How To Recover From Marital Infidelity
Saturday, February 28th, 2009When you discover that your spouse has been having an affair, you may feel so hurt and devastated that you feel you will never recover from the marital infidelity. However, this experience is also hurtful for the spouse who was unfaithful in the guilt and remorse he/she feels, plus the embarrassment of knowing that everyone else knows about it too. Children feel the pain when their parents are fighting and not getting along because they feel neglected and sometimes they may feel that they did something wrong. So there is more than one person that has to recover.The main people to figure out how to work things out are the spouses themselves. How the affair was discovered has a lot to do with the recovery period. If you have suspicions, collected evidence that pointed to an affair and then confronted your spouse, who admitted what was going on, this tends to be easier to deal with than a sudden discovery. It is harder to recover when you walk in on your spouse and the lover engaged in sexual activity or if you find out about the affair through a third party. This is because there is a blatant betrayal of trust involved and you not only feel hurt, but you feel as if you have been made to look like a fool.
It also depends on the length of time the affair has been going on. A one-night stand can be accepted for what it is – a one time thing. You will still feel mistrustful when your spouse goes off alone or on a business trip wondering if the same thing will happen. If the affair has been going on for some time, you do know that there is an emotional attachment between your spouse and his/her lover that may be hard to break. Then you will spend a longer period of time trying to build up trust in this persona again and you may always be looking for signs that the affair has resumed or that it never stopped.
For the spouse that was unfaithful, the reasons for the infidelity have to come out. If there is a problem with the marriage that caused you to look elsewhere, things are not going to improve at home unless you get these problems out in the open and take steps to resolve them. More than likely, you do have feelings for the person with whom you have an affair and it is just as hard to break off the relationship as it was to admit it to your spouse. You may have to deal with hurt and anger on this side as well and feel you are caught in the middle. You do have to step back and reflect on your actions to help you make a decision as to how you need to proceed to make everything right.
The recovery period from infidelity in a marriage does not happen overnight. It takes a long time to get over this – maybe years.