I grew up in a world where infidelity was all around me, stemming back generations.
But I will start this story with my Grandpa Ike, the patriarch of our family. We all loved him, but he had his demons.

He was born to Syrian immigrants in poverty and chaos. He was left in the hospital for 6 weeks as an infant and was dying and deemed a “failure to thrive.”

The hospital called his father to tell him not to bother coming to pick him up. His father rushed to the hospital and brought him to another woman in the community to nurse him back to health. My grandpa never bonded with his mother. She was tough and traumatized.

My great grandmother was sent to America by her parents to “stay” with her uncle. When she arrived to this new country alone, it was clear that she had been promised to her uncle as a bride. He was over 20 years older than her, and she was 16. He cheated on her their entire marriage.

At some point after the last betrayal, she completely stopped speaking to him. She actually ignored him for years, even as she took care of him until the day he died, in COMPLETE silence.

So back to grandpa Ike: he lived in a loveless home. He was poverty stricken, angry, and traumatized by his experience as a newborn. He ran away from home at 8 years old and lived on the streets and then in some kind of home for at-risk youth.

When he was drafted into World War 2, he was a medic and grave-digger, responsible for collecting bodies.

He never talked about the trauma of what he saw in war, but his grandchildren would hear him have nightmares in the middle of the night. We would hear him reliving his experiences. He would mumble something about dead bodies everywhere and wake up with a start.

So you can imagine what he was like as an adult and as a parent… terrifying and abusive. He was out of control of his feelings, angry, scary and controlling. He cheated on my grandmother for decades. And the craziest thing is: he loved my grandma more than anything. But he was out of control, unaware of his demons, and his trauma was running the show.

When I think about how much my grandma suffered, it still brings tears to my eyes. She was so beautiful and strong, wise and empathic. I saw how my grandma shut herself in and made herself smaller. I could sense even as a little girl that she’d lost her aliveness. I saw how she doubted her inner-worth.

I watched as my grandma continued to take care of her betrayer in silence, at the expense of her own dignity and power. I could see and feel the ways the trauma trickled down into my parents’ generation and into my own unconscious beliefs.

So here is where my identification with the betrayed partner started. I felt my grandma and her pain on a visceral level. I had been born into the chaos of infidelity unhealed for generations. And it deeply impacted my sense of self and relationships.

How I wish my grandma could have had good therapy to heal this wound; to fully believe that she was not to blame for my grandpa’s cheating. That her aliveness and strength could stay intact.

When I work with the betrayed partners, I am working to offer the world what my grandma never had.

Back to Grandpa Ike. Despite his hardest parts, he was everyone’s favorite grandpa.

He softened as he aged, and even though he was all of the above, he was also always loving, fun, smart. Somehow despite all of the trauma he suffered he could attune to and appreciate the people he loved. He was a whole mix of things: beautiful, special, toxic, harmful, and traumatized.

AND he changed. And when he died the entire family was wrecked. I sobbed through his funeral. We all did.

I’d never want my grandpa to be written off as just a monster. He was so much more than that. I know that if my grandpa had had the right tools and support to heal his trauma, he could have changed.

He could have offered my grandma what she needed to heal. They could have had golden years and felt closer than ever.

I saw how deeply he loved, how much he wanted to be good for his family.

So I do this work with cheating partners to offer the world what my grandpa never got. Because the Grandpa Ikes of the world deserve to be set free, and their families deserve the best of them too.

When we heal the trauma we allow the person’s essence to be seen again.

We help them to feel the deep pain about what they've done without shutting down in shame. We help them to reclaim their humanity. They can feel their empathy and own their demons, showing up for their partner and healing the wound that caused the cheating in the first place.