I feel there is a disconnect between WS and BS about the pain, the horror and the existential dread that infidelity forces into our lives.
It is in part natural for us to not be able to completely understand what happened to others if we didn’t experience it ourselves.
That is normal.
But just like when you read a book, you hear a story, you watch a movie that involves you, we can to a fairly good extent, identify ourselves with the characters that are living there.
We can do it so well, that we can often imagine ourselves in their shoes and understand what they must feel, moreover we can actually feel the feelings that are being portrayed as it is happening to us.
This is called empathy, and it is indeed powerful.
That is the disconnect between BS and WS i see often and also not exactly willingly, I am forced to experience .
And I get it, that goes both way when you are one of characters in the story and not an external observer. You do have your own emotional stakes. They will coexist among the other person’s emotions because they are yours and you can’t easily detach yourself from them if they are strong.
But it can be done. I can do it. I seen many BS capable of doing it. To try to understand the whys and the emotions behind their WS choices. Often with a sort of forgiveness if not for the act, for the emotional state and chaos their partner went through.
Depending on how fresh our own pain is and how much we healed or at least stopped the bleeding, we can feel kind of sorry and understand. If it’s very fresh or still hurts like hell, this feeling will clash hard with our pain, and that is an added factor that rips you apart from inside, as your pain wasn’t already doing a good enough job in eviscerating you, this is a bonus.
Sometimes it’s a relief that angers steps in because it pushes it back, so you only have your pain to confront, so we often welcome it, it gives you breathing room.
I think this might be why it seems to be more difficult for a WS to show a similar empathy. Shame is a defense against accepting a terrible pain, a pain that you caused, and if you can prevent yourself to feel even a fraction of it from seeping into the room where you are wrestling against your own emotions and perhaps, a beginning of guilt and remorse, shame is a great ally. You can now focus on "me". Your partner business is theirs alone. But they are welcome to come over and hear you. Allow you to explain and express your feelings, understand that you are not evil and you know you did wrong. Just please stop looking at me like I am a monster, I know I made mistakes, I understand. Hear me out. But please listen to me and understand what I feel. Don’t share your pain just yet, I need you to know I am not the villain.
And for some reason often we end up holding hands, keeping our pain away, not because we are stupid or that altruistic to trump our feelings.
Because we need to understand what we cannot understand.
And because hearing you out shifts our attention from our pain to the outside, it could be your pain means we matter if only a little? But is not just that.
We don’t want to look inside because our inside is terror, is not a nightmare that fades after the scare, is not just horror, is the realization that our inside is gone. There is just a cold and bottomless darkness where the pillars of our existence once stood, and we are terrified of this dark hole keeping swallowing everything that survived it, as that was our central foundation.
The word for this feeling is not fear. Is not horror. Although it encompasses all those, it is called terror. The void, the unknown, the unknowable dread.
But I am not telling you anything new in the end right?
You Can sense it.
You can feel it’s chill.
You know there is somewhere in your partner an abyss you opened under their feet.
That’s what the shame is keeping away. You don’t lack empathy most likely. Your soul knows that terror exists and that it’s a terrifying thing to face.
So you keep your emotional distance.
But the emptiness is strange, it does terrify and attract us to jump. We do want to know at some point what we don’t know.
We don’t want to read it written down from the pain carved on our partner’s face perhaps.
But maybe from a stranger who you have no emotional ties with, is more feasible.
The darkness and the cold is not as terrifying when it is not next to you. It cannot seep in you. It will not chill your heart. It is the same abyss we all BS share, but this one, this particular one is not the one opened by you.
It looks the same as all, but someone else did it. This is not your fault.
Maybe, being a stranger you may learn something. From the safety of the same detachment as a spectator, just like watching a documentary on Netflix, reading a book, hearing a story. Your empathy can do her job because you have no stake in this.
And from someone who faced the abyss and fought it I can give a glimmer of hope: when you see the monster in the darkness and put a light on it, it’s no longer terrifying, no matter how horrible once you see, once you know the enemy you are no longer struggling. You are already starting to win it.
It’s ugly but you can finally fight what you know at last.
I wish that this hopefully can help someone to flip that empathy switch on and understand how to fight it back if you so choose. This will never help my wayward partner, it can’t, but I hope that my time I invested into this does benefit someone else.
If it will, it was worthy.
—-
What do I feel when I’m betrayed. When I get hit by infidelity?
Unfortunately my means of communication make it impossible to properly transmit the feelings itself. Not really solely because I’m writing in a foreign language, but because I think some things can’t be translated into words.
This is the matter of emotion and it’s a language we speak, we understand and we share. You can perfectly feel it when you’re in tune with its frequency. It just can’t be articulated into words.
The best thing to share at least the idea, incorporeal quality of it, is through metaphors and picturing, as they carry emotional clues that your self can perceive as it knows those emotional frequency and translate them into intuition.
—-
Imagine you own a beautiful garden, it’s your pride and joy, you cultivated it with love and dedication since the day you were born. Your first breath of air was accompanied by you seeding the first strand of grass.
You love that garden and you never abandoned it for a second. Every plant, every tree, every flower bird and butterfly was born in it by your love for it.
Sure it is kind of your secret garden, you sometimes had doubts of trepidation to showed it fully to others, because it matters everything to you, and it would hurt if it wasn’t liked, appreciated or worse, disrespected and berated.
But you are proud of it nonetheless, because it’s everything to you. So you always wanted to show glimpses of it, maybe sharing curated pictures on social media, trying to present it at its best, to make a good impression, because you feel it is worthy to show it to those who seem worthy to you. But only you can call how much someone can see.
You even met some nice people along the way. Special people that you invited in, for a tea and cookies, friends. You showed them corners and you gave them a free access to those areas of your garden, they also invited you to see theirs, and that feels nice.
You might have met others too, people who you felt in the moment they should have a pass to see more of it. They were even allowed to live in it, sharing it with you, some were allowed to see more than others but that was a very special thing you gifted these ones.
For a reason or another they didn’t stay. Maybe they didn’t reciprocate your kindness with their gardens in the same way, maybe they didn’t really appreciate your garden enough and left, some might even been disrespectful to it, they might have uprooted something or tainted it or just selfishly took away what you had to offer, so you revoked their pass. Those were partners but only temporary, it didn’t work out as you hoped and it’s perfectly fine, each one caring about their own garden.
You might miss some for a bit, or you may resent those who caused damage for a while, but hey, it’s fixable. You will make it again, perhaps even better. After all each strand or thing that grows there is being cultivated daily by you. It will always flourish.
One day you meet someone who is truly special. You invite them in, you are anxiously excited to show them everything. You are a little nervous they might dislike anything but their presence is so fulfilling that you almost don’t care, better yet, if they think something can be improved that would be great, you are going to do it and it will also show them how much they matter.
You think this isn’t just another guest, they belong there.
So you choose them, you don’t just show or host, you follow the strongest impulse you ever had. "You know what? If you like it, stay. This is yours. We will make it ours. And it will thrive even more".
There will be no more guests, when friends will visit he corners they are allowed to, there will be you and them to greet them, because they belong to your garden just as much as yours, and you feel you belong in theirs.
And that’s how it feels and goes. Your garden thrives, new plants and trees are planted and growing, flowers are blooming like they never did, butterflies and insects buzzing around among the birds songs, the air is fresh and sparkling. If it’s not all sunshine and rainbows it doesn’t matter either. Sure there are pests and mosquitoes in every garden but you are no longer alone, it’s a team of two committed to make it the best you can. And you are doing it, relishing in the moments you can just both lie down and enjoy, hike in the trees or just spending a night watching the stars hand in hand.
One sunny day you are taking a hike among the trees smiling and talking and making plans for your gardens or maybe just listening to your chosen partner voice and chatting among the chirping of birds. The air is fresh you are at peace.
Then you wake up confused and hurting, you are in a hospital under surgery, your lower body shredded, there is only chaos and figures rushing to keep the blood transfusions going in your arms? Do you have still fingers? Where are your legs? Why can’t you move? What is breathing for you? What’s in your throat?
Why can’t you think clearly? Where are you? What happened? Where is your partner? Are they ok? Are they hurt? Can you see them? Please someone tell me they are ok, someone tell me something!
It will take o some time for you to begin understanding what happened. Turns out your partner sneaked in another person in your garden, some stranger that doesn’t belong there.
They have been placing explosive mines all over in secrecy for who knows how long and they have been hiding them everywhere, covering the holes in the best way they could, those patches that when you noticed and asked them they excused as something they were doing for some reason and nothing to worry about, they got this.
When you come back home from the hospital you are filled with dooming sensation, still tasting the blood in your mouth. The home is in ruins, it’s burned to ashes just skeletal ghosts of what once stood there allow you to realize that was were you were born, were you lived, what you built.
You rush to the garden hoping that somehow it survived, that the dang is cointained.
You are greeted by a picture straight from world war 1 no man’s land. It’s just craters to where the eye can se. fetid mud ponds full of buzzing pests, filled with innominable fluid where the remnants of your plants and tress and flowers are rotting along the festering corpses of dead birds and the other animals who lived there.
Theirs is nothing more than the desolation and the corruption of everything you loved so much. Just dep craters that seem bottomless filled with disgusting and decomposing fluids and trash you have no idea from where is coming, littering everywhere.
You do the only sensible thing you can think of right now. You run broken inside and still hurting from your injuries to your partner place, to tell them and hear if they know of the terrible news.
But once you get there you chill. You find out that their home they were sharing with you isn’t really there anymore. Just a cardboard cut to trick the eye. Their garden that they also promised to you as you gave them yours it was also fake. You were seeing only curated pictures and never the real thing.
More you see them, they are in another place, garden or not you are too shocked to register it now. And they are not alone. They are with someone else. The intruder they brought in your place when they planted the mines that blew you up.
They look like you thought you were with you, just not with you, with somebody else. Completely indifferent to the devastation of your place and your wounds.
You may want to scream, you may want to die. You may want to retreat in tears to your destroyed place and beginning the slow grind of salvaging from the ruins and rebuilding your life from zero. You may ask help to your friends, who will be shocked about the devastation and may feel overwhelmed, maybe wanting to help but they don’t know why.
You may even confront your (ex?) partner with or without their affair partner. And be met with lies and denial and even suggestion that you likely planted the mines yourself, so it’s your fault for blowing it all up. They may convince you that you are imagining things, nothing happened really, everything is exactly as it was before. You must be paranoid and unstable, it’s your mind playing tricks on you. Thing were always like that, you just misremember.
Probably you will get a mix of the above.
You will doubt your sanity, you will be torn between the realization of what happened and the wish to believe in your partner again, that nothing really matters it’s just a dream, you’re going to wake up in the woods we’re you were walking hand in hand and keep hiking.
There is only one thing that is certain and never stops reminding you. Your pain, your wounds, your missing limbs and finger. Gone as every strand they planted is gone.
You would like above everything to ignore that.
But you can’t.
—-
So this is more or less what it feels like.
At least I can relate pretty well to this picture.
I could add that there is multiple ways the story can go from there.
Maybe the partner doesn’t deny and admits immediately, showing remorse for what they done.
Maybe the persist with their actions for a while and then they knock back at your ruins asking for a second chance to rebuild.
You may let them in once again and begin rebuilding again your home and garden.
And you may later find that the intruder is still visiting your partner there, they are planting more and more mines that are just waiting for you to step over. Maybe it wasn’t just an intruder, it was a party of several, snuck in right under your nose, eac planting their own brand of mines.
Or they might have cut ties with their accomplice / accomplices, but they keep hiding the truth about what they did from you.
That equals to your partner hiding all the unexploded mines they placed with their affair partner under a carpet of fake grass covering the mud. Jealousy protecting the location of the explosive from you. They know they are there and how many they are. But they will not tell you, it looks normal enough after all, there is no need. Protect the mud, protect their affair partner’s mines, keep it hidden from you. That is the priority, you do not need to know. They are protecting you this way.
You will blow up again, is just a matter of time but you’ll step over it. They are making sure of it.
That is the trickle truths and their effect it will be as devastating as the first explosion.
I do not know if this will be helpful in the end or I just wasted my time.
Maybe this is simply something that I can relate to at a personal level.
Or maybe others feel the same way.
Anyway it’s how I would explain it, without digging too much the knife in the wounds, because it still doesn’t sound as bad as it truly feels.
I can say I tried at least.
Hope it is of some use.
