Why You Can't Just Get Over It (and why intimacy demands fidelity)
I remember as a young woman, aged 14 or 15, watching those typical teen romance movies. I now consider them painfully lame, but at the time I thought that to go through the sorrow of breakup would be somehow, a romantic experience. I imagined it would be a time of bonding to have my girlfriends gather around me, comforting me, bringing me ice-cream and telling me that I’d find someone better. But then, just as the heroine dries her tears, her phone rings and the ex is on the other side, apologizing for his mistakes and confessing his undying love.
Closing credits. All go home happy.
Stories don’t always work out that way though, do they? Things are actually far more complicated and difficult to repair than can be captured in a scripted 116 minutes.
I suspect that some of you, reading this are still in the healing process, trying to not let the past creep up into your future and sabotage the love story that you dream of.
So, what do you do when your heart has been broken? More specifically, how can you learn to trust again after you have been betrayed, either through emotional or sexual unfaithfulness?
First, I’d love to take a moment to explain why it hurts so badly.
Humans, young and old, male and female, are designed for relationship. We thrive when we are secure in love; we strive without it.
In accordance with the work of developmental psychologist, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, humans in a healthy environment will follow a pattern of deepening attachment, starting from when we are infants, hopefully reaching its full potential at the young age of six. Certainly, increasing levels of maturity and understanding will only add to these stages of attachment, but the same pattern continues on in adulthood.
There are six deepening levels of attachment - I will briefly outline them here in the hopes of then describing why it can be so extremely hard to get over betrayal and heartbreak.
Level One - Proximity
At this stage, the relationship is solely based on being near one another. Babies cry until they are placed in their parents’ arms. They want to smell you, see you, hear you, and feel you. As the months pass, infants in this stage will naturally feel upset when separated from their caregiver or passed on to someone they do not know, because they do not have the capability to keep the relationship alive in their heart or mind apart from physical proximity.
Level Two - Sameness
If there is an appropriate environment, the child around the age of two will begin to develop attachment to a deeper level around the one year mark of life. He or she will begin to copy and emulate the parent’s behaviour, copying actions, sounds, and eventually words and phrases. There is such truth and beauty in the way that we influence one another the closer we get to someone. Our connection now also has to do with being similar.
Level Three - Belonging and Loyalty
In this stage of attachment, often possibly around the age of three, the child begins to see themselves as belonging to something larger than just them. With this level of connection comes feelings of possessiveness and simultaneously jealousy at the threat of losing the relationship. Children will say, “MY mommy” or “MY daddy”.
Because of this loyalty, the child will begin to see it as right to please the one to whom they are attached. Some of the stubbornness and self-will of the early years can then begin to melt away as they yield to another’s desire.
Often, ones ability to attach can get stuck in one of these three earlier phases of connection, because as we venture further, the risk and vulnerability increases.
Undeveloped friendships and relationships can then unfortunately be marked by negative traits such as clinginess, loss of personal identity because of imitation, and unreasonable jealousy.
Level Four - Significance
Around the fourth year of life, in this fourth stage of attachment, children have the potential to begin to experience relationship because of a sense of being significant to the other person. They will love to hear about how their mom or dad feels about them, and they will find language for their feelings too. They will want to know that they are enjoyed for who they are as people.
Level Five - Love
At this stage, a new level of emotional connection begins with corresponding language around it. The child may draw pictures of themselves with their parent, possibly holding hands and they may try to include the shape of a heart. The child may declare their desire to marry their mommy or daddy, which is their young way of saying that they want to be connected to us forever.
This level of connection is a wonderful thing because it allows us to hold others in our hearts, even when we are separated by time, space, and even death.
Level Six - Intimacy
Finally, if all goes well, and there is a safe place for the heart to step into this place of vulnerability, the child will naturally begin to disclose the deepest places of their hearts. They will begin to whisper secrets, confess their failures, and tell of their greatest fears, because it simply does not feel right to have anything separating them.
Now, consider these stages as important in the development of adult friendships, and more specifically, of finding a life-mate whom you feel you’d like to spend the rest of your life with.
As an adult, the deeper you go in your connection with someone else, the greater the betrayal will feel if for some reason you are rejected.
The greatest betrayal of all is when you’ve come to Level six, with psychological intimacy and possibly sexual intimacy, and then someone was not loyal to you.
If they betrayed your trust by exposing your secrets, or if they had sex with someone else while they were supposed to be committed to you, your mind and heart will register this as catastrophic and dangerous.
You took the risk of trusting and disclosing the core of who you are. You were naked and exposed before them. To be rejected or discarded at that point will certainly hurt. And your brain tells you that you never want to feel this again. It often will involuntarily take-over and refuse to put up a stink if you ever inch towards intimacy again.
And, if you are like many others, you will resort to less risky levels of connection. You may settle for small-talk, for participating in similar activities, and potentially even for skin-on-skin encounters, because the idea of heart-to-heart, “I’m all in” is terrifying.
You are not alone.
May I even add that this is why the God of the Bible thought your heart was important enough that He took the time to set boundaries around intimacy and said,
“Don’t give yourself fully away to someone who hasn’t promised forever to you.”
“Once you are in covenant with one another, don’t you mess around with anyone else. Intimacy demands fidelity. Give it to one another.”
Not only that, but He also made allowance for you, in the occasion of unfaithfulness. Though divorce is certainly not the goal because of the confusion and pain it often brings with it, Jesus himself agreed that because of “the hardness of heart” that can occur in cases of adultery, divorce was permitted.
The hardness of heart. It takes great care and determination to overcome this hardness of heart.
Does time really heal all wounds?
You may be thinking, “Yes, I know how dismal this feels. I am stuck there. Reliving day after day, or else trying to distract myself and dodge the hurt. Am I destined to stay here?”
First, I want to say that time does NOT heal all wounds.
Sometimes time actually causes wounds to become infected and release bitterness into every other area of your life too.
What are some practical steps that you can take to uncover that wound and allow healing?
Confession
I imagine that this is like the moment you come into the E.R. room and have to expose your injury to the nurse. You could just cover it up and try to limp around like everything is fine, but you will come closer to healing if you are willing to face what happened to you.
The wound could be from the disappointment of a long-term relationship that you thought was going to lead somewhere that it didn’t.
The wound could be from being tricked or pushed into a sexual encounter, only to find that the other person was not interested in you as a person at all.
The wound could be that your spouse committed adultery or has become entangled into a porn addiction that has warped your relationship.
This confession could at first just be with a friend you trust, but depending on the severity of the wound or how long you’ve been trying to ignore it, you should likely also bring someone in who has been trained to handle it. Pastors and counsellors will have some fresh insight for you to help you through.
You need to learn to think differently about the things that have caused you pain. All those years of limping have likely brought about a misalignment in the way you live, and new thinking can bring about new freedom.
Forgiveness
This could be likened to the anti-bacterial salve that is placed on your wound. Forgiveness never concedes that what happened was “okay”, rather it acknowledges that it was definitely NOT okay, but that you aren’t allowing your past to reach into your future and dictate how you see yourself, how you see God, or how you will view others.
Forgiveness forfeits the right to execute justice by means of revenge. Forgiveness refuses to imagine up ways that you could pay back. Over time, forgiveness to its full extent, will wish good for the other person instead of harm.
Forgiveness also lowers you out of a prideful place that is spiteful or hateful towards the other who hurt you. It is the only way to prevent their selfish choice from spreading.
Forgiveness does not necessarily mean that you will ever trust the one who wronged you. However, it does set you up to be able to trust others.
Forgiveness does not mean that you feel like forgiving, rather it is an act of the will. Over and over again, you make the painful choice to forgive, for as long as it takes. Years down the road, you may face something that brings an old memory to the forefront, and there you will have to choose to forgive again.
Vulnerability Training
I often think that when we are vulnerable with others, we should use wisdom and make calculated risks.
You have the right to observe someones character for a long time before you would hand over your wallet or the keys to your car. Why should we entrust our hearts, bodies, or secrets to someone if we aren’t certain of their motivations or their ability to protect what we entrust to them?
We must guard against skepticism or cynicism, remembering that no one is perfect. We have to allow others to be human, yet step out in vulnerability, one step at a time.
Just as we learned to attach when we were children, we can slowly walk that journey of attachment as adults too.
Make Room for the Miraculous
I am confident that there is a supernatural factor available when we open up our wounded heart to the One who created us.
The Bible tells us that God is the ultimate Healer, and there is a promise He made in Isaiah 61 where He tells of His desire to bind up the broken-hearted.
We have seen it countless times, where a time of prayer, inviting God’s Holy Spirit into the process has brought far greater results than years of trying or years of counselling.
Invite the Lord to extract the sting of those old memories, and to wash your mind from the sorrow. Be willing to follow Him on a journey of healing, however long it may take.
