“We usually need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend some time as forest dwellers, just surviving.” – Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst
Each morning, I walk with my friend through the woods near our homes. We like to tell ourselves we’re hiking but really we’re just walking the woods, which doesn’t sound as athletic but certainly sounds more lovely.
My friend is a fellow secret sister, another member of our club that none of us ever wanted to be part. The universe isn’t in the habit of asking me what I want. You too, I’m guessing.
She was recently accepted to attend psychotherapist school. I’m not sure exactly what it’s called but it will help train her to help others. Nobody who knows her is surprised that she got accepted. None of us think she will be anything but brilliant at this job. She is so deeply curious about why we are how we are and so compassionate. Her clients will be lucky. I am more than a little excited that I will benefit from everything she’s learning because I seem to still have more than a few kinks to work out in my own psyche.
And this morning, as my friend was telling me what’s she’s learning from a book about Internal Family Systems, we both marvelled at how many decades we can live before life just upends us — by, say discovering your husband is having an affair — leaving us in a world that feels entirely unfamiliar. Who is this man? we find ourselves wondering. And perhaps even more discombobulating, who am I now?
That question was at the heart of my own healing. Betrayal threatens our sense of reality, of truth. If we were wrong about this, we surmise, what else are we wrong about? Is anyone who they seem to be? Including us?
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is having a moment. My understanding of it is perfunctory but, from what my friend has explained, IFS posits that we are a system of inner parts but with a core “Self,” essentially an “internal family.” And like any family, our parts perform various roles — some that keep us going and safe, some that are impulsive and reactive, some that are wounded. Learning to access this undamaged Self — which embodies calm, curiosity, compassion (there are 8Cs) — is key to healing.
But this is all new to me. And was certainly new when I was first confronted with my husband’s infidelity and thrust into, as Woodman notes, forest dwelling: The old was gone. The new was still becoming. Survival was the best I could do.
And that can feel like failure. “I’m sick of surviving,” I wailed to my therapist one day.
But just because I wasn’t packing my bags and meeting with divorce lawyers didn’t mean I wasn’t building a new future on the site of my past, even if I didn’t yet realize it. My old self had crumbled along with what my belief in my marriage. But on that fallow ground seeds of reinvention were nonetheless taking root.
I noticed how often I waited til everyone at the dinner table took what they wanted before serving myself. How often I didn’t venture an opinion when we were deciding on a movie, or a restaurant, or a vacation destination. How long, I wondered, had been sublimating my own wants so that others had theirs met. I realized with some shame that I’d been a doormat. That I'd been swallowing my anger, my resentment, my agency. Somewhere along the way, it had become easier to let go of my needs than negotiate for them.
I started small. I added the word “no” to my vocabulary. I stopped waiting for anyone to offer me their crumbs and began helping myself. He wanted me to continue accompanying him and our kids to see his mother, who routinely undermined my mothering? No. Someone needs to take time off work because one of the kids has a dentist appointment? Let’s discuss it because my work matters, too. I might have still been a forest dweller but I was no longer just surviving.
Betrayal inevitably brings forth the end of something: our certainty, perhaps, our marriage. But it is also the beginning of something. There is pain in dwelling in the forest. But survival, when everything we thought we'd built is reduced to rubble, is no small thing. We will carry the scars of it with us. No matter that others might not see them. The scars are there. They are ours. And perhaps they foretold the promise of new along.