By Jean Fitzpatrick
The crisis of confidence on Wall Street is so bad that not only are consumers angry these days, but banks are even afraid to lend to one another. Lately the financial pages are full of trust and faith and loss — words I use all day in my therapy with couples — and it strikes me that rebuilding trust between Wall Street and the rest of us might be a lot like healing a marriage after an infidelity.
“How could you do this?” the betrayed spouse asks her cheating partner. “How long did you think you could get away with it?” The truth has hit her like a ton of bricks: “I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach,” she says. “I can’t believe how stupid I was.” As she begins to grasp that this thing she would never have predicted is not only possible but has actually happened, she worries that she’s lost her whole grip on reality. Now she wants all the details — where did he like to meet the other woman? did he make an excuse to leave the house on her birthday? what was the sex like? — each one a knife in her heart.
That’s you and me. Looking at the dismal numbers in our 401(k), we can hardly believe how much we’ve lost. Feeling powerless and angry, we’re looking for someone to blame.
In a marriage the partner who has strayed is usually eager for a speedy resolution — a bailout, you might say. The discovery of his cheating is almost as shocking to him as to his injured spouse, because he does not think of himself as the kind of guy who does this sort of thing. Up till now he has somehow managed to split his mental reality onto two separate tracks, one for each of the two women in his life, neatly holding onto an image of himself as a good husband. Now, recognizing that he has risked foolishly and may lose everything — both the marriage and the affair — he is usually remorseful but also thinks his hurt partner is making too much of a fuss. Do they really have to talk about the infidelity so much? Does she expect him to account for all of his movements from now on? “It’s like she wants to know what I’m doing every minute of the day,” he says. “If I don’t answer my cell phone when she calls, it’s World War Three. She’s the one who’s going to kill this relationship.”
No surprise to me that Wall Street started out insisting on a huge sum with no oversight.
Where do we go from here? In the couples therapist’s office, each partner needs to be willing to put the relationship first. That means the cheating partner shows newfound respect for the needs and wishes of his spouse and redirects his time and energy toward her and toward the marriage.
The betrayed partner needs to move past a blaming, hopeless stance (“I’ll never trust him again and I don’t care what he does”) and summon up the courage to insist on a richer, more fulfilling connection — one that will demand more honesty and more caring from her partner and from herself. She needs to trust that the marriage can once again thrive and nurture both partners. Only then can she move beyond despair and work toward the future. More often than not, she needs to be willing to look at how through neglect she may have contributed to an emptiness in the marriage, not because this in any way justifies her partner’s unfaithfulness, but because it is one aspect of rediscovering closeness and joy. This reordering of a relationship toward shalom — which is so much more than the absence of war or conflict, encompassing, as Walter Brueggemann wrote, orderly fruitfulness, generous caring, and equitable justice — demands something that is in very short supply in the midst of a colossal crisis of trust: hope.
The same is true in societal relationships. As we recover from betrayal by the financial sector, we must move beyond anger and despair and grab onto hope. We need to demand more of our leaders and ourselves. We need to educate ourselves about the workings of money and power, recognizing that through our own neglect we allowed our financial institutions to run wild and collectively chose to live on credit. Together we need to put our energies into building a stronger, more truly productive global economy. Holding onto that kind of hope — not pie in the sky, but the stubborn, humble, transformative kind — is our only way out of this mess.
Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, sees couples and individuals in her private practice. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.