At my personal blog, someone commented on the Spitzer story to ask about his wife's shadow. She appears to have money of her own, so she's not staying with him for financial reasons. What does she need that she stays with this man who cheats on her and betrays her?

This was my response:

What she needs, what any woman needs who remains with a husband who abuses her or cheats on her or betrays her in any other way, is to go on loving at all costs and thereby to be able to believe she’s a loving person, though she most likely doesn’t know that. She’s staying with her man as a way of loving somebody who hurt her a long time ago, probably her father, though there are exceptions where it’s an older brother or a grandfather or even a mother. As a little girl, somebody betrayed her trust, and she is holding onto a pattern of being in relationships with people who betray her trust as a way of loving and honoring and staying connected to and never forgetting and memorializing that original betrayer. It’s like a memorial to that painful experience, an unconscious dance she will continue until she becomes conscious of it. If it was her father who originally betrayed her, then she remains with Eliot as a way of loving her father. That’s a big reason why this kind of pattern is so hard to change, why an abused wife will go back to the man who beats her. To the little girl inside Mrs. Spitzer, to leave Eliot would mean she no longer loved her dad (if that’s who it was), and no little girl will choose to stop loving her dad. Little girls don’t do that. Neither do little boys. How we love other people, and see ourselves as loving, are at the very core of who we are as human beings, there is no deeper need than to love those around us and be loved by them in return.

Two more comments:

My first husband was physically abusive when he was in the manic phase of his bipolar illness, so I know this shadow firsthand. My father was not physically abusive, he was abusive in other ways, but I married an abusive man as a way of loving my father.

Second, we call loving someone in a painful way a Tombstone wound because we carry a self-destructive behavior as a memorial to a loss--our loss of connection with the loved one who hurt us with that behavior. The process that heals this wound, the Tombstone process, assists you in releasing the painful way of loving and choosing a healthier way of loving.

The Tombstone process is described in detail in Chapters 15 and 16 of Practically Shameless. It is also  is available on a CD for use at home. It's a brilliant process that feels so good, like giving your heart a long, warm hug. I've used the CD multiple times myself.