I was packing up one of my bookshelves last night and came across a title I had almost forgotten about. When I mentioned it here years ago, it didn’t get much traction, but flipping through it again stopped me in my tracks. I found my old highlights, the paragraphs I lingered over, the pages I folded down because something in them hit me hard at the time. It reminded me why this book mattered so much in my own rebuilding, and I thought it might be worth reintroducing it now.
I read it more than ten years ago, at a time when my life felt like it had been split open. I was freshly out of my affair, standing in the wreckage of what I had done, trying to rebuild something with my BH while also trying to understand myself. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know how I had become someone capable of causing that kind of pain. I didn’t know how to move forward without repeating the same patterns.
I didn’t know what I was looking for when I wandered into the self-help section at my local Half Priced Books. I was just standing there raw, ashamed, terrified, but determined, scanning spines without any real direction. I came across How Could You Do That?! The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience by Laura Schlessinger. It wasn’t a book about infidelity specifically. It didn’t give me steps or scripts or marriage advice. It didn’t tell me how to comfort my spouse or how to rebuild trust. It didn’t tell me how to stop the bleeding.
It told me the truth.
And it told it in a way that I couldn’t wiggle out of, rationalize, or soften.
Most WS know the two big books, How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair and Not Just Friends. They’re essential. They teach us how to show up, how to behave, how to rebuild boundaries, how to prevent future vulnerability. They’re about the relationship, the damage done, the repair required, the steps forward.
But How Could You Do That?! is about the part of infidelity that almost no book touches, the internal collapse that made the betrayal possible in the first place.
It’s about character, not the shiny parts you show the world, but the quiet parts you abandoned long before the affair. It’s about conscience, the voice you ignored until it went silent. It’s about courage, the kind you didn’t use when you needed it most.
This book doesn’t ask, "Why did you cheat?" It asks, "Where did you stop being yourself?"
And that question matters.
Because infidelity doesn’t begin with a kiss or a message or a moment of weakness. It begins with a slow erosion of your own integrity, tiny moral compromises, small avoidances, quiet rationalizations. The book calls this abdication, the surrender of your own character. Not to another person. Not to temptation. But to your own fear, insecurity, or emotional avoidance.
Reading it felt like someone finally turned the mirror around.
Not to shame me.
To wake me up.
It helped me understand that I didn’t cheat because I was broken or unloved or misunderstood. I cheated because I abandoned my own courage. I cheated because I stopped listening to my conscience. I cheated because I let my character slip into autopilot and then pretended not to notice.
This book doesn’t let you hide behind "I didn’t mean to" or "I was confused" or "I didn’t know how to stop." It doesn’t let you blame your marriage or your childhood or your stress. It doesn’t let you soften the truth.
It says, You made choices. Now understand them.
And that’s why it belongs beside How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair and Not Just Friends. Those books teach you how to repair the relationship. This one teaches you how to repair the person who broke it.
It fills a gap that waywards desperately need, the internal work, the character work, the moral work. The part that determines whether you truly change or simply comply. The part that determines whether you become someone trustworthy again or someone who just behaves better for a while.
When I read it, I was trying so hard to rebuild my marriage, but the truth is, I needed to rebuild myself first. I didn’t know that at the time. I thought the work was all external, transparency, boundaries, honesty, repair. But this book made me stop and look inward in a way I had been avoiding. It helped me see not just what I did, but who I had slowly become in the years and choices leading up to the affair. And it showed me who I needed to grow into if I ever wanted to be someone trustworthy again.
It's and oldie but goodie.
