We are in week three of a series on recovering from an affair. Today we examine one of the most important skills to dealing with the affair: feeling. The temptation is to put the past behind and move on. This is not effective or realistic. The pain is there and must be addressed. Anything short of engaging the pain will result in festering and the pain creeping out in toxic ways later in life.
Many of us have a difficult time feeling what we feel. We come up with all kinds of creative ways of coping with feelings, rather than actually resolving our emotions through feeling them. One coping mechanism is to “act in” on emotions. In the broadest terms, acting in is not allowing yourself to feel what you feel. There are two manifestations of this. The first is acting in internally—these are such as denial, repressions, suppression, self-deceit, and hiding. Acting in can be externalized as well. This occurs in the context of relationship. The person acting in will tend to blame, shame, attack, avoid, lie, minimize, rationalize, excuse, control with anger, and gaslight. Continued acting in can manifest itself as depression, anxiety, and withdrawing. It eventually leads to acting out. Acting out behaviors are more destructive and can ultimately lead to addiction. These occur when an individual attempts to escape through such things drugs, alcohol, eating, television, video games, pornography, and affairs.
How then do we avoid acting in/acting out? The key to avoiding acting in is to feel what you feel. For most men, this is very difficult. Our culture has conditioned us to believe that emotions are bad. Emotions are associated with weakness and worse: being irrational. Men have one acceptable emotion: anger. When we are scared, we get angry. When we are ashamed, we get angry. When we feel weak, anger. Our one emotion tends to mask all other emotions.
The issue with most men is not that they don’t feel their emotions, it is that they feel them very intensely. But because we have been told our whole lives that men don’t cry, and that we can’t trust our emotions, we have distanced ourselves from emotions. When we find ourselves in intense emotional situations, we get lost in a fog. We are so overwhelmed with emotions that we simply can’t think to sort them out, and we are not in tune with our emotions as to know what they are telling us. We freeze.
So, in order to not act in, it is crucial to learn how to feel emotions. A first step toward this is body awareness. Our bodies can tell us a lot about what we are feeling. In fact, much of our speech reflects emotions as body phenomena. Butterflies in the stomach, tightness in the shoulders, pit in stomach…all of these are emotions expressing themselves in the body. A second thing to do in understanding emotions is to sit with them. Rather than escaping the emotion, accept it which will grow your ability to tolerate it. A final step in emotional work is to share your emotions. Acting in tends to isolate. To combat acting in, one must engage emotionally in authentic relationship with others.
In this series, I have oft said it is important for the offending partner to join the hurt partner in her pain. I am advocating for empathy. If you are not in touch with your own emotions, it is impossible to feel what your wife feels. As you access your emotions, you become the safe person your wife needs you to be, for yourself, for her, and for your relationship. Open, honest, and safe communication with authenticity and empathy provides the most direct route to healing from betrayal and establishing a new and strong relationship.
For more information on how to heal from betrayal or an affair, call me at 720.465.6180. Healing is possible.
