Larry was taking the temperature of his 2-year-old daughter, Sandi, when the phone rang in the kitchen downstairs. He took the stairs three at time to catch it, figuring it was his wife calling to tell him she was on her way home. Larry had forced Jeanine to take a “night off” from caring for the kids, both of whom had the flu. She had left to go to a concert with friends three hours ago, planning to be home by 11. Now it was midnight. Sandi had been waking up regularly and Larry was beginning to worry — just a little.
The call was from Jeanine, or at least Jeanine’s cell phone. And one of the voices coming over the line was hers. The other belonged to someone Larry didn’t recognize — a man. It took a little while for Larry to make sense of the conversation. He was listening to a “pocket call.”
“I’ll be in town next week,” the male said.
“It was nice, being together in the dark,” Jeanine said. “Call me.”
Larry heard a car door close, then an engine starting up. His mind began to spin.
Larry and Jeanine came to therapy to deal with an affair that lasted six months between Jeanine and an old high school sweetheart. The discovery had come out of the blue for Larry, who believed their marriage was perfect — built on a bedrock of religious belief, close relationships with family and a devotion to their two children. He was devastated.
It was three months after the discovery, but only our second session together. Jeanine and Larry had tried to get through it on their own, but it was becoming clear they needed help. Fortunately, Jeanine had done everything in her power to save the marriage — called off the affair, expressed her deep regret and remorse, and begged Larry humbly to forgive her and keep the marriage together.
“It was a terrible mistake,” she told me, looking with despair across the room at her husband. “There is no excuse for what I did. But it’s been three months, and Larry is madder now than he was when he first found out. It seems almost a little crazy. Is there any way out of this?”
“How am I supposed to be?” Larry jumped in. His jaw clenching up, his feet tapping furiously, as they did whenever we talked of the affair. “How am I supposed to know this won’t happen again?” Jeanine slumped back in her seat, looking hopeless.
Her question is an important one: When this much damage has been done, is there any way back?
Under the right circumstances — a previous history of trust, true remorse from the unfaithful partner and a strong mutual desire to recover — the rebuilding of trust and eventual forgiveness can be achieved over months and years of attention to the relationship. But before that work can be effective, Larry’s emotions and Jeanine’s hopelessness have to be dealt with, and they are inextricably connected.
“Almost a little crazy,” Jeanine had described it. Larry was not crazy, but understanding what was happening to him was a key to the couple’s future together.
When Larry heard his wife and lover in intimate conversation during the pocket call, his brain — specifically, a primitive part of the brain called the amygdala — interpreted it as a threat to his survival. His body went into a state of hyper-arousal, ready to fight, flee or freeze. In addition, special neurotransmitters in his brain made a semi-permanent stamp in his memory, imprinting this moment in all of its shocking detail.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman calls this the “horror of frozen memories.” The amygdala is conditioned by these neurochemicals to be on the lookout for anything resembling the original situation — a movement, a color, a sound, a smell. After the painful experience of the phone call, Larry’s brain stood alert for even the hint of a replay of these events. But Larry’s hair trigger was not limited to real-world situations. The human brain has evolved to think about events and to imagine future possibilities, the human amygdala (alone among species) can be triggered into action by a word or a thought that evokes the memory, as well as by something real.
Here’s how Larry described it to me: “I can’t stop thinking about it. It doesn’t matter where I am — at work, on the golf course, anywhere, my mind keeps going back to that phone call. Then I get panicked. Then I get furious. Then scared again, until my mind is going in circles.”
Larry was describing the obsessive quality of thinking that often takes over in the wake of a traumatic life event. It’s like the mind needs to grind over each detail, trying to make sense, but never quite finding an answer. “How could she have done this if she loved me, like she says?” “Didn’t she think of me? Or at least the kids?” “How stupid I am, how blind not to have seen?”
Often revisiting every shared moment, every absence, every significant memory from the marriage in the light of this new perspective. “They laughed at me — made a fool of me.” “Everybody probably knows. What an idiot.” This is the kind of thinking that betrayed partners in an affair report, almost invariably. Of course it makes sense — the hyper-vigilant amygdala has kicked in to find the pattern in this threatening sequence of events — to prevent it from happening again.
In fact, Larry’s description of his reactions is relatively mild among the betrayed partners I have dealt with. He had lost weight, had trouble sleeping, returned again and again to the memory of the phone call. But many hurt spouses — more vulnerable to begin with, maybe, or more dependent on the relationship — have an even more powerful response. They may feel that their world has been turned upside down, that God has abandoned them or that nothing makes sense anymore. They lose confidence in themselves. They may experience recurring bouts of panic or rage. They may feel that life is hopeless and not worth living. They are experiencing Goleman’s horror of frozen memories. And they may feel this way for quite a long time.
For the more wounded partners, the answers may lie in something beyond just rebuilding their relationship. They may need professional help in dealing with these PTSD-like symptoms — those I’ve mentioned and others, including flashbacks or episodes of uncontrollable rage. The extreme responses to the affair are not the result of character defects or weaknesses; they are physiological and neurological responses to a perceived threat to survival.
While there are no typical couples, Larry and Jeanine are typical of a certain kind of couple who come to therapy to repair the damage of an affair. They recognize that their world has been irretrievably changed by the affair, but they want to make it work. For this kind of couple, the prognosis is good.
Larry spent time in therapy learning to mindfully monitor his emotional state. He learned methods to soothe his bigger reactions. Jeanine took to heart what she had learned about the painful and traumatic effects of the affair on Larry. As a result, she had the patience, understanding and commitment to ride out nearly a year of Larry’s intermittent anger and panic, and the periods of suspicious compulsive questioning that came with it. She became a true partner in Larry’s healing — even though it meant enduring his accusations and blame for what seemed like an eternity.
Larry’s powerful reaction to Jeanine’s talk about the affair three months after the discovery was a signal to me that he was still suffering from the unresolved shock or trauma of the incident. It’s pretty rare, in fact, that betrayed partners don’t go through an extended period of something that looks like this, including some symptoms of panic, anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking and flashbacks, and even a kind of numbed-out dissociation we associate with severe mental illnesses.
To Jeanine, unfortunately, who genuinely hoped to rebuild the relationship, these symptoms looked “almost crazy” — resulting in her feelings of hopelessness.
So, can you rebuild a marriage or relationship after an affair? For a couple like Larry and Jeanine, with sufficient amounts of commitment, patience, love — and possibly some understanding of the physiology of trauma — the answer is yes.
— Russell Collins is a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator. Click here for more information.