No Solid Narrative Ground

Great Betrayals

Anna Fels

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This predicament, a sudden revelation of new, pivotal information about one’s life, is the subject of many memoirs. . . . But what if you’re not a writer and don’t have the option of metabolizing this kind of toxic experience through the process of writing? Most of us can’t seize control of the narrative by publishing our side of the story or get the sweet revenge of going public with the other’s misdeeds.

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Discoveries of such secrets typically bring on tumultuous crises. Ironically, however, in my clinical experience, it is often the person who lied or cheated who has the easier time. People who transgressed might feel self-loathing, regret or shame. But they have the possibility of change going forward, and their sense of their own narrative, problematic though it may be, is intact. They knew all along what they were doing and made their own decisions. They may have made bad choices, but at least those were their own and under their control. Now they can make new, better choices.

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But for the people who have been lied to, something more pervasive and disturbing occurs. They castigate themselves about why they didn’t suspect what was going on. The emotions they feel, while seemingly more benign than those of the perpetrator, may in the long run be more corrosive: humiliation, embarrassment, a sense of having been naïve or blind, alienation from those who knew the truth all along and, worst of all, bitterness.

Insidiously, the new information disrupts their sense of their own past, undermining the veracity of their personal history. Like a computer file corrupted by a virus, their life narrative has been invaded. Memories are now suspect: what was really going on that day? Why did the spouse suddenly buy a second phone “for work” several years ago? Did a friend know the truth even as they vacationed together? Compulsively going over past events in light of their recently acquired (and unwelcome) knowledge, such patients struggle to integrate the new version of reality. For many people, this discrediting of their experience is hard to accept. It’s as if they are constantly reviewing their past lives on a dual screen: the life they experienced on one side and the new “true” version on the other. But putting a story together about this kind of disjunctive past can be arduous.

Understandably, some feel cynical if not downright paranoid. How can they know what is real going forward? How can they integrate these new “facts” about family, origin, religion, race or fidelity? Do they have to be suspicious if they form a new relationship? As my friend said in despair, “I’m just not a snoop; it’s not in my genes."

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FREQUENTLY, a year or even less after the discovery of a longstanding lie, the victims are counseled to move on, to put it all behind them and stay focused on the future. But it’s not so easy to move on when there’s no solid narrative ground to stand on. Perhaps this is why many patients conclude in their therapy that it’s not the actions or betrayal that they most resent, it’s the lies.

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[I]t’s often a painstaking process to reconstruct a coherent personal history piece by piece — one that acknowledges the deception while reaffirming the actual life experience. Yet it’s work that needs to be done. Moving forward in life is hard or even, at times, impossible, without owning a narrative of one’s past. Isak Dinesen has been quoted as saying “all sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.” Perhaps robbing someone of his or her story is the greatest betrayal of all.

I've written about this article before, with a focus on how it helped prepare me for certain unexpected reactions from friends. Now I want to turn to its other message: how important it is to one's mental health to begin reconstructing one's personal narrative after betrayal.

The first step of my personal recovery from my husband's infidelities was reconstructing the narrative of my and our life. That began with a document I called the "Timeline," which was one master sheet that included every important moment between us (when we met, our honeymoon, when we bought houses, when I became pregnant, the births of our daughters) and every attempted or successful betrayal (the physical interactions and, to the extent I could pinpoint them, the phone sex, video sex, chat sex, et cetera (access to his phone and chat records helped immensely with this)).

My husband tried his best to help me complete the document, to figure out exactly when this or that incident had occurred. But "trying his best" didn't mean he did it without reluctance - it was incredibly painful for him to face the facts of his actions, the extent and frequency of his betrayals. He simultaneously expressed concern that I was becoming too obsessed with the document - if I knew he had an affair with a given woman, if I knew they had met six times, three times for oral and three times for oral and vaginal sex, why did I also need to determine exactly when and where those incidents happened?

I can understand why, for some people, this would be crossing over into overzealous pain-shopping. And yes, at times I would almost hunger for the gut-sheering pain reviewing the document gave me - if I was feeling that hurt, he couldn't hurt me more, right? Other times, I would turn to my forensic work because it gave me a palliative sense of being productive in the midst of feeling lost, a sense of being in control after it became so clear I was not.

But it also made what my husband did real. I couldn't read and re-read the entries in the Timeline without being forced to confront and re-confront what he had done. April 19, 2014: While [Nona] is at her mother's house for Easter, Melissa comes over. Melissa and [my husband] have sex in the guest bedroom. They do not use protection. August 31, 2014: [My husband] talks with Cescily for about an hour and 15 minutes. They them have cam sex. And so on.

And, once it was real - once I had to accept that my husband - my husband! who could never have done something like this! - did what he did, I could begin reconstructing my narrative in a way that feels grounded on bedrock.

So what makes me think he's telling me the full truth now? He actively deceived me for years - and then spent two months trying to convince me that it was "just" emails and phone sex (all while assuring me that he could never cross the line of physically doing anything, but that he could understand why I had a hard time believing that).

The short answer: I don't. I will never know if I have the full truth. I no longer have the luxury of trusting what he says he did or didn't do.

I did uncover more evidence than I should have had - he thought he deleted his chats in his secret account, but Google saved them in hangouts, and as he often reported on his exploits to other women, I had the opportunity to cross check what he was telling me with what he had told them, and the stories generally matched. Second, he's shared more than he's had to. He's told me about embarassing failed attempts to cheat and events over a decade old that occurred in other countries and that I would never have learned of otherwise. Finally, I have a J.D. and an excellent memory - and I essentially deposed him for weeks. He had a tendency to compress his betrayals - the timeline, the number of actions, et cetera. But I drilled down on any details that weren't consistent until I had what felt like a complete-enough story.

Ultimately, though, I will never know if there is something he is still keeping from me.

But that doesn't mean the exercise didn't serve its purpose for my own healing.

Now I can understand elements of my history that didn't make sense at the time. Oh, that's why he reacted angrily when he went out to take photos and came back later than I expected and I chided him - it was guilt over having spent a half hour of that time away on the phone with another woman. Oh, that's why I had that weird feeling about him and his touchy-feely ex - it's not because I'm overly sensitive, it's because they were still using each other for sexual validation.

I also began to seize control of my own memories - to recognize that, regardless of what he was doing or feeling, my feelings at the time were real. The wonder of our honeymoon in Nepal? Real.  How meaningful it felt to host Seder, to start and then continue our own tradition? Real. The pride I felt for him at his residency graduation? Real. The joy and strength I felt after giving birth to our daughters? Real. 

At first, I wrote in the Timeline daily - editing, cross-checking with phone records and our shared Google calendar, hypothesizing. But, seven months out from D-Day, I haven't looked at it in weeks. I've certainly not done all the work I need to do of reconstructing my narrative - part of the point of this blog is to continue that work - but the Timeline helped me start.