But the fundamental choice she needed to make wasn’t about which man to be with. Whatever she was doing with her husband—withdrawing, hiding, keeping secrets—she would continue to do with the lover, or in any romantic relationship, until she chose to change. Her freedom wasn’t about choosing the right man. It was about finding a way to express her desires, hopes, and fears in any relationship.
Sadly, this is a common problem. Even a marriage begun with passion and connection can grow to feel like a prison cell. It happens slowly over time, and it’s often difficult to see when and how the bars are built. There are the usual intrusions—stress over money or work or children or extended family or illness—and because the couple lacks the time or the tools to resolve these irritations, the worry and hurt and anger build up. After a while it’s even harder to express these feelings, because they lead to tension or arguments, and so it’s preferable to avoid the topics altogether. Before two people know it, they’re living separate lives. The door is open for someone else to come in and attempt to fill what’s been lost.
When a relationship is strained, it’s not one person’s fault. Both people are doing things to maintain the distance and disputes. Robin’s husband was a perfectionist. He criticized her and was judgmental and hard to please. At first, it was tough for her to recognize that she was also doing things to damage the relationship: pulling away, going to another room, disengaging, disappearing. Most of all, keeping her unhappiness a secret. The affair was a secondary secret. The primary secret was all that she had begun habitually concealing from her husband—her daily ups and downs, sorrows and pleasures, longing and grief.
Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.
I told Robin I would keep treating her if she liked, but only if she put the affair on hold as she worked to be in a more honest relationship with herself.
I gave her two exercises. The first I call Vital Signs. It’s a quick way of taking your own temperature, becoming aware of your inner climate and the emotional weather you’re putting into the world. We’re always communicating, even when we’re not saying a word. The only time we don’t communicate is when we’re in a coma. Several times a day, make a conscious effort to check in with your body, to ask yourself, “Do I feel soft and warm, or cold and stiff?”
Robin didn’t like discovering how often she was stiff, rigid, closed off. Over time, the act of taking her emotional temperature helped her soften. This is when I introduced the second exercise, Pattern Interruption—a way to consciously replace a habitual response with something else. When Robin felt herself wanting to withdraw or withhold from her husband, she would make a conscious effort not to disappear. She’d soften her gaze and look at her husband with loving eyes—something she hadn’t done for a long time. One evening at the dinner table, she gently reached for his hand.
It was a tiny step toward intimacy. They still had a lot of repairs to make if they were to rebuild their relationship. But they’d begun.
Healing can’t happen as long as we’re hiding or disowning parts of ourselves. The things we silence or cover up become like hostages in the basement, trying more and more desperately to get our attention.
I know because I tried to hide my past for years, to conceal what had happened to me, to hide my grief and rage. When Béla and I fled Communist Europe after the war and came to America with Marianne, I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want to be the shipwrecked person I was, a mother who was also a Holocaust survivor. I worked in a garment factory, cutting loose threads off the seams of little boys’ underwear, paid seven cents per dozen, too scared to say anything in English for fear others would hear my accent. I just wanted to fit in, to be accepted. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I didn’t want my scars to show.
It wasn’t until decades later, when I was finishing my training as a clinical psychologist, that I realized the cost of my double life. I was trying to heal others without healing myself. I was an impostor. On the outside, I was a doctor. On the inside, a terrified sixteen-year-old was quaking, cloaked in denial, overachievement, and perfectionism.
Until I could face the truth, I had my secret, and my secret had me.
My secret also had my children, in ways I’m still growing to understand. The childhood memories Marianne, Audrey, and John have shared—the fear and tension they sensed under the surface without knowing what it was about—are similar to what I’ve read in letters from readers around the world who are children of Holocaust survivors.
Ruth, whose parents were Hungarian survivors, told me about the impact her parents’ silence had on her growing up. On the one hand, she had a wonderful childhood. Her father and mother were outwardly joyful and relieved to have immigrated to Australia, happy to be able to offer their children a good education, to send them to ballet and piano classes, to raise them in a peaceful environment, to celebrate their accomplishments and friendships. “We’re lucky,” they’d often say. “Thank goodness.” There was no obvious stamp of trauma.
But there was a disconnect between Ruth’s inner and outer experience. Her parents’ positivity about the present in contrast with their silence
