For eighteen months after I found out, I spent a significant portion of every day asking myself what I had done wrong. Not in a productive way. The kind that loops. If I had been more attentive, more interesting, more present — if I had been more, in whatever way more was required, perhaps this would not have happened. That is the story I told myself for a very long time. And it very nearly did more damage than the original betrayal.
How self-blame works
Self-blame offers something that grief does not: the illusion of control. If I caused this, then I can uncause it. Grief — the clean grief of something that happened to you, that you did not cause and could not prevent — offers nothing to hold onto. Self-blame at least gives you something to work on.
The question that changed things
I had been seeing a therapist for about four months when she asked me a question I have thought about almost every day since. She said: “If a friend came to you and described exactly what you have described to me — her husband’s behaviour, the choices he made, the way he treated her — would you tell her it was her fault?”
I said no immediately. Without thinking.
She said: “Why is the standard you apply to yourself different from the one you would apply to someone you love?”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say. The answer was that I had been holding myself responsible for his choices in a way I would never hold another woman responsible. And I had no coherent reason for that. Only the habit of it.
Where I am now
I am no longer spending my days reconstructing my own prosecution. That is a significant amount of energy returned to me, and I am trying to use it well. What I would say to anyone in the self-blame loop: the loop is not helping you. It feels like processing. It is not processing. It is a way of staying in control of a story that was never yours to control in the first place.
The actual work is the much harder and much more honest thing of sitting with what happened to you, grieving it properly, and deciding — from that clearer place — who you want to be on the other side of it.
— Submitted anonymously. Edited for BeyondBetrayal.net.