After the adultery, you will transition among a myriad of emotions that you might not have expected. Some of them will be fairly typical, such as shock, sadness, and anger. Others might catch you off guard. Hopelessness is one emotion that can really take it’s toll on you.
Of all of the different thoughts and emotions that you will go through, feelings of hopelessness are the most dangerous. Feeling hopeless is your worst enemy because it can have dangerous affects on your mental health, not to mention the outcome of your marriage and the people around you.
Hopelessness can sneak up on you out of nowhere, and can be truly difficult to overcome. Once it latches on, feeling hopeless can turn into severe depression that can have long lasting consequence. There are things you can do to help defeat hopelessness.
Avoid Hopelessness At All Costs
Avoiding hopelessness in the first place is your strongest weapon against the potential outcomes of such a severe emotion. This is because once true feelings of hopelessness sink in, it can be hard to see anything other than your own depression.
Feeling hopeless often means that you do not care about how or even if you should proceed towards reconciliation of your marriage, or even life itself. The hole can become so deep that you cannot see through to the other side, and may begin to feel that there is no point in trying any longer. This, of course, can lead to even more, and potentially severe, issues.
Know That There Is Hope
No matter how bad your situation is, there is always hope. There is hope that your relationship will recover from this terrible mistake, and even if it doesn’t there is hope that you will still live a happy and fulfilled life. No matter what happens, there is always hope and something to look forward to.
Focus On The Constants
In everyone’s life, there are constants that remain true no matter what. The Sun will rise each day, and even on gray days there is light behind those clouds. The Sun will set each night, and splash the sky with ribbons of vibrant color.
The stars will shine at night, and if you cannot see them, you can trust that they are up there and that if you found your way to a dark area on a clear night, you can see them sparkling in the sky. There are people in your life that love you. You have a friend, or child, or parent, or someone that you can count on. No matter what, there are always constants. Focus on these to give you hope for the future.
Count Your Blessings
No matter how dark things get, everyone has something to be thankful for. Take yourself back to childhood and spend a little time counting your blessings. You are alive, you have a roof over your head, the Sun is shining, and there is hope. Everyone’s list of blessings will be different. You might include physical possessions or people in your life. Remember to always count being alive.
Talk To Someone
When you are feeling hopeless, it can really help to connect with another person. Feeling connected to another human being is one of the essential functions of happiness, after all. You can choose to talk to someone close to you or a therapist about how you are feeling and what is going on in your life. Or you can choose to talk to someone about something completely unrelated to the problems you are having at home. Just connecting with someone is the key.
Live Your Life
In the wake of an affair, it can be easy to forget what hope and happiness felt like before you found out. Avoid spending too much time allowing yourself to sulk or wallow in the pain. At some point you have to just get up and go.
Get up, get ready, and start living your life the way you did before the bottom fell out. Of course, there will be some changes, but getting back to normal can help to remind you that there is a life to live and that can help chase away hopelessness.
Strive For Acceptance
Now that the unthinkable has happened, it is important that you find a way to accept it as truth so that you can move on. Forgiveness and acceptance are not the same thing. It may take you years to forgive your spouse for cheating on you, or it may never happen at all. Acceptance is more about you, though.
Acceptance is simply accepting that this terrible thing did happen, and that it is in your past, and that you can still move forward. Acceptance is a major key to finding hope in what might otherwise feel like a hopeless situation.
Hopelessness is a very detrimental feeling to allow yourself to feel, especially because it has the tendency to take over and overwhelm any other emotion or inclination. Feeling hopeless is dangerous for your mental health and growth as an individual, but it is also very detrimental to your relationship.
To truly put full and trustworthy thought into how you want to proceed towards the future, you need to be at a healthy and clear place mentally. Especially if you think that you can save your relationship, you want to put all thoughts of hopelessness out of your head so that you can focus on how to heal both as an individual and as a couple.
You need all of your wits on deck, and you do not want to leave even one trace of those hopeless feelings behind the scenes where they could potentially infect your plans for the future.