not have left otherwise.
I didn't really get angry until after the breakup with Mr. X, when it all came crashing down in an avalanche of lies. Several weeks after the breakup, a few different people came forward with confessions of what they had known. I discovered that the lying was even more pervasive than I had thought. This hit me on a new level.
What? More lies? Impossible! I can't even . . .
And then, the mother of all lies: He. Was. Married.
Married. The many times he used the words “divorced” and “ex-wife” were merely shiny distractions to keep me moving forward. To be fair, his wife had had a boyfriend long before we met, and he had had at least a couple of relationships before ours. But the blood drained from my body when I heard the two syllables: mar-ried. They seemed to drip out of our mutual friend's mouth in slow motion. I repeated the word out loud to confirm, tagging on the most enormous question mark so she knew to take extra care in her response.
“I assumed you knew,” was her reply.
I didn't know. And I hadn't spoken to him since our parting. I had only heard that he had become involved with someone new immediately after the breakup, and thought I might hear of a quick marriage to that person but never expected this about the woman I knew as his ex-wife. Needless to say, I had a very dramatic reaction to this news. Sometimes some serious acting out is warranted. I think I spent several days on the phone. I needed everyone to know. Every. One. If I could have, I would have hired a skywriter.
After my dramatic, days-long performance, I was ready to get back to superhero business, to take a deep dive and come to understand that the situation was really nothing more than Mr. X being Mr. X and me being me, each protecting ourselves. He wasn't brave enough to tell the truth, and I wasn't brave enough to hear the truth. I had to forgive us both—myself for putting on the blinders and him for lying.
Days after learning he was still married, I had dinner with a friend who owns the best little dress shop in Old Pasadena. She hesitantly told me that Mr. X had recently been in the store with his new girlfriend. While she was in the dressing room, he had asked if his girlfriend could use my discount. To add further insult to injury, he had whispered to the salesperson, so his girlfriend couldn't hear, that he had broken up with me because I couldn't get along with his daughter. I hit the roof! That lie was somehow even more egregious than all the others, if such a thing were possible.
The lid that I had been struggling with all my might to keep on the pot flew off. I kept myself together at dinner, but only because I was in shock. My girlfriend and her husband did their darnedest to buffer the blow and soothe me. The next day, however, my anger seemed to take on a visible, monstrous shape and send slime everywhere. Slime all over my house. Slime on the phone lines leading to all my girlfriends. I called one girlfriend, spewed ugly thoughts and feelings, then hung up, my heart barely relieved. Soon after, I needed to call someone else. Each time I hung up, I was embarrassed that I had tainted yet another friendship with all this anger. But I couldn't let it go. Anger had taken the wheel and was driving the car of my life. It had summarily thrown me into the back seat. I realized that the first thing I needed to do to regain control of the car was to have my anger heard—not by yet another girlfriend, but by Mr. X.
I wrote a letter. Not an email or a text. An honest-to-god letter that I put in an envelope with a stamp on it. I asked him to stop lying about me, about how and why we had broken up. And I told him that his friends had admitted other lies they knew of, and that I was more informed than he might think. I let go of all that I was struggling to keep inside.
The act of writing a letter like this can make you feel like a wizard. When I wrote it, the anger transmuted to acceptance—not apathy, but acceptance of what was so. Things happened between us. I was angry and I needed to communicate that anger honestly and completely. Each step—writing, addressing the envelope, sealing it, putting the stamp on it, and dropping it in the mailbox—caused little shifts in my heart. My feelings were given a voice. You may not even need to send the letter, you may just need to hear your own deep and powerful lion's roar. In my case, I wanted to stop any further lies, so I sent it. I wasn't the only one who needed to hear my roar.
Then I got to work on me. I had to untangle what had really happened from the dramatic story I had made up. What were the facts?
He told lies.
I wasn't a victim.
He was being him, and I was being me.
We chose each other and we were still playing our parts perfectly.
I could forgive us both—again.
Several days later, he replied to my letter with a long letter of his own, but only these four lovely words mattered: “Your anger is justified.” I still find that response to be just about as miraculous as they come. As a result, forgiveness was his, and peace was mine.
If you don't receive justification from your Mr. X, find a dear friend who will acknowledge your anger or your pain for you. You can role play with friends, telling them exactly what you need them to say to you. You can even write it down for them like a script and have them say it to you exactly as you need to hear it. Tell them what you need them to hear and then have them repeat their lines as many times as necessary.
Acknowledgment is a powerful tool, because it grounds us in the present moment, and it can calm the crazy firestorms. Face it: when you are in a firestorm, you are pretty much entrenched in the past. I was so entrenched in looking at Mr. X's misdeeds that I was nearly buried alive. His acknowledgment gave me the shovel I needed to dig myself out of my obsession with the past.
Let's move our way back into the present moment now, sweetheart. Right this way . . .
Acknowledgment not only quells your crazy firestorms, it also nurtures your Mighty Flame. I had a friend who was very angry about having cancer. I took her to her favorite beach, which had a private cove. For the good part of an afternoon, she yelled and screamed and let all that anger out. My job was just to bear witness and to provide her with an endless supply of rocks to throw at the cliff. Did the anger at her cancer end that day? Not at all. But the acknowledgment of it lit up her Mighty Flame. By the end of the day, she was glowing. The experience gave her relief from the grief and a place to return to in her heart when the anger rose up again.
Grief, sadness, anger, and rage can all take turns creating fires. In the very darkest days after my breakup with Mr. X, I felt knocked down by both anger and sadness. Anger exhausted me and sadness was an ever-present leaden, smoldering cloak weighing me down. I often felt as if I didn't have the strength to lift it off my shoulders. The more I fought it, the worse it got.
Sad, repetitive thoughts can be insidious and disempowering. They can ebb less frequently than anger, so the respites between them are fewer and farther apart. And before you know it, you are drowning in them. Sad thoughts are like deep, dark waters. You can't even see where the light is, so you never know where to come up for air.
Most important, if you're too busy fighting, you can't see the source of these thoughts. I always want to run through uncomfortable emotions like a freight train, as if my feelings are enemies that need to be mowed down. In reality, they are like white surrender flags saying: “Look here, please!” My friend Fran has received more than her share of calls from me with complaints that I can't stop crying or that I am “still” sad. She always patiently repeats: “Of course you're sad. And, that's okay.” I don't know how many times she has repeated these words over the decades: “Be gentle with yourself.” It was in the midst of my breakup
