My Life After an Affair

Transcription

1 My Life After an Affair By David Feder, BA, BSW, MSW, RSW Imagine that you re driving down the road and you hit a few potholes. There may be a moment where you feel the car slide a bit, but you still feel in control. But then you take a turn and the car begins to spin. You turn the wheel to the left, to the right, and to the left again but the car keeps spinning. You re frozen feeling powerless and out of control. You want the car to stop spinning. You want the tires to get traction. You want to regain control of the car. And then it happens. The car stops spinning, and once again you feel in control. You take a few deep breaths, you calm your nerves, and your heart slows back to its normal comfortable rhythm. This is how it feels when you find that your partner had an affair. This is how Pat felt. Sure, Pat s relationship had its challenges. All relationships do. It s like those potholes in the road that you manage to either barely feel, or miss completely. But an affair is completely different. Once Pat found out, like the car, Pat s life immediately began to skid and spin out of control, leaving Pat with feelings of betrayal, rejection, anger, and embarrassment. How Pat feels is not uncommon. Pat found it hard to sleep at night, and sometimes even harder to get out of bed in the morning thinking, What is there to get up for? Thoughts raced out of control and Pat s concentration wasn t what it was just days before. Pat had feelings that included being replaced, a sense of loss and thoughts about dreams that may never come true were rampant. Pat had other feelings, but none that were more hurtful than losing a loving partner to the affair partner. Anxious feelings were also felt by Pat who, at times, thought about other losses including financial stability, perception of self as a partner, friendships, and family to name a few.

2 For many, fear of being alone may creep in and you may want to understand why your partner chose to have an affair, whether your relationship can be saved or whether your relationship should be saved. In Pat s case, this was in contrast to the advice that was given by the people who cared, people who were saying, Leave your partner. Get out. You re better off alone. But at the end of the day, all Pat wanted was to get life back. Pat wanted control back. Pat wanted the car to stop spinning. How about you? Do you want your life back? For many, the idea of seeking help to save the relationship is frightening. Many, like Pat, wonder whether they have any integrity left since their partner cheated on them and they are trying to save the relationship. As you read this, can you hear the words of your friends encouraging you to call a lawyer and get all that you can? This is time for revenge! Adding to the confusion about seeking professional help, you, like Pat, may have already tried marital counseling and it didn t work after all. Pat s partner had an affair. So, you ask, why would counseling work this time? You wonder if you can save your relationship. Should you save your relationship? Is your relationship worth saving? What should you do? The car continues to spin. You believe that to save your relationship means that you would have to trust your partner again, and that doesn t feel good. Saying that it feels frightening is an understatement to say the least. The last thing you want others to think is that you are condoning the affair. But you will never condone the affair. That is not the question, because your partner s decision to have an affair was wrong. But what you need to know is that the impact of the affair on you should not be ignored, regardless of whether you decide to work on saving your relationship or you decide to move on alone from your relationship.

3 Regardless of your decision, you must understand why the affair happened and you must address how the affair impacted you and how it is affecting your life today. My name is David Feder. My view is that everyone who experiences infidelity will somehow get through it. But just getting through it is not enough. The goal of this is to help people who experience infidelity make an informed decision about their future. In my opinion, the often believed notion that infidelity means separation is simply not true for everyone. One size does not fit all. For those who want to work on saving their relationship, this audio will give you ways to increase the likelihood that you will achieve that goal. Meanwhile, for those who are unsure, it will help you get to a place where you can make a well thought out decision. I understand that in some situations, separation will be both inevitable and the right option. But a marital separation is difficult for everyone, and if this is your decision, some things that you will learn right now will help to minimize the impact that the separation may have in your life. For those of you who want to move on alone, this will give you skills so that you can move on without feeling bitter for years and years to come. Separations that have the highest degree of conflict are the most difficult for everyone, and they also have the highest toll on children, often appearing as stress, depression, and underachieving at school. I believe that by offering proper support and treatment more and more partners will make better decisions about their future, more partners will truly survive infidelity and not merely get through it. For those who either can t or choose not to, they will be more emotionally prepared to separate with less hostility towards one another, and this will make the separation less traumatic for both the adults and the children. My commitment to you is to help you minimize the collateral damage. Finding out that your partner betrayed your trust, and in so doing abused the greatest gift you could have given to them, instantly projects you into a process of grieving. Each of us grieve at our own pace, and it is not the same for any two

4 people. However, given what you re going through, you will need to stabilize your emotions so that you don t find yourself like Pat, like the car, spinning out of control. To do this, it will be helpful to find a way to limit the amount of time you direct onto your loss and the impact that the affair is having on you. Pat, like most people, was obsessing over the affair wondering about how it could have happened and asking or wanting to ask many, many questions sometimes over and over again, trying to make sure of what happened. Pat spent or seemed to spend every waking moment thinking, questioning, and wondering about the affair or of Pat s partner with a third party. Take a moment and ask yourself whether you re doing the same thing. This is both unhealthy and stressful, and if you are going to be able to stabilize your emotions, you need to look after yourself. Begin by trying to reduce the amount of time you spend obsessing about the affair. This will take dedication to yourself, determination, as well as a commitment to care for yourself. That s right: a commitment to care for yourself. Another helpful thing you may do is find people who are safe for you to talk with about your emotions and plans. They will become your support system people you can trust and who have your interest at heart. Now, it may be hard to develop an effective support system, because friends and family may take sides as they will often have their own feelings about your partner s affair and about what they think you ought to be doing. This is where counseling plays an important role. Counseling is more than just a place to talk. It is also more than just a feel good exercise. It s a process that leads to healing. A therapist who is experienced in the treatment of infidelity will show you that recovery is a process. You will see that your situation is not hopeless, even though it may feel that way at the moment. You will see that you have options. You will learn how to develop a support system and how to use it wisely to share with others and to get direction. You will learn effective coping strategies that will help you manage things better even easier.

5 In short, you will learn how to stop the car from spinning. You will learn what normal and abnormal reactions are to the discovery of infidelity, and you will learn how to regain your emotional balance again. That s right: you will learn to regain control of your emotions, so that the craziness you are feeling right now comes to an end. The car will stop spinning. But the first big challenge that Pat had to face was the question of whether the relationship can be saved. Like Pat, you may be surprised, but to do that, you need to understand why the affair happened. I do this by helping couples create what I call a shared narrative or understanding of why the affair happened. You and your partner may not agree on everything, but you both will have to be able to agree on what made your relationship vulnerable to an affair. To move forward as a couple, the participating partner must put an end and stop the affair. But regardless of what you choose to do, both of you have to understand why the affair happened and what type of affair it was. Not all affairs are the same, and research shows that very few people have an affair with the intention of ending their committed relationship. Both of you need to understand the storyline, and if you are both able to reach what I refer to as the shared narrative of what happened, including the roles that each of you played in the trauma, then you will be able to enter the rest of the healing process that will lead to forgiveness. That is when your life will begin anew, whether your decision is to move on in your life with your partner, or alone. Okay, I know what just went through your mind: Forgiveness? Are you kidding me? My partner cheated. Cheated! Broke a solemn oath that I believed to be true and would last forever. My partner lied to me and I m supposed to forgive? But wait! Don t leave now. Give me a few more minutes of your time. Your future will depend on it. Listen on and hear me out. Dr. Fred Luskin defines forgiveness as the decision to free ourselves from the personal offense and blame that have us stuck in the cycle of suffering. While anger and hurt are appropriate, they, unlike wine, do not improve with age.

6 Otherwise stated, forgiveness is the end of the grieving process and the moment you stop being a victim to your emotions. It is the point that you decide to take back control of your life when you say what they did was wrong, but you give yourself the power to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life without lasting bitterness and unresolved anger, with or without the other person. Without forgiveness, you are like Pat, stuck in anger and out of control, spinning. At some point in your grief and you will decide when you will want to regain control of your life and stop the spinning. You will want to regain control over your anger. You will want to find a way to rid yourself of the toxic energy that fills your body and your thoughts, and the most powerful way to do this is through forgiveness. But let there be no mistake. Forgiveness is not condoning the affair. The truth is that what your partner did was wrong. The other truth is that it cannot be undone no matter how angry you are today and how long you decide to remain angry in the future. Anger is hurt and isn t that what you are feeling right now? Just take a moment and think about what I just said: anger is hurt and isn t that what you re feeling right now? What happened to Pat happened for a reason, and Pat needed to understand that reason, and then regardless of whether the decision was to save the relationship or not, Pat needed to forgive. Otherwise, the remainder of Pat s life would have been filled with bitterness and anger, and this would affect Pat s relationships in the present as well as in the future with children, friends, colleagues, family, or any future intimate relationship Pat may choose to have. I am quite sure that right about now, you re saying to yourself, David, easier said than done. After all, how can I be sure the affair has stopped? My partner lied to me before and may still be lying now. Or if the affair has stopped, my partner may cheat again, and if that happens, I would look ridiculously stupid.

7 Forgiving may also be hard because you re suspicious. Who can blame you? Your partner in fidelity has given you a new set of eyes, and nothing looks the same anymore. Right now you are probably thinking, David, what you are saying I need to do is frightening. Absolutely frightening! The cars keep spinning. Then there is forgiveness. You may be wondering why you should forgive your partner when you are not even sure if the relationship can be saved. After all, your partner cheated not you. But if you learn just one thing, this is it. It is one of the hardest lessons in life, but one of the most powerful. You need to forgive your partner so that you can get your life back. You need to forgive in order to regain control of the car and stop the spinning. You need to forgive them. Not for them, but you need to forgive for you, because when you do, you no longer suffer for a hurt that was done to you in the past. Yes, this is for you. You can t really move on without forgiveness. Remember, I don t mean condoning what has happened. Forgiveness and condoning are not the same. What your partner did was wrong. In addition, I don t mean forgetting because you re never going to do that. Besides it being impossible, forgetting is denial denying a part of your personal history. And if you do that, you may be vulnerable to other similar traumas occurring in your life, and that s the last thing that I would want for anyone. As I said earlier, forgiveness is the final stage of grieving. It is your decision and your victimization and the suffering that you have endured as a result of your partner s action. Forgiveness is your ticket to living your life as it was intended to be. By forgiving, you are no longer victimized by what your partner did. You are now in control. On the other hand, if you don t forgive, you will continue to be angry for a very long time and the anger will prevent you from getting control of your life back. Anger uses your most valuable resource of energy.

8 Now, while anger can play a useful role, its benefits are often short-lived, and in time, it will become destructive to your life. If it does, it will be distracting and take up your focus, affecting concentration. Anger taints things and alters perception so that things appear more negative than they may be. Anger is a destructive force in relationships, and people may reach a point where they don t want to be around someone who is angry all the time. Angry people often express their anger at other people at the most inopportune times. Have you ever been angry at work, then go home with a short fuse and blow up at the kids because of something else? Upon reflection, were you really angry at the kids or at something or someone at work? Anger comes out when it wants to come out, not when you want it to come out. Anger makes the car spin. I understand that you may be negative or skeptical at first. But wait a minute. Don t leave now. I know that you want to move away and heal from this trauma, and to heal, you need to try to be open to what I m telling you about forgiveness. If you want to heal, you need to forgive. You have to accept that at some point in time, forgiveness could happen and that it will need to happen in order for you to move forward in your life in a manner that is healthy for you. This is where your real power is. The real power is in forgiveness. Reaching forgiveness is important because once you learn how to forgive, you will no longer be dominated by negative feelings or toxic emotions that give you the feeling of being out of control. It stops the car from spinning permanently. Let me tell you about Pat and Susan. Susan disclosed to Pat that she had been involved in an affair at work that lasted two years. She told Pat how sorry she was for what she had done, and she hoped that she could make it up to him and how she hoped he would allow them the opportunity to save their marriage. Susan knew that this was asking a lot of Pat, and she knew that he would have difficulty getting past her infidelity. Susan expressed her willingness to do anything to prove to Pat that she wanted to stay in the marriage.

9 Because Pat did not practice forgiveness at first, he personalized what Susan did and he remained stuck and tormented by questions of, How could Susan have done this to me? and I didn t deserve this. Pat continued to feel angry at Susan disappointed, hurt, and betrayed and he blamed Susan for all of his emotions and for how she upset his life. Pat replayed this grievance over and over again in his head, and this made him re-experience the trauma of Susan s affair one-and-a-half years later as though Susan s disclosure took place yesterday. Pat was stuck until one day he decided that he wanted to stop the spinning and forgive. Let s take a look at what happened by this brave decision by Pat. Pat stopped blaming Susan for how he was feeling. He took responsibility for his emotions of disappointment, hurt and betrayal, and he started to visualize what he wanted his future to look like. This was a turning point in counseling because he stopped being a victim. This allowed him to replace the anger he directed at Susan with greater empathy for her. By doing this, Pat was able to speak more openly with Susan about his pain and how hurt he was because of her infidelity. Communication between Susan and Pat almost instantly began to change for the better. For Pat, Susan will and always will be responsible for her choice to have an affair. He will never own that nor should he. But by practicing forgiveness, Pat was able to let himself look at the marriage and the role he played in the unhappiness Susan experienced in it. Forgiveness made a huge difference and Susan and Pat were able to discuss a shared narrative and begin a journey towards healing that allowed them to make an informed decision about their future. Forgiveness helped Pat remove unnecessary anger and blame and rebuild selfesteem. It took Pat to a much better place back to being in control of feelings and in control of how much other people or situation would be allowed to both affect Pat or how Pat would react to them. This was a huge relief.

10 I d like you to take a moment to think about the words of Dr. Wayne Dyer: Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. Isn t that true? This is what is really important. If you are hoping to save your relationship, forgiving yourself helps you to remove the toxic emotions from your life. And this is not fantasy. I ve seen it happen time and time again. Or if you are interested in moving on in your life alone, it is still important. Forgiveness allows you to become more connected to yourself and to what is important to you. Free of the toxic emotions that will negatively impact your life well into the future. So really, regardless of whether you choose to stay with your partner and save the relationship or not, there is no way to avoid the need to forgive unless you want your life to feel exactly as it feels right now bitter and out of control. You have to forgive. This is the reality that so many either don t realize or they choose to avoid. You need to be open to forgiveness. You need to forgive for you not for your partner. For you. Even when what is done to you is inexcusable, like an affair, you need to learn to forgive. Forgiveness empowers you. The antidote for loss of control is forgiveness. If you fight this, your car will keep spinning. Your life will keep spinning. But on the other hand, your tires will begin to grip and start giving you back control as you learn how to forgive bit by bit, a little at a time. Sustained anger is your enemy. Anger drains you of energy. It makes you tired and puts you on edge. When you re angry on a sustained basis, it doesn t give you power. That s an illusion. It makes you miserable. Your body hurts and your head pounds. It affects your entire life in a negative, destructive way. Anger often has no bounds, and when Pat was angry, Pat was angry at everything. It got transferred onto and at others Pat cared about. Pat had a short fuse. When good things happened, Pat was still unhappy, unable to fully appreciate the goodness that was around. Anger separated and kept Pat apart, separate from others. Anger can ruin your entire life if you allow it to,

11 particularly if you feel hurt, betrayed, and victimized because your partner cheated on you. Once again, remember the antidote to all of this is forgiveness. As I said earlier, controlled anger is necessary and plays an important role, as long as you can contain it and keep it within reasonable boundaries. After all, anger is a normal human emotion and it is recognized as one of the stages of natural grieving. If you were never angry at things that happened to you, I would be concerned that you are in a state of denial. What you need to understand is that while anger plays an important initial role, sustained anger is not helpful in the long run. Anger is a secondary emotion that may keep you away from your primary emotions of hurt, rejection, fear, sadness, depression, embarrassment, betrayal, abandonment and disappointment emotions that you have to address in order to move forward in your life and along the path that leads to forgiveness. Properly managed, positive anger and forgiveness can act as our protection from being hurt again in the future. This anger keeps others at bay so you will not be hurt again. But negative anger also keeps you at arm s length from others. It makes reconciliation impossible if that is what you want. And since anger is indiscriminate, it can prevent other relationships that you may want to have. So, feeling your anger for a while is necessary to motivate you, but you have to be careful so that it doesn t dominate your emotions and your life. It is a part of grieving, an after disclosure that your partner had an affair, you grieve your losses. This is normal to do, but it can t become habitual this is bad. See, thoughts lead to emotions and emotions lead to actions, and you want to eventually avoid ruminating over thoughts that perpetuate your anger. After anger plays its productive role, you need to find a way to let it go so that it doesn t control you. You see, you can actually choose what thoughts you focus on. You can choose whether you focus on experiences that make you happy or on experiences that make you sad. Imagine what happens when you decide to watch television. You can watch comedy, drama, soap operas, or the news. In the same way, now think

12 of your emotions. You can choose to tune into the Love Channel, the Gratitude Channel, the Beauty Channel, the Worry Channel, or How I m a Victim of Life Channel. It s that simple. By choosing the How I m a Victim of Life Channel, you are guaranteed to feel angry, sad, or persecuted. But if you choose to tune into the Love Channel, you will experience good, happy feelings. It sounds simple, and it works. You choose what to direct your attention on. That s right. You can control what you think about by which channel you tune into. Even though the benefits of doing this can be amazing, change is hard. You may initially resist making this change. After all, Pat did. Like Pat, you may find that initially you got something positive out of being upset, angry, and negative from others. Pat initially got a lot of support from others who empathized with Pat about what happened. Pat got support from people who felt sympathy after hearing of the infidelity by Susan. This made Pat feel supported and loved, something Pat needed badly at the time. But there is a danger in allowing that to turn into a habit. Or you may take my advice and visualize the life you would like to have and where you want to be six months from now. Don t get frustrated if you are not able to visualize what you want. Keep at it. It will come. You do this. You take a journey that finds you in a place of forgiveness. And remember, forgiveness is not condoning. What your partner did was wrong, but through forgiveness and I promise you this you will get that wonderful feeling of regaining control over your life. The car will finally stop spinning. You will feel empowered and able to direct your life where you want it to go and does that ever feel good! It is possible that what you feel will be something that you never felt before. You will approach life with more clarity, less stress, and you will feel better physically as well as emotionally. And whatever relationships you have in your life, they will feel more fulfilling, loving and wholesome, whether they are with your children, family, friends, or any future partner you may have.

13 Forgiveness is habitual and one of life s valuable, powerful tools that you will want to use over and over again whenever someone upsets you or fails to give you what you want, need, or deserve. Forgiveness is also a powerful tool that you will want to use when you get something handed to you in life that you didn t want, like your partner s choice to have an affair. In other words, whether you don t get what you want in your life or whether you get something in your life that you didn t want, forgiveness will be eternally useful. After infidelity, whether you decide to stay in your relationship or you decide to move on alone, you have to be able to forgive. Now, please remember that forgiving is for you and not for your partner, so please do not mistake the purpose or the personal value that forgiveness will mean for you, for your life and for all of your future relationships. Forgiveness is critical if you are going to heal completely from your partner s infidelity. So just take a moment and think about how much better you ll feel after you get past this. You ll feel stronger, happier, more at peace. In addition, you will be doing your body a favor. As Dr. Luskin has shown, people who reach a point of forgiveness have fewer health problems including an improvement in their cardiovascular, muscular, and nervous systems. Impressive, isn t it? These studies prove the benefits of forgiving when someone hurts you, regardless of whether your relationship survives or you move on in your life alone. Forgiveness is really for you and benefits you. As I said, surviving infidelity is not the question. You will. The question is: how? And the choice is yours. I know that you don t want to feel the way you re feeling at this very moment one minute more than you have to, so think about the way you want to feel and if you want your vision to become your new reality.