Reflections on My Journey from Shipwreck to Shore

How I learned to float and swim — physically and metaphorically — after the shipwreck of sexual betrayal last year.

Jan 01, 2025

Dear Ponders,

Happy 2025! As I sit in front of this blank new page pondering what transpired in 2024 and looking ahead, a deep sense of gratitude fills my heart. I say this with gravitas. For most of last year, grateful was a feeling that was almost impossible to summon. I simply couldn’t find it amid the shipwreck of sexual betrayal and the end of a relationship that I believed would last until I die. But the shipwreck forced me to feel the waters of life. I got to know its true nature, and to my surprise, realized I could actually float — and that I was born to float!

From Shipwreck to Shore

2024 was the year I journeyed from near drowning to swimming back to shore.

*A woman swimming from a shipwreck to shore (generated by AI)*

As tremendously painful as it was, I can now say, in hindsight, how grateful I feel for finding the acknowledgement of my betrayal experience as a form of intimate psychological cruelty, trauma and abuse.

A few outstanding books provided me with the absolute clarity I needed to understand the crazy-making experience I had lived in since my ex’s deceptive behavior began in 2021. With the kind of understanding that fully acknowledged and supported my own truth, I was then able to jump ship, move beyond the shipwreck and onto my healing journey.

Here are the books and research papers that have helped me. I’m listing them in case you need help too (although I would never wish upon anyone the same kind of pain):

“Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life” by Tracy Schorn

“Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft

“The Blueprint for Deceptive Sexuality” by Dr. Omar Minwalla

In a nutshell, this is how I experienced infidelity (as opposed to the trivialized misunderstanding portrayed in popular culture):

Infidelity is not just about the sexual or emotional behavior itself; it represents a far deeper, more insidious form of reality manipulation….
… infidelity evolves from sexual transgression into a sustained pattern of systemic psychological abuse and relational maltreatment. The true harm is not confined to the violation of sexual boundaries but extends to the deliberate construction and then the operation to maintain a hidden life — a compartmentalized reality that distorts the partner’s perception of truth, causing significant and progressive emotional, psychological, and relational complex trauma.

My biggest “lifesaver ring” came from Tracy Schorn, the Chump Lady (author of the first book listed above), and her community of Chump Nation. Without her and the support of her community, I would’ve been mired in the debris of the shipwreck and still trying to piece them back together — an impossible and futile undertaking. Instead, I learned to get angry, laugh, and reclaim my space, my own personhood, my innate power, and my own life.

In her New Year blog post, “How to Get Over Betrayal,” Schorn reiterates her mission of holding out a better vision for us “chumps” that is beyond basic survival.

How each of us chumps live out that vision is different. In my case, since leaving the serial cheater in March 2024, I have cleansed and transformed the space I used to share with him; made new friends and strengthened bonds with people in my community; gotten reacquainted with my creativity; learned new skills; and ventured into leadership roles that I would never have felt bold enough to try if it wasn’t for my newly gained wisdom through hardship.

In fact, I count every bit of these as a tremendous success, and I want to own them all. I was so depressed from the chronic mistreatment and gaslighting by the cheater that I didn’t have any motivation or energy to build my life and thrive for years.

How true it is and how amazing it feels that, in Schorn’s words: “All that energy poured into a narcissist — it’s yours now. You gift it to yourself and those deserving of you.”

What a wonderful gift that keeps giving. With immense gratitude to you, Chump Lady and Chump Nation, for helping me survive the shipwreck and discovering that I could actually float!

How Learning to Float and Swim Enlightens Me

I didn’t really plan it, but taking up swimming lessons after the breakup was a tremendous gift to myself, both physically and metaphorically. It arose out a desire that has grown over the years since my near-drowning accident when I stepped into a swimming pool in Hong Kong at the age of 12 — my very first time in water. I wrote about this traumatic event in this post. I was done with always being the bystander on shore, watching my dear ones enjoy the embrace of the ocean while I stayed in my tiny comfort zone.

In the last six months, I’ve been taking swimming lessons once a week, and started to practice on my own once or twice a week. My trust in the ability of the water to hold me up has increased, along with my sense of comfort and enjoyment in this previously strange and hostile milieu.

I learned an important concept from a book written for “afraid adult swimmers,” “Conquer Your Fear of Water” by Melon Dash. It is the concept of being in the body, as illustrated by the five stick-figure and circle diagrams below:

According to Dash — and many other spiritual teachers — we are each a spirit living inside a physical body. The stick figure represents our body. The circle and the space within it represent each of us — a spirit.

To demonstrate how to feel at ease and calm in water, Dash uses this concept to remind us that when we and our body are in the same place, we are being present. We feel good in this state.

In our everyday language, we call this being present, “at home,” composed, grounded, centered, together, mindful. You feel poised, quiet, solid, in control, stable, self-contained, peaceful, balanced, open, and comfortable.
— Melon Dash

There are other states where our spirit and body aren’t in the same place. Represented by the figures from the second to the left to the far right: nervous, afraid, paralyzed by fear, and panic.

I’ve found myself move from being present to the state of panic in a matter of seconds. My experience in water has told me that when I was led by my mind, my body and spirit are separated. My mind is ever so skilled at conjuring up scenarios where I would drown, because that is the single most vivid memory left from my childhood trauma. As a result, my fearful mind makes my body tense up to prepare to fight for survival. But the tenser my body gets, the more it sinks.

This viscous cycle results in my mind getting in the way of my body’s natural ability to float. As my swimming coach often says, “You CAN swim! You just have to remember it!” I’m very fortunate to be coached by this bright young man who is extremely responsive to my needs as an “afraid adult swimmer.” Because of his presence, encouragement, and patience in allowing me to progress at a speed that I’m comfortable with, I’ve gone from shaking from head to toe every time I entered the pool, to feeling comfortable and eager to spend more time in water — often with great enjoyment.

The lessons of staying present in the body has spilled over to how I live my days. In fact, I made an important philosophical discovery during my winter break, when I reset my nervous system and planted new habits based on my new understanding of what it means and how to be present in our body. I will write about this discovery in a future post.

Another wonderful practice I started during this break was reading “Meditations for Mortals” and reflecting on each of the 28 daily lessons with my soul bestie

Amy Brown

In many ways, this book is an antidote of our often-futile attempts to bend ourselves into pretzels to check off never-ending to-do lists and succeed at ambitious goals written in the form of New Year Resolutions and the like. The book takes on a very pragmatic view, acknowledging our mortal limitations and suggests deceptively simple and practical ways to get things done. But not just anything. Things that matter most to us.

Along this vein, I’m not going to wish you success in 2025 in any specific ways, but success in a few things that matter the most to you.

Thank you for reading my blog! Please hit the little heart ❤️ at the top or bottom of this newsletter so it would be easier for other readers on Substack to find their way to Lily Pond. ❤️

Did this post inspire you in any way? If so, please leave a comment and share with me which part(s) spoke to you the most. Thank you and see you again soon!