It is possible to find hope after betrayal…
When Ginny called, the tremble in her voice touched me. Ken had left his phone on, so she did not need the password. She broke her rule of never intruding into his privacy.
She discovered a slew of text messages and cell phone calls that her husband had made to his attractive colleague at work. The number of messages staggered her, especially ones in the middle of the night. Some of the more intimate ones made her nauseous.
Making the Call
Becoming frantic she searched the internet for everything she could find about extramarital affairs. She realized her extreme reactions were normal and human.
She called saying, “I just need someone to walk through this with us.”
On the other hand, she knew that deep down she still loved him. However, her friends thought she was crazy even to consider staying with him. They wanted her to call a barracuda of a lawyer. In her moments alone she felt like she was coming apart at the seams.
Usually, she would turn to Ken in a time of crisis as her best confidant. She wanted to but her anger and now lack of trust made that impossible. She didn’t know whether to confront him directly or to ask him leading questions to see if she could catch him in further lies.
Her brain was spinning with many ambivalent feelings. Her gut had suggested that Ken had been distant for a while. She had asked him a couple of times if he was having an extramarital affair. He denied it and told her she was crazy.
Yet once he had begged her to go for marriage counseling and she had refused. Apparently, he too recognized that something was missing in their relationship.
She just wanted to wake up from this bad dream. Instead, when she thought about it, her heart raced as if she was having a heart attack. The doctor in the emergency room assured her she was only having a panic attack. He too told her she wasn’t crazy, yet something still wasn’t right.
Identifying Steps to Take After A Betrayal
As we talked, I helped her discern what she wanted to do. She realized that if she asked him “innocent” questions and he lied, she would hate him all the more. So she decided not to trick him.
She told him that she had read the emails and text messages She stated firmly that she was sure he was having at least an affair of the heart. In the face of the evidence, he still tried to say the relationship amounted to nothing.
Still Ginny stood her ground. She asked him to start with the truth and to begin marriage counseling. Ken agreed though he was afraid that any of the details that she constantly question him about what hurt her more. He felt like in answering with truth, he and she would be both headed into a buzz saw of feelings that he did not know how to handle.
Naturally, they both were concerned about the impact of a divorce on the children. I suggested to Ginny that infidelity did not have to mean the end of their marriage though I could understand if that turned out to be her choice.
I suggested that the relationship, as she knew it, had been destroyed. Still, with help and an understanding of the dynamics of infidelity recovery, they could rebuild trust and create a new and much deeper marital bond.
Beginning Infidelity Recovery Counseling
During the first session, Ken expressed regret about the pain he had caused Ginny. Yet he wanted to blame her for not having been very available since she took her new job. Ginny flatly rejected this that stating that her job and tiredness did not justify his decision to betray her trust. She felt his reaction was so unfair and just an excuse.
I informed them that this first phase would be the most tumultuous and asked them what they needed to get through it. Ginny wanted space at times but wanted to know she could reach for him and know what he was doing at all times. Ken wanted relief from the barrage of late night interrogation if he felt that he was running out of bandwidth to respond in a non-defensive way.
Ken began to let in how much he had hurt Ginny. His chest felt so tight when he saw the tears in her eyes. Yet he learned to listen and validate rather than just tell her that it would never happen again and try to get her to move on.
He moved from useless apologies to appreciating the pain from of the tsunami created by the disruption of his relationship.
Ginny realized that her endless quest to be a detective to get at the truth really did not help her to overcome her anxiety. Instead she learned techniques to help her sleep, to quell the heart palpitations and to focus away from her obsessive thinking.
I explained that working through the breach of trust would take much longer than either might imagine. Some couples easily need as much as two years.
I gave them the good news: that research has revealed that 80 per cent of the couples who decide to work on their marriage after an infidelity do decide to stay together if they stick with the therapy long enough.
Committing to See if They Could Rebuild Trust
After helping them get through the initial seismic upheaval, I invited them both to invest in a research process. By this I meant that they could learn how:
- To develop new skills of listening to each other without defensiveness
- For Ken to use therapy to investigate what caused him to turn to another relationship
- To work through the roller coaster of flashbacks when Ginny would see a TV show or movie about an extramarital affair movie and relive her initial emotions upon discovery of Ken’s betrayal
- To develop rituals of spending regular meaningful time together apart from planning
- To allow themselves to experience gratitude for the other’s moments of stretching and caring
- To move out of attack-blame interactions to curiosity about what would work
I assured them that they did not initially need to commit to staying in the marriage. Instead, they could focus on learning new skills and see what that the new relationship would feel like after they had moved beyond the shock and awe of the affair.
Dealing with Flashbacks
Ken overcame his impatience for her to “just get over it.” He realized that her repetitive feelings were like flashbacks similar to people who saw blue skies and feared that 9/11 was about to happen again and they were not going to go away quickly.
The analogies of soldiers going through buddies being killed in combat made sense to him. The trauma was too much for their psyches to handle. Instead, the experiences keep coming up in their dreams or even in daytime hours. For example, they might jump behind a wall when they heard firecrackers.
Similarly, Ginny’s brain had been traumatized so that she had no time stamp on the experience of the initial turmoil created by the discovery of the betrayal. When she passed a restaurant she knew Ken had been with this woman, she would shake like she did when she first read the text messages.
Ginny noticed that Ken was expressing his remorse by being alert to what experiences might be triggering her flashbacks or lack of trust. He responded patiently to the triggered anxiety. His checking in often when he was traveling meant so much to her.
Figuring Out What Led To The Betrayal
They began to explore what had made their marriage vulnerable to the extramarital affair. Ginny was quick to say that this did not justify Ken’s relationship with the other woman. But they did need to discover what led to Ken’s assuming that Ginny did not care. Eventually Ginny moved from blaming to appreciating how some of her being dismissive might have led Ken to feel her indifference. Ken could see that he did not expect her to relish the excitement of his new project at work since his parents paid so little attention to things like his enthusiasm about his new band in High School.
Learning What to Do During Flashback
I encouraged Ginny to let Ken know what she needed during the awful flashbacks. During the worst moments, Ginny wanted him to hold her and tell her he believed that they could make it. His patience, knowing that she could not help what was a flashback response to the trauma, helped her through the night.
Crossing the Bridge
In sharing their dreams and making plans for the future they built a bridge that became a bond. The extramarital affair required their relationship to be broken down and rebuilt.
They focused on expressing gratitude for whenever the partner stretched. They celebrated the joy of being alive and doing meaningful projects together. Their conversations no longer centered on the extramarital affair. By dropping down and savoring these good moments, they found themselves relaxing into enjoying the other rather than feeling critical and demanding change.
Like many couples going through the process of extramarital affair recovery, they affirmed, “The infidelity was the worst thing that ever happened to us. Yet if it hadn’t happened, we would have continued to drift and never realized what a deep meaningful closeness we could build.”
