Beyond Stay or Go: Who You Become after Betrayal

there's another line in your book that I think carries a lot of weight because it focuses on the fact that not only is that relationship that you once had gone now, it's something different.

In your book you say, who you thought you were is also gone.

So they're not just dealing with a changed relationship, but a changed perspective of themselves, a changed identity.

Describe what actually shifts between that old person and the new.

There's a dying process and there's a lot of grief and confusion and it's complex grief and trauma.

But if you can ultimately engage the survival systems that I teach in the book, so like grounding, meditation, all of these very somatic floor to healing spaces that you need to be in, you can then ask yourself to become more conscious about the situation at hand.

And it's that consciousness that leads to everything else where you could choose back into things or not.

So one way of thinking about it, it's like Liz Gilbert's quote, there is no such thing as one way liberation.

And I have that in the book.

Whatever your spouse freed in themselves can also free you too.

So can you ask yourself, how is this happening for me in some way? Yes, it happened to me.

Yes, there are things that are happening to me.

What else could be happening for me around this? Is there a lesson I need to learn? Is there a pattern I'm noticing in myself? Where are the areas of friction inside of myself and outside of myself that are making this feel more like a Chinese finger trap instead of kind of a release and an acceptance? Those are your best clues as to where your own growth is hiding.

And once you can start to experience some little rewards in the process of personal growth, you start to kind of see things that you're proud of in yourself of how you're starting to show up differently.

And that's the new self you can begin to become.

I think you point out that it can be difficult to really have any kind of objective view of ourselves because so much is wrapped up in what we think other people perceive us or what that looks like.

You use the Cooley's looking glass self, that idea that I don't just see myself from an objective perspective, but my identity is really based on how I think other people describe me.

And in a marriage or intimate relationship, A lot of that tends to come from how we think our spouse sees us, values us, and so forth.

And so then the betrayal just brings a big break in all of that and exposes the identity of the person that now becomes very unstable.

I mean, I assume that that's what you're arguing, that that's the thing that needs to be really given attention to.

It's so many parts.

So yes, it shatters the role that we play as that person's chosen person, right? So one thing that you'll hear betrayed spouses say a lot is you are my person.

Well, the grief around being unchosen and unsafe in your most chosen safe relationship in life is the first kind of shattering that happens.

But then the shattering that also follows maybe at the same time, maybe shortly thereafter, is the perception that you've built of yourself as part of a family unit, as part of that partnership, as the roles that you play inside of that world.

It really breaks down every single part way that you have presented yourself to the world.