The Trapdoor
As wives and partners make our way after discovery, we are putting ourselves back together as best we can. We strive to live a life in which we can recognize ourselves again, but along that journey, many of us will become acquainted with what I call “the trapdoor experience.”
This experience unfolds as you are moving along in your healing and beginning to step out again into life after the worst of PTS is passed. Just as you are getting traction in a new job, or at school, or even in a new relationship, something happens that seems to undo all your hard work. In that moment, it feels like a trapdoor opens suddenly under your feet and down you go.
In the darkness you are surrounded by all the terrible self-doubts you thought you had finally overcome. You hear all the messages that beat you down in the worst of your trauma—his cruel remarks, the abandonment of family, the isolation from co-workers, the distancing of friends. It’s all as fresh as a daisy, but dark and cold and lonely.
What triggers the trapdoor?
The most devastating aspects of our discovery of our husband’s or boyfriend’s secret life still haunt our psyche. We moved forward in life step by step, making progress in some areas, and beginning to recognize ourselves again—even though we are changed forever.
But the triggers for the trapdoor, in my opinion, happen when we begin to see for ourselves that we have made new and genuine investments in life. We see that we are behaving almost like normal people again. We have enthusiasm for work. We are able to see progress in learning. We let our hearts open to someone and discover we can still love. These are all normal things that we may have thought were lost forever.
These also are things others may take for granted. We can’t. They are heroic steps in our lives that testify to how far we have recovered ourselves and remade ourselves where needed. But in living normally into things like work, education, and relationships, we also know how swiftly they can all disappear. When that truth drifts through our thoughts, anxiety is created. What if it happens again? We aren’t sure if we have another “recovery and remaking” in us. As we move more deeply into those normal life commitments, our alarm system may turn itself on. We are on high alert—hypervigilant to any sign of dangers to come.
We have to remember that our alarm system is trying to protect us. So, it goes off when it perceives we are putting ourselves at risk of further harm. At the same time, in our case those alarms may go off for just trying to live our life. That’s how thoroughly and completely we were traumatized by the discovery our husband’s or boyfriend’s secret life. The devastation could not be contained. It was everywhere. All relationships were uncertain. Job performance suffered and some women were driven out of businesses they made successful. Other women faltered academically and lost confidence in their ability to learn. So, going back to school or getting additional training puts them in the same place where everything fell apart. Starting a new relationship can be hazardous as normal anxieties are escalated.
Our trauma is so comprehensive that when we finally recover enough to participate in life again, our progress is haunted by knowing that we can lose it all in a heartbeat. Self-doubts we once could overcome easily can open that trapdoor and send us down into the familiar dark cellar again.
How do we get out?
We need to have a ladder down there. And we do. It’s the ladder made of the things and people who helped us climb out the first time. That means, however, that we have to know what and who got us out. We need to know the breakthrough insights and tools that made the difference for us.
In my case, I use a journal. Even though I’ve been a writer for ages, I hated journaling. But when my life shattered from the inside out, it was using a journal that helped me to hold onto myself and find the pieces of me that lay around me in the rubble. Sometimes I wrote incoherently. I despaired. I wrote lament after lament. For me, that meant I was staying in the long literary tradition of lament. Sometimes I worked with some of the hardest psalms in the Bible to express my experience within the frame a psalmist had passed on to me. (As the co-editor of a liturgical edition of the Psalms I knew them well!)
But now, when the trapdoor opens beneath—and yes, it still does—I reach for my journal and describe how it feels to me, what I fear is happening, what I think is going to happen to me. In the writing of those words I begin to feel more in control. I don’t need to write very much anymore. It’s like I’ve put those thoughts and feelings somewhere and that’s where they reside—in the journal but not within me. I can begin to climb out of the darkness and take step up that ladder.
I also remind myself that I have overcome the despair of loss before. I have faced down the spectres that celebrate my suffering and loss. I have learned to let go of those losses. That doesn’t mean I don’t talk about them, describe them or analyze them. I do. But I no longer have a problem accepting those losses. I’m not fighting that anymore. What is gone is gone.
When these spectres come to dance again, they dance alone. I know what they want me to do—to re-enact the struggle to not lose, to not accept, to avoid, to diminish, to excuse, to rationalize my way out of truth. The difference now is that in accepting the loss I no longer have to marinate in the agony of it. I refuse to writhe around in the same mess when I already know the outcome. I take another step up the ladder.
The third thing that comes to mind is that I am no longer powerless. I extricated myself from the story in which my husband and his accomplices disempowered me over three decades. I’m not in that story anymore. The people in my story now are not like him. I may have misunderstandings and have to clarify things from time to time, but I don’t have to see others through him. He is not the filter. I am learning to let people be who they are—not who he was. I can ask what they mean, why they are doing something I don’t understand, and tell them how it is impacting me. I don’t have to stay down in that cellar. And with this next step I pull myself out altogether.
Climbing out of the cellar is not without tears. I hate that I can still fall through the trapdoor. I hate that every time I do fall though, I confront how deeply he damaged me and how deeply the abuse of the treatment industry compounded that damage. I remember again who I cannot be now and I miss her. I’m sad. I remember that the losses were real and the harm very grave indeed. And I grind my teeth a little, because the abusers all walk away, clicking their heels, trying to shame us for requiring truth and facing it. But I live knowing that every once in a while, a trapdoor opens underneath me and I will fall into a cellar of darkness again.
A cellar of darkness. But I have a ladder down there now. I leave it there. It may be his trapdoor, but it’s my cellar. And the story it holds now is all about how I got out. So, what’s your ladder made of? What are the things or the people or the messages that helped you climb out of the darkness in your life again? They were not just one-time wonders. They are yours forever.
What I’ve discovered in my ten-year journey is that, as time passes, there are fewer trapdoors. And with each trap door, I climb out faster than the last time. I know it’s a shock to find yourself having some of the same feelings and the same thoughts as when you were in the worst of it, but it’s not the last word at all. Your turn-around time will improve. And each time you see that, you can take a bow. This is what courage is about. It’s not just a one-time wonder. It’s the commitment we make to our own lives in the face of the trapdoor that comes less and less, but still comes.
If it helps you get out of the cellar, reach for my hand. It will be there. Because I believe in you. I believe in your life.
With you,
Diane