Suddenly You Are Reliving Your Worst Memory
You’re watching a movie, and there’s mention of someone having an extramarital affair. Suddenly you find yourself replaying all of the fantasies and feelings that you had when you learned about the details of your partner’s cheating. All of the body sensations and anger and hurt that you experienced upon the discovery of the infidelity return like gangbusters.
The Nature Of A Flashback
You are living through a flashback. After 9/11, people would become afraid just looking at beautiful blues skies because that’s what their body remembers seeing right before the planes decimated the world trade center. You are experiencing a PTSD-like experience.
Your Partner May Not Understand
Others who have been through an acute trauma will not appreciate your feelings of vulnerability and defensive anger. Your partner may feel blown away by the amount of hurt that this flashback has triggered. He or she may seek to urge you to move on out of these feelings which hit you as an unreasonable demand because you can’t move on. Your body triggers these reactions as a result of the trauma.
This Too Will Pass
Always remember that such experiences resemble the waves of an ocean. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. Just reminding yourself that it will pass will help you relax into what may seem otherwise overwhelming.
What’s Really Happening
You do not have to feel guilty. Your brain could not metabolize the depth of the impact of your world crashing, and so you are now dealing with the aftershocks. For your mind to reassemble itself, it will cause these experiences to break in upon you unannounced. You may pass a restaurant where you know they met. While having sex, you may feel inundated by the images that you recall from a text that you read in their interchange.
Soldiers who have witnessed their buddies dying after an explosion will have night terrors in a similar way. They dealt with the impact of the terror and disbelief about how horrible the world turned out to be and stored it in the body because their brain could not handle the onslaught.
No Time Stamp
Unfortunately, when these reactions burst into your consciousness, your mind has not labeled them as something from the past. You will feel as though you’re right in the middle of the tumult all over again.
You tend not to have a sense that this mind-blowing anxiety was then, and this is now. So even though you have begun some of the healing after your spouse has expressed remorse, you still may find yourself as enraged or anxious as you first felt it.
What To Do
Let yourself distract your thoughts from focusing on these images exclusively. Exercise at this point and regularly helps. Making sure you’re getting plenty of sleep. Good nutrition makes a big difference. Don’t go through this on an emptyhttps://dr-jim.com/infidelity-article-index.html stomach. Doing so enables your brain to have more resilience. Find ways to self-soothe knowing that you will come out on the other side.
What To Teach Your Spouse
Help your partner know how to support you. At first, you may want nothing to do with your intimate other because you feel so hurt. However, slowly you may find that as the two of you are rebuilding your relationship, you may welcome a hug or an ear. Teach him that he can’t solve the problem but rather just walk through it with you.
He needs to know that his panicking because you feel upset will not work. Help him to know that just being there in whatever way you designate can bring healing.
Slowly Diminishing Intensity
As you come to recognize the flashbacks for what they are, you can ride the wave of them and not panic that they are happening. Over time, you will find they subside substantially. When they pop back up, your body may suffer from fatigue or other stress.
Have compassion on yourself as you would for anyone else in a similar predicament. You would never tell them that they should get over it or ask them what’s wrong with them that these feelings still surfacing. Don’t let your spouse or friends pass judgment just because they haven’t experienced. Find people who have the patience to understand that healing of this nature takes time.
Seek Help
Have someone that you can confide in when you begin to lose heart. Seek a therapist who has specialized in working with couples who have recovered from an extramarital affair. The right tools and skills can make the process much less painful.
If you live in Westchester or NYC, reach out to Dr. Jim Walkup for a 15-minute conversation to see if feels right to find support through therapy. Call him at 914 548 8645 or email him at jimwalkup@gmail.com
For other articles on extramarital affair recovery, click.
To read more about flashbacks click: Coping with Flashbacks by Matthew Tull
