Trust and Consequences

Posted by fxckfeelings on April 21, 2011

Love without trust is always a painful, combustible combination. If your partner does something to lose your trust, s/he’s got to get lost, no matter how much love remains, and you’ve got to learn your lesson and move on. If you can’t trust someone whose behavior is OK because your trusting feelings just won’t come, then maybe the pain is worse, because there’s nothing to learn and nothing to do. In either case, when the trust goes, acknowledge that you’re not going to get what you want and need to settle for the best possible disaster before everything blows up in your face.
–Dr. Lastname

My partner cheated on me while I was pregnant with our baby, and kept ME the secret. He told lies about me and told people that we were no longer together so that he could openly date the other woman. I’m struggling to stop thinking about it all, and the whole ordeal has triggered a particularly intense bout of depression and self-harm. I have hundreds of questions I feel I need answers to, but my partner is 100% unwilling to discuss the matter, seeing it as “dragging up the past”. My goal is to be able to get through the day without memories of the betrayal and the gossip that surrounded it intruding on my life.

When a guy hides his relationship with you when you’re pregnant, you don’t have hundreds of questions that need answers; you’ve got a few simple, sad, unpleasant answers that need to be accepted.

After all, you’re not doing a PhD in trying to understand him. That’s a waste of time and, like most inquiries into the sad “whys” of this universe, a sneaky way of avoiding acceptance.

You could see it as him not being that into you, but the reality is that he’s not into anyone, at all, except for himself. At this point, the only important question is one you have to ask yourself, and it’s figuring out what’s the right thing for you to do, regardless of what your should-be-ex might think.

First, stop calling him your partner, because, as he made perfectly clear by his actions, he was a partner in sex, not life. Partnership means you work together and have each other’s backs. If you turn your back on this guy, he’ll move on to some other woman’s front before your shadow hits the ground.

There’s probably no way you can avoid some intense depression if you care about him a lot and expected more of him, but don’t make it worse by trying to figure out what went wrong, or where you failed, or why he doesn’t care any more. The only thing you did wrong was fool yourself about your relationship and his character and let yourself care too much. No big crime, but unfortunately, you can suffer horribly from such mistakes without ever really having done anything wrong.

So don’t make things worse than they have to be. It’s too bad you’re feeling depressed and suicidal, but the pain will pass. Nothing has happened that should lower your respect for yourself or change your priorities, and now that you know he’s not good for much more, you’re free to stop worrying about his ability to remain faithful and look elsewhere for someone who has that ability, period.

You’re now free to plan a better future; a lawyer can tell you how to secure financial support, friends and family can provide emotional support, as could a therapist or therapy group to address the issue of self-harm.

When a guy rejects you and acts like a total jerk, it may hurt more in the short run because you feel humiliated; the fact, again, is that you’ve done nothing wrong and he has. You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, other than to trust someone who doesn’t know enough to know when he should be ashamed. The answer might hurt, but the truth will set you free.

STATEMENT:
“It’s scary to find out that you’ve let yourself trust someone who’s basically untrustworthy, but love is blind. Recovery is going to hurt like hell, but better now than later. I’d much rather be gullible and hurt than nasty and cold, so my goal now is to be a good mother and take care of me and my baby in a way that he can’t and never will.”

If you were to have a casual chat with her, my wife would seem sane and reasonable; she’s a fine accountant and mother, but ever since she flipped out 7 years ago and spent 2 weeks in the hospital hearing voices tell her the FBI was after her, she’s had paranoid ideas about my having affairs behind her back. Sometimes, she knows it isn’t true, or I can joke her out of it, or she’ll talk about it as a symptom of illness. Other times, I see her giving me an uneasy look and pulling away, and I wonder whether I’ll ever have her trust. I wish I could persuade her to try new medications and get her paranoia under control, but she resents taking or being told to take medication, so I don’t try. My goal is to get her paranoia under control and save our marriage.

It’s sad to see weird, intrusive thoughts that come from nothing but mental illness tear a love apart, but it happens. Love can’t conquer all, and one of the worst things it can’t conquer is a paranoid delusion.

Your partner looks and sounds like the person you always knew, loved, and counted on, but a sudden flare-up of suspicion where there used to be comfort and love means you may not really have a partner any more. It’s hard to imagine anything other than a fairy tale curse that could drive someone away from the one they love, but the weird neurologic disturbances of mental illness can do it; it’s a real life evil spell.

Unfortunately, you can make it worse by trying to make it better. If you express your love, sadness, fears, concerns, sincerity, anger, you name it—you can’t change how she feels, except to make her feel discredited and blocked, which leads to more paranoia.

If medication hasn’t stopped it by now, it probably won’t. Theoretically, it’s possible she might be helped by some medication not yet tried, but not likely. For one thing, medications don’t always stop paranoid thinking, and, for another, paranoid thinkers don’t always take their medication (because, surprise, they’re paranoid about what it may actually do). So pushing her to take it may do nothing other than to make her feel annoyed, controlled—and paranoid. You see the pattern.

Your best bet is to accept her paranoia, and your loss. Don’t push her to be different, just see instead whether life together can be bearable for her, or not.

Don’t let sadness make you, or the kids, feel like failures. Success isn’t staying together; it’s finding the best compromise that eases her symptoms while allowing you to work together, if possible. What makes this task heroically difficult is that it leaves little room for your own needs, but you have no choice.

In the end, you need independence and other sources of support. You welcome what she can give you, but you dare not ask. Learn to roll with the punches of her paranoia, and if you can’t and they knock you out, defeat is never disgrace.

STATEMENT:
“My marriage is dead and what I have is weirdly similar, but basically different and subject to change without notice. For any number of reasons, particularly the kids, I’ll accept what I must and take pride in doing so, but I do so knowing these circumstances are hard, possibly impossible, and nobody’s fault.”