How Not to Have a Victim Mentality Although You’ve Been Victimized
Once you have mastered the Stoic approach, rather than bemoaning things that happen to you that you may label as bad or unfortunate, you’ll learn to welcome them as an opportunity to hone your ability to create value from adversity . . .
The other day, at my divorce recovery retreat called A Course on Happiness, the women attending learned to activate their superpowers. Everyone at the online retreat had been left by their husband from what they believed to have been a secure committed marriage till the day he left out-of-the-blue, morphing dramatically into an angry stranger.
The first workshop I presented at the retreat is called The Obstacle is the Way, based on a book by Ryan Holiday. The workshop describes the philosophy of Stoicism which, in a nutshell, teaches that if you can view any setback as an opportunity to grow and develop skills, you’ll strengthen your character, making you better able to handle anything life sends your way.
Once you have mastered the Stoic approach, rather than bemoaning things that happen to you that you may label as bad or unfortunate (i.e. your husband leaving), you’ll learn to welcome them as a chance to hone your ability to create value from adversity (e.g., training your thinking to look for things you can feel gratitude about). A simple cliche to describe Stoic thought is turning lemons into lemonade.
Women who are struggling to rebuild their lives after Wife Abandonment have a lot of emotional work to do in order to regain a sense of peace and meaning in life.
They have to figure out how to stop their mind from whirring obsessively about their ex.
They have to learn to stop regretting and blaming themselves.
They have to banish the sense of shame that many feel for being single.
They have to grieve all they have lost.
They have to train their thinking in order to envision a new and different future.
Time heals to some extent but it’s what you do with the time that makes the difference. That’s where the work comes in.
After your husband leaves and when you are over the initial trauma, you essentially have two choices.
You can wrap yourself in the cloak of victimhood, explaining to everyone who comes near how unjust it is and how unfair he was, attempting to elicit sympathy, or
You can work through the perfectly normal grief (this might take time) but eventually develop a defiant attitude that says, “I’m not going to let his leaving ruin the rest of my life.”
The Stoic approach would guide you, perhaps, to practice doing things when you’re really down that you really don’t feel like doing, although you know they’re good for you, like going for a walk or cooking yourself a healthy meal. Getting yourself to do those things takes emotional work but the more you do them, the easier they become and the better you start to feel. And along the way, you develop the skill of good self-care.
In Runaway Husbands, I offer this piece of advice: “Don’t press ‘send’ when you’re still in your pajamas!” By that I mean, although you may want to send a begging, pleading email to your ex in the middle of the night, it might not look like the best idea in the cold light of day. If you can practice the skill of self-control and wait a day, you’ll probably be glad you didn’t humiliate yourself by “pressing send”.
The fact that your husband left forces you to struggle to do the thing that’s in your best interest even though it’s hard. This will strengthen your character and you will grow from it. The more you practice self-control, for example, the easier it will become and you can add it to your list of superpowers!
So, what skills do you need to apply to achieve the items on the list above?
To stop obsessing, you can use your determination to stop yourself from ruminating and instead, distract yourself. When you see that you're on that mental hamster wheel, turn on a documentary about Italy or listen to some beautiful music to help your mind rest.
To stop regretting or blaming yourself, you can read the work of Dr. Kristen Neff and learn to practice self-compassion.
To banish shame, exercise the courage to join a single women’s MeetUp group and go together with your new single friends to activities.
To grieve, permit yourself to feel the pain without fearing that it will overtake you.
To envision a new future, encourage yourself to explore new things, no matter how small, that you can incorporate into your life.
You can change your perspective to look at this huge setback as an opportunity for you to challenge yourself, turning it into multiple lessons on living. It's all about appreciating your life, no matter what form it’s in at the moment and in the end, you'll be proud of how mighty you’ve become!
So, when you encounter anything hard in life, try to look at it differently. View it as an opportunity for you to reach down and bring up your best stuff so you can face down the situation with courage, patience, self-love, determination or resilience. There will be no lack of opportunities in life for you to rise to the challenge and put your Stoic skills in practice.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
We Will Muddle Through This Together with Courage and Grace
If you can stay in the present moment, do some exercise, don’t let yourself awfulize and remember that this is not going to last forever, we’ll all muddle through this. You’re going to have to be tough and not spill your worries on your children or any other vulnerable person in your life. You can do this! . . .
I’m struck by how this crazy virus crisis is the same as being hit by Wife Abandonment Syndrome. You’re going along, living your life, unsuspecting, and then something unthinkable happens out-of-the-blue. Your whole pattern of living changes in a short period of time, new revelations unfolding day after day. You keep hoping that it’s not true, that there’s been some mistake, but there’s no turning back.
You think longingly of your secure past, when the world made sense but now you’re living with an uncertain future. You don’t know if your finances will ever recover. You worry about how it’s going to affect your kids. You’re managing a sense of fear and threat all day long. The landscape of your life is unrecognizable.
Whew! Double whammy! For those of you who have newly experienced wife abandonment, I can’t imagine what you’re going through. At least, you know you’re not alone - you and everyone else on this planet are in the same boat! The coronavirus crisis most likely stirred the cauldron of emotion about your husband’s departure. You may be feeling acutely alone and worrying about who will take care of you if you get sick. It may have awoken your anger that he is with someone and has abandoned you to your fate.
Like wife abandonment, in the current crisis there’s no way around it - you have to go through it. It forces you to work on yourself, to be calm and not spiral out of control. It requires that you strengthen your mind and figure out how to tame your emotions.
You need to stay in the present moment. Most probably, if you had never heard of the coronavirus, you’d be more or less fine (okay - just dealing with the runaway husband). It’s spring and the trees are budding, the flowers are coming out here in the northern hemisphere. We worry about what will happen but if we could just stay in the here and now, it would help. We’ll deal with whatever will come when it comes. Like they say in AA - one day at a time.
This is how I’m coping. I’m quarantined and working remotely with clients so I’m pretty much home most of the time other than taking the dog for a walk. So I start the day early with a half hour meditation and that’s very important. It’s a mini-vacation for my mind.
During that half hour, I try to keep my focus on the meditation and as my mind wanders away like a frisky puppy, I summon it back. Some days it’s easier than others but I always feel better after meditating. And, by the way, there are sometimes other women from our Community meditating at the same time using Insight Timer (the link is on the Runaway Husbands website) and I love that! If you want to join, you don’t need to commit to a half hour. Start with ten minutes and slowly work up over a few weeks. Just do it every day. It will do you good.
Another thing I’m doing is some form of exercise - usually yoga. I tune into a YouTube channel called Yoga with Adriene. She’s a sweetheart yoga teacher who lives in Austin, Texas and has dozens of classes of all different levels and durations. It’s very low tech and you know she’s a good person. Her dog, Benji, is often just lying around near her yoga mat. So there’s another hour when I’m not thinking about the coronavirus.
I’m cooking good food and walking in the sun and I’m more in touch (remotely) with family and friends than I typically have time for. And, of course, I’m lucky because I’m very busy with work.
If you can stay in the present moment, do some exercise, don’t let yourself awfulize and remember that this is not going to last forever, we will all muddle through this. You’re going to have to be tough and not spill your worries on your children and any other vulnerable person in your life. You can do this!
It’s always important to strengthen your health, don’t eat or drink too much and quit smoking, if you smoke. And at some point in the future, you’ll say, “Remember that crazy time in 2020 when the world was reeling from the coronavirus? Wow! That was intense.” And life will go on.
Just know that I’m thinking about you. If you’re on our Runaway Husbands Community Facebook page, tune in to my Facebook live Q&A (7:30pm eastern on Wednesdays), when I answer questions and just connect with you. We’re a community and now, more than ever, we need to support each other with loving kindness.
Stay well and share your thoughts below.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Don't Let These Men Define Us Incredible Women!
Don't let these terrible men define us incredible women. We are so much better than them and we should be thankful to be free of someone who doesn't value all that we have to offer. I used to obsess over the fabulous life these young women were having with my husband, and then I realized he's not that great and he's not smart enough to keep up his fake charade of being amazing for very long.
Okay. Kick off your shoes. Get a cup of tea. Get comfortable. This is a long one but oh, so amazing. Here’s a heartfelt letter I received from Michelle from Atlanta and I so very much wanted to share it with you. It’s full of great advice to you from someone who has been there and gotten through it. Thank you so much, Michelle, for giving me permission to publish it! I know it will help so many women!
When my husband essentially abandoned me I was so distraught, but in my case he strung me along with false facts for many painful months. By him telling me how awful I was, that I wasn’t a supportive wife, that he didn’t deserve to be treated so poorly, and that I should have seen this coming, he kept me in a state of panic and desperation. It also shifted the power dynamic completely to his favor, despite my knowing none of what he was saying was true. I started the long “pick me dance”, and so began my many months of complete humiliation trying to convince my husband that he should come back to the life he claimed I forced him to leave.
When I think back now on all the completely degrading ways I kept trying to get him to acknowledge me (and the children), I feel sick. Through very expensive lawyers and years of waiting for discovery, I finally found out a lot of the truth. My husband was not only cheating, but with multiple women and spending money like he was a billionaire when he wasn’t. It was only first class travel, expensive hotels, lavish meals, etc. I am too embarrassed to write how much money was spent in a typical month, and what's even worse is that he had nothing tangible to show for it except an expanding waist line.
I can't believe he was able to get away with this for so long. I truly believed he was spending all of his time working on our growing business. I mean I did see him on TV as he was interviewed on CNN and Fox News, so it wasn't that I was completely delusional! The depths of the lies and deception were incredible and eventually it did lead to his downfall at work, but that just too impacted me financially.
Now with time, I realize that a man who cared about me would never leave us for himself and blame me fully for it. That he was a coward and a covert narcissist. That I kept trying to convince him he had it all wrong and that our relationship was worth saving, probably just made him feel great, but didn’t change a thing. It also didn’t stop him from syphoning our money secretly to new accounts, setting up new credit cards or sleeping with age inappropriate women.
There were lots of red flags during the time he left before I found out the truth, but I had made it my mission to convince him to come back and stupidly overlooked all of that. Also, with the perspective of time, I can see that even if all my convincing had worked, or if the younger women had dumped him, that I never would have had the same relationship again with my husband. What I mean is that I was on such a campaign to have my old life back I never really stopped to realize that what I was fighting for wasn’t worth it anymore and that I deserved much, much better.
The only comfort I have in this nightmare is that one day I can tell my children that I did absolutely everything to try and save our marriage. Something my ex-husband will never be able to say.
Here are some things that I would recommend to anyone else going through abandonment::
1) Watch videos and read self-help articles but don’t share them with him. I scoured articles and videos online that seemed similar to our situation and sent them to him often. I was obsessed and there is a lot out there to find. I doubt he ever read or watched them.
2) Don’t send him messages late at night. I sent him repeated texts very late at night, or in the early am, when I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes they were loving and sometimes pleading and begging for him to respond and return to us. Sometimes I was upset and lashed out. He rarely responded, but that didn’t stop me from sending. I now know he was in bed with other women at the same time. This probably made him feel even better about himself since he was getting away with cheating and I was still begging for him. So degrading and disgusting!
3) It’s ok to be stunned and hope he will come back, but don’t wait too long. I told lies to our children and friends that he was busy working and out of town to cover for him and keep his spot open in our life in case he decided to acknowledge me and our kids one day and come home. Looking back I should have probably only done this for a month or two, not almost a year.
4) If it looks like a duck, it’s a duck. I found a lift pass for a 20 something year old female for Machu Picchu in our home and believed his story when he said he had no idea what it was and that he had never even been there. Later I found out that he had in fact gone there with this girl, paying for two first class plane tickets, expensive hotels and a private tour guide, all while he claimed he was working in a different state.
5) Don’t be afraid to snoop. I didn’t check the cell phone bills. I think I was afraid for what I would find, but boy how I wish I would have done so much earlier than I did. I would have known the depths of how much he was cheating and with how many random women. This from a man I could barely get to respond to a text from me or the kids, I found hundreds, if not thousands of text messages with random women. That stung.
6) If you see something unbelievable, don't convince yourself it's not possible. I saw my husband in his SUV on the road in front of me with what appeared to be a young woman in the passenger seat and started to follow him. I then called him while following him and he said I was crazy and just seeing things. I proceeded to follow him for miles and miles and he wouldn’t pull over. I think this may have been one of my lowest points. I later found out that I was right. There was a female in there the whole time who had climbed into the back to hide. Did I mention I had his own mother in my car with me while all this was going on? I still feel so sick about that experience when I think back on it now.
7) Don’t sign anything! I signed what I thought were refinancing documents for our new home that turned out to really be a way for him to pull out extra cash to spend on his secret life with women. I wish I had not “trusted in my husband” and sought outside counsel before signing anything. I was more concerned with being a loving, supportive and welcoming wife, that I went against all of my better judgement. I can see now that the time around the signing of these documents that he was charming and manipulating me and it worked. Don't fall for it!
8) If he moves out, change the locks. If you can change the locks or set up surveillance cameras to keep him out, do it! In my case leaving the door "open" for his return majorly backfired. I found out in court while on the witness stand when my ex's lawyers put papers in front of me that were in my handwriting, that my husband had invaded my privacy and stolen from me. Apparently he knew when I was out of the house with the kids and took his time going through everything, and I mean everything. He even stole some of my things and my favorite jewelry, though I could never prove it. But the worst of it is he managed to find my personal therapy journals and took photos of everything and then attempted to use them against me in court! I was beyond mortified and humiliated.
Here is some advice for someone who is in the worst part of their nightmare:
1) Enjoy the divorce diet weight loss! Seriously, I actually got down to my college size jeans and was amazed. It also helped with my low self esteem after being rejected by my husband.
2) Don’t avoid going to gatherings or events where it will be mostly couples. I always ended up having so much needed fun and it is rare that the couples stick together the entire evening. Feeling normal from time to time was so nice.
3) Keep appointments that you don’t think you can handle. This includes hair cuts, mani-pedis, doctor's appointments, book clubs, school meetings, family gatherings, etc. I always thought of cancelling, but every time I went, I came home grateful for the distraction. There is nothing worse than time alone to keep you from being able to move forward. Know that you will go there and people will ask about your husband and or talk about their amazing husbands/lives, but don't let it affect you.
4) It's ok to not want to take your wedding rings off. I found it very hard to remove my wedding rings, so I rarely did. One thing I would recommend is maybe going to a grocery store or to an event well outside of your normal living area without them on as a first step. I found a grocery store two towns over and actually had single men interact with me which was a nice and welcomed feeling. People might say something to you about still wearing your rings, but it's not their business, and only you can decide when you feel comfortable removing them, if at all.
5) Take up a new hobby that your husband would have thought was stupid or a waste of time. Mine used to make fun of me when I made jewelry. I enjoyed making it (therapeutic) and giving it as gifts to friends. Now I am trying to make a real business out of it! I know it isn't probably healthy, but I dream of my jewelry line becoming successful not just for me and my kids, but so my ex can be frustrated.
6) Try and find a local divorce recovery workshop. They usually are not expensive and typically they have a speaker first and then break into smaller groups. I met some incredible people who I still talk to today. It’s tough to even show up and a bit humiliating, but don't leave! The one I went to actually had volunteers in the parking lot to help convince you to come in because they said so many people would turn around and leave. I’m so glad I didn’t!
7) Be prepared for the people you thought would be there for you not to be. I’m not sure why, but divorce to some people is almost like you have an infectious disease. They want to be supportive but not get too close. It’s upsetting, but if you know that it might happen, you won’t take it too personally. Sadly, this also applies to close family members. There were some get togethers that I wasn't invited to when normally I would have been. It hurt a lot, but just know that it will happen. I was also told once by a friend that I wasn't invited to something because the hostess was afraid her husband might talk and flirt with me. Strange but true!
8) It’s ok to let go of the commitment you made in front of your Rabbi/Minister/God. It is ok to let go of the dreams and all those plans for your future. This really is the hardest part, especially if you have children together. When I would think about being an empty nester all alone it made me feel physically sick. I held on thinking that one day that my husband would have an epiphany and remember our vows, our life, our plans... but that day never came. A man who would cheat and lie doesn't care about those commitments and only cares about himself. Plus who wants to be with a man who doesn't honor something so sacred? Would you have married him the first time if he had done this in his previous relationship with another woman? Probably not.
9) I feel it's ok to contact the other woman, but don't say anything incriminating that can be used against you! I never did this and regret it. The main young woman my husband cheated with is still hanging on to this day. I wish more than anything I would have reached out to her once I saw evidence years ago. Of course I don't know what would have happened, and chances are she still would have stuck with my husband because she is fully supported by him, but at least I would have gotten my truth out.
10) It’s ok to put yourself out there to date even if you still believe the horrible things your husband said about you. There are several women I am in touch with from our Sedona trip who say they have just given up and don’t even attempt to look for a relationship anymore. I say that is so wrong! That means their ex wins! The ex is still hurting you despite being long gone and living their fake new life with their pre-pubescent girlfriend. It’s like taking poison and hoping they get sick.
Final thoughts - That I was willing to do anything to get my dream back was, and still is, so humiliating. It’s also tough to come to terms that my not so great ex chose someone not so great over me. I’ve heard all the sayings like, “your better off without him”, or “one day he will realize what he gave up”, but the problem is that doesn’t make you feel any better. It still really hurts that my husband gave me up, our children, our fabulous life, all for a 20-something year old art school drop out who is not particularly attractive or smart.
Yes, I may be in my 40’s, but I am highly educated, told I am fairly attractive, am a very compassionate, friendly person, who is well liked and respected. Did I mention I have two Emmy awards? None of this was enough to keep my husband committed and it still hurts to this day. Sadly, I still fight daily with bitterness, which I hate. I dream of karma but it hasn’t come. Or at least not the way I want it.
However, I do know how lucky I am. I am recently remarried to the most incredible man. He sees in me all the things my ex-husband discarded and apparently didn’t value. My kids even like him (though that took some time and removal of their father’s brainwash and lies). I feel lucky every day, and I work very hard not to sink back into my bitterness and anger since I still have to deal with my awful ex due to the kids and our business. When my new husband and I tell people our story, we often hear the words “fairytale ending” or “I just got goose bumps”. I NEVER would have imagined that would be me since I was stuck for so long believing what my ex thought of me. I am so glad I opened my heart back up.
That is the main point of this letter. Don't let these terrible men define us incredible women. We are so much better than them and we should be thankful to be free of someone who doesn't value all that we have to offer. I used to obsess over the fabulous life these young women were having with my husband, and then I realized he's not that great and he's not smart enough to keep up his fake charade of being amazing for very long. This is a guy who managed to misspell my name multiple times on birthday/anniversary cards (not kidding)! He is destined to disappoint even the dumbest of dingbats.
This is Vikki again - I’d love to hear your reaction to all the great advice Michelle has shared. Take a minute and tell us what you think below. And, Michelle, thank you so much from all of us!
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Mother, Champion, Queen, Goddess . . . but not Wife
One of the themes that wound through our talks at the Sedona Retreat this year was how many of the women felt ashamed. It was taken for granted that it was more valuable to be married or in a relationship than to be divorced.
Often, when I’m leading a divorce recovery retreat in Sedona, Mexico or Montreal, the participants ask what they should say if a group of us walks into a restaurant and someone asks what our group is about. Over the years, we’ve jokingly decided to say different things – we’re a group of women CEOs or an international quilting club.
We’ve called ourselves circus performers or said that it was a high school reunion (in spite of the fact that our ages ranged from 32 to 70!) One year, we said were a women’s barbershop chorus but then someone asked us to sing – whoops!
But one thing we’ve never said, at least not till this year, is that we’re a divorce recovery retreat. We didn’t want people to know. Why? We were ashamed.
One of the themes that wound through our talks at the Sedona Retreat this year was how many of the women felt ashamed. It was taken for granted that it was more valuable to be married or in a relationship than to be a divorced woman. To be participating in a divorce recovery group, by definition, means that someone rejected them. It means that they are struggling to recover and are not the victor in the equation. It means that they are the vanquished.
We talked about this. We talked about how pervasive the view in society is that if you don’t have a ring on your finger or a partner in your bed, you’ve failed. So many women grow up expecting to be married – it’s the stuff of girlhood fantasy, particularly for those in their 50’s and above. It’s the goal, the expectation – it defines what it means to be an adult woman. It means that you’re valuable, wanted, desirable.
So then we talked about how to start to tinker with the erroneous belief that divorced women are “less than” and for the women to start see themselves as valuable. We called out the names of women we admire who got their fame through what they accomplished and not through husbands or partners: Rosa Parks, Oprah, Amelia Earhart, Beyoncé, Madonna, Mme. Curie, Mother Teresa, Ellen, Lady Gaga, Malala Yousafzai. We talked about what Serena Williams had printed on her shirt at the French Open this year: “Mother, Champion, Queen, Goddess.” You notice, the word “Wife” was nowhere to be found!
We opened up a discussion of how to shift our feelings about ourselves – to love ourselves and stop being ashamed – an emotion that comes so easily to women. Thinking it through and integrating that being single is nothing to be ashamed of is a challenge but it’s where we need to go.
So the next time all twelve of us went into a restaurant and someone asked us what our group was about, we proudly said: “We’re on a divorce recovery retreat!” We thought of Serena and owned it. Champions!
Share your thoughts below about the feeling of shame of being divorce and how you are going to overcome it. And if you are interested in attending a divorce recovery retreat, check out the Jump Up! happening in Montreal this September.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Are You Looking for Closure?
Many women feel tremendous frustration due to the fact that their husbands just vanished without any proper conversation or explanation. It leaves them hanging - longing for closure . . .
Today is the first day of the Sedona Retreat 2019. Eleven women from every corner of the U.S. as well as central Canada have gathered here in breathtaking Sedona to work on healing and moving on from wife abandonment. We had our first workshop today and one topic that came up often was the wish for closure. Several women talked about the tremendous frustration they feel due to the fact that their husbands just vanished without any proper conversation or explanation. It left them hanging - longing for closure.
What is closure? After a long term relationship, closure means a husband showing respect and sensitivity to the fact that the wife did not want the marriage to end and is deeply grieved by his decision. He would do that by providing time and effort to help his wife integrate what has happened - to talk it through, try to help her understand his change of feelings, care about how she is going to adjust to her new reality.
But many men who decide to leave either have stopped caring or are deeply uncomfortable with their wife's distress and choose to distance themselves from it as quickly as humanly possible, leaving the wife without any expressions of heartfelt concern.
That leaves the wife needing to find a way to give up the wish for a sense of closure that she will never experience. It's a decision she must make, for her own mental health, to accept that she will not receive that expression of concern. She has to decide to let it go and move on nevertheless. Hoping and longing take a lot of energy. To truly care for herself, she needs to accept that for some things in life, closure is an unavailable luxury.
Along the line of letting go, I wanted to share with you a poem by Safire Rose that I like a lot.
She Let Go
She let go.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the fear.
She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.
Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice.
She didn’t read a book on how to let go.
She didn’t search the scriptures.
She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go.
She didn’t journal about it.
She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She just let go.
She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
She didn’t utter one word.
She just let go.
No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort.
There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…
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Let me know your thoughts about closure below. Are you still holding out hope? Did you get the closure you want? Tell us more!
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Do You Need to Forgive in Order to Heal?
Women have often asked me whether it is necessary to forgive their ex-husbands in order to heal and that’s a question that has stymied me in the past. But in researching forgiveness, I’ve come up with a fresh approach, complete with a healing technique, that can help.
Since I published Runaway Husbands in 2010, women have asked me from time to time whether they need to forgive their husbands in order to heal. It’s the one question that has stymied me because forgiveness didn’t really enter in to my own process after my husband left. It’s not that I either forgave him or not. It’s more that I came to understand why he left in the way he did and then I stopped really caring.
But I know for many, the hurt continues on long after the offence has been committed and we are always looking for ways to heal. So when I was preparing workshops to present at my recent divorce recovery retreat in Mexico, I decided that it was time to tackle forgiveness because I know it may be important to you.
I found two streams in my research on forgiveness. The first involves the idea of turning the other cheek. It is defined as follows: Turning the other cheek is a phrase in Christian doctrine from the Sermon on the Mount that refers to responding to injury without revenge. This passage is variously interpreted as commanding non-resistance, Christian pacifism, or nonviolence on the part of the victim.
This path would require the person who is hurt to step back from a typical reaction in which she might want to even the score, access justice or make the perpetrator hurt back in equal measure and instead, she would have to accept and integrate what people are capable of, and, in the interest of peace, just take it.
A step further along the same lines is when I hear that a woman is trying to pray for the one who hurt her. Both actions, turning the other cheek and praying for the perpetrator, put the power back in the hands of the victim who, although victimized, is not going to be beaten down, but rather, chooses to take the high road.
Women who have attempted to go this route have mentioned how hard it is. The hurt is so great that although they pray for him, their hearts are not in it and then they not only feel badly about him leaving, they also feel badly that they can’t forgive in this way. If they are unable to actively forgive him through prayer or acceptance, it just complicates the process of healing.
The second stream is different. It focuses more on softening the hurt that the woman feels inside rather than actively trying to transmit forgiveness to the one who hurt her. In this sense, I think that the word forgiveness is misleading. What she will be doing instead is closer to developing detachment, distancing, letting him go, and then moving on to self-love and self-compassion.
Michael Beckwith, the spiritual leader from Culver City, California, contributed these thoughts in the excellent Netflix documentary called HEAL: Every authentic spiritual path has some teaching around forgiveness. All forgiveness is self forgiveness because the resentment I may hold towards another or the unforgiveness or the rancor, all of those thoughts are happening within me. Even if someone did me wrong, I still have those thoughts – those thoughts are affecting me. They’re affecting my body temple. They’re affecting my blood chemistry, affecting everything.
He went on to say: So when I begin to forgive the so-called other person, I’m releasing resentment, anger, animosity. I’m releasing all that unforgiveness so that actually, I’m forgiving myself. Now, it doesn’t necessarily let the other person off the hook for whatever they did, it has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with me.
The goal of this approach towards forgiveness is to drain away the pain you feel inside. When you no longer feel the hurt, you no longer feel the hate, and isn’t that a feature of forgiveness? The focus is on healing that internal pain and then naturally, you’ll no longer care enough about the person who hurt you to wish him ill. As author Wayne Dyer wrote: Forgiveness is a process. A choice you have to make over and over, every day until you're free of hurt. Forgiveness is not something you do once, you do it over and over. It’s an action, a choice. Decide that you don’t want to live with the effect of that anymore.
I know what you’re thinking: “Great! Now how am I supposed to do that? Heal the hurt? If it were just a matter of deciding to do it, I would have done it by now!” Of course, you would have! But this stream of thinking about forgiveness does offer some strategies and they go something like this: When you are aware that you are suffering hurt thinking about the person who hurt you, close your eyes and get in touch with your breath. Start breathing regularly and deeply and when your start to relax, visualize something - a place, a person, a pet, a memory - that brings you peace and joy. Stay with that image until it fills you. Feel it! And then take a few more deep calm breaths and open your eyes.
At first, it will be hard to do, almost impossible. But if you continue practicing this meditative “thought replacement”, you will get good at it and eventually, you will soften the hurt until it melts away. It’s a technique of replacing the hurt with appreciation for something precious and for the beauty you still have in your life. It’s something you can actively do - it’s within your control. And it’s both free . . . and freeing!
So do you need to forgive in order to heal? No. You need to heal in order to forgive.
Think of something troubling and then try the breathing technique and tell me how it goes in the comments below.
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Hi! I’m Vikki and I'll be your guide in your recovery process from Wife Abandonment Syndrome. I’m a therapist but also an abandoned wife like yourself and I know what it feels like. I want to help you not only bounce back, but to discover a new you in the process.
