Recovering from an Affair

Are you recovering from an affair? Or is your spouse recovering from one? It really helps to understand why you had the affair and face the reality.

You have to believe that you can recover from an affair because if you don’t, just realise that life is never going to be the same again. This article gives you tips on the physical and emotional reactions, facing the reality that this has happened, understanding who has affairs and why, developing honest communication, and making decisions.

Dealing with extramarital affairs is a life-altering experience. It's more than just dealing with the affairs themselves. It's dealing with the fact that nothing is the way you thought it was. Your dreams of the `perfect marriage’ have been shattered. Your world has been turned upside down and you must begin to make sense of this new world. All this calls for a long-term effort.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Accept the fact that it happened. This doesn't mean `liking’ it. It just means giving up focussing on `if only’ and dealing with `what is’.
• Work to understand what happened in terms of the societal factors that contributed to it.
• Talk about what happened - not just for the sake of talking, but in order to move the process along. Hiding it reinforces the feelings of shame.
• Deliberately focus on dealing with it.
• Believe it is possible to recover.
• Allow time to heal. Time alone won't bring recovery, but it does require time and patience to work through this experience.

Remember, there are no shortcuts; the only way through this situation is to face it head on and deal with it. Even then, it will be difficult for everyone. It's so painful and uncomfortable that everybody wants it to be over quickly, but it just doesn't work that way.

The process of healing and growth is not the steady, smooth progression you would like it to be. It's more often a series of ups and downs, dramatic improvements and depressing backslides, progressions and regressions - a moving back and forth between periods of clear thinking and emotional confusion.

By knowing in advance that this is the normal progression of recovery, you can avoid being so depressed or devastated when these inevitable setbacks take place. Persistence will pay off. Allow for peiods of depression, and view each one as a fork in the road. One path leads to further decline, the other to continued change for the better.