Car vs. ped
Sunday, September 12th, 2010This spring I participated in a volunteer patient-care project at a local hospital, and I learned a lot of hospital lingo along the way. (Example: “SOB” means “shortness of breath,” not, well, you know.) And one of these hospital terms turned out to be a good metaphor for my work with couples: “Car vs. ped.” It’s a notation you’ll find on the chart of a patient who was struck by a car while walking. It means “car vs. pedestrian.”
And it’s a great metaphor for what happens to a person who learns that their partner has had an affair. Maybe this seems obvious to you, but finding out your partner had an affair is a deeply traumatizing experience. It instantly transforms a major part of your life into something you know nothing about: you’re now partnered with someone who had an affair…what else don’t you know about your partner??
That’s why, if the two of you decide to save the relationship, the person who was betrayed begins to present symptoms of PTSD: hyper-vigilant behaviors, intrusive thoughts, intense mood swings, and being triggered by certain objects or words. You have traumatized your partner. (Or, dear reader, you yourself have been traumatized.) What to do?
First, it helps to recognize this as the trauma it is. If you both understand that one of you has been traumatized enough to experience PTSD, that can help you both be patient and hang in there for the long haul. There’s a lot of repair work to do, but if you both understand the severity of the feelings the affair has caused, you can then relax and get down to work. For example, the person who had the affair might grow impatient with being “the bad guy,” or have a hard time listening to his (or her) partner as they work through their awful feelings. It ain’t pretty. You’re guilty, yet you don’t always feel guilty, and maybe you feel guilty about that. (Or maybe you don’t! Maybe you’re feeling impatient, frustrated, and blamed for something you don’t want to cop to.) And, if you’re like a lot of people who have affairs, you can’t help feeling hopeless about ever regaining your partner’s trust. In all of this, it helps to tell yourself that right now, your partner has PTSD, and people recover from PTSD. There is hope that you two will—slowly and carefully—get through this.
Or if you’re the one who was betrayed, you may feel so awful that you can’t imagine you’ll ever be happy again, or ever trust again. If you tell yourself that you have PTSD—that you were struck full-on by a car—then you can trust that, though your recovery might be slow, it is possible. It is doable.
Not everyone survives a car-vs.ped accident. Some affairs destroy relationships, and some individuals never do the work of recovery, never move forward with their lives. But you can follow a different path. You can appreciate how badly you hurt your partner, and begin the hard process of putting it right. Or you can recognize how badly you’ve been hurt, and also appreciate how much potential you have to work through it, heal, and trust again.
