How to recover from infidelity using this 3 phase method.
To The Betrayed,
Right now you feel utterly destroyed. The amount of pain that you’re in is indescribable.
You want to scream, but the only sound that comes out is a broken roar from the unearthed sobs that you can’t control. Your mind races from one end of the relationship to the other searching for answers. Questions like, were there clues that you missed that could have alerted you this was coming, plague your mind.
It won’t STOP! The story line that you can come up with has only bits and pieces flashing across the screen in your mind, like a faulty film reel. So you beg your partner to relinquish the knowledge so that your mind can find peace. Even though deep down you know more anguish is in the details, your mind won’t rest until it gets some answers.
The anger and revenge (oh god the revenge) won’t stop begging you to unleash what your partner (and the other person) deserves.
The immediate shock from finding out that your spouse has cheated, can go on for weeks, and depending on if you two get professional help to direct the blind fury, sometimes months.
There are 3 phases that you’ll go through during your recovery from this crushing revelation:
- Full-Disclosure
- Zone-Defense
- And…Action
What to expect in Phase I?
Night sweats, intrusive thoughts, and uncontrollable emotions are all normal and how your body is responding to the trauma you’ve endured. In fact these symptoms fall under a mental health condition called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When an affair is revealed, your body goes into shock from the trauma and responds in similar ways that a soldier would, coming back from a violent deployment.
On a battlefield at war, wounds accumulate as more shots and debris take hold of your body. The same can be said as you discover more and more pieces of the infidelity puzzle.
No matter how you try and seek cover the enemy finds you and inflicts more pain. For you it’s not delivered from an assault rifle (though truth be told, it might hurt less in this moment), but from the intrusive thoughts that invade your mind, the devastating details, and the debilitating heartbreak.
During this phase your pulse rate is too high to engage your rational brain. You are in fight or flight mode. That means everything that you’re doing is a reaction, not a well thought out plan that’s based on careful crafting and precision. That’s why it’s imperative that you team up with a trained professional to help guide you through this dark period in order to minimize more trauma and damage from occurring.
3 Things To Do In Phase I
- Stop throwing. Whether it’s words, clothing, or your spouse out on his or her you know what. Unless you’re fearful for your or the children’s safety this is a step that’s not helpful in the long run.
- Stay tight, help is on the way. Because you’re reactive right now (and your rational brain is not engaged), no good will come from terrorizing around your world like the Tasmanian devil. Find one, maybe two confidants that can sit with you and try as much as you can to refrain from blasting it on Facebook that your spouse is a POS, etc. This will only come back and embarrass you once you’re back in your rational brain.
- Self-Soothe. Gather tools that help you feel nurtured and cared for. You MUST take care of your wounds right now so you don’t mentally bleed out. Whether that’s letting a friend hold you or sitting with your pet, you have to take care of you especially in the beginning weeks (and sometimes months).
Phase II: Zone Defense
In this phase you have reached a safe place where you can begin to construct a plan of escape. That may be in a therapist’s office, a pastors chapel, or with another trusted confidant that both you and your partner can see.
During this phase you’ve gained some self-soothing skills (like belly breaths and progressive relaxation) so that your grief and rage are not like gravy covering your life.
Your pulse is lower, which allows your rational brain to kick in and respond with more reasoning and logic.
Now is the time to layout your options. You process the information shared during the initial phase, the reasons why your spouse made a life altering decision, and you map out your options together as a couple.
This phase is about constructing a plan. Once you’re educated about your options, and understand what recovery from infidelity can look like, you can see more clearly where you want to go. You have learned that you have the ultimate say over how you’ll let this transgression define who you are, what your marriage was and will be, and how you go forward in life.
3 Things To Do In Phase II:
- Be honest with yourself about how you contributed to the downslide of the marriage pre-adultery. There are countless studies that report that the majority of infidelity cases are due to a break down in the marriage for several years leading up to the error in judgment and both partners need to be accountable.
- Using self-soothing skills learned in phase I, hear your spouse when he or she talks about his or her reason for cheating. It will be very painful and it you will feel like it’s unfair to be thrown under the bus when they are at fault. BUT it’s very rich information that can be gained by truly hearing your partner.
- Don’t take it on as a personal attack. Understand that yes, there was a breakdown in the marriage, and know that even though your partner is telling you all the things that you didn’t do, he or she also knows and has or will claim responsibility for their shortcomings in the marriage as well.
Phase III: And…Action
The third and final phase is putting your plan into action. Now that you’re on the other side of the battlefield, you understand yourself, partner, and the future better than you could have ever imagined. AND you’re ready to dive in.
Shockingly for most (75 percent), it’s time to rebuild a better marriage.
You consciously choose to redefine what weak means to you. Because now you know how much strength and bravery it takes to stay, until now.
Some couples choose to remain in the marriage with the anger and resentment brewing at all times. They have their reasons for staying, and they let the affair take too much power. The affair ended up dictating who they were and were going to be, how much it defined the marriage, and control their future.
And for a very select few (25 percent), the couple decides to end the marriage. In these cases they found, through counseling, that even though they could heal from this together, their marriage was over even before the ultimate betrayal.
The couple typically comes to this conclusion during phase II. After both are able to take accountability of their own part in the break down of their union.
I want to reiterate. Most mistake infidelity as straw that would break the marriage’s back, but that’s not the case, and studies can prove it. The majority of couples are able to both take accountability in their own parts of the transgression and use it as fuel to create a better marriage.
3 Things To Do In Phase III
- Dive into the plan that was created in phase II. You will be judged for your decision whether you choose to stay or go. Stick together as a team once you have made your decision and use each other as a support. Either way you are the only two that will understand what you choose to do moving forward.
- Keep communication at the forefront of your mind. Even if you are separating and heading to a divorce you still want as much transparency as possible so that you two are on the same page (especially when there are children involved).
- Be patient. Even though you have a plan. It takes a long time for the trust to come back. In phase I, you both thought that it would be impossible to rebuild trust. Now you see that in phase III it is possible and it is a long process. Have patience with the betrayed spouse when they have flare ups for concern. And have patience with the spouse that was the betrayer when they get irritated by being pestered all the time with excessive amounts of requests for details.
**Nugget: You’ll soon learn that you don’t have to put all your trust back into your partner. The way you begin to rebuild the trust is by putting the trust back into yourself. You now know that yes, this is painful as hell. AND you’re still standing. That means should anything like this remotely happen again you will be okay and most likely O-U-T for good.**
To The Children,
If your children have the unfortunate burden of knowing their parent’s battle this is how you should help them make sense of this feat without them coming up with their own conclusions and taking mistaken assumptions into their future marriages.
“Yes, your (mom or dad) made a mistake and had an affair. But he/she is not alone in what lead up to that choice. The truth is that for (insert length of time—months, years etc.) life got away from us, and we didn’t give each other or the marriage the right attention. When a couple loses touch with each other and stops working at the marriage each and everyday, their marriage becomes susceptible to errors in judgment.”
To The Betrayer,
Deep breathe. You have been shown in a matter of a single moment how quickly your world can come crashing down. And you have witnessed the worst kind of pain that can ever strike, and engulf your loved one.
Right now you’re probably confused. You look in the mirror and wonder, what was I thinking. But then you remember all those lonely nights when you begged your spouse to connect, or those hard days at work when you’d come home to feel unappreciated or even repeatedly disrespected by your family, and you hesitate to give remorse.
You knew life would be different with the new baby, the increased responsibility at work, and the new Mcmansion. But you could have NEVER predicted that small real life choices in your marriage would drive you to make a decision so grave against your morals.
You’re thinking is also muddled in that you know that your choice was absolutely wrong and yet the part of your brain that ensures that your basic needs are met keeps justifying your actions. So much that it makes you ask, “How sorry can I be if I feel justified in causing all this pain”?
Here’s the key. You don’t have to be sorry (right now for the affair—we’ll discuss this more in Phase II when we discuss the affair fog in the downloadable PDF file or in treatment).
But what you’re truly remorseful for is what this has done to your spouse. The once vibrant person that you married is now bent over riddled pain. More agony than you ever thought was possible.
The emotions coming at you with such intensity gives you an idea how crimes of passion can and do occur. You could honestly say that you don’t even recognize the person that you married, when they throw daggers with their eyes as they scream.
The amount of grief that your spouse is in is equivalent to a soldier coming home from war; a veteran that has experienced trauma on every level. So the wales, screams, night sweats, incessant questioning, the intrusive thoughts that strike day and night, are normal. And here’s your plan to work through the three phases.
Phase 1: Full-Disclosure
When your infidelity first comes out, hang on because the fury of human emotions is about to rain down on you.
The incessant questioning is thanks to the human brain and it’s inability to settle for gaps in the story. It will run through the timeline, the clues, and bits and pieces until it all makes sense
To help in this process it’ll be demanded that you provide any and all information. Every fiber in your being will scream, “Shut up! Don’t share that, it’s only making things worse.” But your partner will insist and push until you release the details.
Now the amount of details that you share will be completely up to you. You can keep it for yourself or give up the information to your spouse. If you decide to tell all, go all in. Even the slightest hesitation on your part to filter the story will be picked up by your spouse and throw him or her into a tail spin, fearing that you’re still being dishonest.
To answer your question, yes this will make everything worse and more painful. And unfortunately, it seems like the betrayed need it in order to move through this phase.
During the Full-Disclosure phase don’t try and justify or explain your choice. That will come right before or after moving into phase II.
Now is the time to keep the focus off of your reasoning and onto your partner. It will make this process go a lot quicker and limit how much more trauma has to take place.
3 Things To Do In Phase I
- Remain calm and patient. All the questions will get overwhelming. The anger that you can’t respond too, even when you feel like your choice of indiscretion may have been justified (based on the state of your marriage pre-affair).
- Stay with your choice. Once you make the decision of how much information you are going to share with your spouse stick with it. A betrayed spouse will be searching for any hiccups in the retelling of events. If you hesitate even for a millisecond they will notice and it will all blow up in your face.
- Get a good confidant. Someone that is neutral. You don’t want a friend that supports divorce, they will only make you feel more justified and less compassionate towards your spouse’s pain. And don’t have someone that is 100 percent pro-marriage. Because if your marriage was long gone before the affair you don’t want someone keeping you from seeing the truth and dragging out phase II. Find someone that has a neutral stance. That truly wants what is best for you and your spouse. That could be a parent, a pastor, or a counselor trained in systems theory.
Phase II: Zone-Defense
As the name of this phase describes, you two will team up against the world and defend your choices against stereotypes, and mistaken beliefs. During this phase you’ll get the opportunity to speak your truth and what the marriage was like for you before your choice and your spouse gets to listen. This phase is about truth-telling, acknowledgement of your own parts in the breakdown of the marital boundaries, and plan making.
During this phase your spouse will begin to see that the affair was more about what was wrong with the marriage versus the act itself. Because a lot of family and friends may know what happened, you two will have to team up and support each other through the unsolicited advice (and trust me, everyone and their neighbor has an opinion about infidelity and how it should be handled but anyone that understands from a place of experience will keep his or her mouth shut—because they know you don’t know what you would do until you’re in it).
By the end of this phase you two will know what you want for your future. There are three options that you can choose from; (1) move forward and grow from this experience creating a better marriage, (2) remain married but resentful, or (3) dissolve the union.
3 Things To Do In Phase II
- Talk from your heart. Tell your spouse the truth about what you weren’t getting from him or her in the marriage. Talk about your perception of the state of the marriage before you made your choice to cross the marital boundaries.
- Don’t be a “Yes” partner. You need to co-create a plan that works for both of you. When your counselor asks the tough questions about why you want to be married etc. make sure you are honest with yourself and answer whole heartedly.
- Let your spouse know what you need to build a better marriage. Don’t hold back or you will return to this predicament or worse divorced. You not only need to know what your needs and your partner needs are (in order to meet them) but also to know if you can fulfill their needs and create a thriving marriage together.
Phase III: And… Action
Go out and implement the plan.
Like I said in the first portion of this article this may look like a new and improved marriage, this may remain the same and you’ll stay married but in a tense and resent filled way, or this may lead you two to a lawyer’s office.
That will be for you two to decide in phase two. Where it’s safe to talk about what went wrong before the affair.
3 Things To Do In Phase III
- Be patient. If your spouse needs to keep asking questions or double check that you are going where you say that you are, it’s okay and eventually that will pass (but be prepared because this can go on for months).
- Dive into the plan that was created in phase II. You will be judged for your decision whether you choose to stay or go. Stick together as a team once you have made your decision up and use each other as a support. Either way you are the only two that will understand what you choose to move forward the way you did.
- Keep communication at the forefront of your mind. Even if you are separating and heading to a divorce you still want as much transparency as possible so that you two are on the same page (especially when there are children involved).
Jessica is the author of Back 2 Love and How to Start a Mental Health Private Practice. She owns a practice in New Prague, Minnesota where she lives with her husband, two kids, and two pups. For more relationship advice follower her on Twitter. Don’t forget to check out her video series, Back 2 Love on her YouTube channel Super Living.