- Do you want to be somebody secretive?
Do you want to be somebody dishonest?
Do you want to be somebody
who doesn't honor your commitments,
or do you want to be somebody who tells the truth,
who honors your commitments, right?
Cheating, infidelity, open marriage, broken hearts,
this is gonna be a good one.
I mean, not for them, but we're gonna talk
about betrayal trauma and how to come back from it
and if and when you can.
Mended Light.
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Welcome to "Therapist Reacts Raw,"
where my producers give me something
that I've never seen or read or listened to,
and then I just respond to it in realtime.
So what they're giving me today is,
"I cheated on my wife three years ago.
She agreed to forgive me if we open the marriage,
but now, I live in agony every day."
This is from Instagram.
Okay, getting good stuff off the Gram.
So, "I cheated on my wife three years ago.
She agreed to forgive me if we opened the marriage,
but now, I live in agony every day.
So basically, my wife, 39, found out that I, 41,
have been hooking up with a woman I met online
who lived two hours away.
When the woman visited, we checked into a hotel.
This went on for three months,
and we had met a handful of times when my wife caught us.
She was waiting in the hotel lobby
and saw us coming down from the room.
She left me the next day."
Yes, that is the proper response.
"We separated for eight months,
and they were terrible on all of us,
especially the children.
We started talking about getting back together.
My wife thought that since our sex life wasn't enough for me
and that she was sure I will cheat on her again,
we might as well open the marriage.
I told her no because I've learned from my mistake,
but she wouldn't waver.
I relented, and we decided, she did,
not to tell each other the when, where, and with whom."
Oh, okay, so this isn't open the marriage
as in bring someone into the bed
with the two of us together.
This is open the marriage as in any of us can go anywhere
at any time and be with somebody else.
So first of all, don't cheat on your partner.
If you really feel like you want to be with somebody else,
break off the relationship, and that's hard to do.
It's hard to break off a relationship.
It's hard to get divorced.
It's hard to go through all of that, like.
It's a big commitment to end the relationship,
and so you think, "Well, maybe I'll end it
if I find something better, or maybe I'll end it
if this doesn't do the trick or whatever,"
but the fact is, this comes down to your integrity.
This comes down to who do you want to be?
Do you want to be somebody secretive?
Do you want to be somebody dishonest?
Do you want to be somebody
who doesn't honor your commitments?
Or do you want to be somebody who tells the truth,
who honors your commitments, right?
And then his wife says because their sex life
wasn't enough, "Let's open the marriage."
It's a big assumption that it comes down to sex,
that he was meeting up with this other woman
that he met online.
Like, yes, were they having sex?
Yes, but is that what it was actually about?
Odds are, probably not.
Sometimes yes, but usually, it comes down to emotion.
It comes down to feeling depressed.
It comes down to feeling anxious.
It comes down to being filled
with self-loathing, being bored.
It comes down, being afraid, feeling inadequate
compared to your spouse, and seeking somebody else, right?
Or not loving yourself, and the love that your spouse
gives you isn't enough, so you try and fill the bucket
with, you know, your love bucket
with affection from other people,
but because you don't love yourself,
there's a hole in the bucket,
and the affection just leaks out the bottom.
It's a mistake to assume, "Oh, it's just you weren't
having enough sex or good enough sex with just me,
so let's open the marriage."
He didn't want to, but she said, "Let's do it,"
and so he relented.
"Now, over two years later,
we are back to normal on the outside.
On the inside, I'm dying a little each day.
Every time I see her happy, I wonder if this
is just her old, bubbly self,
or if she was thinking of someone.
She is a very beautiful woman,
and I'm sure she has no problems finding men who want her.
Whenever she takes a shower after coming home,
whenever she rejects my advances,
I think that she has been with someone, and that kills me.
I've tried to discuss closing the marriage again,
but she shuts these attempts very quickly
with the divorce card."
Why end the relationship instead of having an affair?
Or conversely, if the relationship has issues,
or if you have issues personally,
why work through those things instead of having an affair?
Because there's no mistrust if there's no deceit.
There's no devastation if there's not betrayal.
So whether or not there were problems in their relationship
that he sought to console himself outside of the marriage
or there were problems within him
that he sought to console himself outside of the marriage,
what he created was a shattered foundation
'cause there's no trust anymore.
And then they decided to say, "Okay, it's an open marriage,
but we're not gonna discuss the when, where, or with whom."
So what we're saying is, "We're gonna have a partnership
based on secrecy."
Why not tell each other where, when, or with whom?
Probably to spare each other's feelings,
not make one another jealous, et cetera, et cetera,
but the fact is,
the suspicion, the doubts, the fears,
like, that all just surfaces and surfaces hard.
"Before all this happened, we had amazing sex
several times a week,
but now, we have probably done it
four to five times these past three years.
She demands I use protection,
and she refuses to let me," go downtown.
He uses a different phrase.
I'm gonna be gentle about it.
"She refuses to let me go downtown or bring her to orgasm.
I stopped asking because the sex is painfully bad now.
I haven't slept with anybody else
because the look on my wife's face in that lobby
still makes me sick with guilt.
(sniffs) I don't know how much more I can take.
I love my wife, and I want to spend the rest
of my life with her.
Will she ever stop punishing me? (sniffs)
Have you ever forgiven a cheating spouse
and stopped punishing them?
What's going on in her head?"
Okay, I can't say exactly what's going on
in her head 'cause I'm not her,
but when you made the choice to have an affair,
as I said just a minute ago, you shattered the foundation
of what this relationship was based on,
and so now, she's been spiraling,
looking for something else to base it on,
and she believed that her relationship,
her marriage was safe.
She believed that you were true and faithful.
She believed that it was just the two of you,
and that's broken now,
and so she doesn't know what to replace it with.
Why is she still married to you is the question,
if she wants to live this way?
Because it would seem it would be easier
to say, "Okay, this is not a relationship anymore.
Let's just be done."
It could be fear out of public perception, saving face.
What will people say?
It could be financial reasons.
It doesn't sound like she's
terribly emotionally connected anymore
or sees this as a partnership.
"Have you ever forgiven a cheating spouse
and stopped punishing them?"
Dr. John Gottman talks about three phases
to healing from betrayal, and we go over these
in our Healing from Infidelity course,
which you can take in conjunction with working
with one of our counselors, one of our specialists.
Atonement, attunement, and attachment.
Atonement means being fully accountable.
It's not just saying, "I'm sorry,"
but it's stopping the behavior.
It's not just saying, "I'm sorry."
It's not making excuses, rationalizing,
justifying, or minimizing.
Your partner needs to see that your remorse
equals the pain that you've caused,
that you're taking it as seriously
as they are because then, maybe then,
they could start to believe
that it's not gonna happen again.
During the atonement phase, your spouse needs
to be able to talk about their hurt,
their anger, their pain without you shrinking
into the discomfort of being in the situation
and stopping it and pushing or getting defensive
or lashing out, and during that phase,
they need to work through the fact
that they thought their marriage was safe
and discover that it's not,
that you were committed and discover that you weren't.
It's traumatic.
The look on her face, it's because she had just experienced
a trauma in that hotel lobby.
Now, from atonement, we go to attunement,
but it's important to realize that attunement,
it's just building on atonement.
It doesn't mean atonement's done.
You keep doing those things,
but in attunement, we say, "What was going wrong
in the relationship or in me personally
that led me to be vulnerable to that sort of behavior?"
Which isn't to say that if we had relationship problems
that cheating is justified because the fact is,
cheating is a choice.
It's choosing to cross a line,
and if there's problems in the relationship,
you can handle them in a million other ways,
but you still look at how can we strengthen our connection?
How can we work through the issues
that we were having to be in a healthier place?
And that is a job for couples therapy very often.
It's important to recognize, by the way,
forgiving a person is not the same thing as trusting them.
We think, "Once I'm forgiven, I've earned the forgiveness,
and then it's all in the past,"
but that's not what forgiveness is.
Forgiveness isn't earned.
Forgiveness is given freely.
Forgiveness is given because I don't wanna hold on
to bitterness, anger, hatred, rage, and grief.
I wanna let it go.
And forgiveness is not a one-time thing.
It's something you choose over and over
and over every time those negative feelings come up.
You don't forgive someone 'cause they deserve it.
You forgive them so that you can have peace.
You forgive to let go, and you can forgive someone,
by the way, without letting them back into your life.
You can forgive somebody
and still be done with the relationship.
That's because there's a difference
between forgiveness and trust.
Trust has to be earned
through changed behavior and consistency.
That's what trust is.
So my advice, "Will she ever stop punishing me?"
I don't know, but she still feels the need to punish you,
that, or she really likes her new lifestyle.
You should find out which it is.
'Cause if she really likes her new lifestyle,
and that's not a fit for you, then your marriage is over,
which sucks, but this is a really painful lesson
that you can move forward with
and not make the same mistake again
and have a healthy relationship
in the future with somebody else.
However, if she's punishing you, then the question is why?
Is it because she needs to punish you to feel better?
Is it because she hasn't felt from you enough atonement,
enough grief, and enough remorse or changed behavior?
You said that you wanted to stop.
Well, have you been sleeping with other people?
I would have the conversation and say, "I haven't been.
I'm wracked with guilt over what I did.
I don't wanna be that person,
and I understand if what I did ruined this,
and there's no coming back, and I will regret that
for the rest of my life, but I need to know:
do you want to have a healthy, committed relationship
with me, just the two of us?
Because I'm willing to do the work."
And if she says no, you got your answer.
And if she says yes, bravo!
You touched her heart, and she believes
that your contrition is real and is ready to move forward.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, I wanna invite you
to check out "Sex Fixes Everything, They Said."
It's one of our "Crap Therapists Say" videos,
where we talk about sometimes,
therapists don't give the best advice,
so we respond to it and give our substitute advice.
You can check that out right here.
Also, if you need help healing from betrayal trauma
and infidelity, I want to invite you
to work with a member of our team on that.
Go to MendedLight.com and schedule
a complimentary 15-minute discovery call to get started,
to get started on the healing.
Have any of you suffered from betrayal trauma?
How did it affect you?
How did you handle it, and how are you managing it?
Let us know in the comments below
because we like to learn from you
and have everybody learn from each other.
Until next time, folks, keep shining
because we need your light.
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