THE CHESTNUT HILL INSTITUTE

I think I’m beginning to get it. When it comes to infidelity, for some people the only thing you are allowed to say is that cheating is bad. If you write a book about cheating, then like Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard in the opening credits, all you can say is “Cheating is bad” over and over for a couple of hundred pages.

And if you say anything else it blows their circuits and makes them furious and stupid. They just don’t get it. The question is, what don’t they get?

What they don’t get is that I am a clinician. My job is to help people in trouble. That’s the only reason I wrote When Good People Have Affairs. If I were to do what people say I should do, it would be like a pulmonary specialist writing a book on coping with lung cancer filled only with the phrase, “Smoking is bad.”

Case in point: a recent article about us in the Independent. This is yet one more article by someone willfully misunderstanding what we say in our new book

The author of the article, Caitriona Palmer, either willfully misunderstands what we have to say, or else she just doesn’t know how to read. Frankly I’m getting tired of being beaten up in print by people who are so stupid.

Caitriona says that we say that an affair can help save your marriage. But do we say that? NO! Not at all. What we say is that affairs are destructive and cause a lot of pain. We say that if and when someone would ever ask us if they should have an affair, we would definitely say no.

So where does she get the idea that we encourage affairs, when in fact we do the opposite? Maybe from the fact that we say that in our clinical experience, there are occasions when marriages come out stronger than before after it’s been discovered one person had an affair.

And that’s true. It’s true in exactly the same way that a person might have become a better person a year after experiencing a terrible injury. And that’s true too. It happens all the time. And I would indeed tell a patient who’d had a terrible injury that if he has the right attitude he might very well come out of the whole thing better than before: perhaps with better perspective on life, perhaps with a stronger commitment to live his life well.

But I would never prescribe or encourage an injury as a way of improving yourself! And it’s the same thing with affairs. Don’t do it, we say, but if it happens, then don’t assume that your marriage is destroyed. It’s certainly been injured, but with the proper help it might become better than ever. Or it might be destroyed. But as a clinician, I can only hope and work for healing and growth.

Caitriona goes on to say that I say that “most adulterers are good, kind people who are simply seeking real happiness and love.” But that is a stupid or mean spirited distortion.

Look, I don’t know what moral planet Caitriona lives on, but in my world, the real world, good people sometimes do bad things. Bad people look for bad things to do. Good people try to avoid doing bad things, and mostly do so, but sometimes they screw up, and when they do they are very sorry.

That’s what good people are like in my world. Is that what they’re like in your world?

Here’s the kind of good person I have in mind. He’s a physician. We’ll call him Roger. A kind, much-loved doctor adept at healing the sick. He’s also a good, loving father. And Roger has also been for most of his married life a good husband, faithful, supportive, affectionate.

But Roger was trapped in a bad marriage. He did his best to make things better, but he was no better than most of us at healing our marriages without professional help. And trapped in what felt like loveless marriage, this guy was in hell.

Roger never went looking for someone to cheat on his wife with. But someone turned up, and this guy had an affair.

It was far from joyous. It was mostly an experience of guilt and fear and confusion. Finally, with my help, he came to see that he would be best off ending the affair and working on healing his marriage.

I’ll tell you one thing: my work with Roger would have gotten nowhere if I’d have approached him as a “bad” man. He already knew that what he did was bad. Like most of us, he needed help, not judgment.

And by the way, to take another distortion that Caitriona comes up with, I do NOT say that adulterers should never own up to their cheating because doing so will only cause more pain and heartache. Personally, as everyone who knows me will attest, I hate lying. And of course people need to own up to what they have done and what it means.

But the practical question is, should you tell your spouse that you’ve cheated if you’ve ended the affair and want to heal your marriage?

Let’s go back to our doctor, Roger. One reason his marriage felt so bad to him was that his wife seemed angry much of the time. There were plenty of other problem too. Now let me ask you: do you think it would have INCREASED or DECREASED the odds of their saving their marriage if Roger had come to his wife wanting to save his marriage and had added a confession to an already-terminated affair?

The correct answer is that of course it would have seriously DECREASED the chance that he could have saved his marriage. If he’d confessed, it would have been the equivalent of dragging someone lying in hospital after being injured in a car crash and then kicking them around the room.

So there you have it. You can see how poor ol’ Caitriona has totally misunderstood the spirit and letter of our book. Is this an example of When Good People Write Bad Reviews?

Posted: Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Category: Relationships, News & Notes
Author: Mira
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