After You Find Out…
Your partner has revealed all of the details. You’ve received daily apologies. Yes, your partner has owned the responsibility for breaking your trust. The two of you are working hard to find ways to communicate and understand what caring about the other means. But there’s one problem. While you may feel that your partner sincerely loves you and is trying to make up for the pain that the infidelity has caused, you find yourself cold at times and unable to lower your defenses to trust again. You keep interrogating your partner and going over and over the details like a police detective. Deep down, you are not sure that you can ever forgive.
The Challenge of Forgiveness
Of course, forgiveness in this situation requires time. You need evidence that your partner lives up to promises and does not respond when you need to call to check. However, when you recognize that your partner is reaching out to you in all of these ways, and you cannot reach back many times, you know something has to change within you. You begin to realize that you have been unable to forgive because this infidelity has kicked off something upsetting in you.
Your Partner’s Affair May Create Flashbacks
You see, unknown to you before, and you have always had a deep fear. Underneath, you may have felt that there was something so wrong with you that your parents would abandon you. Adults can usually pull in resources to deal with this. Repeated experiences of feeling alone from them may cause you to relive this feeling now. You may find yourself, each time you think about your partner’s affair slipping back into those childhood experiences.
How Your Relationship Protected You
Your relationship with your partner may have protected you from a deep fear about you. One of the things that you found most attractive about your partner was the affection and readiness to affirm your most positive qualities. Now those same affirmations feel hollow and empty. You can no longer let them buffer you against a more profound sense of deficits. Somehow you cannot get it out of your mind that this would not have happened if there was not something very wrong with you. Your partner realized the fundamental truth that you are a flawed human being, undeserving of love and commitment.
Fear of Being Unacceptable
At this point, nothing your partner can say will breakthrough your fear that people will find you unacceptable. You may realize that you have often assumed something would be found wrong with you.
You have two choices. You can feel like a total victim, or you can decide that this belief, while false, can only be changed as you turn it upside down yourself. No one else can help you believe in yourself again unless you permit yourself to realize and appreciate all that you do have much to offer. Finding the freedom to do this sometimes requires you to confront a part of you that has made you believe that your worth needs to be continuously questioned or validated from the outside.
When Your Parents Regularly Put You Down
If your parent constantly needed to denigrate you unmercifully, you may have come to believe that this was something you had to come to accept as truth. A fatal flaw lay at the heart of your very being. When you first met your partner, you were amazed that this person seemed to see something different. But still, you may not have held your partner at arm’s length to be safe. Eventually, your partner moved away because of a fear that you were not receiving the love.
If this sounds like I am suggesting that you are responsible for the infidelity, please let me hasten to reassure you. Your partner carries the responsibility for breaking the expectation of fidelity. Still, your growth and ability to trust will emerge as you begin to appreciate how wholehearted you swallowed a picture of yourself as unacceptable.
Ways to Approach Healing From Infidelity Differently
Sometimes you will feel this most clearly if you imagine being a best friend who sees you struggling with the depth of the feeling of being fatally flawed. As a best friend, you would quickly realize how far from the truth this is but have empathy for how deeply entrenched this belief has become in your friend.
Let yourself imagine as a friend taking on the mission of helping your authentic self discover the truth of how much you, too, deserve love and commitment.
If infidelity has rocked your marriage or relationship, you’re not alone. In the state of New York, I help couples often heal from betrayal and find healing and happiness in the future. If you want to explore your issues with a free 15-minute telephone or Face-time conversation, please reach out. You can schedule with me by phone at 914-548-8645.
