Catherine ‘Cathy’ Lewis
Senior Counselor
28 Years of Experience
Specialties: Telling a partner, marriages and long relationships, being the one who was told
Catherine “Cathy” Lewis
Senior Counselor
Cathy was married for nineteen years before her husband told her. He said it in the car, parked outside their own house, because he could not manage it indoors. She remembers exactly what she said back and she is not proud of it.
They stayed together. It took about two years of getting it wrong before they got it right, and she is candid that most of the getting it wrong was hers. Not because she disapproved, but because she was hurt that he had not trusted her sooner, and she let that hurt do the talking for a while.
That is why she is the person here for anyone facing a disclosure conversation, from either side of it. She knows the exact shape of that fear because she was the one being told, and she knows what she wishes somebody had explained to her that night.
She will tell you, for instance, that the first reaction is almost never the real reaction. That a partner who goes quiet is usually not disgusted, they are recalculating everything they thought they knew, and that takes a few days rather than a few seconds.
She has been doing this for twenty eight years now. Her husband, for the record, is still her husband.
What it is like to talk to Cathy
Cathy is practical. If you are trying to work out how to tell somebody, she will not just reassure you, she will help you plan it. Where to do it, when not to do it, what to say first, and what to do with the silence afterwards.
She is equally the person to call if you are the partner who has just been told and has nobody to talk to about it. She has taken a lot of those calls and she does not think you are a bad person for finding it difficult.
She does not promise it will go well. She was there and she knows it does not always. What she will do is make sure you go into it having thought about more than one outcome.
In Cathy’s own words
The thing nobody tells you about being the partner is that you grieve a little. Not for the person, they are right there. For the version of the last nineteen years where you thought you knew everything.
I got that badly wrong at first. I made his confession about my feelings, and he had already spent two decades being frightened. He needed me to be steady and I made him manage me instead.
So when a man tells me he cannot face telling his wife, I know precisely what he is protecting. And when a wife rings me in bits at eleven at night, I know that too, because I was her.
The best calls I take are the ones where somebody rings back a week later to say it went alright. I never get bored of that. I would have given a great deal for someone to have told me what was coming, so I try to be that for other people.
Cathy, on what this work gives back
Things people have said to Cathy
These are the kinds of sentences that open calls here. If one of them sounds like something you have thought, you are in ordinary company, and Cathy has answered it many times before.
- How do I tell her without ending my marriage?
- He told me two nights ago and I have not slept since.
- We have been together twenty six years. Is it cruel to tell her now?
- She said she was fine with it and then went quiet for a week.
- I do not know if I am upset about the thing itself or about the lying.
- Do people actually stay together after this?
You will not shock Cathy
Cathy is for anybody standing on either side of that conversation. She has been the one who was told, she got the first two years wrong, and she has spent twenty eight years since making sure other people have better information than she did. She will not judge the partner who struggles and she will not judge the person who waited.
There is nothing you cannot say
Nothing is too strange, too private, or too much, and nothing you say will surprise Cathy. Start wherever feels easiest, and take as long as you need.
Click to talk to Cathy(888) 771-2235
Or choose how long you would like
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How It Works
Three simple steps. No accounts. No sign-ups. No records.
Call the Number
Dial (888) 771-2235 any time, day or night. We connect you with the first available counselor.
Talk About Anything
Whatever is on your mind, we have heard it before and we will never judge you.
Hang Up and Breathe
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