Remorse? Or Regret for Getting Caught? Either Way, It's Also an AFOG

"The remorse I feel will always be with me." When New York Governor Eliot Spitzer delivered that line in his resignation announcement today, my eyes rolled.

Remorse? I don't know how much remorse you can have for something you've been doing for a decade if the only reason you stopped was that you got caught.

One thing is for sure: The Spitzer family has been thrust into a transition from one family dynamic to another. What that ends up being is up to them. In one well-known 12-step program, I've heard it called an AFOG -- another fucking opportunity to grow.

Silda Spitzer was inches away from her husband during both his Monday press conference and his resignation announcement today. She had her neutral to grim mask in place -- who wouldn't? People criticize wives for "standing by their men" in public when those men are labeled by many as cads, cheaters and liars (those all usually go together). No one knows why those women do that. They are probably in shock at that time and don't know why they do it either, other than that's what their man wants and everyone wants to look as "less bad" as possible.

I think it's nobody's business whether the woman sticks with her husband after this kind of thing or not. We all spend so much of our lives striving to "be right" and "look good," and there's more than that at stake. Hillary Clinton made her choice and stuck with Bill. People say that's because of her political ambitions and make jokes about her freezing him out from that moment forward. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't. Relationships are complicated living things, and how they are depends entirely on the people involved, not on convention, mores, laws or other people's expectations, though we often succumb to those things in the process.

Forgiveness is powerful. So is communication. Love is most powerful of all. I believe those three things can conquer anything. Not necessarily "will" but "can."

I know of a couple -- he cheated on his wife with multiple partners and one of them ratted him out to his wife. They were set to split, but she ended up asking him to go with her to a couples retreat as a last-ditch effort. He went just to humor her and to be able to lie to himself that he'd done everything he could. He had no intention of fully participating in it. Well, surprise! He cried for 3 days and they communicated on a real level for the first time in a long time. He ended up recommitting to his marriage and they are still together. Part of that involved coming clean to her about everything, not easy for him to reveal or her to hear, and then they could, with counseling, deal with everything. They became truly close as a result and their marriage was transformed. I know of another couple in a similar situation where the wife was the one who strayed -- with more than a dozen partners, in fact -- and it had a similar outcome. Rare, but possible.

Right now all of the Spitzers are devastated. They'll find out who their real friends are, that's for sure. I guarantee they'll be shocked both at who turns their backs on them and who supports them. Each member of the family probably feels as though they won't live through this. But they will. They don't have to fall apart and get caught up in the rightness, wrongness and how it all appears. With time and a lot of help both from friends and professionals, they can forge a completely new family dynamic that's real and strong and completely transformed from the one they've had. I wish them the best!