When infidelity strikes in your relationship, you are faced with what may seem like overwhelming problems. It may seem like you are in a no-win situation. Healing after an affair for the loyal spouse can be very challenging because of having to deal with the onslaught of negative thoughts, emotions and the loss of trust in your partner. For the two of you to move forward certain concerns need to be addressed and sorted out.
1. That I will not be able to forgive
You may think that you have to forgive your wayward spouse before you can begin healing after infidelity. But this is not necessarily so. Think about it, your spouse has done you tremendous harm and caused you a lot of pain and grief, it is not reasonable to expect you to forgive without some trepidation.
You need to be able to trust your disloyal spouse once again and for that you need to see positive proof. Not just words, but actions that would indicate a willingness to work on correcting the flaw in his or her character that made them cheat in the first place.
Forgiving a cheating spouse is not an easy thing to do. In fact you may feel that you’ll never be able to forgive. And yet you don’t want to be stuck in the past, you want to be able to get over the affair and move forward. The journey to forgiveness begins with acceptance. That is accepting that the affair is now part of your history and that you can’t go back and undo it. Acceptance is a much easier pill to swallow than forgiveness.
2. Loss of intimacy
The whole point of marriage is the intimacy and closeness with another person. But when an affair enters the mix, that intimacy is lost and you mourn for it. To be truly intimate with your spouse there has to be transparency or an openness. Transparent means to ‘see through.’ So both of you need to be transparent with each other enough to let the other partner see the real you.
3. Not knowing all the details and being afraid they are keeping something from me
Another concern for most affair victims is that they are afraid that they are not being told the whole truth and that the cheater is keeping details from them, details that they feel they need to know in order to heal, put the affair in the past and start to build a better future. Sometimes getting information out of your spouse can be very hard. They may not want to tell you the truth for fear of putting you through more pain.
It is up to you to make them realize that their lies are hurting you more. Both of you need to come to a decision on how you are going to handle the affair details in such a way that it is not going to derail your efforts of repairing your marriage.
Healing takes different times for different people. Healing after an affair will take a lot of effort from both of you and your cheating spouse will have to make huge efforts to earn your trust and respect back.