Question

Dear Shelley:

Overview: husband cheated, tried to make it work, husband stopped his counselling, blamed me for not having sex cause I could not get over the “other woman”, cheated again, now separated, living in the same house but separate rooms, one 14 -year- old daughter, husband is out every night getting his “happiness on” leaving me to our daughter and her questions which I have to make up excuses for him. He is manipulative and my daughter may be his next victim and I am physically and emotionally exhausted.  How do I survive and protect my daughter?  Do I let our daughter find out how worthless he is on her own?  

Drained and hopeless,

Latina

Answer

Dear Latina:

Best not to involve your daughter in your divorce issues.  It will only harm her. I am certain that she can see for herself what is happening and she doesn’t need to be involved. Trust me on that.  You do not need to cover for him. A 14 year old is smarter then that. You need to love her more then you dislike him.

Sounds like you could make use of some firm boundaries with your husband.  In order to reduce the extreme physical and mental exhaustion I suggest you start thinking about establishing boundaries, I.E. what you will accept and what you will not accept.  Have you spoken to an attorney to see what your rights are in the present situation? That would be a very good idea.  Is there a way for him to establish his own residency? Would you be willing to move?   If not, how can you create some lines in the sand as far as his behaviour goes?  Learning to say no and create consequences to bad behaviour is urgently needed.  

What are you doing to take care of yourself so the stress doesn’t eat you up alive?  Are you exercising, doing yoga, anything?  Do it!  It is a proven antidote to stress and stress kills.  How about support? Do you have close family and friends to lean on and if not, how about a divorce support group?  Are you eating well and getting rest?

A survivor is someone who takes action to move forward and address what is wrong in their life.  Start taking small steps everyday.  Only you can make the difference in your life…not to mention your daughter’s.  Learn to accept what you cannot change or control. Choose to handle this situation differently, in a way that will serve you.

Regards,

Shelley

Shelley Stile is an ACC certified Divorce Recovery Life Coach and author who guides her clients to let go the pain of their divorce and move on to create new and vibrant lives after divorce. Shelley has been through her own divorce so she knows first-hand about the journey of divorce recovery. Receive her free, powerful e-book, The 10 Secrets to Coping with Divorce’, and her monthly ‘Take Back Your Life After Divorce’ Newsletter by going to: http://www.freedivorcesupport.com.

If you’ve ever been the victim of infidelity the one thing you’ve wondered is “why” did he cheat? You will ask yourself that question dozens of times and may even think learning why the affair happened will keep it from happening again or relieve the pain you feel.

The truth is, knowing “why” won’t keep it from happening again and it won’t lessen your pain. Why not? Because you are not a cheater. No way can you control what a cheater does by understanding their motivation. And no way will understanding take away any of your pain.

If you have respected the boundaries of your marriage it is likely that you will never fully comprehend why a man would ever go outside the marriage for sex. The reason the cheater cheats is because he has an internal character flaw. He functions on the mistaken notion that going outside his marriage will solve his problems or fulfill his needs in some way.

Below are some of the more common reasons men cheat:

1. Some men cheat because they are not getting their needs met inside the marriage. They are under the skewed belief that going outside the marriage is justifiable. They get their “needs” met, their marriage stays intact and they delude themselves into believing that as long as their wife doesn’t know, no one is being harmed.

2. Some men have no respect for boundaries. They know that with marriage come certain boundaries when it comes to sex but they have little guilt when it comes to stepping over those boundaries.

3. Some men like the thrill of having something extra on the side. They don’t know how to pass up an opportunity to get a little “thrill.” The act of cheating has more to do with the fact that cheating is taboo than the actual sex.

4. Some men think they are not real men if they turn down a sexual invitation. They define their “manhood” by how attractive they are to the opposite sex. The more attention and propositions they get, the more manly they feel. These men are bankrupt on the self-esteem department!

5. Some cheat because they are hiding a secret. For instance, the man who is bisexual and hasn’t disclosed this information to his wife. He may love his wife and want to keep his marriage intact but, he will get his needs met. Maybe a man has a kinky fetish that is wife has a problem with…he may go outside the marriage to fulfill whatever his sexual desires are.

Whatever the reason it is the cheaters to own. If a man is not getting his needs met in the marriage it is his place to solve that problem without bringing a third person into the situation.

If a man has an issue with boundaries or low self-esteem, it is not his wife’s place to suffer the consequences. If you’ve been a victim of infidelity more than likely your husband has blamed you in some way.

I don’t believe in being a victim and I don’t believe in taking responsibility for someone else’s actions. If your husband has cheated and tries to tell you it was because there were problems in the marriage remind him that you were living in the same troubled marriage and chose not to cheat. A choice he could have made himself. A choice he is responsible for, not you.

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Women who have been left for another woman describe the experience in extreme terms:  Stella, sixty-two, whose husband left her for someone else after thirty-three years of marriage was typical:  “ I cried every day for two months.  I still cry two years later.  And railed and screamed in the car and burned his suit in effigy in the backyard, every witchy, crazy, demented thing you can think of.

I drove by their house and hid in the bushes.  I could be at work, get overwhelmed and go into the mini gym and cry and walk on the treadmill as fast as I could until it passed.  I lost thirty pounds but gained ten back.  Jangled nerves, twitching eyes, hyper alert. So sad like you wouldn’t believe.  This is the guy I’d been with since age twenty-three, the only guy for more than half my life and all my adult life.  It was depressing that he was pulling away into alcoholism anyway but this was the coup de gras.”

Carol Taylor, fifty-two, who unknowingly moved her whole family to a different state because her husband had a girlfriend there, says, “I was blindsided, every emotion you can imagine.  Furious, sad, terrified, overwhelmed, guilty because I hadn’t been able to protect my children.

I don’t know why I didn’t see the warning signs, he moved because his girlfriend was in Florida.  The move really hurt the kids.  I cried for two years every day so loud you could hear me in the neighborhood.   I found Al-Anon, they got me through.  It’s a godsend and it’s free—you can go fifty times a week if you need to. “

Romantic rejection actually triggers changes in our brains according to anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has studied the chemistry of romantic love.  Her research was an eye opener for me.  It answered many questions about my own reactions to being cheated on, rejected, and will probably shine some light on yours.

In Cut Loose she describes how brain scans of rejected people suggest that they secrete excess dopamine and cortisol during the initial phase of being rejected.  That’s why rejected lovers get frantic and tend to relentlessly pursue the beloved.  They may also take humiliating measures to reconnect with him, anything from writing letters to storming into the other woman’s home to begging him to change his mind.

Paradoxically, along with the stress and the impulse to protest, abandoned lovers also feel renewed passion.  This has a biological basis.  Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that produces romantic love.  But when love is thwarted, dopamine-producing neurons in the brain’s reward system prolong their activities.  As the beloved slips away, the very chemical that contributes to feelings of romantic love becomes even more potent, creating protest and romantic passion, which impels the abandoned wife to go to extremes to get him back.

I certainly sprang into action as soon as my husband told me he was leaving and tried desperately to hang on to him.  All of a sudden, I felt intense love and attraction for him when previously I’d felt mostly indifference.

If you ever wondered, like I did, where the intense rage that we jilted wives experience comes from, brain chemistry goes a long way to explain it. .  It seems that love and hate/rage are connected in the brain.   The primary rage system is closely linked to centers in the prefrontal cortex that anticipate rewards.   The common response to unfulfilled expectations is known as ‘frustration-aggression.’

In short, when people and other animals begin to realize that an expected reward is in jeopardy, even unattainable, these centers in the prefrontal cortex trigger fury.   Both love and hate produce excessive energy, drive you to focus obsessively on the beloved and cause intense yearning.  They can exist simultaneously, which is why we vacillate wildly between love and hate when in the throes of being rejected.

“You can be terribly angry at a rejecting sweetheart,” says Fisher, “but still very much in love.”  This reaction explains why jilted lovers stalk and sometimes kill their exes, or even resort to suicide.  Men commit the majority of homicides while women may attempt suicide.

Luckily, many suicidal women fail to kill themselves because they’re probably making the attempt to manipulate the rejecting husband into returning.  However, many do succeed even if they didn’t really intend to die.  Even though our strongest drive is survival, the drive to love can triumph even over the will to live.

Eventually these feelings wane and you must deal with another form of torture, hopelessness and despair.  In a study of 114 men and women who had been rejected within the past eight weeks, some forty percent experienced ‘clinically measurable depression..  The expression, dying of a broken heart, is not just hyperbole.  People do actually die of a broken heart.

They expire from heart attacks or strokes caused by their depression.  These statistics probably come from a study of rejection in college students where most psychologists do their studies.  If clinical depression is that common after rejection when you’re just dating, imagine how severe it is after twenty years of marriage.  Fisher compares the process to the infant mammal when separated from its mother.  When you isolate a  puppy in the kitchen at first it protests.  Eventually, however, it curls up in a corner in a despondent heap.

It’s amazing so many of us survive, and actually bounce back to find a better life.  As severe as our response is to grief, for almost all of us the will to survive is stronger.  We’re programmed to forget and go on.  I often think of what it must have been like in earlier days when women lost so many children before age five.  Their grief was just as intense as ours would be at such a loss, but they got over it and bore more children or the human race wouldn’t have survived.  We have inherited this ability to grieve and go on.   The expression “time heals” is very accurate.

Of course, not all of us suffer equally.  How we react depends on many things, including our upbringing.  The same women who deal best with loneliness because they had secure attachments as children, have the self-esteem and resilience  to overcome a romantic setback relatively quickly.

Those of us who grew up in tense, loveless homes where we constantly had to deal with chaos or rejection, are often left with few defenses after being dumped.  Biology plays a part as well. We all know women with sunny dispositions, who always see the glass as half full.  They take everything, including being left for another woman, with more equanimity and bounce back more quickly.

Erica Manfred is the author of He’s History You’re Not, Surviving Divorce After 40.  She has written for Cosmopolitan, New York Times Magazine, Ms., Parenting, Women’s Day, and Bottom Line/Personal.  She currently runs a women’s divorce support group in her hometown of Woodstock, New York.

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I spoke at a divorce support group last night and heard some interesting stories about adult children of divorce.   One woman’s ex told her 19-year-old son that he was about to divorce her before he told her.

Actually he asked his son whether he thought it was a good idea.  I thought I’d heard everything but this was a new twist.  The poor kid suffered a breakdown after the divorce.

Another woman shared with the group that her husband was a serial philanderer but she hadn’t told her 21-year-old son the real reason they split.  It seemed he had a variety of mental health problems and she was afraid of his reaction.  Her marriage counselor and his therapist agreed.

However, her son was curious about the reason for the divorce, and what his father had done and kept asking her.  Her ex just lied to him, she said.   I told her I felt her son deserved the truth.  She didn’t have to tell him the details, just that his father had affairs, period, but I feel that family secrets are toxic.

I shared with her that my parents split up when I was ten, and got back together six months later.   I had no idea why they split and neither of them told me.  After my dad died, when I was 35, I asked my very proper mother why they broke up and she at first said, “we had problems.”  I asked, “what kind of problems?”   She said, “you know, problems.”  I said, “mom, I’m thirty-five, you can tell me.”  Finally she said, looking very embarrassed, “well he had affairs.”

Strangely, I wasn’t shocked although I had no clue he’d ever had affairs. I never saw my dad flirt with other women or any signs that he’d screwed around.  But somehow it made sense, considering who they were and what their relationship was like.

She was the domineering wife, who controlled the marriage and took care of him, me and everything else.   He was the dependent and resentful spouse, who acted like a rebellious teenager,  just like my ex who also cheated, but just with the woman he left me for.  It made sense that my handsome dad would rebel by having affairs.   He was too dependent on my mom to actually leave.

I told the woman at the group that I wished I’d known about my father’s affairs.  She asked why.   I told her it would have helped me understand their relationship, my adolescence which was hell, and my own life.   I thought I had a right to know about them, if only to sort out my own problems and issues.

I wonder how other older divorced women have handled this issue?  How have you dealt with your adult children when it came to explaining their dad’s cheating, or your own for that matter?

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