A marital affair is not confined to physical betrayal only. Emotional adultery is just as common today and cause just as much hurt, pain and heartbreak, so healing and coping after an emotional affair is the same process.
Discovering that your spouse is involved in an emotional affair is a painful thing to deal with.
They have formed a close bond with someone else and this often triggers negative feelings and emotions such as anger, sadness and anxiety, in you. Whether or not your spouse’s emotional adultery becomes physical, developing such a close emotional attachment causes serious damage to the marriage. How do you prevent this attachment from turning into a physical affair?
It goes without saying that your spouse needs to agree that it is an emotional affair and they need to sever the emotional connection with the other party. Only then will you be able to begin rebuilding the intimacy in your relationship again. Until you get there, you need to learn how to cope with the emotional infidelity in your marriage. There are three requirements to coping with an emotional affair:
1. Patience
2. Persistence
3. Program
Exercise patience
Just like a physical affair, recovering from an emotional affair and getting past all the pain and devastation literally takes years of commitment, time and effort from both of you. So it is important to be realistic about the time involved to fully heal from this experience. If you don’t temper your expectations, you’ll just be adding to your frustration by expecting too much too soon. The best thing you can do during this time is to actively work to understand and deal with what has happened.
Be persistent
In addition to being patient, you also need persistence and determination to overcome an emotional affair. There will be days when you are unable to function because of all the negative thoughts and emotions swirling around in your head, giving you no peace.
You need to look inside yourself and get in touch with your painful emotions. However, I know you want to stop “feeling” all of these emotions and you want to just turn them off so you can get some relief, but don’t. Eventually you will be able to get over all the bad feelings, but for now there is no escaping these feelings; you have to go through them.
This is the time to reach out for help and support; join a local support group, get marriage counseling or coaching, read books on affairs. Resolve that you will see this thing through no matter how long it takes, don’t let the affair that happened today define your tomorrow.
Find a program
Affairs whether they are physical or emotional bring with them many challenges, feelings and reactions. It can become overwhelming trying to do it all by yourself, so get some outside help. You can read books, find an infidelity coach or step-by-step marriage repair program.
Look for programs authored by experts with a proven track record of helping couples restore and rebuild their relationship. You want a program that has been “battle-tested” in the field that will give you actionable techniques and strategies to help you cope during this difficult time.
Finding the right expert or resource to guide you can mean the difference between struggling through months or even years of unhappiness or building a new and more meaningful relationship.
Click here to learn how you can rebuild the emotional connection with your spouse…