens a lot. We’re in a smallerish town. The kids still all go to church/school together. There are triggers in the school pick-up line every effing afternoon. Former friends go walking down my street. His car is parked outside my house one night a week, hanging out with the neighbors. It’s a lot.

My D day was over 3 years ago and I’ve been divorced 2. I have to low key admit- I love “Vanderpump Rules”. Have watched for years. But this season “Scandoval” has triggered me. I see so much of my ex in the pathetic narcissist Tom and empathize so much with Ariana, the absolute betrayal by someone you love and who you thought was your partner for life. The lying, the gaslighting, the blame shifting- it’s all there and it takes me back to that place where it was all happening to me and how utterly soul destroying it was. My life is so free and happy now, I wish that for all my fellow chumps!

As someone who got a massive amount of dirty details about cheating, I can attest that this doesn’t stop the flashbacks or ruminations. At first you think it’s going to but it just leads to more horror for your traumatized brain to mull over. The only benefit I can think of– which isn’t a small thing– is that, eventually, the more you know, the more stupid, cringy gross, deformed, maudlin and loserish cheaters and their collaborators appear. It’s demythologizing and at least fodder for gallows humor which can be healing. Laughing beats staring at walls for hours in stricken horror in any case.

And if you can laugh about it or cry about it with someone else, all the better. The only real cure for that kind of social trauma that I know of, aside from time and safety and distance, is appropriate and empathic social support. I wrote the other day about the biblical passage and film title, “The Power of the Dog.” The power of the dog lies in the pack– the illusory despair that defeated victims have that evil is legion and all powerful. And affairs have a kind of “mob rule” element woven into them because they’re at least “two against one” if not more and because of the tendency of domestic abusers to feverishly grub approval from bystanders, character assassinate victims and grub cultural rationales for their behavior. So I think the remedy is seeing it demonstrated– over and over for a long, long time– that this is not true, that decency outstrips evil. I wince when I hear the common idea that victims suffer from “low self esteem” when I think what victims really suffer from is “low esteem for the world” and it’s that which needs to be corrected.

Sometimes it can help to change environments to see another perspective of humanity. My kids and I live part of the year in a country that, not so long ago, suffered a violent military coup and subsequent reign of terror and has been in “recovery” from this period ever since. We originally visited the country for an extended stay as medical tourists to get specialized medical care for my chronically ill middle child. That in itself was a great experience. I’d never experienced so many medical practitioners who actually care about their patients. I enrolled the kids in all sorts of classes and, by the time it was time to go home, the kids didn’t want to. They were having a ball. So was I. I arranged a long term lease, started the residency process and figuring out how we could spend part of every year there in the future. FW can’t legally stop us coming and going at will because he encouraged– in writing– the second extended stay overseas to facilitate his affair and even obstructed our ability to return at a few points.

I think part of why the experience was so positive for us is that we were in a country that’s been recovering from trauma while we ourselves were recovering from repeat trauma. To cut a long story short that I’ve told before, my once chronically ill and disabled son was physically abused by staff in a district school. The school retaliated against my other children and legally threatened me after I filed a civil rights complaint. All sorts of horror and drama ensued including deep family rifts and having to fight off false charges of educational neglect, etc. All of this was added to the trauma of my son’s long and scary illness, years of sleep deprivation and the general dearth of social, medical or educational support we all experienced. And then FW did his fuckwit thing (insert long tortured scream).

Unlike many of the countries that went through similar political terror, our adopted part-time country began bringing the culprits to justice and rectifying wrongs in a systematic way. There are tribute plaques to victims everywhere, schools teach about that period and there are yearly memorials, parades and marches in honor of victims and the survivors who wouldn’t shut up. The people who went through those years of persecution and fear as teens and young adults remember everything about it and the subject comes up a lot in casual conversation. In fact, there’s rarely any sense of social “faux pas” for referring to that history.

The only people who seem offended when that subject comes up are the ones whose families were on the wrong side of the war and profited from it. But people like that are such an embattled minority that they stand out like sore thumbs except in their insular, muttering little guilt-enclaves Even political conservatives distance themselves from that ilk and make a show of supporting the remedy against past repression and silencing– which involves the open and continuous discourse and remembrance, a lesson obviously taught by the Holocaust.

The consensus between survivors seems to be, to quote Doris Lessing, “We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared and the repetition, the listening, it is as if we are saying: It was like that for you too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so it must have been. I wasn’t imagining things.” This creates such an interesting difference between the general social “ambiance” in the US– where PTSD is generally framed as a form of mental illness and there’s a shameful feeling of “psychiatric inquisition” towards sufferers which makes people very careful of alluding to harsh experiences lest they get the “tut tut” from bystanders– and this other country where PTSD is, for many, “last Tuesday.” Not kidding. Rough account of a classic exchange I heard between an antique dealer and one of his childhood friends.

“So last Tuesday I had flashbacks for the whole afternoon. Remember how [secret police] came to the school?”
“Yeah, whatever happened to X?”
“He’s fine.”
“I thought he was dead.”
” I saw him at the club.”
Contemplative lull…
“I need to start swimming again but chlorine bothers my eyes.”
“We have salt tech. It’s like swimming in your own tears.”
“Better than swimming in urine. But does it kill germs?”
“It hasn’t killed me yet!”
Hahahahaha

For some reference, people the violent past regime didn’t like or anyone who tried to help people the regime didn’t like were regarded as “human viruses” that the country needed to be “vaccinated against” by abducting, torturing and killing tens of thousands of journalists, students, scholars, hippies, priests, nuns, homosexuals, etc. Although military ghouls tried to argue in their trials that they were saving the country from terrorists, there hadn’t been any terrorism for the five years before the coup. Consequently the idea that perpetrators typically backfill the narrative with lies, exaggerations and rationales at victims’ expense is quite easily understood by most people and often discussed in shorthand.

Shorthand is beautiful. People aptly finishing your sentences is beautiful. People not freaking out when anyone brings up something harsh is beautiful. Conversations flowing from references to something terrible and back to cheerful normality is beautiful. It means everyone knows the same thing and that, for the moment, you’re safe. Ive since learned that this is not the case in countries that didn’t bring perpetrators to justice and still name squares after past violent dictators. I’ve heard the complaints and I’m not the only foreigner who’s noticed there’s a bit less social censure in this country. Whenever you say that to a native they might argue a bit that it’s really not so great and launch into a diatribe about everything that’s wrong with the country from economy to politics to social problems. But then I just smile and tell them how wonderful it is to see how free people are to complain and form their own analyses. I love seeing the weekly street protests and labor demonstrations.

It’s hard to explain how this kind of social environment begins seeping under your skin. It made me mentally relax in ways I never had before. I’ve encountered plenty of garden variety assholes in this country just like everywhere else but there’s always the sense that they’re somehow outnumbered and this perception dulls the sting of assholery. For instance, if you have a random unfortunate asshole encounter, you know you can probably blurt or joke about it to the very next person you meet because this social norm of “processing trauma” seems to have become naturally inclusive. Even the conversation with the antique dealer was set off by my mentioning how I had to homeschool and hand select tutors for my son after his school abuse experience just to get him away from trauma triggers and let him rebuild trust in adults. We started talking about flashbacks and his friend joined in. I didn’t feel like he’d hijacked the conversation to talk about his own experience but instead was showing his recognition of the seriousness of my family’s experience by analogizing it to an event the entire world recognizes as extreme injustice. I wouldn’t have dared to make the analogy myself. My kids didn’t die. There’s no comparison, yet there’s always some small fragment in common in all injustice and trauma. The antique dealer, as the horse’s mouth, saw the overlaps and took me as someone who would probably understand the rest. The generosity of that is pretty astounding.

That said, talking about cheating openly is another matter regardless of where you live. Unlike the shriveled little puddle of angry former supporters of the dictatorship, the league of cheaters and their apologists is transnational and ubiquitous. But even so I found the social response to be generally a bit healthier. I enjoyed all the quippy folk sayings about cheaters. And if someone seems fairly sympathetic, it doesn’t take much for them to understand things like perpetrators falsely blaming victims and the rest. They can finish your sentences. It’s like having stones taken out of your pockets.

I’m not necessarily recommending international travel as a cure for betrayal trauma. I’m not even saying I know the answer because, em, here I am ruminating and mulling like everyone else. I’m just making the case that social response and maybe even political environment seem to carry a huge amount of weight in terms of recovery. When I find myself stalling in recovery, I relate it to a sense that the world doesn’t seem safe to me so I try to throw the net wider and make my world bigger. Any effort to reach out and expand support networks might gradually begin to dull the power of intrusive memories. They never fully go away but simply start to feel different in direct proportion to the perception that at least part of the world is on your side. And finally, there’s one thing that I think makes this more likely to happen: learning about what other put-upon groups of people have been through and pitching in. I know we’re supposed to say that getting involved and doing service is healing because of the philanthropic aspects of of it but I’d argue that it also develops a kind of political armature and understanding of abuse of power and betrayal in all sorts of contexts and bonus, puts us in contact with others who get it. Not that you would then take that knowledge and interject with, say, “My being cheated on and emotionally abused is exactly like you having your hand cut off in a diamond mine in the Congo!” But people like this are more likely to understand the whole range of related themes. “Getting” other people’s experiences, even if seemingly unrelated, feels like a passport to a better side of world.

Hi CN, Today is a big trigger, my birthday. Even though I separated/divorced almost 20 years ago. My ex wanted to celebrate the b-day a day early. He HAD to fly out of town early on a Sunday to attend a Monday morning meeting in NYC (we lived in Washington, DC.) Turns out he was leaving early to spend Sunday/Sunday night with his FW. Ah, an insult that never seems to end. While I have managed to move beyond most of these emotional bombshells, the b-day plus Mother’s Day ( preparing the celebratory brunch myself to honor myself) are still painful. What is not hard are the countless hugs, kisses and loving words from my children and grandchildren.