A woman married for 30 years has described the devastating impact of discovering her husband's year-long affair, saying her life has 'lost its cohesion'. The reader, who wrote to advice columnist Annalisa Barbieri, said she found out by chance that her husband had been seeing another woman, leaving her feeling 'reduced to pieces'.
The wife, who described herself as previously 'super-active', said the betrayal has narrowed her focus to this single event. She wakes and sleeps thinking about it, and is plagued by a sense of shame at being deceived. 'The worst thing is the sense of utter shame at being deceived, at having lived a lie, of not being good enough,' she wrote.
Clinical psychologist Prof Alessandra Lemma noted the 'striking absence of anger towards your husband and a strong presence of shame directed at yourself'. She suggested this could be a coping mechanism, allowing the reader to make sense of an 'unthinkable rupture' by locating the catastrophe within herself.
Lemma advised the reader to consider what the marriage provided for her sense of self, where her anger is, and what feels most unbearable about the betrayal. She also urged the wife to look at the relationship as a whole, not just its ending, and to think about what she wants to happen next.
Barbieri emphasised that the shame is not the reader's to carry, and encouraged her to talk about her feelings with someone she trusts. 'You trusted your husband, he betrayed you: that's on him,' she wrote.
