Infidelity Recovery: How To Heal From An Affair?

Recovering from infidelity is frustrating, mentally challenging and almost impossible but hope always keeps us going. However, those who have recently found out about their spouse cheating on them, there are chances of experiencing stress, depression, flashbacks, anxiety, anger, outbursts and even post traumatic stress disorder. Substance abuse in both the partners could also show up leading to sadness and the end of a relationship.

Before going ahead, let’s define first what is affair recovery.

Affair Recovery or Infidelity Recovery

It’s a process of healing from a relationship which gave you emotional, mental and physical trauma after facing infidelity. Often a painful process, recovery from infidelity may take about 6 months to a few years. This affair could be in emotional form where one partner falls in love with someone other than their spouse or starts looking for sexual experiences with them.

Although the process of healing from infidelity could be heartbreaking and overwhelming, if you and your spouse want to work it out then we have a step by step process of recovery for you. These steps are designed to heal the relationship and start things all over again.

Recovering From Infidelity: Step By Step Process

Step 1: Cutting The Affair Down

If you are really serious in healing from infidelity and win the trust of your partner, make sure that you stop all the contacts from one you had an affair with. You may even need to quit the job, move to another location or change the house. It has to be done however it suits you and your partner but the affair shall not linger in any form. There is no way you try to connect with the person with the tag of friendship as you can fall back into it due to lack of warmth from your spouse. If you don’t cut down on illicit affairs then be ready to break your marriage leading the divorce.

Step 2: Share Your Credentials

Winning the trust is an important part of getting over infidelity pain. Open up all your social media accounts and share their passwords with your partner. It could be tempting to have secret accounts but remember, here you are trying to save your relationship. Hence, no secrecy!

Step 3: Sincere Efforts & Remorse

Showing sincere remorse and maximizing your efforts to heal this relationship counts. No matter if your spouse is not responding properly to your efforts and you are unhappy with it, you must keep working as infidelity was traumatic to them. If you don’t take ownership of your mistakes, your partner may not be able to forgive or heal the trust after infidelity.

Step 4: ‘Reunite Tool’ For Constructive Resolution

Complaints and passive-aggressive behavior is common if the partner is hurt. However, this tool allows the partner who is being cheated to comment on the improvement of their spouse, giving them a benefit of doubt in some places, owning their part and making complaints in a productive way. This tool could help in handling conflicts in a relationship and make it better during recovery from emotional affairs.

Step 5: Sharing Details Of Affair

The one who has cheated often steps back in sharing details of their affair and the spouse keeps asking about the details, even after many years. In order to avoid hurtful discussions in the longer run, it is best advised to have a detailed discussion of the affair. The spouse can prepare a list of questions and the other one has to answer them honestly. Once done, both should agree to not to bring up the discussion and let the marriage heal.

Step 6: Dealing With Triggering Flashbacks

Recovering from infidelity is backed up with traumatic stress and flashbacks shared by the partner, just like someone who has experienced a natural disaster closely. Instead of yelling on your partner and suffering in silence, speak about the triggers smoothly. The hurtful person is expected to receive apology and empathy and create healing opportunities for marriage.

Step 7: Couple Counseling

Considering couple counseling and asking about cognitive behavioral therapy from the therapist can help in capturing the negative thoughts, work through them and improve the relationship for a longer run. If you are seriously considering the option, here are some of the best online marriage counseling programs.

Step 8: Discovering Love Bucket Together

To feel really loved and satisfied in a relationship while healing from infidelity, both of you need to sit down and add things that you want to do together. Apart from that, it is also required to find things that drain your relationship like defensiveness, criticism, lack of emotions, stonewalling, being too independent, etc.

In order to keep your relationship free from illicit affairs, make sure that you keep filling each other’s love buckets and keep moving forward without draining it off completely.

“The couples that are meant to be are the ones who go through everything that’s designed to tear them apart and come out even stronger.”

Healing broken trust in your marriage after infidelity is certainly a very daunting task and requires a number of efforts to build it back once again. But we are sure that if you love your spouse then you would look for the above pointers to grow the relationship again.

If you wish us to help you connect with a counselor, do not hesitate to message us at info@calmsage.com.