The Integrity Advantage by Kelley Kosow

Author:Kelley Kosow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

My Personal Journey from Acknowledgment to Acceptance

I’m always amazed at what good actors we are. We learn these skills early in life—to have a tough exterior, to not reveal what is going on inside, to not let people see you sweat, and of course, to smile. We create facades and illusions of what our life “should be” and they can be exhausting to sustain or draining to keep chasing. My facade was the so-called perfect marriage with the so-called successful husband. We had a beautiful house, three beautiful daughters, and a busy social calendar. We “had it all.”

Just as beauty needs to be more than skin deep to endure, the funny thing about facades is when you feel that the one you have carefully crafted is about to be torn off, it is easy to become desperate, to do whatever it takes to keep up pretenses and prevent the walls from tumbling down.

A few years before my marriage officially ended, my then husband moved out. During one of our many fights, my husband told me he needed to get away and was going to drive down to Key West for the weekend to think things through. A few days after he returned, we had another huge fight. The next day, he told me that he had rented an apartment and would be moving out.

Even though deep down I knew that this was where our marriage was headed, I was devastated and desperate to maintain the facade for a little longer. I still wasn’t ready to take that towel off that I had been hiding under since my wedding day. Three kids later, I was even more deathly afraid to admit that our marriage wasn’t working. I remained steadfast in my denial that separation would be best for everyone. I did more than stay in my denial. I did what any well-trained lawyer would do: I argued and fought to keep my denial firmly in place by trying to control the situation and manipulate the outcome by asking questions like, “What would we tell the children?” and “How would this impact their lives?” and “Couldn’t we try another therapist?”

Ultimately, my strategies won out. My husband appeased me by saying that since he was traveling for business, he would come home one or two days during the week and then move to his apartment on the other days when he wasn’t traveling. The arrangement would not appear much different on the outside, and our girls were too young to notice or question the truth. Desperate, I agreed to this arrangement. It allowed me to put a bandage on the facade that was crumbling down around me. Little did I realize that this bandage was not helping me heal, but instead the adhesive kept the “dis-ease” firmly entrenched in my body and poisoning my self-esteem.

I asked him to show me his apartment. I wanted to see where he was going to be staying when he wasn’t at home. When we walked in the door, my heart dropped.

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