It’s been almost a week now since I discovered my partner cheated on me and only a few days since I wrote about it in here where I came to the conclusion that I needed to give my partner a second chance. While I’ve had a little more time to clear my head and have really tried to start moving on from this, I’m finding doing so is proving to be extremely difficult. Having felt betrayed and my trust broken by him, has left me feeling like a wounded bird who keeps re-injuring itself over and over again through its own actions.
One may think, how is that actually possible?
In my case, it comes down to one simple thing. I have been spending vast amounts of time interrogating my partner about every littlest detail of this whole infidelity experience from the beginning of how it started to the end of when I caught him. What I am beginning to realize though in doing this is that it’s not only causing me more pain each time I do so, it’s also causing him more of that as well. And while my ego seems to get some sense of satisfaction out of that, my spirit has been showing me that neither of us are ever going to heal and move on from this if I keep doing that behavior.
The simple fact is that this infidelity experience occurred, but it’s now done and over with…hopefully and God willing. Rehashing any of the minute details of the whole thing has been doing nothing more than raising my anxiety, causing me to feel sick to my stomach, and reliving it over and over again. I’m not sure if it would ever even be possible to grasp why my partner did this as there are any number of reasons as to why he was led to doing it. I’m not him, I don’t have his thinking processes, nor the old tapes that play in his brain. So none of his explanations that he might offer me, nor having him tell me any more details of the experience, will help me in the least bit. Instead, it just makes me more frustrated and more angry to where I lash back out again at him.
While my ego might like the lashing bit because it wants my partner to know the pain I feel, my spirit does not. Doing so is not practicing forgiveness and beginning the movement towards healing and acceptance. It seems as if each time I probe my partner for more and more data trying to wrap my brain around what happened, I grow more sad, frustrated, and angry. In turn, he goes into deeper levels of guilt and shame and having any more of those feelings is not going to help him heal from this either. Thankfully, he’s taken some steps to find a therapist to help in his own process of healing as I know my partner feels terrible about what he’s done. If I’m truly going to practice forgiveness, I must, at all costs, drop my interrogation and berating to allow him to heal.
I know there’s a part of my partner that has been wounded ever since his childhood when he molested at around the same age that I was. Like it did for me for years and years, I believe being molested has prevented him from ever being able to fully receive unconditional love from anyone. While it will be his therapist’s job to help him figure this out, I can see clearly how my partner was trying to self-sabotage the deep intimacy and closeness we had been experiencing prior to his indiscretion because it was totally foreign to him.
The bottom line is that if I want my partner or myself to heal and move on from this experience, I need to let it go. That means not talking about it and rehashing all of its details. That means not berating my partner when I feel some of the pain surface from within me about it. That means waiting patiently for him to share with me anything that may come up during his own healing process. And that means going to my Higher Power through prayer and meditation to trust that I will heal from it as well.
I think it’s a normal reaction to want to know every little detail on a partner’s indiscretion, especially when so much love and trust is broken from it. I also believe it’s a normal reaction to lash out at the partner who cheated because of feeling betrayed. But to become a spiritual person filled with love and light and to give my partner a second chance, I know I must let all of those behaviors go and trust that God will guide the two of us through our own healing processes in our own way.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
