201: High-Conflict Breakups

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  Attempting to figure out how you want to handle your infidelity situation on your own can be like trying to swim through mud.  When you are ready for an expert to help you find relief and a clear path forward, let’s get to work.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  

To get started, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  The whole point of resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you is to be able to live out your love life/sex life/relationship life in a way that you feel great about, AND to be able to have enough bandwidth left over for the rest of your life, too!  Infidelity situations can be really exciting and great.  But they can also be the source of a lot of difficulty and drama.  So when you’re ready to put the difficulty and drama behind you, and get on the with the business of living a life that you love, book yourself an introductory coaching session with me, or enroll in my course and start making use of the powerful teaching and assignments it contains. 

Okay people.  Today we are going to talk about going through the process of breaking up with someone, and extricating yourself from a relationship with someone who is, to put it in the most simplistic terms, behaving very badly.  Now, from the very get-go I want to make it really clear that I fully appreciate the fact that we’re all capable of behaving pretty badly, at times.  And I also want to make it clear that I recognize and respect the humanity of all humans – even when they are doing things that we really don’t like, or consider completely unacceptable.  I fully respect the fact that it is our suffering that fuels our worst behavior, and I have the utmost empathy for people who are in excruciating emotional pain, and have no idea how the hell to deal with that, and end up acting on their pain in ways that ends up creating a lot of trouble for themselves and others.  So when I say un-nuanced things like “people behaving badly,” I want you to know that I’m using that language as shorthand.  I don’t believe that people do “bad things” because they are fundamentally bad.  And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you know that I’m not a big fan of dualistic thinking.  I don’t even really believe in “good” as an absolute thing, and “bad” as an absolute thing.    

But, I do believe that we have the right, and even the duty, to decide what we’re willing to put up with in life, and what we aren’t.  We do this collectively, by establishing laws and rules and systems for enforcing them.  And we can do this individually, by getting really clear on what we are and are not willing to tolerate.  And when we’re clear on those things, we can steer clear of situations or behaviors that we don’t want anything to do with.

Keeping that in mind, it’s important to acknowledge that for better or worse, some people have a really hard time when a relationship comes to an end.  They feel sad and hurt and rejected and unloved and abandoned and worthless, and they feel awful, and they have no idea what to do with that – and all of these feelings they don’t know what to do with may lead to some pretty interesting behavior.  And of course, some people have an even HARDER time when a relationship comes to an end and there was infidelity involved.  More specifically, sometimes people have a really hard time when they were cheated on, or their partner engaged in or is still engaging in some kind of infidelity, and is breaking up with them.  These folks may feel ANGRY and WRONGED and SELF-RIGHTEOUS and JEALOUS and VENGEFUL and all kinds of other stuff.  And these are feelings that a lot of folks do not know how to handle very skillfully.  

So, sometimes when people are on the receiving end of infidelity AND a breakup, they kind of lose their shit.  

And again, that’s shorthand.  That’s not the most nuanced way of putting it, not by a long shot.  And, I want to stress that I fully respect the fact that people don’t like being cheated on!  That’s fair enough!  And it’s a very human thing for people who have been cheated on to experience very uncomfortable emotions that they don’t know what to do with, and to then behave in ways that constitute what we might call “behaving badly.”  Right?

But no matter how much compassion you or I may have for people who are hurting and are doing crazy shit because they are hurting, it is not incumbent upon you to take any crazy shit from anyone.  You don’t have to tolerate anyone else’s bad behavior.  

Even if that behavior is coming from someone you once loved very much, and perhaps still love very much.  Even if that behavior is coming from someone who you thought you’d be romantically committed to forever.

It can be really disorienting, or confusing, or discombobulating when someone who you once shared a life with starts “behaving badly,” – or perhaps very, very badly - but this happens.  And when it does, I want to suggest that it is your right and even your duty to be willing to call a duck a duck.  It is your right and your duty to say hey, no matter how much I loved or love this person, they are behaving in a manner that I consider unacceptable, and I’m going to address this behavior.

Now, at this point it is very important for me to mention that sometimes high-conflict breakups get really dangerous.  Sometimes your soon-to-be-ex will do things during your breakup process that are extremely annoying, but otherwise harmless.  But some people do things that are illegal.  Some people do things that are illegal, and have the potential to harm you, or put you in harm’s way.  And I do not have the expertise to advise you on what exactly you should do in these kinds of situations.  Let’s be clear about that.  If you’re going through a high-conflict breakup or divorce, there may be some things that your lawyers need to handle.  Or maybe you can enlist a mediator.  There may be some things that you need to turn to law enforcement for help with.  And this podcast is not a substitute for any of those things.  If you think you are in danger, seek help immediately.  Intimate partner violence happens, and although I sure hope you never have to deal with that in your life, you might.  It’s important to be aware of that possibility and take it seriously.    

But although those disclaimers are really important, having been on the sidelines of many high-conflict breakups, I do have some recommendations for how to deal with these kinds of situations.  And the first, most overarching thing I want to say is that dealing with someone else’s bad behavior is about tactics, but it’s also about mindset.  What you actually do – or don’t do – to deal with someone else’s behavior is important, but without the right mindset about what’s going on, it’s going to be hard to effectively deal with what is happening.

So to that effect, here’s my first recommendation.  If you have cheated on your partner, and they know that, and they are upset about that, that’s fair enough.  It’s okay for them to not like what you’ve done.  But there’s the thing.  Although they have the right to be mad, that does not mean they have the right to act from their anger in whatever ways they want to.  Just because you have done something that they have every right to dislike does not mean they have the right to behave badly, so to speak.  Even if you think it’s totally fair for them to be upset by your infidelity, that does not mean you have to tolerate whatever bad behavior they’re engaging in.  

What I’ve noticed is that some people believe that’s true in the abstract.  Some people believe that this is true for other people who have cheated, and whose partners or ex-partners are behaving badly.  But they don’t believe this is true for them.  Rather, they believe that because they cheated, they DESERVE their partner’s bad behavior, and therefore, they have to take it on the chin, literally or figuratively.

Although I understand and am completely sympathetic to the reasons why people adopt this sort of thinking, I also want to encourage you to consider the possibility that this kind of thinking may not help you AT ALL.  You can take responsibility for your actions without taking on the role of somebody else’s punching bag.  I mean that metaphorically, but in some situations, this becomes more literal than metaphorical.  And you don’t have to put up with any of that.  Even if you’ve done something that you don’t think is cool and your partner doesn’t think as cool, that doesn’t mean you have any obligation to take any shit from them.

My second piece of guidance echoes something I’ve already said: you have to be willing to acknowledge to yourself that your partner – or your ex-partner’s – behavior is unacceptable to you.  That might not sound like a big deal, but it’s actually a REALLY big deal.  Sometimes people deal with behavior from their partner that they really don’t like, but they come up with a million excuses for their partner’s behavior, and a million reasons why it’s okay for them to put up with it.  If you want to change a situation that you don’t like, that way of thinking is not going to help you do it.  You have to be able to say, “This person did these things, and I don’t like these behaviors, and I’m not going to tolerate any more of this.”

Some people really want someone ELSE to tell them that their partner’s behavior is unacceptable, so that they can think it’s okay for them to think it’s unacceptable too.  But guess what?  This doesn’t always work.  Let’s say someone is hitting you.  Let’s say you’ve cheated, you feel bad about it, and your soon-to-be-ex partner is hitting you.  I could easily find ten people to tell you, “Hey, it’s not okay for someone to hit you, no matter what you did, and no matter how hurt they are.”  But if you don’t believe that yourself, it doesn’t matter what those ten people think.  You have to be willing to say, “This person is doing this thing, and I don’t want to be a part of this, because this behavior is not acceptable to ME.”  Nobody can do that part for you.  Yes, it can be really nice to have other people validate you, and say things like, “Yeah, I agree that your ex’s behavior is unacceptable.”  But nobody can make you decide that something you do not like is unacceptable to you.  You have to do that part for yourself.

And when we’re used to loving someone unconditionally, or at least, loving someone a whole lot, it may be really hard for us to say, “Wait a minute, I may love this person, but they are behaving in ways that I am not okay with.”  That can be a really hard switch to make.  It’s fair for it to be hard to make this switch.  But your current and future well-being may depend upon it.

Here’s the third thing I want you to consider: Once your ex-partner has demonstrated a pattern of behavior that you consider unacceptable, it’s time to stop thinking of that person as your teammate.  The two of you may have been teammates for a long time, and you may still care about them deeply, and you may hope that the two of you can have a great friendship someday, or something like that.  And maybe you can!  But if someone is behaving in ways you consider unacceptable, your job is not to figure out how to be friends with them in the future.  It's not your job to figure out how to be their teammate.  They aren’t being your teammate, so why are you trying to be theirs?  Now, I know how a lot of people answer this question.  A lot of people just can’t fathom the idea of not being on the same team as someone they were in love with, or were married to, or have parented children with.  But this is a mental shift you may really want to make.  

Even if you stop thinking of your ex as a teammate, there may be things that you and your ex need to take care of together.  You may need to navigate the process of getting divorced together.  You may need to figure out new arrangements for parenting your children, or taking care of other important humans, or caring for your pets.  There may be business that you need to attend to together, but that doesn’t make your ex your teammate.  You can work productively with your ex – or at least try to – without harboring the idea that you’re on the same team.

Fourth point: You can have compassion for your ex’s suffering without tolerating their behavior, or making excuses for their behavior.  Yes, people are assholes because they suffer.  Yes, it’s fair for your ex to be upset if you cheated, and it’s fair for you to have a certain amount of sympathy for their antics.  But you can care that they’re a human, having a very human experience, without putting up with whatever they’re dishing out.  

Here’s an analogy worth considering: even though you know the school bully is hurting a LOT because both of their parents are dying of incurable diseases, that doesn’t mean that you’re okay with the bully beating up your kids and taking their lunch money.  We can have the utmost compassion for the human who is hurting, and we can have compassion for why they are behaving the way they’re behaving – without condoning their behavior, or acquiescing to it.  If your kid is getting beaten up by the school bully, you’re probably going to want to do something about that, even if you also respect the fact that the bully is in excruciating emotional pain. 

Fifth: You need to start prioritizing your own interests.  Nobody is going to do that for you.  This might sound obvious, but sometimes it isn’t, and even when it is, it can be hard for us to prioritize our interests when we think doing that will be detrimental to someone we care about.  Here’s the deal, people: you are important.  Your well-being is important.  Your priorities are important.  You have the right to protect them.  And even if doing so means that somebody else doesn’t get what they want, that doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong in the cosmic scheme of things.  Sometimes we think that something really bad is going to happen if someone doesn’t get what they want, and more specifically, we think something really bad will happen if we don’t do what someone else wants us to do, but if we’re thinking that way, it’s time for us to take a good look at our people-pleasing tendencies.  

Sixth: If you aren’t yet in the habit of setting really clear boundaries, now is the time to get better at boundary-setting.  If you haven’t learned how to set clear boundaries and enforce them, you can learn now.  If you’re resistant to setting boundaries, you can take a look at why this is the case for you – and then you can decide if you want to continue being resistant to setting boundaries.  Setting boundaries is a big part of taking responsibility for what you have the power to control in your situation, and that is IMPORTANT.  You may not be able to control your partner’s behavior, but you do have the power to take responsibility for how you respond to it.  And that will change everything.

Seventh: Figuring out how exactly to deal with your ex’s behavior may be an epic exercise in innovation.  You may have NO prior experience with dealing with what your ex is currently doing.  You may have no relevant experience for dealing with anything like what you’re dealing with.  For instance, if your ex gets a burner phone and sets up fake social media accounts to harass you, how do you handle that?   You may have NO idea.  Yes, there are people out there who can advise you on how to deal with your ex’s bad behavior – but in my experiences of witnessing these kinds of situations, you may not be able to find someone who can tell you EXACTLY what to do in response to everything your ex is doing.  

I think it’s fair to say that there really aren’t enough resources out there for people who are dealing with an ex who is behaving badly, but even if this is a major societal failing, it’s something that I urge you to be ruthlessly realistic about.  You may not be able to get the kind of help you’d ideally like to have.  It’s possible that no one may be able to tell you exactly what you should do to deal with your ex’s uniquely bad behavior.  So you may have to take the lead in figuring out how to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt.  Can it be helpful to have an excellent thought partner as you figure out how to deal with your ex’s behavior?  Absolutely.  But you have to take responsibility for finding that excellent thought partner, and, even when you find them, you’re still going to have to play a key role in deciding how you deal with your ex’s bad behavior.  You may not have wanted the job of innovator-in-chief for dealing with your ex’s crazy antics, but if this job has landed in your lap, you may want to do it as well as you can.

Eighth: On a related not, you may need to be your own advocate to a greater extent than you might anticipate.  You may need to ask for help ten times, when you think you should only have to ask once.  You may have to hunt for the right kind of help for far longer than you think you should have to.  Sometimes people kind of give up – or COMPLETELY give up – when they don’t get the help they need on their first or second or third try.  Here’s the deal, people: for better or worse, sometimes it takes a lot of work and advocating for our own needs to get the help we need.  But if it’s taking you a lot of time and effort to get the help you need, that is not an indication that you are not WORTHY of getting help.  When people don’t get the help they need as quickly as they’d like to, sometimes they kind of say, “Oh, well, maybe this is an indication that my problems aren’t all that bad, maybe I should just be able to deal with this myself.”  Not necessarily.  If your ex is doing things that lead you to feel concerned about your safety, there may be some things you can do on your own, but there may be other things that you really CANNOT do on your own.  So be tenacious about searching for and obtaining the help you need.

Nineth: You may be dealing with someone who behaves very badly for a relatively short period of time, and then calms down pretty quickly, or you may be dealing with someone who is going to continue behaving badly for a very long time.  And there may not be any way for you to know whether you’re running a marathon or a sprint when the race begins.  And that’s kinda challenging, and it’s okay for you to NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL.  But you’ve gotta recognize that this uncertainty is a feature of your situation, and figure out how to deal with this.  Taking good care of yourself is essential.  Investing in supportive resources is super important.  There may be times when you have little choice but to spend a fair amount of time and energy dealing with your ex’s crazy behavior – but, you also need to pace yourself.  You may need to deal with things as they come up, but you also want to have gas left in the tank for the rest of your life.  Do what the essential things when they are essential, but pace yourself.

Tenth: Be ruthlessly realistic about what’s going on, and take as much of the drama out of it as possible.  If your ex-partner is behaving badly, they’re behaving badly, and that’s just the deal – at least for right now.  It’s kind of like if it’s raining REALLY hard on a day you thought was supposed to be sunny.  It’s fair for you to have WANTED the day to be sunny.  But if it isn’t sunny, and it’s raining really hard, then guess what, it’s just raining really hard and you’re probably going to be a lot better off figuring out how to deal with the rain rather than standing around going, “Can you believe this?  It was supposed to be SUNNY today, and now it’s RAINING!!!  This wasn’t what was supposed to happen!”  Sometimes people will have pretty much the same response to an ex-partner who is behaving badly.  Their ex will do the objectionable things, and they’ll keep doing them, but instead of saying “Okay, I guess this is what we’re dealing with right now, let’s figure out how to deal with this nonsense” the person on the receiving end of the bad behavior will continue to say, "Can you believe they did that?” or, “OH MY GOD, this is so awful, I cannot understand why they are acting this way!” over and over and over again.  Even after the pattern of bad behavior has been WELL established!  Sure, it can be shocking when people behave in ways that we consider outrageously bad.  But at some point you may be better served by saying, okay, this is what’s going on, and I’m going to figure out how to deal with, rather than continuing to tell yourself – or other people – that you just can’t believe what’s going on, and oh my god, it’s just so awful, how could this possibly be happening to me, I don’t understand how anyone could possibly act like this, etc., etc., etc.

Eleventh: Labelling or diagnosing your partner may not be nearly as helpful as getting really factual about what exactly they are doing, and deciding what exactly you want to do in response to that.  If someone is calling you 87 times a day and telling you over and over again how much you hurt them and telling you they’re going to make you pay for all the hurt you’ve caused them, does it matter if they’re a sociopath or a narcissist or someone who’s just having a really hard time dealing with their feelings and managing how they act on their feelings?  My opinion is, it may not matter.  I know we all love labels and diagnoses and I agree that sometimes a diagnosis can help us understand certain behaviors.  But sometimes focusing on questions like, “Is my ex a narcissist or a sociopath or both or neither?” is just a distraction from getting really clear on what exactly they’re doing, and figuring out how exactly you are going to deal with it.  If someone is calling your affair partner and threatening to tell everyone that they broke up a marriage, the question isn’t, is your ex a sociopath?  The question is, what do you want to do in response to your ex’s behavior?

So to reiterate, dealing with someone’s bad behavior is about tactics, but it’s also about mindset.  Once you get your mindset in order, figuring out what tactics you want to take becomes easier.  Not necessarily easy, but easier.

And I really want to stress something I said earlier.  Just because you cheated, or just because you did or are doing something that counts as infidelity, that does not mean that you deserve whatever your ex is doing that you don’t like.  Yes, you may have done something that you don’t think is great, but that does not mean that you have to put up with someone else’s bad behavior.  It’s fair for your partner or ex-partner to be upset if you’ve cheated, but that does not give them a free pass to behave badly.  And if they do behave badly, it is not incumbent upon you to make excuses for them, or to sit there and take it.

I also want to emphasize that dealing with other people’s “bad behavior” can be total pain in the ass.  If you have an ex who is giving you hell, and calling everyone you know and telling them that you’re a terrible human being, and is harassing your affair partner, and doing god knows what else, it’s fair for you to be like, “Uh… I would rather not have to deal with this, thank you very much!”

Fair enough.  But for better or worse, bad human behavior is a part of the human experience, and sometimes we may have to deal with humans who are behaving badly towards us, or towards people we care about.  Even if we don’t like this, it is part of the human experience, and we may have to deal with this stuff sometimes.  So the biggest favor we may be able to do for ourselves if we’re dealing with another human’s bad behavior is to get ruthlessly realistic about what’s happening, and then step up to the plate and deal with the circumstances at hand as best as we can.

Whenever we’re willing to deal with what life presents us with, instead of trying to avoid it, or instead of wishing things were otherwise, we win.  So although it may not seem like it right now, dealing with your ex who is behaving badly is an opportunity for you to develop more courage and resilience.  It’s an opportunity for you to become more discerning and brave.  It’s an opportunity for you to get really clear on what it means for you to protect your own interests, and get better at advocating for yourself.  And building these capacities within yourself might be very worthy of your time and energy, even if that’s happening within the context of someone behaving pretty badly.

Okay everybody, that’s where we’re going to leave it for today.  If you are ready to get help dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s work together.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I can’t wait to meet you.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Seize the day.  Bye for now.