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You’ve probably heard about the Five Stages of Grief. The stages were initially identified by author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to describe what a person goes through after finding out that they have a terminal illness. Here are the five stages and an example of what a terminally-ill person might say while in each stage:
- Denial: “There must be a mistake. I’m fine.”
- Anger: “Why me? This isn’t fair.”
- Bargaining: “God, I’ll do whatever you want. Just let me live for a few more years.”
- Depression: “What’s the point of anything? I’m dying.”
- Acceptance: “There’s nothing I can do. I might as well make the best of the time I have left.”
Some time after Kubler-Ross introduced this model, relationship experts realized that people who are going through the end of their marriage also go through the five stages of grief. Here again are the stages, along with a person what a person approaching divorce might say in each stage:
- Denial: “He won’t really divorce me. He’ll change his mind.”
- Anger: “This is outrageous after all I’ve done for him.”
- Bargaining: “I’ll do whatever you want…just don’t leave me.”
- Depression: “I never thought I would be divorced. What will people think of me?”
- Acceptance: “Life will go on after the divorce. I’ll be OK.”
In working with couples who have recovered from infidelity, I’ve pieced together the thought process that gets people into and out of affairs. I’ve written the following from the perspective of a man, but it wouldn’t be too much different for a woman. By the way, this thinking (except for the parts about sex) applies to emotional affairs as well as physical ones.
- Excitement. “Wow! An attractive woman likes me! Yes! Even though I’m [insert age here] I’m still in good shape and attractive. I’ve still ‘got it’! This is going to be great. I haven’t felt this much excitement in my life for a long time. We’re going to have a lot of fun and I’m going to be happier now. My girlfriend understands me, unlike my wife, who hasn’t understood me for years. I just have to be careful so that my wife will never find out about it. Actually the sneaking around part adds to the excitement!”
- Boredom. “This is starting to become monotonous. And it’s getting harder to sneak out of work and then to make excuses at home. My wife is asking why we aren’t intimate anymore, and at the same time the sex with my girlfriend is boring now. That excitement I felt a few months ago is gone. And my girlfriend is starting to annoy me; she wants to know where this ‘relationship’ is going.”
- Reality. “Maybe my wife isn’t really the problem, because things weren’t any better with my girlfriend. Maybe I have some issues of my own that I should look at. Maybe it’s true that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. I’ve cut things off with my girlfriend, but my wife is very suspicious because of some e-mails that she found. I wonder if I should come clean with her or if it’s better to keep denying everything. I really hope my wife doesn’t leave me.”
Rick,
I didn’t begin this letter with “Dear Rick” because you aren’t dear to me right now. Far from it. So for now “Rick” will have to do. It’s hard for me to even think about your name, let alone say it out loud.
There is no way that you will ever comprehend the magnitude of what you have done to me. The devastation is total. Everything that I married you for, hoped for in you, believed about you, KNEW about you is gone. All of it. There is nothing left. Where do I go from here, Rick? What do you expect me to do?
So even though I don’t believe that you will ever really get how I feel, I’m going to try to explain it anyway. My therapist says it will be cathartic for me to write this letter.
Remember the night you asked me to marry you? I do. I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve always been a dreamer. When I was a little girl I dreamt about the day a man would propose to me. I imagined what it would be like. And then it actually happened. I was the happiest girl in the world. I started to dream about our perfect wedding.
Remember when we talked about what name I would use after we were married? You told me that I should keep my maiden name because it’s my dad’s name and I am so proud of him. You were right. I am so proud of him. But I was marrying YOU and I decided to take your name so that it could be one more thing that we would share. I wanted us to share everything. Rick, I didn’t want to have my world and you have your world. I just wanted us to have OUR world. You could say that I left my family behind and invested my whole life and future in you. EVERYTHING. In YOU, Rick.
Then we had the perfect wedding and started our life together. I was still a dreamer, only now my dreams turned to us having kids, buying our first house, even growing old together.
Those dreams are shattered now. My whole life and future have been ripped away from me over the last few days.
How could you do this, Rick? I put my WHOLE LIFE into this. Everything I did, every thought I had, was about US. I thought you were doing the same for me and that you felt the same way about us. And all the time you were deceiving me. I feel so stupid now for falling for your lies. I cannot believe that you had a secret life that I wasn’t a part of. It’s hard for me to see how I could ever get back to how I used to feel about you or to ever trust you again.
Here’s the part that I don’t understand: I still love you. And that really puts me in such an awful place. I love a man who has treated me like dirt. Where do we go from here, Rick?
This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.
Becky
Note: this is not really a letter from a betrayed spouse. I would never violate a client’s confidentiality. This letter is merely the product of my imagination.
We’ve all heard of a man having a “mid-life crisis” during which he does things like buy a sports car and try to look and act younger in an (ultimately futile) effort to stave off feeling like an old man. This happens to middle-aged men all the time, but lately there is a new phenomenon that affects women who are in mid-life: the Walkaway-Wife Syndrome. I have been seeing more of this recently in my marriage counseling practice. (The term “Walkaway-Wife Syndrome” was coined by Michelle Weiner-Davis.)
Walkaway Wives usually initiate divorce within a year or two of the youngest child’s graduation from high school, when the home has become an “empty nest.”
Remember that during the early years of a marriage, the wife is typically the primary caretaker of the relationship. As the years go on, if she is unhappy, and her husband is unresponse to her concerns, she may eventually give up on the relationship and “check out” emotionally. However, she keeps this decision a secret because she wants to hold on until all of the kids have left home.
Then one day, “D-Day” in a way, she tells her husband that she wants a divorce. He is taken by surprise: “I had no idea you were unhappy. Why didn’t you tell me?” In fact, she had told him many times, but eventually gave up because he was unresponsive.
At this point, a lot of men will spring into action in an attempt to save the marriage. He’ll get in shape, losing weight and going to the gym. He’ll start to go church. He’ll read relationship books. He becomes very attentive and responsive to his wife for the first time in years.
Now the wife has a dilemma. Are these changes genuine, and will they last? Or will her husband go back to his old ways once she decides to stay in the marriage?
This is a very delicate time in the relationship, and marriage counseling can help the couple navigate through it.
I often see low self-esteem in one person having a negative impact on a relationship. More often than not, it’s the woman who has the self-esteem issue. She may think that she’s not attractive, not valuable, not loveable, not as good or as smart as others, etc. Therefore, she fears that her husband/boyfriend doesn’t find her attractive, valuable, or loveable, and this causes her anxiety.
The relationship problem results because the woman has a tendency to intrepret things that her husband/boyfriend says or does in a negative way, even when the man doesn’t mean to be saying something negative. For example, the man makes a comment on his wife’s appearance which may not be 100% positive (maybe it’s only 80% positive). Unfortunately, the wife, due to a systematic bias in her thinking, interprets the man’s comment as something like “I’m fat” or “I’m ugly.”
This upsets the wife greatly because her husband’s good opinion is very important to her due to the fact that she doesn’t have an especially good opinion of herself. At this point she may reply to her husband in anger or in some way “picking a fight” and an argument ensues.
So the woman’s self-esteem issue is causing a problem in the relationship. If follows that a person can improve his or her relationship by working on his or her own self-esteem!
One more post about domestic violence. It’s a good one, though.
When we think about men who are violent towards women, we naturally think of the man as of being in a position of power over the woman. Typically, he is physically stronger, and he is using his strength to hurt her and to intimidate her.
Yet ironically, even though we think of the abusive male as being powerful, he is being abusive because he feels inadequate. He feels bad about himself for some reason, and he defends and compensates against this feeling by exerting his physical strength against a weaker victim.
What are some things that the violent man might feel inadequate about? Here are a few:
- he has just lost his job, or had some other major setback in his life.
- he doesn’t like his job or is doing poorly at his job.
- his wife/girlfriend is more successful than he is; perhaps she makes more money or just received a promotion.
- his wife/girlfriend has a better education than he does.
- his wife/girlfriend has left him (possibly due to previous violence).
All men feel inadequate at times. The issue is how well the feelings are dealt with. Obviously, a man with a strong ego and decent self-esteem is able to handle situations like these in healthier ways.
It is hard for many people to fathom why an abused woman would stay in her relationship. We might ask, “how can I help her to see that she needs to get out?” But let’s not judge someone until we’ve “walked a mile in her moccasins!” (Or let’s Trade Places like we talked about here a few weeks ago!)
Consider things from her perspective:
- She may feel financially dependent on her husband/boyfriend and believe that she could not support herself and her children if she were on her own.
- She may be afraid of:
- Greater physical danger to herself and/or her children if she tries to leave.
- Being stalked and beaten worse than before.
- Emotional damage to her children.
- Losing custody of her children.
- The unknown. (”Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”)
- Making formidable life changes.
- She may still love him. It sounds crazy, but emotional dependence is powerful. She may still see the “good” in him and think that he won’t hurt her again. In fact, during the “good” times, when he is not abusing her, he may seem like a great husband.
- She may have strong religious convictions and believe that divorce is wrong.
Again, it’s best not to judge someone until we put ourselves in her shoes. And let’s be careful not to blame the victim. After all, it’s not her fault that she’s in a violent relationship.
You might think that in California, in the 21st century, we would be smart enough, educated enough, and advanced enough that domestic violence would be a thing of the past.
You would be wrong.
I saw many victims of domestic violence during the year that I was an intern at Tri-Valley Haven for Women, a domestic violence shelter in Livermore. “The Haven,” as it is called by those who work there, is a valuable resource to the community because it houses, counsels, educates, and assists women who have been beaten by their husbands or boyfriends.
Now that I’m in private practice as a marriage counselor, I still occasionally encounter domestic violence in the couples that I work with. When that happens, I tell the man that he has to make a commitment to non-violence as long as the couple is in counseling with me. If the violence continues, I won’t see the couple together but may work with them individually.
By the way, some people wonder why so many women stay with men who beat them. That’s a great question, and I will answer it in my next post.
Some couples who come in for counseling have severe “trust issues.” I see this most often in younger couples who are not married. The couple may not have been together for very long, and most likely were in previous relationships where one or both had experienced a cheating partner.
In the most severe cases, a person may be obsessing over whether or not their partner is cheating, even if there is no evidence or reason to suspect. A nightly checking of the partner’s cell phone to scroll through the text messages, or looking for multiple calls to an unrecognized phone number, or breaking into the partner’s email account to look for any incriminating emails are all things some partners do to convince themselves that no cheating is going on.
There are a couple of questions to address here:
- What can be done when a person is obsessing over his/her partner’s trustworthiness? In this case, traditional treatments for obsessions, such as the “thought stopping” technique, can be valuable. Three simple methods to use are:
- Thought Replacement: when an unwanted thought enters your mind, immediately replace it with a healthy, rational thought. You can only think about one thing at at time, so crowd out the “bad” thought.
- Thought Stopping: when you catch yourself with the unwanted thought, immediately shout Stop! either aloud or only in the mind. Continue to shout Stop! until the unwanted thought ceases.
- Thought Disputing: Challenge the unwanted thoughts that come into your mind, asking: “Is this a rational thought? If not, what is irrational about it? What do I need to do to change this idea?”
- How can I really learn to trust the person I love? (I am assuming, of course, that the person really does deserve your trust, in other words, that they are not cheating.) Trust can be defined as “a measure of belief in the honesty, benevolence and competence of the other party.” How can you expect to spend the rest of your life with someone you will always suspect? Some believe that when you enter into a new relationship, you are starting all over again and can leave the baggage from a previous relationships behind. While that may be possible, it doesn’t always happen. The fact is that when you move onto a new relationship, hurts from the past are still present. Give yourself and your relationship time to build trust. If we have spent enough time with our partner to develop strong feelings for them, trust should be part of that. Do some research on the topic of trust: what does it really mean and how can each of us reach the goal of trusting together?
Trust is a vitally important part of any relationship. If you feel the need to do any of the checking mentioned above, how about trying some of these ways to start trusting your partner?
There is an interesting article in The New York Times today about a couple who took vows never to be apart, night or day. They always stay within 15 feet of each other. I thought about this and decided it would be impractical for just about everyone in our society. Jobs, if nothing else, would make it impossible for most people. The couple described in the article don’t have traditional jobs (they write books and live an ascetic lifestyle in a desert tent) so that’s not a problem for them.
In addition to staying next to one another, they also eat the same food from the same plate and read books together, not turning the page until both are ready.
Even though it’s probably impossible for most couples, part of me thinks it’s a really cool idea. The level of devotion and couplehood is very impressive. It certainly is in contrast to a lot of couples I meet in marriage counseling who don’t spend much time with each other at all.
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