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Authors: Jeanne Safer

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THE AFFIRMATIVE NO

What are the tasks that anyone who has been betrayed must accomplish? Grieving for one's losses—for bad choices, for lost time and destroyed hope and misplaced devotion, for the shame and self-laceration (conscious or unconscious) that all these things evoke—this is fruitful sorrow. Learning to live with doomed longing for an unrequited beloved (one who is unwilling or unable to reciprocate devotion) until it diminishes as life goes on. Recovering the ability to trust oneself and other people instead of retreating into terminal self-doubt and paranoia. Neutralizing the inevitable rage and hatred directed against oneself and the other. Restoring self-respect and a sense of control over one's own destiny.

What was done to you and how it was done, who you are, and how you think determine how you cope with a betrayal of this magnitude. A former patient of mine, and I myself, responded to circumstances not unlike Deirdre's in ways that were qualitatively different from hers, yet there were underlying commonalities, and all three of us ultimately achieved similar ends.

Barbara, a lovely young woman, announced in a session that she was suddenly, thrillingly in love. She was in the midst of a whirlwind courtship with an exciting man who couldn't wait to marry her, even though they had only just met. I was suspicious and counseled waiting until they knew each other better—which made her furious with me—but instead, they moved up the wedding. They started looking for an apartment immediately after returning from a lavish honeymoon; the down payment was her parents' wedding gift. Several months later, after missing many appointments and being evasive and defensive when she did show up because she was beginning to have doubts about him, she came to a session aghast. She had gone to her bank to withdraw a small sum and gotten a notice that her account was overdrawn. Her new husband, it turned out, had looked over her shoulder the last time she used the ATM, copied her PIN number, and then emptied her account of the $100,000 her parents had given them. Then he disappeared.

Barbara was grief stricken, horrified, and humiliated—reactions that were not made easier by reminding her of her father, who had been discovered to have a second simultaneous family across the country when she was a teenager. A year of intensive self-examination in therapy put her back on her feet, during which time she got a job as a boutique manager and learned to curb her impulsiveness and improve her taste in men.

Two astonishing things then happened in quick succession: her former husband called her asking to reconcile (he told her he had reformed), and she got a call from the FBI. It turned out that she was the third woman that he had stolen from in similar circumstances. The agent even knew about the phone call she'd received and asked if she would agree to a meeting so that her ex could be apprehended. I wholeheartedly encouraged her to do so; this was the most gratifying, sane revenge I could imagine—getting even by doing justice.

The stratagem worked. She later testified at his trial, where she met three more women whom he was in the process of fleecing, bringing the grand total of victims to six. Barbara was instrumental in sending this psychopath to the federal penitentiary. Even though the money was lost, she felt enormous pride and a sense of restored power that she had prevented him from harming anyone else. Then, after a long and careful courtship, she married a stable, hardworking man who genuinely cared for her.

I suffered a shocking betrayal in my twenties (not, alas, the first). Like Deirdre, I made a vow, but one with a very different focus from hers. The man I had lived with for five years and planned to marry announced as unceremoniously as Ben had that he was leaving me. He added, for no reason other than to give me pain, that he had had an affair with a close mutual friend the previous year. I subsequently learned from someone else that she was only one of many lovers. I had never imagined, never suspected, and felt shattered; how could I have not known who he really was? His deviousness, assisted by my unconscious need not to know, contributed to my blindness. His behavior, past and present, cut off all possibility, at least in the short term, of my retrieving anything of value from our time together; fidelity to a promiscuous and sadistic liar in any way, shape, or form was out of the question for me; indifference was hard enough to achieve.

Working on my doctoral dissertation kept me occupied initially, but what ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect. I started with the fact that in my own history, as in Barbara's, lay a philandering father and a mother who for years made herself oblivious and then martyred herself by staying with him anyway even after the truth came out. Understanding and grieving—and a wise analyst—painstakingly changed my life and the choices I made.

*   *   *

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call “the Affirmative No.” The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim. This is not an act of negation or rebellion; it is an act of self-assertion, subjectively defined. Deirdre's vow exemplified this. It reestablished a sense of self that had been battered almost to death. Her thoughts and actions announced to Ben and everyone else, “I refuse to allow you to obliterate the things I hold most dear; they cannot be taken from me. This is the essence of my life, and here I stand.” Her antidote to passive suffering was swearing fidelity, just as Barbara's was furthering justice and mine was pursuing self-knowledge. Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.

Will is misunderstood by many contemporary therapists as a purely behavioral tool involving techniques like assertiveness training and one-size-fits-all affirmations—superficial caricatures of a process that can activate the deepest healing capacities of the self. Will is underrated as a therapeutic agent, an instrument of transformation and self-determination—sometimes the only tool a person can call upon in extremis. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about it. To make a blessing out of a curse is a genuine triumph of will, and transforming shame into pride a rare form of alchemy.

FAITH REWARDED

Betrayal forced Deirdre, as it does every betrayed person, to contend with the demons of her nature. Her vow and the actions that sprang from it converted her self-hatred and negative grandiosity (the clinical term for the common assumption people make that they themselves are the cause of everything bad that befalls them) to unassailable pride in the way she conducted her life. When she realized nothing could stop her from behaving with love toward others, she was finally able to behave with love toward herself again.

Two decades later—we last discussed their relationship on what would have been their twenty-fifth anniversary—Deirdre has remained true to herself and to Ben, after her fashion, but the nature of her love for him has changed: she has finally stopped missing him. “I don't have room for him anymore with all the other people I love,” she declared. “That frequency is no longer one I tune in to.”

Keeping faith is no longer something she has to work at; through long practice, it has become her natural state of mind, and she employs it in all areas of her life. “Now,” she says, “it feels very peaceful, very easy, and calm.” The self-doubts and humiliation that bedeviled her have faded away along with the ever-decreasing potency of Ben's betrayal in her mind.

Along the way, she has miraculously managed to preserve a revised version of her first husband, stripped of his vices. This adorable Ben visits her regularly. “He's in my dreams,” she confessed with a tender smile. “Sometimes it's night after night for two weeks, sometimes once every three months. I'm always glad to see him; I always care about him. Of course, it's tricky to figure out what I'm supposed to do about my second husband.” Here, at long last, is a moral dilemma she can contemplate with pleasure.

*   *   *

Deirdre, Barbara, and I accomplished the essential thing a person must do to transcend betrayal and to help prevent its recurrence: we each transferred the locus of our self-respect from the one who abandoned us to ourselves so that no one could wrest it from us ever again.

Defining your own truth and then living according to it—whether you do it by making a vow, testifying in court, or committing yourself to unflinching introspection—changes your sense of self and sets you free; it makes you fearless—or at least more courageous—with every significant person in your life. When you're not so insecure, there are things—offhand cruelties, insensitivities large and small—you don't tolerate, things you don't have to deny. You no longer hold yourself responsible for everything or believe that it's up to you to make every relationship work. You expect and demand to be treated by the one you love as you treat him. Once you are the one who defines the meaning of your life, nobody can gainsay it. This act of self-assertive defiance immunizes you—at least to a certain extent—from ever allowing someone else to control your destiny ever again. Then you can love and be loved in return.

 

5

UNREQUITED LOVE

My Golden One

MY YOUNG SELF SPEAKS

If you do not love me I shall not be loved.

—SAMUEL BECKETT

When I was nineteen years old, I fell passionately in love with a man who meant far more to me than I did to him. I surrendered my will to him and only felt fully alive when I was in his arms. I needed him too desperately to accept that he didn't love me.

Unrequited love affairs are hardly unusual (especially at that age), but the aftermath of this one was: I buried the most telling details of our relationship for nearly fifty years, barely alluding to him in therapy and mentioning him to my husband only in passing. For all those decades, I hardly gave a conscious thought to the one who had briefly been the center of my universe—who had
been
my universe and who had left me bereft. The only trace of him was in dreams—opaque ones.

I only recovered the full truth about what really happened between us when I reread the diary I kept at the time. The black morocco cover fell apart as soon as I opened it, and I had to hold the whole thing together with rubber bands. What I read there—every emotion, every conversation, every encounter painstakingly recorded in my own handwriting—did not seem like memories, but living presences in my body and my psyche, fresh, raw, and unmetabolized.

My young self was speaking directly to me from that tattered volume. I saw how, in order not to lose him, I had tried to stifle any emotions that might have displeased him when I was with him and to censor unacceptable feelings even when I was alone. I had erased all this from consciousness because the experience was too painful in itself and evoked pain from earlier in my life.

As I read on, I realized with a jolt that I also held in my hands the key to an anxiety dream that had recurred for decades. I knew it referred to the period in my life when I had known him—in sleep I returned to the city in which we had been lovers—but I'd never been able to grasp the meaning of these nocturnal visits until I opened the diary once more.

Those gold-edged pages also revealed an aspect of my character that I had conveniently forgotten because it didn't fit with my self-image. Despite my efforts to suppress my rage at him for how he'd treated me, I had actually expressed it in two acts of revenge against him—the first one witty and self-possessed, the second far darker. It was the only time in my life that I acted this way. Unrequited love always has a sinister side that no lover wants to admit to.

In the process of recovering the excruciating details of my doomed affair, I also retrieved its full, fervent, thrilling intensity and the joys that were intermingled with the anguish. Despite my abject behavior, I even saw precursors of boldness and insight in myself.

The impetus for turning to my diary and uncovering the secrets from this pivotal chapter of my life—secrets that had never surfaced in twenty-five years of intensive analysis—was an eerily parallel experience I had at age sixty-five: my most intimate friend left me alone when I was seriously ill. Her abandonment led me back to his, and it caused me to reencounter myself as a young woman frantically, hopelessly in love. To this young woman I owe the insights into the nature of passionate unrequited love—and how to escape its clutches—that I might otherwise never have discovered.

MY GOLDEN ONE

I thought of Michael as “golden” from the moment I saw him. We were both avid folk dancers, and he first appeared at a dance early in my sophomore year in college. He was like nobody else I had ever known. Tall and lithe, he moved like a sprite, with musicality and joie de vivre. Brightness seemed intrinsic to him, and I was sorely in need of brightness in a city infamous for its freezing wind and bleak winters, at a university whose unofficial motto was “Where fun goes to die.” Michael had a roguish smile, a profusion of blond curls, sly amber-colored eyes, and an aura of gleaming ease and aplomb; at twenty-four, he seemed to dance through life. His wit and his wildness intrigued me. When I found out that he wore a black leather jacket as he drove his sleek motorcycle, played the oboe, and was more than willing to help me with my incomprehensible math homework, my monochromatic world burst into color because he was in it.

The only problem was that he was a doctoral student from another university on a science fellowship of uncertain duration. At first, I panicked that I would lose him just as I had found him, but I rejoiced when his tenure was extended first three and then six months. I was longing to fall in love, and I didn't want to miss even a temporary opportunity to do it.

BOOK: The Golden Condom
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