Navigating Betrayal: Advice for Healing and Moving Forward

Understanding and Managing the Desire for Revenge After Infidelity

Dear Amalia,

Recently, my husband confessed that he cheated on me with someone he met through his studies. I also found out that our mutual friends knew about the betrayal. After the initial shock and ongoing suffering, I have a tremendous desire for revenge. This desire is aimed specifically at the woman with whom he cheated because he has paid the price. I won’t elaborate, but all this has led to great suffering. We are still married and in couples therapy.

I want her to be humiliated as I was humiliated and to suffer as I suffer. My husband tried to break up with her several times, but she wouldn’t let go until I finally told her husband about her affair with my husband. But I feel it is not enough.

I talked to her, and she is selfish and doesn’t regret what she did. She only thinks about herself, and I want her to pay for the suffering she caused me and my family. It’s become an obsession. I feel like I can’t go on with my life until one of two things happens: she sincerely apologizes for what she did, or she’s humiliated the way I was and suffers the way I suffer.

I would appreciate your advice,

The Betrayed

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Dear Betrayed,

First, thank you for allowing me to respond to your situation within this section.

Let's go straight to the point: what a nightmare! You are suffering, and in addition to the heartbreak, you feel humiliated. The fact that mutual friends knew about the betrayal can add to the feeling of humiliation and helplessness. You are trying to hold on in a dense social network, which includes your studies, friends, and the circle of the woman with whom your husband had an affair. There is a lot of stress and many triggers there.

You say that the crisis currently fills your whole world: you are still married and going to therapy, so I assume it is a frequent topic of discussion. There are also your husband's attempts to break up with her and your confrontation with her husband.

I understand that you feel you need something significant to happen so you can put this story to rest and free yourself to rebuild your life and relationship. The first solution you come up with—a sincere apology from her—is an excellent solution. The main problem is that you have no control over it. Few things make us more miserable than trying to get someone to behave the way we want.

Besides, you can't tell if the apology is sincere. Therefore, there is a danger that even after you receive the recognition you long for, you will not get the relief you need. After all, this is what happened after you talked to her husband. I guess even then you thought that the confrontation would bring the desired relief, but the obsession only grew.

Training for Calming and Releasing Anger

The second option you presented is that the woman will be humiliated and suffer as you did. This is a very common wish in such situations. After all, "an eye for an eye" is an age-old concept. However, you are asking for my advice, which suggests there is another voice inside you that knows that if you succeed in punishing her, you may get relief in the short term, but revenge actions usually do not achieve long-term relief and often lead to escalation.

So what is my advice? As an emotion-focused therapist, I start with the emotion you are experiencing most tangibly right now: your anger. You describe rage, revenge, fantasies of punishment and humiliation, and a desire to cause suffering. I appreciate the honesty with which you describe your emotional state. From an emotion-focused perspective, we hypothesize that usually such anger is not a primary and deep emotion that arises in response to an anger-inducing situation but an emotion that helps regulate another, even less pleasant emotion.

Does that mean you shouldn't be angry? Is anger never a primary emotion? Assertive anger has the potential to improve our relationships with our environment. But assertive anger is different from accusatory rage. Assertive and connected anger is a natural emotion whose survival function is to reclaim something taken from us without our consent or to remove something imposed on us.

When I express assertive anger, the message to others is, "I'm angry" or "I'm not ready to continue like this." But when overwhelmed with rage that shames the other person, the message is, "You are bad," or in this case, "You are evil." Such anger is an emotional defense that usually leads to escalation in relationships.

What do I mean when I suggest that your rage is an emotional response helping you protect yourself from the original emotion you feel following the betrayal? The key word here is "suffering." You move quickly from "suffering" to "desire for revenge," confirming my hypothesis that your suffering is very deep and includes extremely difficult emotions, such as sadness and fear.

I believe that the more you give these uncomfortable feelings attention and legitimacy, the more you will experience a release from the obsessive desire for revenge that currently controls and makes you miserable. Couples therapy may not be the place to connect with these feelings right now, because they are much more vulnerable. Obviously, your husband is not the person who makes you feel the most protected and safe in the world right now, which may be why in his presence you connect more to anger than to the more fragile emotional state hiding under the anger.

And maybe under the rage, there is also anger. But maybe another kind of anger, more connected, whose object is different. Perhaps you are angry with your husband and your mutual friends. There is a hint of this in your letter. Note that you wrote, "My desire for revenge is aimed precisely at the woman with whom he cheated on me." I think you should be intrigued by this choice of words. After all, both your husband and your friends hurt you more directly than this woman, who was never committed to you. This is partly why your anger towards her fails to achieve the desired results.

On the other hand, your husband and your friends are in an interpersonal relationship with you, they care about you, and they feel some responsibility towards you. Therefore, if you express your anger towards them in the way I outlined above (i.e., defining what you are angry about, what kind of correction you expect, and any new conditions you need to feel secure in these relationships), you are more likely to experience the healing power of assertive anger.

At the same time, a desire for revenge is completely normal and understandable. Couples therapist Esther Perel sometimes recommends keeping a "revenge notebook" and allocating a limited amount of time each day to describe your revenge fantasies in detail. Perel says this method can help relieve the obsession, allowing you to rest for the remainder of the day. It might be worth a try.

Good luck and encouragement from afar,

Amalia

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