Monday, December 30, 2002

New Years - The day it all went wrong

Today I find out that I have been cheated on.  Everything is upside down, my perfect existence shattered.  What did I do? 

There are several stages in every experiences specially bad or traumatic experiences like the experience of having been cheated upon. According to psychologists the first stage is the denial stage where you cant accept and you are in a stage of disbelief. Then you start to panic, don’t know what to do stage, feeling of anxiety is common, then you grief there is a feeling of losing something, you are in a world where there is misery you keep on crying and you don’t have motivation to do anything, cannot eat, cannot do task or go to work. Then you have guilt, you blame yourself. I think this stage is good because you start to evaluate things, what went wrong etc. At these times you need to be around people who really care about you, sometimes you feel depressed, and then next stage is anger, you are angry at the world at yourself or your partner who cheated on you.

But what the heck? We all need to move on whether we choose to be with the cheating partner or moving alone, it is a choice for us to make. Life is not perfect anyway, as long as you tried your best, you don’t need to blame yourself. We cant hold our partners feelings and we are responsible with our own action, not theirs. Life is a learning process and we don’t need to dwell on it. When its time to move on, we gather our senses and we take the experience as a lesson in life, and we laugh at it. Sometimes this is better said than done, but still we just have to forget about what happened. Sometimes also, time heals all the wounds they say, but for others it takes time. We are really the one who can make our agony shorter. Next time around, we become really wiser.

Acceptance is hard but you have to move on. You are not the only victim of a cheating partner. Why is it easier to accept? Because if you cant accept that it happens to you, it will just be forever in your mind and it will destroy you physically and emotionally. Even the most beautiful people in the world have been cheated upon. Men and women are just born insatiable, they always look for greener pasture or just sometimes they just don’t know what they are looking for.

I asked myself can I forgive her? Cheating is never justified, yes it can put strain in a relationship, sometimes you can never recover, but once you forgave the person who did that to you, there is no turning back and you have to move forward not constantly reminding them of what they did. It gives you peace of mind when you forgive them. It is easier for you to forgive because it will help you to heal.

Sure I said, I can forgive.  But there was a hitch, to this day I have no idea how I survived through the torment to follow without loosing all respect for myself or commiting suicide.