Infidelity: to stay or go…? | Lucy Beresford | TEDxFolkestone

i had a client let's call her hattie and on the face of it she seemed to have it all she had the high-flying career the three healthy kids and 18 years of marriage under her belt to the wonderful will they had come together stayed together because they fitted both on a conscious but also on an unconscious level you see hattie had always been the golden child much loved by her family never flunked an exam never taken drugs never so much as snogged anybody behind the bike sheds at school whereas will a musician slightly different upbringing

in and out of various boarding schools sent there by emotionally detached parents he had been drawn to hattie for her stability and her focus and she had been drawn to will for his slightly more creative laid-back style but together they worked if only will hadn't opened hattie's phone that day checking for details of a family holiday flight hadn't seen those texts from hattie's colleague stewart texts that led will to emails emails that then proved to him that his wife had been having an affair for by now two years suddenly this fantastic couple were in crisis

will is heartbroken and furious hattie is stunned and deeply ashamed and all of their conversations keep circling back to this one question should i stay or should i quit how many of us have wondered privately what we would do if infidelity ruptured our relationship now i respect that your view of infidelity might be very different to mine but today i would like to share with you what my 20 years experience as a psychotherapist and radio agony aunt has taught me which is that i am absolutely convinced the more courageous option is to stay and rebuild

that relationship nevertheless it won't surprise you to learn infidelity remains the number one trigger for relationship breakdown across the globe and sometimes that pressure to quit comes from external sources there is no longer the same stigma around divorce your friends might say hmm can a leopard change its spots your mother might say plenty more fish in the sea my darling but most times that pressure to quit comes from within now i toyed for a while with calling this talk a rapper's guide to infidelity because uh yeah i know appearances can be deceptive but seriously for

a while i have been impressed by the candor of the rapper jay-z who has spoken out so movingly about the aftermath of when he cheated on his wife the singer beyonce in an interview with the new york times he said that when you see on the face of your beloved the pain caused by your cheating it makes you want to run away hide quit the relationship and never come back and that sentiment reminded me of all my training in child development how when a child is naughty and it makes mummy cross they can only see

themselves as a bad child and they can only see mummy as cross mummy bad mummy and it makes them want to hide and the child psychologist melanie klein called this splitting how at moments of high emotion you want to split off those good and bad parts of yourselves but also of others this is how we feel as a result of a revelation about cheating all of that high emotion makes us want to revert back to that childhood defense mechanism jay-z is talking about exactly the same psychological split and hattie and will they went through exactly

that same process in will's face hattie could only see this broken furious man and in hattie will could only see this monstrous woman who'd broken his heart and ruptured his family but this moment of splitting is the turning point this is the courageous bit to hold the sweetness and the sorrow in your heart at the same time jay-z and his wife beyonce looked inward faced their pain and emerged to rebuild a reinvigorated relationship with each other as well as writing a couple of albums in the process now not all of us are going to be

able to channel our emotional trauma into platinum selling music more the pity but we can all turn it into something arguably even more valuable a reinvigorated relationship with our same partner how do we do that one of the callers to my show put it very simply recently she rita thank you rita rita said to be courageous is to be vulnerable it is only by being vulnerable that you can attempt to override those default childhood defense mechanisms but it's hard it takes courage for the one betrayed it takes courage to admit being hurt courage to examine

events leading up to betrayal and courage to rebuild your confidence and for the betrayer it takes courage to admit causing hurt to the one you love courage to face your own guilt and courage to do the daily work required to repair that breach of trust now i think there are three things three brave things that the betrayer needs to do quickly to repair that breach of trust i call it sos you know how like in morse code sos is the internationally recognized signal for distress it says we are in crisis well betrayer you are in

crisis this is what you need to do say sorry take ownership and do the spade work sorry ownership spade work sos with sorry of course you apologize for what you have done but you have to be quite careful with the english language because the word sorry has got a little bit distorted of late it is not enough to say i'm sorry you're shouting at me or i'm sorry i'm currently having to sleep in the spare room that's not quite what i'm talking about you have to get to a place of true contrition so that you

can say i am sorry i broke your heart similarly with ownership you must own what you did it would not have been enough for hattie for example to say i'm sorry will that i broke your heart but you were always so busy with your music or your demanding parents she had to own the choices she made to perpetuate an affair for two years thirdly with spade work the betrayer must take action after all actions speak louder than words and they act as a kind of insurance policy for your partner that you won't hurt them again

so whether yours was a sexual affair or an emotional one the person you had the secret life with or told lies about has to be cut out of your life for good so at work hattie had to reorganize things so that she never communicated with nor worked with stuart ever again and she agreed to be transparent with her phone laptop bank accounts and passwords but once that sos is in progress if the couple are to repair their relationship they have to sit down and work out what led to this affair now don't get me wrong

this is not to let the jay-z's and hatties of this world off the hook let me be clear i believe that affairs are wrong they are destructive and i do not condone them but if you are to work out what went wrong you have to assess what left your relationship vulnerable to being blown off course remember what i said about splitting it is not enough to say you had the affair therefore i am the victim you are all bad and i am all angelic even if your partner was 99 responsible for the mess you are

now currently wading through that still leaves one percent for you to look at and own and work on because the very thing that will bring you together keep you together as a couple will be the thing that threatens to blow it off course in hattie's case hattie's affair was an escape as so many affairs are but not from a bad marriage or a bad husband but from something earlier something deeper something of her own life a an escape from her identity this golden child identity that had been nourished and nurtured by so many people over

so many decades but will was in that marriage too he too had his one percent he too had bought into the idea that hattie would always be strong and he would always be the breadwinner and hattie would always mother him in some way and that had brought its resentments on both sides resentments followed by reactions couples can get too comfortable we all need to sit down periodically and examine this beautiful subtle finely balanced ecosystem that we have created as a couple with the grooves that we have settled into the assumptions the resentments they are what

will blow your relationship of course the dreaded rut and infidelity shakes you out of that rut and forces you to look in the mirror and ask do i like who i have become in this relationship and how can i change because change you must you cannot go back to being the person you were before infidelity erupted your relationship just as your relationship will never be the same again it could be better you could be like hattie and will who moved on but together they stayed together they are still together and i do believe passionately that

the more courageous option is to stay but here's the thing i am not saying you have to stay forever give it time look within and you may very well fall back in love with your partner or not but it is a win-win either way either you see your partner with new eyes new passion new compassion or you learn enough about yourself to be able to move forward with confidence into the next healthier relationship in other words if your relationship really is broken at least you know you were open not just to repair but to growing

as a person instead of giving in to this swipe right throw away culture of ours that sees splitting as the only option i've worked clinically around the world and the most amazing thing is that all my patients whether whatever their race their faith their age their sexual orientation they have taught me that we all actually only want three things we want to feel safe yes we want to feel loved definitely but we also want to feel heard in all of our delicious complexity and that is the path of true love and i would love it

if you could see your partner with that courageous generosity of vision from today thank you you