Is Infidelity ‘Ambiguous Grief’?
Is infidelity a kind of ambiguous grief? Even though she survived, she feels like people don’t understand her loss.
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Dear Chump Lady,
Thank you for everything you do. I found your blog when I really needed to reevaluate my situation. Your humor and perspective helped me move on.
When I was chumped, I experienced overwhelming grief at losing the man whom I believed was the love of my life. I was devastated when he abandoned our two teenage children and me to live with his s*x worker “girlfriend”, whom he’d met a few months earlier.
I mourned our past, present, and future, and for a while, I lost my sanity.
Recently, I’ve heard of the unconventional loss of a loved one described as ambiguous grief — but we’re not really included in the description.
My question to Chump Nation is: Given that our grief is real, what are the stages of betrayal grief, and is bitterness one of them? I think it might be the brain’s way of moving on from denial. I think I needed to experience bitterness to fully process the anger and pain and move to acceptance.
These days, I’m over it. Rather than looking back, I’m starting to see the possibilities and potential my life holds. My children are now in their twenties, so there’s nothing stopping me from doing anything I want (within reason). I’ve earned my resilience, and I’m grateful for the new person I have become.
I wonder, is gratitude the final stage?
My ex-husband married his affair partner, and the kids want nothing to do with him. He continues to make poor decisions and not address his issues. Apparently, the affair partner thought she wanted my life. I think she did, but not the life I had, the one I have now. Thanks to my divorce attorney, I walked away with a reasonable amount of money and my independence. Funny how things turn out.
Free and Happy
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Dear Free and Happy,
I think the grief of being chumped is pretty unambiguous. You bargain, you plead, you get angry, you mourn. The person who was central to your life is no longer there, either because they checked out via abandonment, or continue to appear and use you (thereby prolonging the grief). The ambiguous part is how this experience is perceived by everyone around you. Which was, up until we started changing the narrative, to blame you for it.
What is ambiguous grief?
Ambiguous grief what therapists call “complex, often unresolved emotional pain felt when a loved one is physically absent but psychologically present (e.g., missing person, kidnapping), or physically present but psychologically absent (e.g., dementia, addiction). Coined by Pauline Boss, this “loss without closure” lacks clear, socially recognized rituals, making it uniquely isolating.”
As I’ve written before, I don’t believe in closure. Like the sort that needs to confront the cheater with a big, long relationship autopsy and results in newfound understanding and apologies. (Finally! I know it was 17 Schmoopies instead of 6!) There’s just acceptance.
But unresolved emotional pain? YES. That’s every chump who’s ever been chumped. So shrinks should definitely include infidelity in the ambiguous grief column. We check both columns — FWs who are physically absent, but take up a lot of mental real estate. And/or FWs who are physically present but checked out. (Affairs being their own kind of dementia/addiction.)
Does it help to label it?
I suppose it would make our pain more legitimate to the mental health professionals. Unfortunately many of them seem hellbent on getting us to stay with our abusers. (Aka Infidelity Makes a Marriage Stronger!)
However, I think it’s a useful concept for chumps. That not all grief has finality. And if you have to see this person, if you bred with them, this complex grief will flare up. This doesn’t mean you can’t have peace or acceptance (what I call “meh”). It means this sh*t is traumatic.
Free and Happy, it sounds like you’ve arrived at that place with gratitude. What’s ambiguous is that both things can coexist, you can be grateful for your new life, grateful you’re out, and still mourn what happened and your losses.
I was devastated when he abandoned our two teenage children and me to live with his s*x worker “girlfriend”, whom he’d met a few months earlier.
Yeah, isn’t that a marvel? How a brief acquaintance of a few months can outweigh an entire married life and TWO WHOLE CHILDREN? That’s its own kind of psychic whiplash.
Stop saying ‘bitter’.
Given that our grief is real, what are the stages of betrayal grief, and is bitterness one of them?
Bitter is pejorative. So is “scorned.” You’re entitled to your anger. This is just your body’s alarm system going off to protect you from harm. We reject revenge here. (If it feels good don’t do it.) But anger is the righteous fuel you needed to get out of there. Anger helps you maintain your boundaries. You won’t always feel like an exposed, raw nerve, but don’t let anyone call you “bitter.” It’s one of those words they shame women with for being angry.
(Do men get shamed as bitter? I think the equivalent right now might be all the divorced dad energy jokes.)
I’m grateful for the new person I have become.
See what anger and bitterness did? 😉
The gain a life portion of the journey is so much better than the cheater part. There is nothing ambiguous about the relief to be out of bad marriage. No tag backs, Schmoops.
CN, any ambiguous grief to report?
There is a line (or two) in (I think) Anna Karenina that states something along the lines of “Every happy family is the same, but every unhappy family is unique in its own misery” that strikes at the heart of this.
A Chump dealing with the effects of the FW’s infidelity is dealing with a complex issue with very complex impacts on the Chump and others. I wouldn’t describe the grief response as being in any way ambiguous; grief is grief regardless of what it is/who it is that has been lost, it’s just that the grief relating to your FW’s infidelity is made more complex (amongst other things) by the sense of betrayal and injustice that the Chump will naturally feel, as well as the Chump (most likely) having to deal with others’ sense of grief too … children for example.
I’d also pick up on CL’s question about whether or not male Chumps get shamed as bitter. I’ve never been called “Bitter” to my face, but it’s been clear (at least to me) that the boundaries that I have put in place to protect myself (or our now adult kids) from Ex Mrs LFTT’s BS have resulted in some people saying “Are you not over that already?” …. they are thinking that I’m bitter but won’t say it. They can’t (or won’t) understand that the boundaries are there to protect me and the kids, not to punish Ex-Mrs LFTT.
LFTT
I’ve resisted the term grief. When people in my support circle assume I’m grieving and use the term grief with me, I tell them I don’t relate to that at all, that I feel more that I’m recovering from trauma. Grief is too neutral I think. That my experience would be the same if I had a l loving husband who died rather than an unloving husband who cheated for years and lied about it every single day. Maybe I will relate more to grief further into this but a year after dday, it helps more to see it as trauma.
The grief is more for the life you lost (hopes, dreams, future) than for the cheater as a person. That part is trauma for sure.
For me 20 years of litigation abuse and 2 very broken grown kids recycling the toxic patterns, means I’ll never fully grieve or heal in any conventional style. But I’ve changed and most of all I’ve experienced a type of spiritual clarity &peace I could never have known without this particular fiery trial.
Yes!!! I’m also having to watch my two broken grown kids replay some of the toxicity of my ex! It is extra hard to resolve grief and anger, seeing ongoing impacts on/in them. I, too, must realize it might never fully heal because of that.
I never ever thought I would say this before my world blew up. But now I am actually GLAD that neither kid plans on having kids of their own and they are 99% likely to carry out their plans (to not produce or raise children).
I am actually relieved that I won’t be a grandma because of how I bred with a narcissistic cheater. Our line needs to end.
Speaking from my own experience here, I think chumps can and do experience loss, pain, trauma, and grief, anticipatory as well as unresolved, but I don’t think it’s because we’re experiencing “ambiguous loss.”
I don’t think of and did not experience what I went through with my ex in the same way I did my mother’s descent into dementia. “Ambiguous loss” means either the person is missing in the sense of an MIA service person, meaning no one knows where they are or if they’re alive, or that the person is there, but their mind is not, and they are incapable of discerning this. When a few months before she died my mother could no longer recognize me, and wondered aloud whether I was a nurse, I experienced “ambiguous loss,” as well the state called “anticipatory grief.” Ambiguous loss, because she was there interacting with me, and I was still her daughter who knew her as my mother, but she was no longer capable of seeing me as her daughter and interacting with me as a family member. The pain and grief that I felt was not a pain and grief intentionally inflicted on me by my mother, but one that arose from the situation.
Cheaters, on the other hand, may seem as if they’ve taken leave of their senses, may become cold and cruel, but they know who you are, and they know who they are. They also intentionally inflict the pain and grief we experience.
Sometimes people say, “A death without a funeral,” in talking about divorce. It’s a different kind of grief for us chumps, though, because something you built and cared about got completely shattered by someone else, someone you thought was invested in you and the marriage. It’s a horrible betrayal by someone you thought was on your side.
I recently buried my last remaining older relative, and that was not the same. She had lived a wonderful, full life, even with dementia in the end. Her decline occurred over a matter of weeks, and she was in hospice for only two days. I miss what she was to me, but I know that losing her was part of the cycle of life. That’s very different.
My separation and divorce felt unreal at times, knowing that my husband/ex was walking on the beach while I dealt with all the chaos he left. Of course, that stoked some anger in me along with the grief. I hit meh pretty much when the judge signed. My ex gave me a long, messy closeout, but I just laughed through it with my attorney. Eventually, my ex let go.
It’s way better now, years later.
David Kessler, colleague of Elizabeth Kubler Ross, is my favorite teacher on grief.
For a very long time, I did not want to call my experience of being betrayed “grief” as it felt to me like that meant Traitor Ex was this wonderful person I had lost. I’m having a hard time explaining this but that’s the best I can come up with. I bristled at the idea of calling it grief because it felt like it elevated him to a venerated status he did not deserve.
Eight years out from DDay, I do call it grief.
David Kessler calls grief “a change you didn’t want”. That’s all I need to call it too.
I feel grief, changes I do not like, didn’t want, for many many things. Learning to live, to enjoy living, one day at a time, with changes I don’t like and didn’t want is an unavoidable part of life and an essential skill to develop.
The end of my so-called marriage (MIRAGE) is just one of them, and it’s a big one.
♥️