Adultery: PTSD and the Betrayed Spouse

After the Affair

Should I Stay or Go?

Betrayed Spouses Often Experience Symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

By, Laurie S. Hall

Vicky pulled the bottle of Viagra out of her husband Tom’s medicine cabinet. The recently dated prescription label on it said eight tablets. There were four pills in the bottle.

“When I saw the bottle, I knew instantly that none of the missing four tablets had been used with me because Tom had lost sexual interest in me two years earlier,” said Vicky, whose name has been changed for privacy reasons. “He blamed his loss of interest on job-related stresses. I was sick to my stomach when I realized it was because he’d been cheating on me.”

As a society, it seems, we have cheating on our minds. In recent years, famous cheaters have included Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, Jack Welch, Prince Charles, Frank Gifford, Kobe Bryant, Paula Zahn, Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Gary Condit, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and a randy group of Desperate Housewives.

Has adultery been mainstreamed? Is the concept of ‘forsaking all others until death do you part’ just a quaint relic of an idyllic past that never was?

To find out, researchers have been investigating the number of marriages affected by infidelity and the resulting statistics vary widely. A University of Chicago study found that in any given year, four to six percent of marriages experience infidelity, with 25 percent of all marriages affected by the pain adultery sometime during the life of the marriage. The University of Michigan’s General Social Survey discovered that 15% of those who were married at the time of survey had had at least one other partner besides their spouse.

Although the studies point to between 15 and 44 percent, no one really knows how many marriages have been affected by adultery. After reviewing 25 studies, the late psychologist Shirley Glass, known as “the godmother of infidelity research,” concluded that 44 percent of husbands and 25 percent of wives break their marriage vows. “These figures are hard to research because there is so much secrecy,” said Dr. Don-David Lusterman, author of Infidelity: A Survivor’s Guide.[i]

Whatever the actual figure is, it’s fair to say that a significant percentage of American marriages have been affected by infidelity. Even so, sexual behavior data from 59 countries shows monogamy is the dominant pattern in most regions of the world.[ii]

 

What causes affairs?

Much of the shame betrayed spouses feel comes from the common assumption that cheaters look outside their marriages because their spouses aren’t sexy enough or loving enough. “I felt there must have been something really wrong with me that my husband didn’t want to be with me,” said Vicky.

Researchers have discovered that’s not necessarily so.

One of Dr. Glass’ findings, based on her clinical research in Baltimore, MD, was that the majority of men who have affairs characterized their marriages, including their sex life, as ‘‘happy’’ or ‘‘very happy.’’

“I’m not saying that a bad marriage won’t make you vulnerable [to an affair],” Dr. Glass said. “I’m saying that’s not the only thing that can make you vulnerable. A lot of people who see themselves as loving and devoted can find themselves in this dilemma.”

“Today’s workplace is the most fertile breeding ground for affairs. The observed increase in women’s infidelity is because more women are in the workplace and more women are in professions that were previously dominated by men,” Dr. Glass wrote with Jean C. Staeheli in their 2003 book, NOT Just Friends: Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal. [iii]

According to Glass, the three elements that determine whether a relationship should be considered an affair are:

1. Emotional intimacy
2. Sharing secrets
3. Sexual attraction or “chemistry,” even if it is not acted upon physically 

Even if intense relationships don’t lead to sex Glass said they are a threat to marriages and part of what she termed ‘‘the new crisis of infidelity.’’ The reason, Glass said, is that the emotional intimacy with the friend gradually, almost invisibly, supplants that with the spouse.[iv]

Whether the affair is emotional or physical, Dr. Lusterman’s clinical research has shown that affairs can be about a deficit in the marriage as well as a deficit in the cheater.

“People become disheartened about the marriage. So, they engage in an illusion that someone else will meet their needs,” he said. “But there are also personality-disordered individuals who go out on the hunt. They see themselves as Don Juans. They’re so empty inside that without getting their score, they feel dead. It has nothing to do with love or sex, it’s about getting filled up.”

 

The trauma of adultery

Whatever the cause of the affair, discovering it is often extremely distressing.  The weekend Vicky found the Viagra, she also found receipts in her husband’s briefcase showing that he had been in a hotel room with another woman on Valentine’s night.

 Vicky’s husband had talked about flying her down to the city where he was on business so they could be together for Valentine’s Day; but, it hadn’t worked out. So, on Valentine’s Day, he’d sent her $350 worth of roses from the finest florist in town. That evening, he’d called Vicky and said,  “I’m so sad you’re not here, I’m going to bed and curl up with a book.” Instead, the trail of time stamped receipts showed after he had hung up, he went to a bar, picked up a girl, and took her to a nearby hotel.

 Hours after she’d discovered the receipts and the Viagra, Vicky sat curled up in a corner.  “This guttural noise came out of me,” she recalled. “It was like a deep gut scream, like my insides were being pulled out.”

 Women aren’t the only ones who are devastated when they discover their spouse’s infidelity. According to accounts in the New York Daily News published the day after Richard Cohen found a diary illustrated with photos in which wife Paula Zahn laid bare her alleged affair with his pal, the married ContiGroup CEO Paul Fribourg, “Richard felt like he’d been stabbed in the heart twice when he found out his wife had been cheating with one of his best friends,” one of the tycoon’s pals said. “They played golf and tennis together. Their families skied together in Aspen.”[v][1]

 Likewise, according to reports in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, upon discovering that his wife, tennis star Chris Evert, was having an affair with Australian golfing legend Greg Norman, the man Olympic skier Andy Mill had considered his “best friend”, Mill was heartbroken by his betrayal, saying: “A year and a half ago I’d have taken a bullet for this guy. I didn’t realize he was going to pull the trigger.”[vi]

A feeling of being “heartbroken” is common in the betrayed spouse.  “The discovery of infidelity is devastating because it shatters basic assumptions about the security we expect in committed relationships,” said Glass.

         Glass compared the emotional shock of discovery of an affair to the trauma experienced by those who have gone through horrific events. She made an impact among marriage therapists by saying that betrayed partners in adulterous affairs often suffered from post-traumatic stress similar to that experienced by combat veterans.

“The discoverer is profoundly traumatized,” said Lusterman. “It really is a kind of PTSD. Your marriage is very important to you and if you really believe the contract of monogamy still applies, it’s a terrible shock because your whole life is tied up in your marriage.”

It’s the deception that hurts even more than the fact your spouse has been having sex with someone else. Deception is inherent in the definition of infidelity, says Lusterman. “Infidelity is occurring if one person continues to believe that the monogamous contract continues, while the other person is secretly doing otherwise,” he said.

 Upon discovery that they have been deceived, betrayed partners are often especially harsh with themselves for not seeing it coming. After she discovered her husband had been cheating on her, one woman said she felt she ‘must be dumber than a box of rocks.’

“People say, Oh my god, that’s been there for year! Where have I been? I never pieced it together. It never even entered my mind,” said Lusterman. What is happening is they are sensing the loss of the person they thought they knew.

 “In intimate relationships, there is a truth bias, so people tend to take their partner’s word as truth unless there is a prior history of lying and deception,” said Glass. “After the betrayal, the traumatized spouse questions everything they trusted and depended on. They say that they no longer know whom they are married to or what their marriage stands for. The most severely traumatized are generally the ones who had the greatest trust and were the most unsuspecting. However, even someone who is suspicious and is initially relieved to learn that they weren’t paranoid, has difficulty accepting the reality of a partner’s deception.”[vii]

 

 Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The Associate Press reported that Dina Matos McGreevey who once stood shell-shocked next to her ex-husband, then-New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey, as he announced before TV cameras that he was “a gay American,” later said the McGreevey’s relationship was over once he came out.[viii]

 As for Vicky, shortly after she discovered her husband’s infidelity, she called her attorney and began the process of filing for divorce. Her decision to end the marriage wasn’t a knee jerk reaction. Several years earlier, she had discovered pornography on their home computer. Not wanting to shame her husband, Vicky never told anyone. Instead, she spent eight months reading about the effects of pornography. Alarmed, she lovingly confronted her husband about what she’d discovered.

 “I told him I loved him very much and because I loved him, I wanted to talk with him about something that concerned me very much,” she said. At first, he denied using pornography, accusing Vicky of viewing it; but, then he relented and agreed to go for counseling. They sought out a counselor who had experience dealing with pornography addiction.

 The counseling did not go well. “The therapist told me he couldn’t help my husband because he wasn’t willing to look at the things he needed to in order to heal,” Vicky said.

 After that, Vicky never again found evidence of pornography use. Although in the intervening years, the marriage was sexless by her husband’s choice, Vicky and her husband had wonderful times together. “I was crazy about him and he was crazy about me,” she said. “He would often introduce me by saying, ‘This is Victoria, my beautiful wife. I’m so lucky to be married to her.’ Everybody thought we were the ideal couple.”

 When she discovered the affairs, she realized the pornography addiction hadn’t gone away, it had just gone underground and escalated into full-blown sexual addiction. Her decision to divorce came after considerable research about sexual addiction.

“When I hear of multiple affairs, I know I’m dealing with a Don Juan who hasn’t quite come out,” Lusterman said. “He may be a married man who loves the wife, the kids, and the dog. But, while he’s filling up his inner emptiness with what he calls a victimless crime, he may also be exposing his wife to sexually transmitted diseases.”

 “When the wife finds out what’s going on, she’s enraged, hurt and angry. She needs to tell him, ‘I don’t want to have any dealings with you until you figure out whether you can whip this.’ If the husband is sure he doesn’t want a divorce, he can begin to change. Otherwise, he’ll continue having affairs. It’s a very sad thing to work with people who are so empty and don’t even know it.”

Because of all the crazy emotions swirling around when infidelity has been uncovered, therapists caution that wounded parties should take their time sorting through their options.

 Dr. Shirley Glass offered these tips for deciding whether to throw in the towel or pick up the pieces:

   Throw in the Towel:

• If partner has no compassion for your pain.
• If partner justifies the betrayal or minimizes the significance of the infidelity.
• If partner continues to lie and deceive you.

   Pick Up the Pieces

• If partner shows remorse and empathy for your devastation.
• If partner takes responsibility for understanding their vulnerabilities.
• If partner is willing to discuss the betrayals openly and honestly.
• If the unfaithful behavior has stopped.[ix]

 

What Does It Take to Patch Things Up?        

If the betrayed partner decides to stay, Glass and Lusterman believe marriages can survive an affair, as long as both parties are willing to do the hard work necessary to achieve an authentic relationship.

In Lusterman’s practice, he’s found that 75-80 percent of the clients who are willing to work on things end up with a better marriage. For this reason, he believes that most marriages do not end because of infidelity. They end because people didn’t know how to conduct them.

“When I see a couple who are not communicating about important things, who go day after day and never talk about what hurts them, I know there’s hurt underneath that can lead to problems,” he said. “One of harbingers of infidelity is that one or both parties are really bad at talking about what matters. So, if they’re going to save the marriage, people really have to develop a method of speaking with great honesty.”

Part of being honest is being forthcoming about the details of the affair(s). This doesn’t involve every gory detail about breast size, penis size and exactly what happened between the adulterer and his lover. “What’s important is how was I lied to,” Lusterman said. “That involves time lines, reconstruction of travel, business arrangements, and other details. Once that’s done and some comforting occurs, then we can work on “normal” marriage problems.”

One of things Lusterman works very hard on is to get a level of conversation going where the betrayer can become empathic to the level of suffering they caused their mate. The betrayer also has to deal with the post-traumatic stress they caused their spouse.

         “Like all post-traumatic stress disorder, the PTSD associated with affairs has two prominent features—hyper alertness and numbness accompanied by alternating extremes of emotions. Victims feel like a rapidly cycling bi-polar. He’s five minutes late for dinner. She thinks, ‘that’s what he did when he was having the affair.’ So, she thinks he’s with someone else, now. When he does show up, she’s loaded for bear,” he said.

Lusterman believes the betrayer must help the wounded spouse become comfortable again by telling them whatever it is they need to know to feel safe and the person who has been hurt needs to learn how to take a step back from strong emotions and say, “I’m having a really crappy day. Can we talk? Can you be there for me?”

“When couples can do this, they have really learned how to talk,” Lusterman said. “And that bodes well for the marriage because a good marriage is a good conversation that never really stops.”

Whether you decide to stay or not, therapists advise that you find some way to communicate with your spouse. “The spouse will be hurt if they just walk away. The more you talk, even if the outcome is the sad ending of what you started with vows, the better off you are, because even if the marriage is dead, the other person is still alive and you will need to cooperate about your kids. Keeping the conversation going keeps you from losing the ability to be a full parent,” said Lusterman.

Whatever you decide to do about the marriage, the effects of betrayal can be long lasting.

 

While Matos McGreevey said she is moving on, even dating, she has lasting issues trusting others. “It’s very painful to know that you’ve been betrayed by the person you love, the person you trust,” she said. “And it’s equally painful when you have the rest of the world, who doesn’t know what you’re feeling, what your relationship is like, criticizing you for taking certain actions.”[3]

 

As for Vicky, eight years after finding that Viagra bottle, she is still sticking to her decision to avoid future heartache by not dating at all. “The statistics are too high,” she said. “I can’t risk it.”