Healing After Betrayal and Infidelity
Recovery from the impacts of betrayal on the individual and coupleship can take years. During that time, both the betrayer and the betrayed, if they move into real recovery, can experience deep changes that lead to personal and relational transformation. For couples who want to work through betrayal and stay together, it is important to keep this hope for a better future in mind. But it is not, and should not be, a bypass around the very real and present damage of a broken heart.
Why Betrayal Can Feel Like Physical Heartbreak
The heart has historically been thought to be the seat of emotions. Although we now know much more about the interplay between our emotions, brain, and entire nervous system, there is still much we are learning. But those who have been betrayed often literally feel the heartache as pressure in their chest, as if their heart has been fractured and weakened. Our aching hearts tell of the very anatomy of our loss: of our shattered sense of the past we thought we knew but do not and of a present that may feel unmanageable; of our fragmentation; and of our existential worries about what the future will bring, and whether we can even withstand that future.
Grieving After Betrayal: A Path Towards Healing
Heartbreak is painful, and it can be purposeful. It points us towards our grief. Grief, at first, guts you, leaves you feeling unable to leave your bed, unable to think, unable to feel anything but the loss, immobilized by the sheer pain of deception.
But heartbreak, if we let it, can open to the healing potential of grief. And grief is a bridge. It is a shaky one, ropes and wood strung between the edges of two precipices, over a yawning canyon, an abyss we could topple into. But it is a bridge, and a bridge is a connector, a path, a way from what has died, towards a someday, someway, somehow.
You see, heartache can feel like it will swallow us. Like we will fall into that abyss. But grief says, I am purposeful, I am useful, and if you let me, I can help you heal. Walk with me, and I will open those wounds to the air, let the salt of your tears wash them, and eventually, I will weave new fibres between the edges of those gashes. I will show you how to knit the wounds back together. Your heartbreak left you cut open, and I will build scar tissue over the wounds. Later, when you are ready, you can tattoo brilliant colours onto those scars.
These are battle scars, and once we have been through such a battle, we do not keep those hard earned victories secret. Instead we support the fullness of our human expression when we let the truth of life be written on us. When those wounds heal, you will have had enough of the lies, and the deception, and the hiding. You will no longer keep your own secrets or those you have kept to protect others: for example, abuses you tucked into drawers, drawers into dressers, dressers into rooms, rooms behind doors, doors behind locks.
When grief is done its work, you will be done carrying those burdens.
Rediscovering Yourself After Betrayal
As you grieve, and the wholeness and humanity of the truth of you becomes real, you no longer want to hide, and you will be no party to anyone else’s hiding. You will see that here, after all of this, there is the magnificence of you, living, breathing you, beautifully and wonderfully made. And so you begin to open those doors and free what has been held prisoner. Often as you start to explore these rooms, you will discover more doors, further back, down long forgotten halls, and you will keep opening, sweeping out, letting the air and sunlight in. You are freedom sweeping, you are getting to the letting go. Finally, free of the secrets and pain and deception, you will discover there is a lightness, a levity, but along with this a new strength and certainty, a solidity of you that is grounded. This only happens through the initiation rites of pain and losses are battled, are won.
And one day you will wake up and you realize, I am really me in a new way. Because reality that was obscured for so long by deception and abuse, and the impacts of trauma, makes way for you, fully here, fully human.
Healing from Relational Trauma: What Is Lost and What Can Be Reclaimed
Grief says: eventually, I will recede. But I will never leave you entirely. This is because you do not forget what was lost, and some of what was lost can never be recovered. Childhood relational betrayal that left you maimed by the abuses of parents who really could have chosen to do better, or maybe by those who simply didn’t care enough to stay, to know you, to love you. Or a 5- 10- or 40-year marriage that twisted the life out of you, as betrayal does. You don’t get that childhood back, that time back, that life back. There is no recovering it. But there is recovery from it. Through heartbreak, as we open to the grief, there is restoration. And finally, and maybe even better, as we move back in time healing even the oldest of wounds, relational betrayals that started well before this present one, we can begin to cast out those lies that have created the false beliefs we may have built our life on. Then as we face the harm: both harm that was done to us and harm that we did to others, we may realize that we were never meant to live in the darkness and that what is in front of us is nothing less than freedom.