SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

We used to say it all the time over here "You have to let go of the outcome."

​It’s great advice. It’s also incredibly easy to type, and brutally hard to actually do. We rarely talk about how much time, energy, and raw courage are involved in even getting a start on it. We don't talk about how uncomfortable, scary, and painful the process actually is.

​When D-Day happens, most of us fall into a mad scramble. We panic, and we immediately shift into desperate damage control. In our minds, we think we can just put our spouse's guts back into place quickly, nice and neatly. We think we can lie, minimize, and manipulate to gain control of the situation and make it less than what it really is. We grasp at anything to stop the bleeding.

But beneath that panic is a hard realization, things are entirely out of your control.

​I never thought of myself as a controlling person until I realized just how desperately I was clinging to control after the bomb went off.

​Before D-Day, we create an illusion under a cozy safety net. We took what our betrayed spouses offered us, love, support, and comfort, completely for granted. Our outcome for our lives felt fixed. We grew fond of it, attached to the idea that it would always be there. That attachment fed our minds with comfort. That’s why D-Day is such a violent shock, it rips that safety net wide open and blows the illusion of control out of the water.

​Ive seen the sudden quick turnaround time and time again where our BS is our entire world again. Why? Because we are terrified of the unknown. Human beings like to feel protected in a safety net. Change forces us out of our comfort zone, and the moment we step out, we immediately feel unsafe. It is easier and more comforting to cling to a bad situation with a "sure idea" of the destination than to be left staring into a blank future.

​I know one hard truth I had to learn, It’s NOT just the outcome we have to let go of, it’s the unknown we have to learn to embrace.

​The unknown is hard to face. To be honest, it still freaks me out a bit. It feels like you could lose anything at any time, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nobody likes loss. But at the same time, when you embrace the unknown, you realize you could also gain everything.

​There is no definite, guaranteed outcome no matter what life you are living. You don’t have to be a naturally "controlling" person to want control over your life, you know what I mean? But out from under that false safety net, you finally see the truest reality, life has always been an unknown. No outcome was ever certain, even before you blew up your life.

​The absolute truest thing I’ve come to realize is that the only control I have is over myself. That’s it. And the more I grew comfortable with that reality, the truest reality, the better I could breathe, and the more I could finally let go.

​When my marriage ended and we ultimately divorced, walking through that door taught me that letting go of the destination wasn't a death sentence. It didn't mean I stopped caring, and it didn't mean I was giving up. It just meant I stopped trying to force a reality that wasn't mine to dictate.

​Letting go means getting comfortable with a process where you don't even know where to begin, but you choose to believe in it anyway. It takes courage to walk this path. A lot of it. You will feel like you are doing the hardest shit of your life when you finally drop your hands and stop trying to control your spouse's choices.

​It won’t feel better for some time. But eventually, you will get some real, sustainable peace out of it.

​Anxiety and panic come from attachment, from needing a specific answer to feel safe. But attachments aren't healthy. What you want is a true, authentic bond with yourself and, if possible, a healthy connection with your partner. You don't want to operate out of neediness and fear.

​If you are in the early days of this, stop trying to glue the shattered pieces back together perfectly. Stop trying to manipulate the ending of the story. Step out from under the safety net, make friends with the unknown, and realize that no matter what door you walk through, you can choose to be a safe, honest human being today. That is the only piece of the world you own.

How did you finally learn to let go?

One of the messages that's stuck with me from this site is that even if you do end up divorced, you want to be able to say that you did everything you could to change, fix yourself, and to show up for your BS and the marriage. It helped me to focus on what I should be doing right then, in the moment, rather than whether or not my marriage would survive.

One of the messages that's stuck with me from this site is that even if you do end up divorced, you want to be able to say that you did everything you could to change, fix yourself, and to show up for your BS and the marriage. It helped me to focus on what I should be doing right then, in the moment, rather than whether or not my marriage would survive.

Amen to that.

Letting go of the outcome is excellent advice, and I think human nature prevents us from doing it very quickly. Maybe it’s a stabilizing force to prevent us from whiplashing across different understandings of reality and losing ourselves, but letting go of our life plans and dreams is like draining a lake with a garden hose. I think it takes a disciplined pursuit of health and truth to give the process enough time to take hold.

The other thing that was helpful was the "If you love them, set them free" principle, wherein if his safety and healing are of paramount importance to me, and to be safe and heal, we need to be apart, then so be it. I would be absolutely devastated if he decided that, don't get me wrong. But at least it shifted the focused-on outcome from marriage/divorce to recovery and whatever that requires.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 3:46 AM, Wednesday, May 27th]

I think human nature prevents us from doing it very quickly.

Yes, it's a survival mechanism until we are strong enough to face it. Our brains can only handle so much reality collapsing at once.

I think it takes a disciplined pursuit of health and truth to give the process enough time to take hold.

It's a daily practice. Letting go isn't a one-time decision you make. Letting go is a choice you have to make a hundred times a day, in the smallest, most agonizing micro moments.

In my early days, I tried to create a protected bubble around my BH to shield him from more hurt. But if I'm honest, as much as I wanted to stop his bleeding, I wrapped him in safety because his pain made me feel unsafe. I was doing the work with a desperate attachment to one specific ending, saving my marriage.

​That didn't make me a safe person. When you are attached to an outcome, your recovery becomes transactional. You start keeping a hidden scorecard in your head, "I gave up my passwords, I sat through the rage... so why aren't you healed yet?" The danger of this mindset is that your baseline becomes entirely dependent on their mood. The moment your spouse has a bad day or hints at divorce, your foundation crumbles.

​I realized I had to form my own foundation first. At the root of the wayward mindset is a deep inability to handle emotional discomfort. The piece of advice that changed everything for me was, you have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.

​Embracing the unknown is the exact antidote to the old mindset. It forces you to build distress tolerance and sit in the terrifying blank space of life without reaching for a quick fix.

​Dropping the outcome is the only thing that allows you to be truly present. When you accept that the marriage might end, you stop defending the relationship and you start defending them. You can finally look at their devastation and think, "It doesn’t matter what happens to us. What matters right now is that you are hurting, and I am here to witness it."

"You drop the expectations because you want to be able to say you did everything you could to fix yourself and show up honestly for your BS."

​My marriage ultimately ended in divorce. I lived the exact worst-case scenario that terrifies so many in the early days. But because I had spent that grueling time learning how to face the unknown, I didn't dissolve when the ink dried on the papers. I didn't run back to the toxic coping mechanisms that ruined my marriage in the first place. The work wasn't wasted.

​When you stop demanding a guarantee from the future, you build a core that can survive any weather. You realize that you can lose your marriage, your timeline, and your comfort, but as long as you own your honesty and your integrity, you haven't lost yourself. And there is peace in that.

[This message edited by foreverlabeled at 2:22 PM, Wednesday, May 27th]

I think for me to let it go I had to come to realize that redemption was possible even if I could not redeem myself in the eyes of my husband.

I don’t mean I didn’t intend to try to make amends, but that I needed to focus on my individual direction and become more reliable for myself. Recognizing that I betrayed myself and my own best interests helped me decide what I needed to strengthen within me. This helped me to stop trying to convince him of certain aspects of our relationship, and it made me get real with myself.

I didn’t have enough foresight to understand that was actually what he needed to see—a solid commitment to myself because once I had that he had an easier time believing I was truly sorry and this wasn’t the person I was trying to be in life.

Letting go of the outcome to me means that I stopped trying to convince anyone of anything—I needed to become healthy and whole and stand on my own credentials in all my relationships. This created the consistency, when I was no longer changing to keep someone but instead focusing on becoming the most authentic version of myself. I had been a chameleon most of my life, changing to be who I thought the person wanted or needed me to be so I would be loveable to them.

I should clarify this wasn’t done with malicious or even conscious intent. It came from learning to survive in a chaotic household, believing I could restore or maintain the peace by being perfect. So it was more of an instinctual ability.

My first venture into that was my IC wanted me to stop doing all my coulds and only do my shoulds. Meaning, I only do what’s required of me and the extra shit I was doing to hustle for love were off the table. It was a terrifyinv experience to go home to my broken husband and do less, but we both understood I was going to add back things with authenticity over time and he agreed to it. I was very surprised most of the things I stopped doing he didn’t even notice. They weren’t important to him. And it left me later having a whole lot more room to do things he really did want and so it was a win win, but just an example of how I moved towards authenticity.

I think for a long time I thought I was doing it, so the second thing was I had to accept failure as part of process. Healing and becoming more reliable means you are going to peel the layers of an onion. And sometimes you will get to a layer that calls other layers into question. So you have to be flexible, adaptable and committed to the vision of where you are trying to go. I can’t tell you how many times that I would see that work I had done earlier was more about ego than actually changing something.

So I had to stop trying to get an A and also getting it rapidly. Instead, I had to focus on things almost one at a time because it requires a lot of mindfulness to change that one thing. And it often led to the next practical thing to work on so it was building on the last.

It was a couple of years in when I surrendered. I was at peace if we were going to stay married and I was in peace if we were going to divorce because the confidence in myself that I could face anything and be reliable for myself grew.

And I have surrendered many times since then.

And here I am in my tenth year and I still realize things and still work on them. It’s not being done in a critical time of distress, it’s a more comfortable rhythm. I have these aha moments when I just can’t unsee it, and I have to work through another round of thought or behavior modification.

Every single thing I have worked on has not only been worth while, taught me a practice, things to go back to when life gets hard again—-it has continued to add layers of peace of mind. And I experience love, not as chaos, not as just feelings, but as a state of being. A self filling fountain. Whatever I face, I do it with love now. And keeping that in the forefront transcends some of my human tendencies because I always strive to lead with it.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:41 PM, Wednesday, May 27th]