A reader recently asked, “In your worldview does the Cheater suffer any consequences? Or is it only the betrayed person who has to do all the work?”
This is a great question that should be addressed more often.
First, the cheater suffers consequences. There are always consequences when a person violates their promises and betrays their spouse. That is the reason the cheater lies and manipulates. They don’t want their spouse to find out, because they know that it will be bad for them. The person who betrays his/her vows knows what he/she did was wrong .
If you think about it, this makes sense.
Whether you call it the law of sowing and reaping, karma or the tao, there are consequences for the violations that happened. When you don’t do what you promised to do, there are consequences. Always.
However, the consequences of the cheater’s actions are not isolated to them alone.
The biggest consequence is that you have to suffer through the affair and all that it entails! The spouse who was betrayed endures tremendous pain, anxiety and confusion during an often long and drawn out discovery process .
How those consequences show up, when they show up and how the cheater deals with them are individualized. When you don’t see the consequences or they are delayed, you may wonder if they are experiencing them at all.
As the betrayed spouse you often never knows or can’t be sure that anything actually happened. That leaves you feeling crazy , insecure and suspicious . You wonder, “Did this happen? Maybe I imagined it.”
The cheater may deny having any issues or discomfort, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Some cheaters, in a manner similar to sex addicts, take a hair of the dog approach in dealing with their pain. They plunge even deeper into the affair to avoid unpleasant issues.
The structure of the question comes across as an ‘either/or’ situation. On one side is the hurt and consequences and on the other is the betrayed doing the work. The affair situation is not so easily broken down as that. This combines the concept of cause and effect with a variation of the guilt/blame balance.
The two concepts don’t go together that way. Cause and effect, with the whole idea of consequences is a separate idea from the guilt/blame balance.
Either of you can start working on your marriage relationship. Ideally, the cheater has more work to do than the betrayed in terms of recovery. The issue that comes into play, is that of pain. The betrayed often feels the pain sooner than the cheater. The cheater is already using cheating in dealing with their pain rather than experience its full impact.
Since the cheater has a way to deal with their pain, it leaves you as the betrayed holding immense pain without access to your spouse in dealing with the pain.
Typically the person hurting the most starts the recovery process. Both of you need healing.
Many times what happens is that the betrayed starts the recovery and takes on the pain of both spouses. Rather than let the cheater get motivated by pain, they start recovery and remove the pain before the cheater is ready. This adds to them feeling a greater amount of pain than they normally would (This is what I refer to as the pain see saw).
Although it is not up to the betrayed to do all the recovery work, they often try to do it all themselves, with mixed success. This is why it’s more important for the betrayed to focus on healing themselves rather than fixing the relationship in the early stages.
Problems arise when they focus more on fixing the relationship than getting their own healing done.
One place to start your own healing is with the video, “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the Walls and Remove the Roadblocks”. The video guides you through an important part of your own emotional healing.
Keeping it Real,
Jeff
