196: What Are You Tolerating?

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and 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. A lot of the so-called advice out there for people who are cheating is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is not what I provide. I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation – no matter what you’re doing. When you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, I can help you do it. We can either 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 working with me in either of these ways, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com. I can’t wait to meet you.

Okay. Today we are going to talk about what happens when we tolerate things that we really don’t like that we think we have to put up with, but we actually do NOT have to put up with. I know that was kind of an awkward mouthful. What I’m getting at is that although it is quite likely that we are going to have to put up with a certain amount of stuff that we aren’t thrilled with in life – as long as we have likes and dislikes, anyway, which most of us do – we don’t have to put up with EVERYTHING we dislike in life. We don’t want to use the logic that life isn’t perfect against ourselves. Even if it’s quite likely that we’re going to have to put up with some things in life that we don’t love, we also have the power to DO something about situations that are not to our liking. We can choose to relate to situations we don’t like differently – meaning, we can think about the circumstances at hand differently and we can engage with the situation differently. Or we may be able to walk away from situations we don’t like entirely. Sometimes we think we’re stuck with something, but really, we could walk the hell away and never look back. So although it’s important to recognize that there will probably always be aspects of our lives that we don’t love, we also want to recognize and make use of our power and options, instead of telling ourselves we have to tolerate anything or everything.

More specifically, when it comes to relationships, I’m all in favor of adopting the perspective that even the best relationships are unlikely to be perfect. I’m all in favor of adopting the perspective that even the most worthwhile relationships can be really hard at times. I’m all in favor of recognizing that humans can be really difficult to deal with sometimes, even when we love them and they love us very much. I think that recognizing all of this is great, and I think it’s useful to consider that there will be times in life when we may willingly choose to tolerate things we don’t like very much.

BUT. We do not want to use these ways of thinking against ourselves. We do not want to use recognizing that relationships aren’t perfect as justification for tolerating relationships or relationship dynamics that we really do not like, and perhaps do not want anything more to do with.

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out where to draw the line between stuff that’s happening in a relationship that we don’t like but are WILLING to tolerate, and stuff that’s happening in a relationship that we don’t like and do not want to continue tolerating.

I think there are a number of reasons why we may have a hard time distinguishing between things that we dislike but are willing to tolerate and things we dislike but are unwilling to tolerate, but one of the most common reasons that I see, and the reason that I think is perhaps most important to be aware of is this.

We sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between things we don’t like and are willing to tolerate and don’t like but are unwilling to tolerate is because we do not give ourselves permission to acknowledge and explore what it is we dislike in the first place. When we can honestly acknowledge what we dislike, we can then examine our dislikes. And then we can decide, in a reasonably calm and conscious way, what we want to do about whatever it is we dislike. We usually have multiple options when it comes to dealing with things that we dislike, and when we can see those options, and when we empower ourselves to choose the option that we like best, dealing with things that we dislike doesn’t have to be a terribly big deal. And, we don’t have to keep on tolerating things that we don’t want to tolerate anymore.

On the other hand, when we aren’t willing or able to fully acknowledge what we dislike, this is practically impossible.

WHY would we be reluctant to acknowledge and explore what we dislike? There are lots of reasons. Sometimes we’re scared that if we acknowledge what we dislike, we’ll then have to do something about it. Sometimes the idea of doing ANYTHING is unappealing, but sometimes the problem is that we’re afraid we’d have to do a specific thing, and we don’t want to do that specific thing. For example, we may think that if we acknowledge that we really don’t like something that’s happening within a romantic relationship, that will mean we have to end the relationship. And if we don’t like the idea of doing that, we may shut the whole thing down by not looking closely at whatever it is we might dislike. We may go right into committing to the belief that we “have to” tolerate whatever we dislike in the relationship if the idea of losing the relationship seems too terrible to contemplate.

Another reason why we may not want to acknowledge what we dislike is because we believe that we don’t have the power to do anything about it. We believe that we’re just stuck with whatever it is we don’t like, so we HAVE to tolerate it, and that’s just all there is to it.

I want to suggest that our choices about what we tolerate and what we choose not to tolerate say a lot about our relationship with our own power. And I also want to suggest that examining what we tolerate and being willing to ask ourselves whether we really want to keep tolerating it or not, and then making changes if we want to, gives us the opportunity to relate to our power in a whole new way.

There are plenty of things we do NOT have the power to control or even influence in life. But learning how to recognize and utilize the power we do have tends to make life a whole lot simpler and a whole lot better.

So with all of that said, let’s talk about two examples of things I see people tolerating in their infidelity situations that you really do not have to tolerate – and then we’ll talk about what you can do if you suspect you are tolerating some things that you might not want to tolerate anymore.

Here’s the first example. Sometimes people get stuck in what I’ll loosely call “infidelity jail.” Meaning, they will do something that counts as infidelity, and their partner will find out about it. Maybe their partner finds out because they tell them, or maybe they find out some other way, but one way or another, the cheated-upon party knows they were cheated on, and the cheater is in a certain amount of trouble. The person who was cheated on is mad at the person who cheated for doing the big, bad, cheating thing, and for the time being, the fact that the person who cheated did whatever they did is the only thing in the relationship that matters. Nothing else – or very little else – is talked about, aside from the cheating. The person who cheated is continuously being held accountable for their behavior, and the person who was cheated on is continuously explaining to their cheating partner how their cheating made them feel, and what they, the cheater, need to now do to make things right. If the cheater thinks this sort of treatment of the situation is unfair or unhelpful or excessive, they may not say so, because they’ve at least sort of bought into the idea that because they cheated, they don’t really have any rights anymore. Or at least, they’ve given up a lot of their rights.

This is what I mean when I say “infidelity jail.” I don’t actually know if this is a term that other people use or not, so if other people use this term the same way I am and I’m not giving the right person credit for this idea, I apologize. And if other people use this term in an entirely different way, I apologize if I’m confusing you. But this is what I mean by infidelity jail. You cheated, and that fact now defines you and your relationship with the person you cheated on, and you’re basically in trouble all the time.

A lot of folks tolerate being put in infidelity jail. Moreover, a lot of people contribute to putting themselves into infidelity jail. No matter what your partner, or the person you cheated on is doing, you play some role in putting yourself and keeping yourself infidelity jail. Nobody can forcibly put you and keep you there without you tolerating this. You may not like being in infidelity jail, but you’re effectively agreeing to be there. You may not have made the conscious decision to tolerate this arrangement, but if you’re in infidelity jail, it’s because you’re tolerating it, NOT because anyone is forcibly keeping you there against your will.

Another common example of people involved in infidelity situations tolerating things they don’t like is when one member of an affair couple is married, or in a very committed relationship, but the other member is not. And the member of the affair couple who is not married wants more from their married affair partner than that person is currently giving them. Maybe they want more time with them. Maybe they want their married affair partner to either get a divorce, or work out some kind of open relationship agreement with their spouse. Or maybe it’s something else that they want. And maybe the married member of the affair couple has promised their affair partner that they will do the things that this person wants them to do. Maybe they’ve been promising certain changes for weeks or months or years. And the unmarried member of the affair couple may not like it very much at all that their married affair partner hasn’t been doing the things they’ve been saying they would do, but they may not feel like they have any power to do anything about it, so they stick around and tolerate the situation.

What do we do if we’re in a situation like this? What can we do if we know we’re tolerating something we don’t really like? Or if we suspect we’re putting up with something that we don’t really want to put up with?

Here is where I suggest you start.

If you have the sense that you might be at all unhappy with some aspect of your infidelity situation, I want you to see if you can give yourself radical permission to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what it is that you don’t like. This might not sound like a big deal, but it actually is a pretty big deal.

When I work with clients and give them the opportunity to do this, some people freak out immediately. Some people are SURE that being really honest with themselves about what they do not like will immediately lead to bad things happening.

Will bad things actually happen if you acknowledge what you dislike? Possibly not. To echo what I said earlier, usually, what people are afraid of is that if they allow themselves to honestly acknowledge what they dislike, it will either feel terrible to do so, or they’ll have to do something about whatever it is they don’t like. Or people are afraid that both things will happen.

In most situations, you really do NOT have to do anything, at least not immediately, if you acknowledge that you really dislike the things that you dislike. Noting your dislikes does not impel you to take any particular actions, in any particular timeframe, or impel you to take any actions at all. To reiterate what I said earlier, sometimes people are scared that if they acknowledge they’re unhappy with their partner’s actions, they’ll have to end the relationship. And if that seems like an unattractive idea, people often just shut the whole thing down by trying to stop thinking about whatever it is within the relationship that they dislike. And doing this often creates more problems than it solves. When we dislike something but we aren’t really willing to face our dislike, the dislike itself festers and remains unresolved. When we’re willing to face our dislike, we open up the opportunity for things to start to change.

Now it is possible that if you honestly acknowledge what you don’t like about what’s going on in your relationship, you may feel some uncomfortable feelings. But here’s the thing. If you’ve been tolerating things within your relationship that you don’t really like, you’re probably already feeling some uncomfortable feelings. Being honest with yourself about what you don’t like may create a different set of uncomfortable feelings for you, but it’s unlikely that in your state of relative denial you were feeling totally amazing, and as you start to be more honest with yourself about what you don’t like, you’re suddenly going to start feeling terrible. It’s more likely that you may go from feeling one flavor of discomfort to feeling another flavor of discomfort, and that might be weird, but it might not actually be a net change in discomfort. And it’s also possible that as you start to honestly acknowledge what you don’t like, you start to feel some relief. Maybe a LOT of relief.

The truth really can set us free. Not being honest with ourselves usually feels pretty awful. Starting to tell ourselves the truth can be scary, but it also be liberating.

So what I want you to do, if you have even the slightest awareness that there is something going on with your infidelity situation that you don’t like, is to allow yourself to fully and comprehensively dislike it. Write about what you dislike. Allow yourself to speak your uncensored truth. Get detailed. What don’t you like, and why don’t you like it? You can write all of this down as if you are telling me about it. You can imagine that we’re having a coaching session, and you’re speaking to me. Or, you can schedule yourself a coaching session, and you can actually speak to me.

So often, we hold back from expressing what we really dislike because we have all these rules in our head about what we should and shouldn’t dislike. Or what it’s okay for us to dislike, and what it really isn’t okay for us to dislike. And this may be even more pronounced for you if you’re operating from the belief that because you’re engaging in something that counts as infidelity, you’re doing something wrong, and therefore, you don’t really have the right to dislike anything about your situation. For instance, if you’ve cheated, and your partner knows, and they’re telling you eighteen times a day that you’ve broken their trust, you may not like that – but you also might not think that it’s okay for you to not like that.

Guess what? It IS okay for you to not like that. You are allowed to dislike things. Period, full stop, the end. You’re allowed to dislike things even if you have cheated, or are cheating, and you don’t feel fantastic about what you’ve done or are doing. Your behavior may not be uncomplicated, but you still have the right to say, you know what, there are aspects of this situation that I don’t like. Even if you did the supposedly bad thing in your relationship, you still have the right to not like whatever your partner is doing in response.

This doesn’t mean you have to tell your partner – or anyone else, for that matter – about what it is you dislike. At first, your job is to simply be honest with YOURSELF about what you don’t like about your situation! You don’t have to justify or defend your dislikes to anyone else! In fact, telling someone else about what we don’t like can actually be a distraction from being honest with ourselves about what we dislike – and being present with the experience of disliking whatever it is that we dislike. Your first job is to simply allow yourself to be comprehensively honest with yourself about what you don’t like, and to consider your dislikes legitimate. And you can do this on your own, in private – or with the help of an impartial guide, such as myself.

Sometimes people think that if they dislike something, especially if that something is something another person is doing, the obvious thing to do is to tell the person in question that they’re doing something that we find objectionable. So if it’s your partner, or someone you’re involved with who’s doing something you dislike, it may seem like the right thing to do is to communicate all of your thoughts about what they’re doing to them.

I want to suggest that a lot of the time, that is NOT your first order of business. If you look out your window and you see someone lighting squirrels on fire, by all means, go outside and tell them to knock it off. Or call the relevant authorities in your area and get them to tell the squirrel killer to knock it off. If you need to prevent immediate harm from being done, by all means, do it.

But a lot of the time, there really isn’t anything to be gained by focusing first on communicating what we don’t like to whoever is doing what we don’t like. For one thing, the person who is doing the thing that you don’t like may not stop doing what they’re doing just because you tell them you don’t like it. This is where we often get really mixed up in romantic relationships. Many of us have absorbed this vague but powerful idea that holds that people we’re romantically involved with are responsible for making us feel however we want to feel in our relationship with them. And by extension, many of us believe that if we’re romantically involved with someone, and they’re doing something we don’t like, and we tell them that they’re doing something we don’t like, they should stop what they’re doing. Because we don’t like it. And a lot of us think that that will solve the problem of us disliking whatever we don’t like.

A lot of us to subscribe to some variation of these ideas. And when we buy into these kinds of ways of thinking, they usually make us pretty miserable.

I do think it’s totally reasonable to make requests of people we are romantically involved with. Sometimes it’s absolutely appropriate to ask things of the people we’re involved with. And, I also think that expecting another person to do what we want them to do all the time is not a recipe for anything great. Hoping that we can make ourselves happier by telling people what we want them to do and them doing it for us is a pretty precarious path to peace. At best.

Rather, we are often better served by dealing with our dislike for someone’s behavior, then deciding, from a place of relative clarity and calm, what we want to do in response to that behavior. And we have the power to do both of those things.

But instead of doing those things, instead of fulling allowing and digesting our dislike, and then deciding what we want to actually DO in response to whatever we dislike, we tend to try to get our person to understand what it is that we dislike, or we try to do that AND get them to change their behavior.

Instead, I want to suggest is you make it your first priority to get really intimate and present with your dislike.

For example, you can allow yourself to say, “I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY DON’T FUCKING LIKE IT THAT MY AFFAIR PARTNER HASN’T LEFT THEIR SPOUSE YET, EVEN THOUGH THEY’VE BEEN SAYING THEY’RE GOING TO LEAVE FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS,” and then allow yourself to feel utterly shitty because you REALLY don’t like those facts. The interesting thing is, when we allow ourselves to feel shitty, without resisting feeling shitty, and without wallowing in feeling shitty, we start to feel better more quickly. Now, let me make it clear that if you really want your affair partner to leave their marriage and they haven’t yet, you may continue to feel shitty about that even if you let yourself feel shitty. If the circumstance doesn’t change, and you still don’t like it, you may still feel shitty. But it’ll be different. You’ll feel shitty in a different way. When we allow ourselves to dislike something, instead of trying to not dislike something, and instead of trying to get someone to change someone else’s behavior so we don’t have to deal with thing we dislike anymore, the shitty feelings dissipate a little, or shift in some ways, or our relationship with the feelings changes. I’m totally serious about this. Try it and see.

And then, once our shitty feelings dissipate or at least shift a little bit, we feel better! And we can think more clearly. And then we can decide what we actually want to do in relation to whatever it is that we don’t like.

So often, when we don’t like something, we think that there’s a major problem at hand. And so we may freak out, or attempt to fix the problem. Or we may do some combination of these things. But there really might not be any actual problem at hand – other than the fact that we don’t like the way things are.

It’s totally fair for you to not like the way things are. But acknowledging that you don’t like the way things are, and allowing your dislike of the way things are is very different from believing that something really has gone fundamentally wrong in the cosmic scheme of things, and trying to fix what seems to obviously be a problem.

When we don’t like something, quite often, the only real problem is that we don’t like something, and that doesn’t feel good to us. I’m going to say that again in a slightly different way. When we don’t like something, the main thing that has gone wrong is that we don’t like the experience of disliking something. If that sounds crazy, I completely understand. And I encourage you to roll this idea around in your head for a little while. What this means is, when we feel shitty, THAT is what we need to solve for rather than attempting to fix the circumstances that we think are making us feel shitty. We need to deal with our shitty feelings before we can do much of anything else.

Here's an example that will hopefully help you make sense of the last few points I’ve made. I may HATE it when I’m crossing the street and somebody runs a red light and zooms through the intersection I just started walking through. I may not like that at ALL. And, I assure you, I really don’t like it when this happens. But when this happens, when a car runs a red light and zooms through an intersection and nobody gets hurt, and nobody dies, is there really a problem at hand? Arguably, there is not. I may THINK that it’s bad for cars to run red lights and do things that have the potential to injure, maim, or kill pedestrians and perhaps their canine companions too, but if the car in question hasn’t actually done any of those things, has anything actually gone wrong in the universe? Possibly not. Possibly the only problem, for me, is that I’m angry because I think some driver shouldn’t have run a red light.

So that’s what I have the opportunity to solve for. I can solve for my anger. I probably can’t go chase down the car that ran down the red light and have a talk with the driver. I probably can’t prevent the driver from ever running a red light again. And I certainly can’t change the fact that the car just went through the red light. But I can deal with my own thoughts and feelings about what happened.

And then, I can decide if there’s anything I actually want to do about the running of the red light. Maybe I want to lobby for new speed bumps. Maybe I want to help launch some public safety campaign about the benefits of stopping at yellow lights. Maybe I really want to dedicate my time and energy to those kinds of endeavors, to solve what I believe to be a problem. That might be great. But in the moment when the car has just run the red light and blown through the intersection where I’m crossing the street, I can’t do any of those things immediately. My most immediate task is to deal with my own experience. And if I do that, then I can later think clearly about whether I want to advocate for the installation of speed bumps nearby, or whatever. Maybe I do want to dedicate myself to doing that. Or maybe I’d rather allocate my time and energy to other things. When I’m all worked up, it’s hard to make that decision. After I’ve digested my anger, then I have more options.

So let’s get back to the example of being involved with someone who is married or in a very committed relationship, and not liking your married affair partner’s actions or inactions with regard to leaving their committed relationship.

Once you have allowed yourself to deal with the most immediate problem at hand, which is your dislike of the circumstances you are in the midst of, then you can start to think about what you actually want to DO about your situation. Or not do!

Maybe you give yourself the opportunity to REALLY dislike it that your affair partner hasn’t left their marriage yet… and then you decide that your dislike just isn’t that big deal anymore. Sometimes NOT allowing yourself to dislike something is far worse than allowing yourself to dislike it. Sometimes disliking something doesn’t have to be that big of a deal. Maybe you actually have a really great life, and your relationship with your married affair partner is just the icing on the cake, and it’s actually not that big of a deal to you whether they leave their spouse this week or next month or ever. Maybe you’re just happy to enjoy them in whatever ways they decide to be available to you. Maybe!

Or maybe, having fully assumed responsibility of your dislike of your relationship situation, you decide that you actually don’t want to wait any longer for your affair partner to leave their marriage, or otherwise change their situation. Maybe when you fully acknowledge your dislike, you realize that you don’t WANT to tolerate the situation you dislike anymore. Maybe you decide that you’ve been tolerating something that you do not want to tolerate anymore, and you’re just done, and you’re ready to release yourself from a situation you’ve had enough of – even if it may be sad, in some ways, to do so.

There is also the option that you adjust the way you’re participating in the situation you dislike. Maybe you don’t extricate yourself from it completely, but maybe you engage in it differently. For example, if you’ve been deferring to your married affair partner’s availability, maybe you start to set your own availability instead. If you’ve been your married affair partner’s sounding board for all of their marital woes, maybe you start to decline to participate in conversations that revolve around your affair partner venting about their marriage. You have the power to change YOUR behavior at any time, even if your person doesn’t change THEIR behavior.

You also have the opportunity to communicate with your person about what you want. You can make requests of your person. If you have made decisions about what you’re going to start doing differently, you can communicate those decisions to your person, if you want to. So for instance, if your married affair partner has been saying that they’re going to tell their spouse that they either want an open marriage or they’re going to leave the marriage but they haven’t done it yet, you might decide you’re going to wait another six months to see what your affair partner does. And you might tell them that.

And if you have taken responsibility for your dislike of their behavior, and you have taken ownership of your power to do whatever you want in response to their behavior, you can tell them about this decision in a really empowered and non-attached way. Telling someone, “You’ve been saying you were going to do this forever and since you haven’t done it yet, I’m giving you six months but after that that’s it, I’m out of here” is very different from saying something like, “You know I love you. And you know I understand how hard it’s been for you to make changes in your marriage. But I don’t want to stick around forever if things aren’t going to change, so I plan to wait another six months to see what course of action you take.” If you say that kind of thing to your person, and you mean it, and you mean it in a completely matter-of-fact, unthreatening way, that’s totally different from subtly - or not-so-subtly - trying to get your person to make changes in the situation you don’t like. And if you make an announcement from an empowered state, your person may recognize that you have taken ownership of your own life and they may recognize that if they want to be a part of that, they have some decisions to make.

There are of course other things you could choose to do in a situation like this. I’ve only named a few possible options. The important point is that when you allow yourself to dislike whatever you don’t like, you’re able to think more clearly about what you’re willing to tolerate and what you aren’t, and what you’re going to do in the service of what you are willing to tolerate and what you aren’t. When you do not allow yourself to fully dislike what you dislike, it’s really hard to take actions that serve your deepest desires and highest priorities.

Now to echo what I said earlier, sometimes we don’t want to look too closely at what we dislike, because we’re afraid that if we do, we’ll end up giving something up, and that will be a catastrophe. Sometimes we tolerate things we don’t like because we don’t believe anything better is available to us. So remember, you always have the choice to keep on tolerating whatever it is that you don’t like. Recognizing what you don’t like doesn’t mean you’ll be forced to make any changes.

You may also want to consider that saying no to some things is what allows us to fully say yes to other things. Ceasing to tolerate things that we don’t have to tolerate and don’t want to tolerate frees up our time and our energy to pursue and enjoy the things we really WANT to pursue in our lives. By telling ourselves that we have to keep on tolerating things that we really don’t want to have anything to do with, and don’t HAVE to have anything to do with, we effectively keep ourselves stuck in prisons of our own making.

And that is it for today. If you would like my help resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together. If you want to work with me one-on-one, head on over to my website and schedule an introductory coaching session. If you like working independently and you’re good at putting what you learn into practice, enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One. You can learn more about both of these options by going to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening! Have an amazing day. Bye for now.