By Philip Chanin, Ed.D., ABPP, CGP
Board Certified Clinical Psychologist
Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
www.drphilchanin.com
philchanin@gmail.com

Betrayed but Stuck

In a recent New York Times article (May 30, 2026, p. D6) entitled “Ask the Therapist,” psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb responds to a letter from a woman whose husband has had multiple affairs. The letter is headlined “Betrayed but Stuck.” Here is the letter:

“My husband of 10 years has been unfaithful to me on four occasions. These affairs have spanned multiple years but with sporadic, opportunistic contact. After the first disclosure, I was shattered but could see a way through. I could even see the potential of this devastation to give way to something more honest and real between us.”

“The most recent discovery happened two years ago, shortly after the arrival of our second child. Floored by grief, postpartum hormones and sleep deprivation, I decided, again, to stay, but feel none of the conviction about our relationship that I once had. I know I should leave; any fear about being alone or the impact on my children has fallen quiet in relation to my growing certainty that leaving him is the right thing to do.”

“And yet, I am still here. A sense of apathy makes me wonder if I could tolerate this forever. I grew up feeling misunderstood and that love was conditional on my grades and being good. My mother grew up experiencing trauma that was never addressed, my dad is emotionally stunted and neither of my parents demonstrated healthy relationships. My dad cheated on my mum, then left her when I was in my 20’s. I was the one to discover their affair. I want to be shaken awake, moved out of inertia and into a new life. Help.”

Lori Gottlieb responds to this letter as follows: “I understand why you’re confused by the gap between what you believe is the best course of action (leaving) and what you’re actually doing
(staying). What’s keeping you mired in inertia is this: You’re not just struggling with whether to leave your marriage; you’re struggling with whether to leave what has felt like home, long before you met your husband.”

“Our experiences of love are formed in childhood, and I imagine you’re aware of this connection. What might be less apparent is why you would repeat something that caused you pain. Wouldn’t it seem logical that if you felt unsafe, misunderstood, and conditionally loved as a child, you would find a partner with whom you could create a different kind of loving relationship?”

“The problem is that there’s a part of many of us, outside of our awareness, that’s inexorably drawn to the familiar. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often choose angry partners, those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical, or those who grew up with betrayal end up choosing partners with a tendency to betray.”

“Why? Because the pull toward that feeling of the familiar makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. The psychotherapist Terry Real has put it this way: We marry our unfinished business. If we haven’t worked through what hurt us as children, we recreate it in adulthood because our subconscious has a finely tuned radar system for what it recognizes as ‘home.’”

“It’s not just that we seek the comfort of the familiar. It’s that we want to master a situation in which we felt helpless as children. Maybe this time, the subconscious imagines, I can heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody similar—but new. But by choosing these types of partners, we get the opposite result: We reopen those wounds and feel even more unloved.”

“This subconscious pull is what leads to your ‘and yet.’ It’s the part that’s working to maintain what you know so well: absorbing, adapting and denying your own needs so the relationship feels like what you’re used to. You become skilled at tolerating what doesn’t feel right because
when you were a child, your survival depended on it. And even though your adult self finds this situation intolerable, your nervous system says: This is survivable. I’ve lived versions of this before.”

“But once you’re able to bring the underlying conflict into conscious awareness, you’ll realize that your ‘apathy’ isn’t indifference at all. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness is a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings. The psyche protects itself by dulling everything: grief, anger, sadness, shame. You know it’s all there. You’re just waiting for your nervous system to recalibrate.”

“You might ask yourself: What kind of love feels possible—and am I willing to outgrow the version of myself that accepted less? That’s the work—not convincing yourself to leave, but excavating the part of you that learned that your desires were secondary and that love required you to be a certain kind of good. It’s realizing that decisions require you to believe that your desires matter enough to act on.”

“It’s understanding how the people who were supposed to model secure, honest relationships instead handed you a blueprint for exactly the relationship you’re in now. A good therapist can guide you. With clarity and self-compassion, you’ll take small steps not just away from this painful marital situation but also from the architecture you inherited.”

“An Orientation to Imago Relationship Therapy” by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and Robert Elliot, Ph.D., begins with the question, “Why Don’t Relationships Work?” Here it is stated, “From earliest times to the present, the testimony is consistent: men and women have trouble with their most important relationships. The divorce rate nears 50 percent, and for second marriages it is even higher. Of people in intact marriages, 80 percent report varying degrees of dissatisfaction. In earlier days, the divorce rate was lower, but there is no reason to believe that marriages then were more successful, if we measure that in terms of satisfaction and happiness. Of all human enterprises, marriage shows the starkest contrast between beginnings and outcomes, between the enthusiasm of the launching, and the pain and distress of the storm-tossed passage.” (p. 2)

In the section on “Romantic Love,” the authors write, “Romantic love is powerful and important, and can be glorious, but we believe that it contains within it the seeds of its own decay. Our thesis is that a Primary Love Relationship emotionally recapitulates important aspects of the early life situation of each of the lovers. Experiences in infancy and childhood with significant caretakers leave all of us with important residues of ‘unfinished business”, frustrations, hurts, and unmet longings, residues that we unconsciously carry into our life with our present partner. That pattern of unfinished relational business is attached to what we call the Imago.” (p. 3)

“…we propose that the Imago unconsciously guides our selection of a romantic partner. The Imago is the key to that mysterious spark that draws two lovers together ‘across a crowded room”, out of a myriad of other choices. What we bring to that romantic encounter is not only our present needs for companionship and love, but also our unconscious hope that the partner will meet, touch, and heal the hurts and unmet longings we bring from the past. Ironically, the old hurts are likely to be reactivated and exacerbated with this partner…As that happens, the disappointments, frustration, hurt, and rage can be profound.” (p. 3)

The Power Impasse

In the section “The Power Impasse,” the authors state, “The romantic or honeymoon stage of marriage, as long as it lasts, is sustained by idealization of the partner, and the hope that at last one has found the partner who will meet one’s deepest needs. It seems inevitable for that stage to decay (‘the honeymoon is over when…’). The breakdown may occur quickly or over a long period of time, but few couples escape it. In ways that partners often have trouble understanding, frustrations and disappointments appear: “This is not turning out the way it was supposed to.’ Each has a deep image of the way the other is ‘supposed’ to be, and the natural process seems to be that partners begin trying to maneuver each other into fulfilling that image.” (p. 4)

“Forms of maneuvering may be open or hidden, loud or quiet, active or passive…one partner may yell, and the other retreat in silence. Each is trying to get his or her needs met, but the coercive process is counterproductive. It can reach a tug-of-war or impasse state in which each is feeling enormous frustration and hurt. The more intractable and repetitive the arguments (‘We go round and round on this issue, over and over again.’), the more likely it is that they are rooted in unfinished business and unhealed hurts in each partner from past relationships in childhood.” (p. 4)

As children, we have thousands of interactions with parenting figures. These interactions, over the first 18 years of our lives, form an unconscious image (Imago) or gestalt. As we fall in love, we don’t realize, because it’s unconscious, that we have chosen someone with characterological features of our frustrating parent. Thus, we have picked one of the hardest people to get our needs met with, because they have some of the same features that made it difficult for us to get the attention and love we needed from a similar parent.

As Hendrix and Elliot state in the section “Formation of the Imago,” “In infancy and childhood, each of us tried the best way we knew to get our caretakers to meet our needs. And our caretakers tried the best they knew to meet our needs. However, no matter how adequate our caretakers were, they could not and did not meet all of our needs all of the time, and that left us frustrated some of the time.” (p. 6)

“…some of us had caretakers who had their own problems. Sometimes they were depressed or preoccupied, busy or angry. At other times we were left alone because of their sickness, work, divorce or death. Others of us had parents who were cold and detached some or most of the time. Whenever our caretakers’ needs made them physically and emotionally unable to meet our needs, we experienced pain and intense frustration.” (p. 7)

“Each transaction with our caretakers left an impression in our minds. In some transactions our needs were satisfied and we experienced pleasure. When we were frustrated, we experienced pain. Each pain left an ‘imprint’; each imprint became part of a ‘picture’ in the deep part of our mind. That picture we call the Imago, the deeply embedded image of the ‘other’…The Imago is a synthesis of the positive and negative traits of all our primary caretakers as they were related to the satisfaction or frustration of our needs.” (p. 7)

Terrence Real’s Perspective on Marital Dissatisfaction

Terrence Real, in his seminal book How Can I Get Through to You?, writes in a similar vein about the profound difficulty most people have in creating a fulfilling marriage. He states, “One of the few stable statistics in our fast-changing world is the rate of divorce, which has hovered between 40 and 50 percent for the last thirty years. Any two people who marry face a grim 50 to 60 percent chance of survival…Of those who remain together, how many do so happily, as opposed to those who stay for external reasons, like their children, finances, religion, or fatigue? Conservatively, we can estimate that at least one out of three, perhaps one out of two, of those couples left standing do not relish their lives together.” (p. 33)

Real poses an interesting question: “Is there some natural law of marital entropy? Some ubiquitous centripetal force pulling people away from one another? Of the thousands of statistics about marriage churned out by social research each year, the one I find most depressing is that in all couples, rich and poor, happy and unhappy, one of the most reliable predictors of marital dissatisfaction is simple longevity. The longer couples live together, the lower their reported contentment.” (p. 35). The wife Maggie is quoted as saying, “My feelings for Steve are like a balloon that’s been leaking air for years. I don’t hate my husband anymore. I did for a while. But I don’t even have that much left in me. I’m just out of air.” (p. 36)

In his third book, The New Rules of Marriage, Real explains how couple get stuck: “There’s a saying in family therapy that most couples have the same fight over the course of 40 or 50 years. These seemingly endless, irresolvable repetitions are like children’s Chinese finger puzzles: The harder you pull, the tighter they get. They are vicious cycles that dig us in deeper and deeper, eating up, over the years, more and more of the goodwill and connection we started off with…I call the vicious cycle that a couple faces over and over their Bad Deal. It’s as if both partners have agreed to play out for all eternity reciprocal roles that gets neither of them anywhere.” (pp. 65-66)

The Marital Replay of Painful Childhood Experiences with Parents

Real then asks, “Where does your Bad Deal come from?” He writes, “While it might not be readily apparent, the vicious cycle most couples find themselves stuck in replays some aspect of the relationships they grew up with.” Describing several such couples, Real states, “The painful dramas they each grew up with spill into their marriages with the seeming inevitably of a classic tragedy. Their relationships are crowded with ghosts.” (pp. 67-68)

Next Real asks, “Are We Doomed to Keep Repeating the Same Pattern?” He asserts, “At a more spiritual, mystical level, we pick partners with whom we can re-create whatever it was that was relationally dysfunctional in our formative years out of a deep-seated impulse to heal it. We are drawn to partners who meet two conditions: 1) The person’s character is similar enough to that of one or both of our parents that, with this person, we can re-create our most familiar and most unresolved childhood drama; and: 2) The person’s character is dissimilar enough from that of our parents that, with this person, the old drama carries within it the potential for a new and healthier outcome.” (pp. 72-73)

Continuing with this theme, Real asserts, “It is the urgency of your wish to ‘get from your partner what you should have had but did not get from your parents that drives your losing strategies and guarantees failure…We hit the piñata this way and that, trying to get candy we’ve always known lies inside. But we are deluded. Whatever it was that we wanted from them came and went a long time ago. It’s far too late for anyone to give it to us now. We are no longer children. The only person who can learn to make up for what wasn’t there—the only person who can finally give you the missing skills and love you so yearn for—is yourself.” (pp. 74-75)