The Female Covert Narc and Emotional Infidelity
I picked up my wife’s phone in the kitchen one night before sitting down to dinner with our 3 and 6 yo. I saw momentarily the half dozen words that would change our lives and the lives of our young boys forever.
We had been together 12 (what I thought) wonderful, crazy, beautiful years.
He lived in Australia, I knew they had been pen pals before we ever met, I heard about him occasionally…I was not jealous or afraid. Women have male friends and my wife had male friends. I knew many of them and broke bread with some, did Winter Solstice parties with them, I saw Christmas Cards some years…..and I was not afraid of them. My wife loved me and was committed to me and our family.
Then the fires of 2019 happened in Australia and she made 30 or 40 pouches to put baby kangaroos in and sent them to Pete to help the wildlife. They connected on FB (I don’t do Giant Collective LIES which ALL social media is) so I had no idea how many love messages they sent back and forth or for how long. I learned she talked to him for hours with some cheap international phone app.
In the house where our children were born she did this.
I did not sense the major change in our marriage taking place in front of my eyes, and THEN it (or I) shifted and knew she was in love (in her fantasy) with Pete…. my wife, the woman I most cared about in the world, stopped being present…just like that.
She had made her mind up about what she wanted and got passports for the kids and updated her own. I had to sign the passport documents and had no idea this was the reason. I was still in the dark at that point. We talked about going somewhere together. Sounded reasonable.
She was lying. It is how she survived as a child and she was still a child.
By the time we got to therapy our marriage was over. This is often the case.
We have the beautiful boys. Beautiful home in the country a mile off the main road, architecturally designed and built over 18 months of construction, on 10 acres of native prairie 200 yards from where I grew up. The remnants of a trail native Americans used to walk to the Minnesota River is on the property. She wanted to birth the boys at home, be a homeschool mom, let me to do ALL the financial side because I could. And I was willing. We were both willing.
We have friends, family, extended family, roots and networks of people and places you gain over years that gave us a firm sense of belonging, safety and place. It was a perfect set up for boys. Room to roam, a big garden, 25 laying hens, a 300' deep well to clear water. The blue Skys went on forever in that place. For one of her birthdays I resurrected a Totem Pole (not native built) that was mysteriously in the weeds for many years and repainted it and set it up.
This is my second marriage my first ended amicably with one son. I am 20 years my current wife’s senior, but very fit, well heeled, and connected to my community and family and to myself. I deeply hesitated to become married but she said it would work, my gut was torn at the time, but I saw a second life for me, doctors had told me I could not have more children 15 years ago. I am a poet and beekeeper.
As an empath with better compassionate listening skills than most men I became a wonderful father again who had the time and maturity to understand the value of my children and to let them know they are valued and loved and important. I love them. I let them know that every day.
I never catted around. I am six lbs over my high school graduation weight. I bike. I downhill. Though I could have been more culinary, I cooked and grilled when I saw I could. I picked up after myself. I knew how to load a dishwasher. I was not afraid of housework. I built upon a 100 year old family owned company and added 50 employees who were like family. I encouraged her to not spend so much time with the boys. Visit friends. Take a class. Travel to see work peers she once spent time with. She never did. I did not mind her not listening. I knew it was how she moved through the world.
I really appreciate THIS story where YOU stop yourself and look at yourself, your faith, your marriage and have some deep self reflections about your actions. I sense you can be contrite. You realize forgiveness comes before trust. You also have important spiritual Faith which is the muscle you rely on and activate in such situations. It is a powerful, truthful tool.
And then I picked up her phone.
Like you, I was vested and I was not going to give up my marriage, my boys, my sense of belonging for an emotional affair with a man she had never met. (I did a background check on him. 51 and never married. NO kids. He lived in Brisbane with his Mum or in his car when he didn’t live with her. He had a erstwhile music career which was going no where and volunteered for the Red Cross. He claimed he was an emergency medical tech. So nojob. No prospects. Heavy drinker. Described by women who knew him as a “stalker” Got government checks to live on.) I wrote him a long letter, sent it to his Mum’s address in Brisbane and told him to “Fuck Off” three times in the short very clear note.
From the beginning I told her I was willing to work on our marriage, sense of security, how to better connect… I would do anything as I had been doing all along…but even from the beginning it was clearly not enough….certainly Love was not enough. Even as we drove out to see her “therapist” my wife was was sharing the brilliance of Gwenth Paltrow’s Conscious Uncoupling Theory, and trying to get me to read books on divorce and its special impact on men and caring fathers. I did not know what she was thinking. She never said. She communicated and spoke with Signals when she had enough bandwidth.
We each got our own therapist. I also did 9 sessions of special Birth Trauma Therapy because she asked me to look at that. 14 weeks of spin dry (I am not an alcoholic and I do not have a problem, but she wanted me to do it) We worked with a co parenting coach. We drove 4000 miles round trip to visit with friends and do some intense couples counseling with a practitioner who was not credentialed. It was a cluster F…where I was blindsided and blamed for why her emotional affair happened and that it was ME that had to change behaviors to make the marriage work. I bought a new touring bike and shipped it from San Francisco and started riding 150 miles a week.
Her therapist was a cranial sacral/massage therapist pretending to be a LMFT, but at least my wife was talking. And as she peeled back the the outer layers of her family of origin issues, and I peddled 10 lbs off my body, my wife checked out of our marriage. The truth was too hard.
I thought it was fixable but I was in denial cu Kublar Ross on grief stages.
She was gone. She had left. And as the months went by and the $150 an hour sessions and expensive books and drum circles, and Sunday morning meditations piled up for the sake of trying to save our marriage…I could see SHE had NEVER BEEN in the marriage and had clear and troubling attachment/borderline issues that preceded me by decades. I left the house because she had no where to go and we could no longer live together. I tried Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, but my heart was deeply broken and I will not do that this year.
All of us have childhood Trauma. ALL OF US. Including me. Each of you reading this has Childhood Trauma that impacts your adult life, emotions and relationships.
2% of us have Emotionally Intelligent Relationships with our caregivers or parents. 2 out of 100 people. It actually might be less. Our thesholds and capacities for that wounding Trauma and how we recover from it greatly determines the quality of our adult lives and intimate relationships.
I know a few of the details of my wife’s childhood Trauma, but at 2 am side by side and wide awake in that comfortable king size bed where you would think/feel TALKING with vulnerability about yourself with your partner of 12 years and it would be safe and secure…she never said a word. Kind of a red flag right?
If I could piss on her father’s, grandfathers, and other people who claimed to be her caregiver’s graves I would. The caretaking she received as a child. came strictly from hunger.
It may be you can recover from an emotional affair or infidelity. And your marriage can be stronger, but if you never know and understand and nurture the Truth of yourself and listen to the same often more difficult Truths inside your partner, regularly, compassionately, if you are not making secure connection the priority in your marriage every day and sharing it with your partner in important vulnerable and reciprocal ways, it seems doubtful Trust can be renewed after emotional/infidelity or through the hours and weeks and years of therapy required to regain it. I have lived through this and devoted lots of time and energy and financial resourses to dealing with her Trauma…but the only antidote for Childhood Trauma (with women or men) is the Hard Truth. Few of us face that, examine that, learn what it is…and so it gets carried forward into the next generation. It becomes Generational Trauma.
I will soon be 18 months separated from my wife. I am more acclimated to not being with her than being with her. I figure 3 months of healing for every year of partnership. So I am approaching the halfway mark in my healing process. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night by myself and in the dark not knowing who I am. I have pieced myself together. I have gone mostly No Contact…but triggers can still unglue me.
My wife is the Petitioner in the divorce, but has no interest in divorce because divorce is the ultimate abandonment. None of us want to be abandoned right? And so even as I text or email politely ask in notes for her to move ahead with the legal ending our of our marriage, she has no incentive to move forward. Her pathology doesn’t want to engage the real world consequences of divorce or marriage. We have not had a face to face conversation in all these many months. A few words when we exchange the boys, but nothing else.
The way you communicate, converse, hold each other, love BEFORE divorce is simply magnified 10 Fold once you start the process. I did not understand the term Stonewalling, but 18 months of her silence is the definition I will always remember. I have incorporated it at a cellular level. It is the most brutal abuse I have ever received from anyone in my lifetime.
I see the boys two nights in a row a week as we struggle toward 50% custody. The process is glacial, and this morning it is 5 degrees above zero. Finally snowing. I ordered kid snowshoes for the boys, both brilliant red. The color of the pill I took to understand the Matrix of my marriage.
Last year at Winter Solstice was the lowest place I have ever been in my life. I could not see or reach or believe in myself. The love I have for my boys saved me and saved the rest of my one precious life. I don’t think about it the way I did then. A lifeline was tossed to me and I grabbed it and slowly separated from my drowning wife before she could pull me under.
What I continue to learn in therapy with a PhD practitioner who has written four books on grief and speaks at conferences world wide, is that Childhood Trauma can create lifelong emotional damage to your spirit, emotions, your somatic self. And often no amount of therapy, love, truth, or healing can change it.
After months of looking I found a mental health program in Arizona that addresses specifically many of my wife’s attachment and borderline issues. It gets excellent reviews. It is expensive. But as I come back to myself I realize I am able to reach out again, and so I offered to pay for this potential healing venue in the hopes that long term she and the boys and the rest of her life would benefit. Her terrified false self responded “F off”…and so her amygdala continues to rule.
I do not blame my wife. And I am far from perfect. I might blame and rail against the caregivers/parents who were not there for her as a child and young adult. Who traumatized her by their lack of love, empathy, failure to access resources. Their failure to protect her while she looked at them to protect her. People who she trusted and who then turned on her and abused her, hurt her, stole her childhood from her giving her lifelong wounds she is never going to recover from. If I knew where these men and some women were buried I would piss on their graves.
Gabor Mate says that all mental and physical illnesses come from Trauma. I believe this 100% and I believe all long term relationships and marriages must go back and explore Attachment Styles to really understand yourself and your partner. That is the beginning of a healthful long term journey. Start doing this IMMEDIATELY after your honeymoon. Waiting 5, 10, and 20 years is too late.
This Medium story by Carmen Spagnola started my own healing journey. Though it was too late to save my marriage, it deeply helped me come back to myself and who I am. Not a small thing.
Thanks for writing this important story about Self Reflection and Realization, understanding forgiveness and right and wrong. Sorry for the long rant. Keep building your Faith. Good luck
Namaste. Thomas
Here is Carmen and the excellent read I suggest.
https://medium.com/@carmenspagnola/portrait-of-a-marriage-yes-its-mine-b824784820f7
