75% of the couples who seek marriage or relationship counseling after discovering infidelity or cheating not only survive but thrive. Granted, that’s a select audience because some couples give up and call a lawyer.
However, I cite this statistic to give you hope if you are even considering working on your marriage after experiencing the devastating trauma of betrayal. I want to inspire you to seek help as early on as possible because doing so will save you enormous pain.
The sooner you start, the more likely you can save your marriage. So let me detail for you reasons to initiate a process of exploration.
#1. In Spite Of The Infidelity, You Still Love Your Mate
Maybe huge pieces of that love are eclipsed right now at the height of the betrayal. To deal with the aftermath will require every ounce of resilience you can muster.
Give yourself, a moment to pause. The person who betrayed you will always be the parent of your children. You have an enormous shared history with each other. Apart from this egregious act, you may still harbor respect for the other values of your wife or husband.
You may have assumed that the depth of your hate represents the lack of love. Rather this rage represents the intensity of connection. It shows the refusal of your psyche to let you experience this level of hurt again.
If you happen to round a cliff and a mountain lion jumps out at you and misses and goes over the other side of the cliff, your heart will race, you will feel trauma. You will have great difficulty in getting your brain to let you wander down that mountain path again.
Reattaching to your mate will challenge every part of your psyche not to stay in a reactive mode after a betrayal. Many believe that the trauma of infidelity ranks highest on the Richter scale of disasters regarding psychic pain.
You have loved this person in the past, and you can, with the right tools and skills, come to love again. I appreciate that, at the moment, you may not have much faith in this. Trust me. You may find yourself completely surprised by the miracle over time.
In short, I believe your relationship can survive infidelity.
#2. Your Values Demand That You Seek Help
I am not trying to guilt you into investing in working on the relationship. I am simply inviting you to imagine how much better you will feel about yourself having explored what went wrong, Grow from the experience and seeing what your relationship can become.
Even if you do not stay married, you will learn ways to communicate so that you can build a new and stronger next relationship. Feeling comfortable and alive in a relationship requires self-knowledge, negotiating skills, anger management, empathy. You will need a willingness to let the relationship teach you and help you grow.
Remember you did not have a “Marriage for Dummies” manual. Your parents may not have modeled ways to make a relationship work. In fact, your childhood trauma and tragedy may have taught you that it’s not safe to trust.
Most people can find a thousand reasons to move toward divorce, especially after infidelity. Divorce can leave many scars on you and your children if you do not work through it and continue to parent well. See if you can imagine how you will feel five years from now if you found the best cheating recovery specialist and you gave it your best shot.
You may find in your spouse someone who:
- Understands and gets you
- Wants to listen and support you
- Has learned to manage conflict with you
- Is committed to spending time celebrating life with you
- Knows your quirks and can laugh with you about them
- Has learned how to appreciate things that don’t go right and roll with it
- Wants to grow old with you
- Knows what it feels like love and cherish you
- Now is the best chance for you to learn about what went wrong
Sure, right now you want to blame this partner you have trusted with your life. You feel that no one who loves you could have with conscious intention have caused this much pain. You want to lash out because the wound seems far too slow to heal.
You may wonder why I would want to encourage you to face into this buzz saw of pain. I do so, because of my sincere belief that you may be able to make this experience into a catalyst for becoming all that you can be.
Extramarital affairs can serve as a two by four to wake each of you up. Our society tends to cause us to zone out. As a result, we live in a state of unconsciousness. We don’t see the impact on our spouse. We lose touch with each other without even recognizing it.
Why go through the agony of being forced to wake up and not learn and grow from it.
#3. Without The Right Tools, You Won’t Know How To Live Your Best Possible Life
I find myself delighted by a statement that I hear in many forms at the end of Infidelity Recovery Therapy. Couples will say, “Dr. Jim, we felt like this affair impacted us as the worst thing ever to happen. Nevertheless, we now realize that it will stand as the best thing to have occurred. We did not know what a real marriage could offer. Now we love it.”
I hope you can appreciate the urgency in my attempt to encourage you to give recovery after cheating try. You may start out doing it just for the kids; You may feel the pressure of your family and friends. You may not want to hurt your partner even though you feel hurt terribly. Your religion may frown on divorce.
So Give It a Try
If you can attach to any of these reasons I want to nudge you to take the gamble. Let me encourage you to leap of faith. Find a specialist in extramarital affair recovery.
- Talk to one on the phone to see if you feel you have found someone who has the experience to help you understand what to do to lessen the pain.
- Make an appointment for an initial session:
- Ascertain if this therapist’s approach seems to offer you a plan that makes sense
- See if each of you feels comfortable in sharing and letting this person confront you
- Notice if the therapist’s approach leaves with you hope
- If so, sign on for six sessions to become acclimated to the process. At the end do you have a sense that you are learning about yourself and the other and finding tools that will help you both work through these conflicts?
- Assuming you see possibilities for growth, sign on for an extended period. Let me break this to you gently, sometimes the trauma and the flashbacks from cheating may require as much as two years of work in order fully to integrate to heal fully.
- Couples that have experienced childhood betrayals or loss, most will need this extra time.
- Do soundings along the way with the therapist to identify your progress so that you do not slip into hopelessness with each setback
Many people get as close to signing a check as a retainer for divorce proceedings. They draw back. If you are finding yourself hesitant, trust your heart. As I mentioned earlier, 75%of couples seeking to survive after cheating who get help, do rebuild their relationship. See if you can create a new relationship, different from anything you have experienced before.
For other articles on infidelity recovery, click here.
I want to wish you well on this challenging journey. If you are in the New York, please call me at 914-548-8645. I would love to talk for about 15 minutes for free to help you decide if work with me might benefit the two of you. Having specialized in this work for over forty years. I find myself rewarded many times by the gratitude of couples who stick with the work and feel exhilarated by their new relationship.
Updated 4/4/22
