READER BEWARE – THIS ONE IS LOOOOONG…
Why is it that victims of abuse and betrayal feel shame when they are the ones being harmed and wronged? There’s something very counterintuitive about the shame victims of emotional/psychological abuse, and abandonment feel. Adults who were abused as children also often feel this way – even though logically, a child is not responsible or at fault for the harm caused by their abuser(s). It’s almost as if the victim’s feelings of shame represent a joining with the perpetrator in the all-too-common victim blaming that goes along with abusive relationship dynamics.
It wasn’t until recently I recognized that it was shame that caused me to hide my first and second husband’s sexual acting out (once I knew about it), flirting, narcissistic behaviours, lying, compulsive pornography use, pre-occupation with money/wealth/materialism over family priorities and other integrity issues. But shame didn’t only drive me to hide the pain I was suffering in my marriage from others, it also drove me to try to hide it from myself. For years, I did not want to face the fact that the person that had promised to love and care for me would behave in ways that could be so harmful.
In my first marriage, the evidence mounted for years before I really started to question my husband, I just didn’t want to see what he was doing to me – I didn’t want to face what it would mean. But, another reason it took so long for the evidence to become overwhelming enough for me to start to see my situation for what it was – he was also a really good liar. He was skilled at manipulating, blaming and gaslighting me. From the first time my first husband confessed to me that he had started developing a relationship with another woman at work (and this, when our first child was 18 months old and we’d been married only 2-1/2 years), I took it on. I determined (with his help of course) that there must be something wrong with me and that I had to be perfect to earn his love or keep him. I didn’t realize at the time, but now I see that he was emotionally abusing me. He wanted me to feel this way – and, some of the things he said to me to make me believe that his fidelity needed to be earned by me (even when he was busy carrying on and secretly acting out anyways)…it makes my skin crawl thinking about it now. But tearing down a woman’s self esteem is a tool abusive men use to control them – blaming, shaming and generally making their wife feel like they aren’t good enough and that if they don’t do XYZ, or look like a model, or keep the house clean, or make dinner every night by 5:00…then bad things will happen in the relationship – fill in the blank. For me, I was afraid he would start up another extra marital relationship but take it all the way next time and leave us.
My first husband threatened me in covert ways with his potential for infidelity more than once and it kept me in line for a long time (and after all the backflips I did, in the end, he betrayed and abandoned me regardless). One time, my first husband told me that the only reason he’d married me was because he knew I would always stay skinny (I was 25 years old and became a 104 lb marathon runner after that); another time, he told me that a lesser man would have left me a long time ago (we’d only been married 2-3 years at that point and I had been in university, we had a new baby and he worked nights – sure, things were hard and we’d had what I thought were normal marital disagreements for two people trying to get through school with a new baby… but, why did he have to make it about me?). Another time, my first husband remarked, as I was killing it in every aspect of my perfectionist life, that I was his “trophy wife”, and I actually felt proud of myself in that moment. I guess I thought I was “winning” somehow. But the lack of connection to him that I felt, the fear of what he might be doing while away on business trips, the sense that I was on some kind of hamster wheel all the time, just to keep him from humiliating me and hoping no one else could see what I felt – it was all too much sometimes. Being a trophy just means you make someone else look good while you sit on a shelf neglected. I recall speaking with clergy right after he left our family to go off with his affair partner and they said, “he loves you, he’ll come back”. His own parents said, “he worships the ground you walk on, he’ll come back”.
But, without really knowing yet that I had been in an emotionally abusive marriage for 14 years, and not understanding how common it is for abusive men to create an outward facade of devotion and caring for their partners – I knew they were wrong. He had fooled everyone else, and even me for a time, but not anymore. I recognized that I had not felt valued or loved by him for many, many years. In fact, I had felt on a cellular level that he had discarded me many times over the years, from fairly early on, without really knowing why. The shame and humiliation I felt when my first husband left me and our family was so difficult. I could no longer hide or hide from the fact that my husband did not love me and that he was discarding me openly.
Unfortunately, at the time of my first husband’s abandonment, the most common treatment available to me were various forms of covert victim-blaming, including telling me I was co-dependent, even though I did not exhibit co-dependent behaviours in any other relationship in my life. All of the therapy I received was geared towards helping me taking responsibility for “my part” in what had happened in the marriage. We like to feel in control, and I felt so much shame, and had been blamed so much by my first husband for his secret sexual life (especially after he left, the blaming and emotional abuse got much, much worse), that I spent more than 10 years after he left trying to figure out how I had contributed to the demise of my first marriage. But, after watching him bounce from relationship to relationship, and spiral into drug and alcohol abuse, I concluded that while I was far from perfect, he would have lived a secret sexual life no matter what I had done.
I probably embraced this freeing perspective around the same time I realized something similar in my second marriage.
One night, while attending a women’s conference, several years after marrying my second
husband, a speaker I was listening to briefly touched on the fact that women like myself who had been betrayed and abandoned often felt shame over these events occurring in their lives. Despite my best efforts to find someone to talk to about what I was going through (especially someone who had been through it and could really relate), I hadn’t found anyone to confide in, and it was a light bulb moment for me to hear this. I felt for the first time that maybe I wasn’t the only one that had been through betrayal and abandonment that also felt shame because of it. I was not alone.
In my second marriage, despite discovery of an affair 5 years into the marriage (which was ended immediately by my informing the affair partner that her new “boyfriend” was in fact in a committed marriage – she honestly did not know and was horrified to find this out), I continued to imagine that I could “fix things”, driven by the motivation to avoid a second divorce, and the shame that I felt would accompany another failed marriage. But after discovering many other inappropriate online relationships, actually speaking with some of the women my husband had asked to send him “pictures”, speaking with another woman who had actually been on dates with him, and catching him on a date with yet another woman one year after the first time I caught him having an affair, it still took me two more years of hiding the truth from extended family and friends while I got up the courage to face the shame of marital failure again. And I finally left him. I had learned what narcissistic abuse was like – he seemed to have no remorse or empathy, to feel entitled to his extra-marital activities and to have no sense of accountability or responsibility for his actions. I learned to accept that you just can’t change another person, no matter how hard you try. I had tried to go back to my old tricks of “giving it my all” as I had done in my first marriage, and it didn’t motivate my second husband to change anything. If an emotionally abusive man is committed to their entitlements, and their need to control you, nothing you do will change them. I felt shame again – but this time, it wasn’t because I didn’t think I was good enough – this time, I was ashamed for not recognizing the red flags at the beginning, for not getting out sooner, and for allowing myself to be cheated on, lied to, manipulated and hurt again.
6 months ago, I was still struggling with feelings of anger towards family, friends and members of my faith community that I felt didn’t or wouldn’t try to understand what I was going through. I felt judged and blamed; I felt the expectation that I “should be over it” after 15 years. I felt shame about two failed marriages and apparently not being able to let it go and move on. I felt ashamed of my own anger. Then, I came across podcaster Anne Blythe (see btr.org), and things started to change. For the first time since my first husband disclosed his work affair 26 years prior, I heard things that made me feel validated and understood. I learned that what I experienced in my two marriages was a form of covert domestic abuse – it was emotional and psychological abuse (with some sexual abuse, financial abuse and spiritual abuse sprinkled in for good measure). I used to wonder why battered women (those who experienced physical violence) couldn’t leave relationships and had “studied” the cycle of abuse as it was defined in the early 80’s as part of a school project in elementary school. During my second marriage, while trying to make sense of what I had been through with my first husband, and also trying to figure out why I couldn’t seem to leave my second husband, even when I knew he was hurting me, I thought, “I’m acting like a battered woman.” But at the time, I didn’t realize, that’s because the impacts of ALL forms of domestic abuse cause the same reaction in women, and even though I’d never received a scratch – I WAS AN ABUSE VICTIM TOO!
The realization that I had been a victim of domestic abuse was freeing. It was the turning point in my journey (a journey I’m still on, by the way). It was kind of like how Einstein had said that when solving a problem, the first 90% of your time/effort will be spent in defining the problem – once the problem is properly defined, THEN, you can solve it. After finally defining the problem of what was really going on in my first two marriages, I understand now that the abuser WANTS his victim to take responsibility for his abuse. As long as I was feeling shame, and taking responsibility as if I had brought the abuse upon myself – as long as I thought that somehow I was flawed and that it was because of my flaws that I couldn’t get my marriages to work, I was not able to see that the problems in my marriages were HIS abuse problem, HIS sexual acting out, HIS lying, HIS manipulation, HIS responsibility…and I had been unable to begin real, true healing.
Finally, the healing began. The true healing. Don’t get me wrong, I got along for 15 years after my first husband ran off with his affair partner. I raised four kids, built a career, ran marathons, traveled, did lots of great stuff. But my emotional healing was going nowhere.
Recently, while reading Brene Brown’s new book, Atlas of the Heart (and can I just say, I’m a super fan and have read all her books at least twice, and listen to BOTH her podcasts – what Brene Brown has contributed to the world’s understanding of shame and the development of my own emotional intelligence is nothing short of amazing), I came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks. She says:
“We know from the research that unwanted identity is the most powerful elicitor of shame. If you want to know what’s likely to trigger shame for you, just fill in this sentence stem: It’s really important for me not to be perceived as __________.”
So for me, and ALL the women that have been abandoned by their (so-called) committed partner, cheated on by their (so-called) committed partner, abused by their partner…or for all those that haven’t left, who maybe feel like they can’t yet (or ever)- as women who truly value marriage or committed partnership, who have families and are doing what we do (which is everything we possibly can to nurture and strengthen our partnerships and families), the blank in Brene’s quote above would be “discarded” or “rejected” or “not good enough” or “unlovable”. The unwanted identity of the discarded, abandoned, rejected, betrayed, unloved woman is the worst for us. And so, the shame.
Having come to a place where I understand, after a long journey that started with my own victim-blaming and looking for “my part” in the relationship problems, that the shame we feel naturally because of an unwanted identity truly belongs elsewhere. It belongs with the perpetrator of the harm done to us, caused by all the lying, secrecy, manipulation, gaslighting, betrayal, smear campaigns, blaming and general tearing down of one’s self esteem.
And I have a new identity now. I’m a survivor, a thriver and a Shero. No shame in that.
chandralaframboise.com 