Are you struggling with shame after infidelity and have no idea how to break free from it? This week, I'd like to share material from our Hope for Healing course for wayward spouses. I believe with these tips and insights in hand, the wayward spouse can begin to assess their shame and make strides to overcome it. Additionally, these materials can be incredibly helpful for the betrayed spouse, as it's crucial in recovery work to empathize with and understand what the other person is going through.

How Does Ego Attack Our Happiness?

It's a safe assumption that, in many ways, the wayward spouse has made their life all about their ego and how they're perceived by others. At the core of ego is a sense of emptiness, which we continually try to fill. Ego is what drives us to find ways of filling our inner void for:

• Love.
• Acceptance.
• Security.
• Respect.
• Significance.
• Assurance.

In order to have our relational needs met, our ego goes about filling this inner void by puffing itself up to obtain the validation and affirmation it so badly craves. It lives in fear of being judged and found insufficient or "wanting."

That's the problem with ego. Even if we accomplish something today, we continue to judge ourselves and put pressure on both self and others to continually stroke our ego. When seeking to understand what happened and address shame after infidelity, the wayward spouse must be willing to confront their ego.

Self-focus and ego drive us to continually prove that we're significant. And the higher we inflate the self, the further we can fall into inferiority. If we are deemed inadequate by self or others, well then, that can seem a mountain too high. Self is competitive by nature; it's continually trying to prove it's superior by comparing itself to others. In his book Mere Christianity,* C.S. Lewis points out that competitiveness is at the very heart of pride:

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever or good-looking, there would be nothing to be proud about."

Where Does Shame Stem From?

In recovery work, it's important to understand that shame is no different than pride or superiority. It is still based on the ego's competitive nature, in the way that it tries to meet the needs of our ego through the comparison of oneself to others. In the case of shame, especially shame after infidelity, we've been judged either by self or others and found to be a disappointment or a failure. The response is either a categorical refusal to try because the risk of failing again seems unbearable or an ongoing attempt of self-improvement in hopes that the ego will enjoy being accepted by others again.

Marriage is one of the primary places a self-esteem cycle of this caliber plays out. Our ego looks to our mate for validation and affirmation. We want them to serve as a vanity mirror, which reflects our best selves and allows us to feel secure, special, and whole. In marriage, however, our mate tends to be more like a magnifying mirror than a vanity mirror; they can reveal all of our blemishes and flaws. As a result, the self isn't validated and the ego can be left wounded.

What we need from our relationships is driven by our sense of who we are. For instance, if we see ourselves as failures, we may need constant affirmation from our mate to feel good about ourselves. Marital expectations determine what we want from the relationship. Here are some other examples:

• If we believe it's our mate's responsibility to make us happy and we get into a fight, we can feel a much deeper rift than someone who takes responsibility for their own happiness.
• If we believe we're responsible for our mate's happiness and they're miserable, then we can feel a void of love that comes from their lack of positive response.

I believe marriage is a people-growing machine, both for the wayward spouse and the betrayed spouse, and it's in the less-than-ideal circumstances that we have the opportunity to examine ourselves and change how we respond to life. We have all been betrayed in some way or another. We have all betrayed in some way or another. There is a bit of good in the worst of us, and there is a bit of bad in the best of us. How we respond to relational pain and shame after infidelity is largely determined by whether we understand it's not all about us, that life is hard, and that we are not in control of everything.

How Do We Try to Soothe a Wounded Ego?

If we see life as being all about us, we feel entitled to abandon our commitment to our mate and look elsewhere to soothe our wounded ego. Some of the ways we can seek validation are through:

• Having affairs
• Engaging in controlling tendencies
• Abusing drugs and alcohol
• Going shopping
• Watching porn

Even though we might feel justified in seeking fulfillment through these venues, we might still attempt to hide our behaviors out of fear of judgment and loss of self-esteem. And while these behaviors can successfully meet our needs for validation, this satisfaction will only last for a brief moment or season. They come at the cost of our ego the moment our behaviors are discovered — we're judged for them and seen as a failure. Now, because of our failure, we shift from pride to shame, but it's still not about a concern for others.

To overcome our shame after infidelity, we might begin working on self-engineering. We might work on our self-esteem, self-control, self-image, and self-concept, all in an attempt to once again feel good about ourselves. Ideally, once our self-esteem is reestablished, we will look to our mate once again to meet our needs and affirm our image of self. If our mate falls short of providing the level of validation we need to repair our wounded ego, we are in danger of, once again, being tempted to abandon our commitment to them and seek whatever is necessary to fill the hole in our soul.

What Is the Antidote for Pride?

The antidote for pride is humility. There's a well-known quote that speaks to this; it says that humility is not thinking less of yourself, rather it's thinking of yourself less. Instead of thinking of all the ways we're superior (pride) or inferior (shame) to others, we must begin to realistically look at our life and recognize that we're no better or worse than others.

Humility is realizing that we're all people, and that each of us has equal right to be here. It's accepting the reality that we've probably been much more difficult to live with than we might ever realize. Humility is about letting go of the belief that we know what's best. It's accepting the reality that what others think is as important as what we think.

Humility isn't about shaming oneself; it's about getting outside of self to bring life to others so we can legitimately feel good about who we are. The antidote for any form of shame, whether it's shame after infidelity or something else entirely, is self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. Instead of beating yourself up, I hope that you can begin to accept yourself as good enough, just the way you are. You have to forgive yourself for being a disappointment in your own mind. You have to quit striving to be good enough and, instead, let who you are be enough.

In recovery work, overcoming shame requires destroying the power of shame by continually exposing it to safe people. As you get beyond the shame, you'll find an amazing ability to have compassion for others. If you are ready to move out of shame after infidelity and need a process-oriented approach, please consider registering for Hope for Healing. I know what you're going through is scary and incredibly difficult, and Hope for Healing can help you begin to tackle your wounded ego and set boundaries to heal yourself and also to heal those you've wounded.