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?
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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 think feeling bitter is a reasonable response and a natural reaction. For me, it was a byproduct of accepting the reality that my marriage was a sham. It was a temporary state that served a purpose, protected me until I was ready to move forward. I don’t feel ashamed of it, it’s an authentic reaction. I also suffered from depression. I don’t feel ashamed of that either.
My boundaries areca strain to keep up, and a daily reminder of what blew up into a billion pieces. Especially I’m church. Each person,except for very very few, want me to rejoin my X on that side of the church building in the old santuary and SHOW HIM I don’t care!! Show him, while I get sick to even look at him. The body holds it in. I no longer share my plans or reasons. It’s so hard not to go over the whys of what I must do.. i am stopping as of now, to explain anything.
I can relate to you comment about male “bitterness”
I have learned to have pretty defined boundaries with the FW. Fortunately I have no contact with her except at events with our kids and grandchildren. I just keep my distance and set my attention level to ignore. I get the occasional raised eyebrow or veiled comment from others when this comes up in conversation. The contemporary cultural assumption is “Can’t we all be friends?” Well no, obviously not. Without repentance you cannot have restoration. It is like discovering the dog crapped on the floor, so you just through a rug over it.
I’ve given up caring what other people think. They simply don’t understand.
Personally I have found that mentioning FW narcopath was considering a fatal accident for me and /or the 7 figure sum he stole from us to shut that sh*t down before words leave any moron’s mouth about my “bitterness” aka righteous anger. I respect myself enough to not grovel at FW feet and play at being friends.
Bruno,
Ahh the “Can’t we all be friends?” f*ckery.
The answer is “No” plain and simple.
…. and I owe no-one an explanation to “why not?” because no-one whomever asked that question of me could explain to me why I should.
LFTT
“Ahh the “Can’t we all be friends?” f*ckery.”
Say you had a neighbor who, every morming for a year, snuck up on you as you left for work and punched you in the face. After a year they stopped, but only because either they moved out of state, or you did. Would you be their friend if you ran into them at your kid’s birthday party in the future?
No. You wouldn’t. How is betrayal any different?
This isn’t really a situation of “let bygones be bygones”. It’s a person who actively harmed you, for some length of time. Then you split from them which quite often makes for more harm, or attempts at least. That is not sopmeone you SHOULD be friendly with.
Sure, don’t make a scene. Don’t throw the cake at them aflame with the birthday candles. That would not be cool to do in front of your kids. But if you can stay away from them, and not interact at all? That’s great! The goal shouldn’t be “besties”. It should be just to remain neutral eough to not cause your kid’s discomfort.
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.
I grieved my husband until my brain caught up, which was several months. I think it was cognitive dissonance.
What I’m really talking about is grief for the life I thought I had, grief for my children, and grief because I lost myself in the relationship and it’s breakdown.
100% yes! Good point.
Yes, TRAUMA feel like the best word to describe what I’ve been going through since my D day almost a year ago. Shock, rage, grief etc. but TRAMATIC in nature beyond normal/expected life events like illness and death. The depth of betrayal and the calculated nature of the cruelty is traumatic.
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.
I agree. I do not miss the ex that lied so much and cheated with our son’s friend (his second affair).
I kind of miss the life I thought I’d have when he “got over” his insanity.
But, I have to say, I’m six months from divorce and a year and a half from D-day…
I love my life now! I survived the trauma and I feel victorious! I’m do very grateful!
I’m 8 years out from D-day (it wasn’t one day, it was a gradual realization, so it’s been more like 5 years since I truly decided it was done), and while the whole situation hurt like hell, I now I think the affair/divorce was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’m living a life I could only have dreamed of and I’ve never been happier. Just wait – it only gets better from here.
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.
Two of my older adult children do not want children however the youngest has and he exhibits alarming traits as his Father . These developed primarily at the end of the marriage when his Father was lying and gaslighting and being disrespectful toward me. The kids had been brought up with love and respect but the late life shift stayed with the youngest who was a teenager at the time and now is married with two children.
😓
Thank you for voicing this. I see daily the narcissism and lying in one of my kids, and know deep down it would be best for him to never have any children. It would be a disaster, 3 generations of narcs breeding a 4th and traumatizing innocent victims.
Yes! A disaster that just perpetuates. It’s so clear in my ex’s family, and unfortunately in mine, too. My son has some of the worst traits of his dad and dad’s dad, and my mom (whom I have spent a lifetime trying to counteract and heal from). I hope more and more will voice this if that’s what they’re thinking based on what they see in their young adult children. There has to be more of us out there that are thinking “This traumatizing of the next generation and the genetic and environmental components of harmful personality disorders in the family 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.
Agree with all you said! The only ambiguity is that we thought/believed we were dealing with full humans and these Fuckwits are NOT fully human in the sense that they are without empathy or conscience. I don’t know that this makes for ambiguity, just deep grief from the betrayal. And the cognitive dissonance from what you were made to believe you had and what you actualy had is so traumatic in a way that other losses, however difficult, are not.
Throughout the marriage I believed my ex had real emotion , his anger at his own work mistakes or life mistakes , tears over a movie or something emotionally stirring , unity with our thoughts . However he did not identify with event pain unless it affected him . An extreme need for attention . He did not lack in his family and my love and attention. It remains complex and confusing and even at the end of our divorce in a lawyer conference settlement he asked where I would go. So bizarre.
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.
♥️
Yes, that helps, “a change you didn’t want.”
In retrospect, my ex had been a very difficult husband and a poor parent for a long time, but the end of my marriage was cataclysmic. My therapist once commented that it was like he walked out the door and threw an incendiary device behind him. Later, my husband expected me to be pro-reconciliation, but there was very little in the ruins to work with.
For some time, people in my old church pinged me about missing him and trying to keep things positive. The truth was, I really didn’t miss my husband after a while and got that he was someone you would wall off and keep away. I was indeed polite and reasonable during the divorce. I gave my ex that. Part of the reason I picked the attorney I did was that he was known as a tough negotiator, a gifted litigator, and completely a Southern gentleman about the whole thing. My ex picked an ugly street fighter, reflecting who he was. But we got it settled and closed out despite all of the drama that went down. My attorney was masterful and retired the day after the judge signed off, so ironic.
In retrospect, I was seeing the destruction of what I thought would be a happy retirement with my ex as we launched our children. I was naive. It didn’t happen that way, but it all worked out. The kids are, thankfully, doing beautifully in both their personal and professional lives. That’s a lot, given that they grew up with an addicted, mentally ill father who abandoned them. I don’t take that for granted.
“It means this sh*t is traumatic.” It is.
I think the people who don’t understand this type of grief and pain are people who have not experienced it. They can only liken it to a high school break up. Not even in the same universe as a betrayal in a long term marriage/relationship. So many facets of pain.
Exactly, in my first toxic abusive marriage to appease the parents , I developed a rare incurable autoimmune disease, and disabling , however with my second marriage I only incurred flare ups twice , the last being do to the sever stress and trauma from his reckless deceitful behavior. We had had a 20 plus year marriage many were in aw of . I sometimes wonder if he has any regrets now that he has married a women younger than the Daughter he raised. I’m angry for the hurt he has caused the adult kids.
Yes, more than a few people said, “You’ll find someone again.”
I’m in my late 50’s after mostly being a SAHM for twenty years. My marriage blew up after he retired, and the college kids and I hit rock bottom financially for a few years. The divorce and closeout were a mess. Big, horrid stuff.
And then the coffee dates, OH MY. No offense, but these were dudes that I had to get away from, pronto. I learned early on to say, “Sure, coffee, but I need to head out at 11 am, just so you know.”
It’s not like dating in high school. There was the one who was thinking I could pay off his college loans so he could retire. And the one who had a knee replacement scheduled, who was hoping I could take care of him. But best of all was the one who asked me to pick him up. OK, fine. He told me that his car was acting up when we scheduled, and then admitted, while we were sipping, that he had a recent DUI. Let’s leave a little early so I can get to a meeting. The last one presented as a widower. Got it. Then he admitted after we got our cups that he and his wife had divorced, and then remarried five years later because she got cancer and had no insurance. The story went from there, as it became clear that he was looking for a caretaking relationship with me. Nice to chat, see ya around.
My ex is paired up again, last I knew. We haven’t interacted in years. As one of my besties would say, “Good luck with that, dude.”
Yeah, most of the guys available at 50+ have either been deservedly divorced for their sucktitude or they have a chronic failure to launch and have had a series of failed relationships in which they use women to do their adulting. Occasionally you might meet a widower, but then you’ll have to contend with competing with a memory. I assume there are some lovely male chumps out there who left a cheater, but they are few and far between as they usually get snapped up pretty quickly. The pickings are slim indeed.
Deserved divorce sucktitude. 😂right on!
Yeah, those guys from the coffee dates, we call them “hobosexuals”. They are looking for a comfortable home or a future hospice wife. Boy bye.
Oh don’t get us started on loser dates post divorce, it’s like vultures circling & ready to finish us off?
LOL. It’s actually funny to me now how horrid dating has been. I’m enough years out now that I’m perfectly fine not pairing up again, thankfully.
I also have two friends who remarried in their 60’s with disastrous results as negative examples. Both went through messy divorces after only a handful of years of marriage. You would think people could handle that sort of thing in their later years with some level of decensy, but no.
That is for sure! In 9 years I’ve not dated however five guys have tried to pursue me, they need to replace wives for the take care of me loss or have anger issues or other warning signs. I’ve resolved alone and independent are ok. 😊
It’s only a small comfort, but at least you could count yourself lucky you hadn’t dated any of those guys in high school and they turned out like that later on (on the other hand, your ex may have been even worse, according to your accounts).
Yes, I’m glad I didn’t end up with any of the guys in high school. There were a few in college that I wish I had ended up with instead of my ex.
I married my ex in my 30’s and ignored a bundle of red flags. A long-term family friend of his even strongly warned me off, noting that my then-fiancé showed signs of being very rigid and controlling. Of course, I blew it off.
So true! I am approaching the one-year anniversary of my D Day and a friend of mine said yesterday, “It’s been quite a year for us both. You with your discover of your ex’s double life and me with my husband starting a new business.” I was so shocked at her comparing these two events/challenges and lumping them in together. She was MINIMIZING (albeit unintentinoally) all I’ve been through: rebuilding my life and all the logistics and emotions that entails.
That was definitely rude. However, I could also imagine that “starting a new business” meant deeper issues in her marriage, too, such as her husband being emotionally “checked out”, financially irresponsible etc. (which she might have seen as a possible threat to the marriage as a whole). I could be completely wrong, though. Some people are just insensitive, sadly.
Reminds me of when a friend’s long-time boyfriend was killed by a drunk driver. A coworker told her, “Yeah, I had a rough summer too. My apartment was robbed.” (I’m shaking my head at the cluelessness of some people!)
Sigh…people can be such dopes! Express sympathy and leave it at that. No comparisons needed.
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I think it’s futile (at best) to try to assign stages to loss, grief, pain. It’s a means of trying to control what happens, and feelings are not apportioned that way. Plus, it adds a pressure of — am I moving forward? “Oh, I feel sad, not angry, so I must be backtracking.” I don’t think it works like that.
Everyone is different and handles pain in their own way.
I think it would be interesting to learn about the stages of betrayal grief, just to understand that it’s normal and you’re not alone. Progress is never a straight line, and I think most of us know that there will always be a scar.
Yes, I had an odd conversation with someone in January who believes that if you talk about your divorce at all, you’re not healed. This was after the death of a relative of mine who was also a friend of hers.
Well, I think it’s like a scar. At times, it twinges and pulls, and you need to talk about it. Not that it dominates my thoughts, but it’s still there at times.
She later apologized, saying that she hadn’t been kind to me. I agreed. Sometimes a few comments are OK, even years later. And we were both grieving then, just some days past the funeral of someone we both loved. We’re good now.
Grief is that way, a bit of a twisty road with some backtracking.
In my experience, the trauma outweighs the grief. The only thing that allows me to truly be myself is strong boundaries. Prolonged exposure to the FW, like a mutual outing with the kids, only hurts the chump and assuages the guilt of the cheating ex.
Although the trauma and grief is unambiguous, being around the FW does resurface ambiguity toward the awful choices they made to destroy your family, and the utter lack of empathy toward what they’ve done to the people who loved them the most. That part I will never understand but stopped seeking answers a long time ago.
My “complicated” grief might be similar to the suicide of a spouse in terms of lack of protocol. I moved, filed and grieved by myself. Sometimes I think my seven year old wounds from a 30 year marriage scarred over without fully healing.
I definitely have scars that ache and pull at times after several decades together. And that’s fine. It doesn’t affect my everyday functioning anymore.
Yes, and I think that’s healthy. When you were married, your love was real.
The terms “complex grief” or “ambiguous grief” are lame even when applied to survivors of horrific crimes or catastrophes. By that token, I think an entirely different word needs to be coined for the grief of survivors whose “losses” were caused by criminally malicious acts.
Ancient Latin has about a dozen different words for grief like aegritudo, maoror, comploratio, etc., that probably once had subtle distinctions between them and fell on a spectrum of seriousness and complexity. But for the experience of being sexually betrayed to be included even on the less deadly end of a spectrum with say, loss of a loved one due to violent crime, first cheating would have to be correlated with recognizable patterns of domestic abuse.
So on the long list of studies I’d like to see done on the correlations between cheating and coercive control,I’d be interested to know if most FWs (regardless of gender or identity) tend to foster dependency by isolating and hacking away at victims’ self esteem so that, by the time chumps are abandoned or discover the betrayals, they were already stripped of normal emotional resources, independence and resilience, thus making the grief over loss far more intense.
Personally I think cheater mentality, like all abusers, falls on a spectrum of criminality to the extent that cheaters tend to be “re-enacting” traumatic childhood betrayal but with the “correction” that victim/perp roles are reversed. So there’s arguably some intentionality there, even if subconscious.
If you think about it, that adds another layer of strangeness to the kind of bereavement that chumps experience if the grief itself may have been the point since it’s how the cheater can measure their own centrality. In short, if cheaters hadn’t deliberately feigned love and lovability while fostering dependency in their victims to maximize or entirely engineer their own centrality, victims might not have much of a sense of loss at all since there was nothing real there to lose to begin with other than possibly time and other opportunities.
As a bonus, if the entire scale of seriousness for cheating was adjusted, the “anger” stage of chump grief wouldn’t be called “bitter” any more than the anger stage of people who lost limbs or loved ones to political violence.
Yes. This is exactly what happened to me and I wrote this letter. “So on the long list of studies I’d like to see done on the correlations between cheating and coercive control, I’d be interested to know if most FWs (regardless of gender or identity) tend to foster dependency by isolating and hacking away at victims’ self esteem so that, by the time chumps are abandoned or discover the betrayals, they were already stripped of normal emotional resources, independence and resilience, thus making the grief over loss far more intense.”
Thanks for the thought provoking letter.
If an experiment were performed comparing the mental states of chumps following the usual “cycle of abuse” build-up that precedes cheating or in cases where the relationship had been exceptionally healthy right up to the point the cheating began, I’m sure it would be discovered that, in the latter cohort, chumps would fare much better and recover much faster because they wouldn’t have been systematically isolated and rendered as psychologically prostrate and dependent through years of conditioning as the former cohort. That is, if the latter cohort even existed in reality which it doesn’t because there’s simply no such thing as a healthy, non-coercively controlling cheater.
That should probably be the first fact to nail down to make any progress on how to treat survivors– that virtually all cheaters commit coercive control if not other forms of abuse as well. But too bad it would be deemed a conflict and “biasing” if regular people crowd-funded this kind of research… as if the patriarchal leanings of academic institutions aren’t the reason the studies haven’t already been done. The institutions– like us– already know what the results would be and that it would be very difficult to unring the bell officially correlating cheating to DV.
My ex would deny it, but he very likely had a lot of traumatic childhood betrayal on multiple fronts. He claimed not to remember anything before age 7-8, and the therapist who diagnosed him with BPD with aspects of NPD had been able to probe that a little and was concerned. The borderline was immediately an issue after we married and got way worse over time.
I get that there are debates about nature vs. nurture, but he had a lot going on that made marriage and family very difficult, even before everything blew up.
I forget who wrote it but I read an article recently describing how cognitive dissonance makes it less likely that formerly traumatized children who grow up to emulate their abusers will be willing to identify what was done to them as abuse– at least not the specific things they themselves go on to repeat. The “forgetting” might also increase the risk of reenactment.
The thing that bugs me about the “nature” hypotheses for criminality– aside from the eugenic-y implications and the fact that every theory supporting the idea ends up getting overturned (don’t take my inexpert word for it https://aeon.co/essays/psychopathy-is-a-zombie-idea-why-does-it-cling-on )– is that “nurture” theories are the stronger argument for removing children from the custody of abusive adults in order to break the generational cycle.
Meanwhile “nature” arguments can run in the other direction. For instance, one of the most powerful proponents of the genetic basis for delinquency and criminal behavior and psychiatric advisor to at least two presidential administrations, Harold Koplewicz, basically argued that it really doesn’t matter how you treat children since it’s predetermined how they’ll turn out anyway.
Most modern nature theorist try to argue that “genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger” and assume this parsing softens the more negative associations and implications of “born bad” theories but unfortunately all it really softens is the legislation protecting children.
How could anybody argue that it would be fine to leave children in the care of abusers (and thus force them to endure even more abuse!) just because “this won’t change the outcome anyway”? I know this is not your own belief, but it’s shocking that other people apparently subscribe to this kind of thinking.
If you read the Substack reports of Drs. Emma Katz and Elizabeth Dalgado on how courts in the UK and US frequently grant custody of children to convicted batterers as if a guy beating up his wife in front of his kids had no bearing on his ability to be a good parent or read reports on “reunification camps” in the US, it seems a lot of people argue that it’s fine– even optimal– to leave kids with abusers.
In an age when scientific theories are often the bases of laws and policies, every little bit of science arguing pro or con can tip the balance (think of how the “doll test” tipped the balance in the Brown vs. Board of Ed SCOTUS decision). So it’s disturbing that on the pro side are “national experts” like Koplewicz essentially saying you can’t make a “good” child bad by leaving them in hell just like you can’t make a “bad” child good by protecting them.
I sh*t thee not. If you have some Maalox on hand, I recommend reading reform psychiatrist Peter Breggin’s The War Against Children of Color for the blood curdling history of organized psychiatry in the US. A friend in Brazil read the book and, after throwing up a few times, changed her dissertation to medical ethics.
Yes, it’s basically the “loss” of captor bonding that may be causing a lot of the grief and pain. I’ve been through this when distancing myself from my very abusive parents (and I’m still struggling with it despite decades of no contact), and I’ve experienced a lot of pain after abusive relationships in adulthood, too. It’s really a very specific type of grief or emotional pain, I believe.
Maybe we mean the same thing. I think of the lifting of the bond with the captor as basically loss of anesthesia so that all the delayed pain of accumulated injuries and deferred terror caused by abuse fire up at the same time. Before the captor bonding fizzles away entirely, the wave of agony can be confused for “loss” and “heartbreak.” But I think those events actually happened a long time before but didn’t register as such initially, either because the ramifications are so catastrophically terrifying (in the case of a child facing that their parents don’t love them and won’t protect them) or because that’s when abusers typically come in with the “lovebombing” stage of abuse in order to muddle events and rebrand the experience as “wuv.”
Even if it’s not always helpful to overall survival, the fact is that “rebranding” and denial are emotionally protective so who wouldn’t want to defer indescribable pain or fear if they could? If, for instance, the only power we had to mitigate the experience of being violently m*rdered was that we make every m*rder victim delusionally believe they were “having fun” at the moments they died rather than experiencing unspeakable pain and terror, we would use that power.
Thank you so much for this letter, Free and Happy, and for your insightful response, Tracy. I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately, how there seem to be hierarchies of grief. Some more ‘acceptable’ than others. Being chumped triggered every symptom of grief for me, from not eating to not sleeping to uncontrollable crying 24/7 to physical pain to depression to anxiety, the list goes on. And yet when I opened up to people about what had happened and what I was experiencing, I sometimes had well meaning people who had suffered big losses in their lives say things like, “Huh. That sounds a lot like grief.” They couldn’t call what I was going through grief, because my situation didn’t equal the grief over a death.
My friend’s dog died shortly after my DDay, and she got an outpouring of cards and flowers and unconditional sympathy. She said it felt strange knowing the agony I and my two adult children were in after DDay and knowing that I was walking around like a hollowed out shell, barely functioning, and feeling traumatized, humiliated, and ashamed. At that point I was still operating under FW’s pick-me-dance kickoff narrative that I was a bad romantic partner (news to me) and he, Mr. Saintly Do Gooder, had been forced to look elsewhere to get his needs met. So I had a lot of internalized shame. Add that to the well-meaning or ignorant or insensitive comments of people who have never been chumped–I was afraid to tell anyone but my core support people what had gone down.
In addition, I had what I now know to be a betrayal trauma response from all of the intermittent reinforcement of the 18 months of pick-me dancing. My brain was on fire 24/7, ruminating and worrying. I was hypervigilant and shaky. I could not focus or concentrate on anything or anyone but FW (my romantic partner of nearly 40 years, married for 30). The cognitive dissonance of trying to make sense of his behavior and still believing the garbage coming out of his mouth made me feel so hopeless and crushed that I did not want to be here any more. It was overwhelming.
The grief is now coming in smaller waves, but it never fails to swamp me when it does. One of my children had a birthday this week. The grief reared its head and lumbered around, taunting us even when we were laughing and celebrating. After a lifetime of sharing these events with FW it is so bizarre for all of us that he’s just…gone. And he blames us for this. Because we’re not over his ‘mistake’ yet, we haven’t moved on, we don’t want to be friends, etc. — all the standard cheater talk. He even says our kids abandoned HIM because they won’t pretend like everything is fine now.
I’m getting closer to meh every day, thanks in large part to this community, and I’m so grateful I now have an opportunity to share my experience and hopefully do something to help others who are experiencing their own DDays right now. It does get better, and I’m looking forward to Tuesday.
Yes. I feel like the man I loved died, or never existed. Even though it doesn’t make sense, my emotions and grief are real because I wasn’t living a lie.
You’re doing well; it takes time, and you’re over the worst. These days, I think of my ex-husband as being pathetic. With regard to the chaos, I think “that’s not my baggage to carry.”
Oh yes, uncontrollable crying. Forgot to mention that one on my list, in my comment.
Dear lord! I could have written every word of your post! Down to the birthday celebration and the DARVO blameshifting about abandonment!
The kids and I now see it as we’re better off creating new memories untainted by the poisonous presence of the lying snake narcissistic sociopath. Reframe it this way helps with “missing” FW.
Actually, that’s an insult to snakes and reptiles really.
For me it’s clear and nothing ambiguous : trauma, betrayal, destruction, at the hands of a monster.
It breaks my heart to see our children neglected and gaslighted when in FW care (shocker – lying covert narcissist continues to lie and manipulate post divorce!) but forced to maintain a semblance of relationship because they are minors in need of his financial support.
To me that’s ambiguous grief. Society does not even have a word for this ongoing pain endured by a FW’s children.
And it does not end with divorce, therein lies the horror. I witnessed firsthand for decades the continued lying of the NPD FW in the form of now octogenarian exFIL lying to FW narcopath.
Oops. Sorry, posted in the wrong place.
Yes, seeing what our kids go through is the worst. Mine were in college, but lived with me and caught the bus during the worst of it. People said, “So much better for them to deal with it now.” Mmm…they both had significant abandonment and identity issues that went full bloom. My older one said that it was like Dad blew up their entire childhood to the point that they didn’t know who they were anymore. Different from the younger one, who has some PTSD that periodically rears its ugly head. I invested a lot of time and energy with them while Dad was walking on the beach and doting on waitresses. And I paid for therapy when getting food on the table was a struggle. He got off easy in the divorce with no responsibility for their health insurance and college because the three of us decided that we needed to remove anything requiring ongoing contact.
My ex’s mom was undoubtedly somewhere on the NPD spectrum, and the family dynamic was way off. I learned pretty early on that I preferred to play with the kids or do the dishes rather than sit at the table with all of them for hours, particularly her. After his parents were gone, the oldest brother took over as patriarch, and he already had all of his mom’s scripts embedded in his thinking. My ex idolized that brother and wouldn’t stand up to him. Ultimately, I chose to cut them all off as divorce loomed on the horizon.
I’ve come to the conclusion that no one can understand our individual griefs or the singular pain we each feel given our respective stories. I’ve thrown so many of my pearls to pig in the mud that I only have one left, me. Do you truly understand what it feels Like to have a leg bit off by a shark while surfing? We get the idea, we cringe but who understands the mental anguish and years of rehab and a prosthetic. I’ve given up on true validation for anyone, best friends and even other chumps included, to completely get this grief that remains an undercurrent in my life. Not one X but 2 cheaters. I must validate myself, give myself the life I never had with 2 destructive men. Hold my dear friends closer, hold kids, grandkids…I do keep the anger that pops up with triggers often. But I need that anger just like I need a smoke alarm to keep me safe from another burn. Let’s love ourselves tenderly and love the good people who are all around us. But I must work to stop trying to make all people feel my pain. They have pain too. Enough pearls to swine. I’m keeping my own polished.
Love this, “Let’s love ourselves tenderly and love the good people who are all around us.”
So well said 2x chump . I trusted my ex to go through therapy and belief we mend & go forward but he did it again
It seems to be a common error (or self interest in the money to be made untangling skeins) amongst therapists that cheating is a temporary fixable problem that they can swoop in and fix rather than an unsolvable character problem.
The horrible truth unveiled by CL is that the serial cheating secret-double-life variety of FW is actually the usual sort. Out of the 8+ therapists involved over the years with us due to FW narcopath cheating, only 2 had this insight.
I believe FW’s can work at reconciliation, but only if the affair partner isn’t interested. In other words, if they’ve been dumped.
In my case the first therapist gave me a book on codependent no more and kept me in guilt tears and confusion until we switched , this man a marriage counselor , minister who gave us a book to read together and about intimacy and sex . Neither therapist cued to his need for porno obsessive flirting ,trying to get attention ,lying and lies by omision. I believe my ex worked his charisma on the therapists . He became someone his wife and kids did not know. He had went through an industry change and our Daughter said this was a catalyst .
I absolutely believe ambiguous grief applies to us as chumps. I believe the trauma of betrayal can absolutely be compared to both traditional grief and ptsd. I think grief and the symptoms of ptsd likewise cycle and repeat until it gets somewhat processed by the brain and body (as described by neurobiologist van der Kolk). I believe it is one of the symptoms that the trauma of betrayal effects on the body. The body/ mind go through a series of symptoms such as cognitive dissonance, hypervigilance, flashbacks, obsessive thoughts, rumination, avoidance, sadness (sad about loss, sad about rejection etc), nightmares, inability to sleep or eat, obsessive need to discover details, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, feelings of fear and terror, memory loss, extreme anxiety and panic attacks, emotional numbness, disassociation, shattered self-esteem and self-identity, inability to trust, withdrawal, depression and even hopelessness and sometimes suicidal ideation. I think it is this sadness and depression that may be experienced or interpreted as grief. Others might look at the chump (the trauma victim) and ignorantly interpret all this as “bitterness”.
Beautifully said. Absolutely.
All this is true…so much damage it is unbelievable 👆
There is chump grief, but it’s not the same as the grief you feel when a loved one is not present due to something like dementia, because you are dealing with betrayal at the same time and the betrayal is the reason the person is not present. I do think the grief part of it eases off when you get to meh and you do learn to live with the reality that you won’t ever get justice, though you will certainly never be okay with it. So I would not consider it the same as ambiguous or anticipatory grief.
The picture Tracy put up with todays blog,of the angel, head down over the tombstone. Touching and appropriate
It really paints a picture of the feeling.
I think my reactions and those of my adult children feel “ambiguous” for a couple of reasons:
One: This is not anything we ever dreamed could happen. (For us, after 36 years, my kids’ entire lives, we found out that my life partner/their dad is not who we thought, that he had an entire secret second life. That he was not the great guy we all thought he was, that he was actively deceiving us about who he was for who knows how long. Who was this guy, and why did he do this to us?) And it doesn’t just occur all at once. You piece it together more and more with hindsight. We also didn’t know anyone who had faced this. (At least until I found Chump Lady.) Maybe part of that came from the misplaced shame of chumps. A death, horrible as that can be and as sudden and unexpected, you know what to do, and everybody around you does (or should) too. Felt at a loss about what to do.
Two: I find I don’t recognize how I feel. Like others have pointed out, this is a particularly complicated situation. Not only is a person alive but absent or there but mentally not there, this person did this to you on purpose and may still be trying to blame you and cheat you in the divorce process. And it’s not just what happened with that person, you have to divide up the estate, move, start anew. Your whole life is blown up. And there are those lovely flying monkeys telling you this is your fault.
One of my teeth started to hurt. My dentist said, Oh, you injured your jaw by clenching or grinding your teeth. Oh.
I wake up all stiff and sore, end up limping around for the next couple of days, probably because I wake up curled into a tight, little ball. Oh.
Stomach upset. Oh.
Exhaustion. Oh.
Other people, like my therapist, had to point out, yeah, that’s from this. I don’t think they’d have to do that as much for me with another kind of loss.
“Who was this guy? And why did he do this to us?” — yes! That’s exactly it.