We are in the second week of a five week series on Healing After Betrayal. This series is written to bring understanding and hope in one of the most heart wrenching experiences possible.
As a couples counselor who specializes in sexual integrity issues, I help marriages and relationships heal from affairs. To do this, I focus on what I call the three R’s: Recovery, Relationship Repair, and Redemption. Today we focus on recovery.
As we examined last week, a couple who experiences betrayal feels as if they are in the midst of a major medical crisis such as a car accident. If this is your story, I want to give you assurance that you can survive. There is hope for healing. There is hope to build a new relationship. There are two primary tasks in the recovery process: stabilization and understanding.
Couples, particularly the hurt partner, are very much in crisis after discovery of an affair. Everything is broken. Trust is nonexistent. Grief is profound. Simple tasks, such as getting out of bed, taking a shower, making meals, take tremendous effort.
In order to establish stabilization, honest and empathic communication is required. The offending partner must stop all communication with the affair partner and establish observable patterns to build trust. Such things as enabling the tracking function on your phone, never carrying cash, being punctual, and allowing your wife to access all text and phone records are a great start to rebuilding trust. Beyond these things, proactively opening conversations for your wife to express her pain is necessary. Simply put, you have abandoned her once with your betrayal, do not abandon her again and make her face the pain alone.
The why questions looms large after discovery of an affair. For the hurt partner, trying to find an answer to this question can be a crazy-making process. Sleepless nights and a racing mind don’t help either. Discussions with the offending partner never seem to end well, and never give satisfactory answers. The difficult truth is that there will be no satisfactory answer—you did not deserve having your world shattered. There is no magic bullet. There is nothing that is going to put your world back together again. You are in the process of grieving the loss of what you thought your relationships was and what you thought your life was. And because you cannot answer the why question, everything comes into question. Deep fears and wounds are exposed; even wounds prior to your current relations, things that you thought you dealt with come roaring back. The affair taps into all of your insecurities, and ultimately you wonder if you will ever be enough.
You ARE enough. This is not about you. The affair was not about you. Was your relationship perfect, no. Were you perfect in your relationship, no. But just because it/you weren’t perfect, does not mean he should have betrayed you. He could have chosen to invest in the relationship, and instead he left, breaking his promise and your heart.
For the offending partner, the why questions is also just as difficult to answer. Now that everything is in the open and you are seeing how much you have hurt your partner, you might wonder, “Why would I ever do this? How did I end up here?” You too are questioning everything. What you gained from the affair pales in comparison to the devastation you are now witness to. It likely shakes your self-image. You never thought you’d be one to have an affair. Who are you, really? Ironically, there often is a odd sense of relief when the truth comes out. You’ve been living a lie for so long that, in a weird way, it is nice not to have to hide anymore. But any of the burden that you no longer have to carry, is placed squarely on your partner.
Making sense of the affair is essential to moving forward. That being said, it will never make complete sense. As we look to the past to gain understanding we are careful to explain but not excuse the affair. Personal, relational, occupational, and spiritual factors might have all contributed to the affair and might help explain why it happened. But ultimately, that understanding does not excuse the affair—it did not have to happen. Plain and simple, the affair is a violation of trust and marriage vows. It should never have happened. And now you are both left to deal with the fallout. The silver lining is if you do deal with the fallout, rather than running from it, there is hope for restoration.
For more information on how to heal from betrayal or an affair, call me at 720.465.6180. Healing is possible.
