Mira: Infidelity and me
by Mira and Charles on April 28th, 2010Journalist gets personal with me
Well, here we go. This is the raw Q and A from a journalist who recently got into my personal issues with the whole cheating thing.
Q: How did it feel listening to husbands and wives talk about infidelity?
Mira: It feels exciting and hopeful, like doing cutting-edge open-heart surgery on high-risk patients. People’s lives are at stake, or at least their future happiness. There is the possibility that we won’t be able to salvage what’s good, because too much damage has been done, and that’s the scary part. But there is the hope—which I’ve seen justified over and over—that in spite of all the hurt and pain people will come out happier and better than ever before.
Q: Even though you had dealt with an infidelity yourself with your husband, did you ever feel that hope for your marriage surviving with little or no affairs diminish?
Mira: Of course in my case it was the mildest of infidelities, just a brief emotional affair which he confessed to me because he was afraid of our losing each other. Still, that opened my eyes to how painful it can be to be betrayed: if it hurt me so much, how much must it hurt others? But even though I hated him at the time, I soon was able to see again the good things about him, including the fact that he was and is a really good man; he’d just let himself get caught up in a really stupid thing which was to a large degree my fault. It’s not as if I was being all that nice to him during that time. The whole thing just reminded me how precious love is, how easily it is damaged, and how it is worth fighting for. In our case, we won the fight.
Q: Why do you feel so strongly that the person who is having the affair is just as much a victim as the one it’s being done to?
Mira: I wouldn’t say that the cheater is “just as much” the victim as the spouse. But I don’t like to talk about “victim” anyway; it’s legal language. I prefer to stick to my workbench, which is all about helping people heal their lives. And from that point of view, it is most helpful to look at how both people have contributed to the situation that ended in one having an affair. I don’t need to play judge and worry about who contributed the most; I just want to understand how it happened so I can create healing in the present and prevent another affair in the future.
Q: You say that confessing to an affair is a bad idea—why?
Mira: So many people have misunderstood me about this. Here’s what I say: If you’ve cheated in the past and it’s over and you want to heal your marriage, don’t tell: it will just add mistrust and hurt and anger to an already weakened marriage. If you’re cheating now, end the affair and don’t say anything about it, for the same reason. This is the kind of honesty your marriage doesn’t need: instead, be honest about what you need, how you feel, who you are.
Q: The seventeen types of affairs seem to be able to relate to many different people, do these types of people resemble your clients or did you arrange them from personal experience?
Mira: I discovered the 17 types of affairs from many years of research and clinical experience. With every kind of affair I got to discover more about, I learned what it was that the person who cheated was trying to get for himself or herself. That’s how I discovered what the 17 types of affair were.
Q: How do you suggest people get through living with guilt after having an affair and move on successfully with a marriage?
Mira: You do not need to feel guilty if you’ve paid for your crime. How do you pay for the crime of cheating on your spouse? You do it by taking the time to really listen to how she was hurt, by showing you really get why and how she was hurt, and by working your butt off to be kind and loving and faithful and to make yours the best marriage you can make it.
Please check out When Good People Have Affairs if you’re caught in a triangle. You’ll find a ton of help there. And if you need one-on-one help, we have a ton of experience helping people heal here at The Chestnut Hill Institute. We put lives and relationships back together.
