Healing Infidelity

Healing Infidelity Through Faith is Now Available!

2019-04-12T07:35:00.000-05:00

That's right! My long awaited sequel to Healing Infidelity—Healing Infidelity Through Faith—is now available to purchase. It is a more Christian-focused book on the topic, dealing with issues like what really defines marriage according to the Bible, how infidelity impacts that unique relationship, and how, according to ancient wisdom of monks and the Fathers, one can, through Christian principles, address the various issues surrounding cheating on one’s spouse.

So if you are a Christian, this book will have insights for you that you likely won’t expect, that will challenge you, even as the truth is clearly laid out from Scripture. This book will give the Christian, and even the non-Christian, some keys from the wisdom of Scripture how to take the next steps in healing from infidelity as well as improving your marriage overall. Check it out!

Is PreMarital Sex Really Sinful?

2018-09-17T12:29:00.000-05:00

The following post is from a Christian perspective. You are welcome to read it if you are not in this camp, but be aware of that leaning. This is primarily directed at the Christian community. However, it is my contention that this secularized view of "premarital" sex is one of the root causes of a lot of adultery and cheating committed in today's society, both inside and outside the Church. That is why I'm putting it here.

-------------------------

Teen camp. Just the mention of those words can send shivers down some ex-camp councilor’s backs. Some love it, others dread it.

I was probably somewhere in between one year in the nineties when I, out of duty as a pastor, offered myself to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of teen salvation and holiness. One of those nights Tom, my pastor friend on the district, asked me to come and give a devotional to his teens as a “guest speaker.”

I can’t recall what I had chosen as my topic, but I made the statement that premarital sex was sinful. One of the teens raised their hand, and asked the question, “Why is premarital sex sinful?”

It was then I realized, I didn’t have a good answer. I said something about how it drastically affects your married life in ways they couldn’t understand right now. True, but it was not much for a sincere teen to hang his hat on. I knew it wasn’t sufficient. I made a commitment to have a better answer to that question. I discovered that answer in the traditional understanding of Christian marriage.

The secular values bombarding us have so influenced our views on marriage that many sincere teens do not find it easy to grasp. Many, even in the Church, view marriage as society's legalization and the church's blessing toward the enjoyment of a sexual relationship, with responsibilities. While they may see the value in not cheating on one’s spouse, until they make that commitment, what’s wrong with a little fun? Until then it is just one way among many to have a good time. Right?

What the secular view has obscured is the reality that the sexual act isn’t just a way to have fun. It has a sacramental function that God ordained from the beginning. “Do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For ‘the two,’ He says, ‘shall become one flesh.’” (1Co 6:16 EMTV)

A person becomes one flesh with every person to whom they unite in the sexual act. The sin results from treating what should be for a holy purpose as common. For those who engage in premarital sex, the goal isn’t to join with that person, to live their lives with them, to have kids with them, nor is there any concrete and binding commitment to do so. Otherwise, they would be getting fully married. Rather, it is an abuse of God’s created purpose of the sex act.

St. John Chrysostom in the third century makes this point especially clear in his twelfth homily on Colossians:

“Therefore to wit He said with accuracy of expression, not ‘they shall be one flesh’ but joined together ‘into one flesh’ (Genesis 2:2, Sept.), namely, that of the child. What then? When there is no child, will they not be two? Nay, for their coming together hath this effect, it diffuses and commingles the bodies of both. And as one who hath cast ointment into oil, hath made the whole one; so in truth is it also here.”

Even in today’s “liberated” society, people shy away from thinking of such an act as “holy.” Yet, that is exactly why we don’t treat sexual union with more reverence and fear, because we use it in common ways and so abuse its proper God-uniting sacramental value. We treat it as a way to have a good time, a way to sell products, a way to increase ratings, a way to show your love before you take on the responsibility of a binding commitment, or as a way to take a person out for a test drive before buying.

Boiled down, we treat marriage as a means to have sex, instead of engaging in sex to consummate a marriage. So, when a teen asks, “Why is it sinful?” they are thinking “What value is it really to get married in order to have sex? What does that license really confer that I don’t have the ability to enjoy right now?” If they saw the reality that this act produced, a real union with their partner, the question answers itself. How can you join with a person as if married when there has been no real commitment to maintain that union before God, spiritually, legally, or physically?

The problem is how to convey that in a convincing way to the teen(s) in your life, and no doubt not a few adults. Some teens are genuinely looking for solid reasons to combat the secular views society attempts to sell them daily. Explaining this will give them a handhold to remain faithful to their future spouse. Many, unfortunately, need a more direct jolt to get the message.

Jesus, if anyone, knew the value of a good parable to get through to the harder to reach. Perhaps that proves the best chance of success here as well.

Premarital sex is like a teen who gives their friend one of their favorite CDs to enjoy. When he returns the CD, the teen finds it scratched and worthless. “Why did you mess up my CD?” the teen asks. His friend responds, “I decided it would work as a cutting board, and it did indeed keep the cabinet from getting cut up.” What will the owner of the CD think of this answer? He will never lend anything to that teen again. Then how can you take the gift of sex, designed by God to unite two people into one flesh, and use it for purposes it was not designed, destroying the purpose for which it was intended? What will God think when you show Him the fruit of your use of His gift?

As a Christian community, we need to gain back the holiness of sexual union if we are to combat the secular view that debases it as something common and therefore, shared by everyone. It starts with teaching the teen in your life this traditional view.

And/or, the teen inside of each of us.

Are You Weak for Staying?

2016-03-20T05:06:00.000-05:00

One common feeling that hurt spouses have when they discover an affair and decide to stay to rebuild with their spouse is they feel they are being weak. Weak because on the face of it, society would suggest that if you don't have the strength to toss them out or leave them after such a betrayal, you are too weak to do what needs to be done. You are accepting their behavior.

Added to the fact that many hurt spouses already have a self-esteem attack due to the affair, such feelings can magnify that effect. They feel that giving the unfaithful spouse a "pass" by forgiving them gives the unfaithful spouse no "punishment" for what happened. They get to have "fun" while the hurt spouse suffers.

The problem with that perspective is it doesn't paint the whole picture. It only describes one path a rebuilding attempt can take. Certainly it can be a bad perspective if that is what is going on, but it doesn't define all rebuilding situations.

So what really makes a hurt spouse weak or strong?

What makes a hurt spouse weak has nothing to do with staying or leaving. It has everything to do with whether the hurt spouse hides from reality to preserve a fantasy, or faces the hard choices and seeks to deal with it in a constructive way to resolve the problems whether or not they stay or leave.

Before we break that down, first we must make an important distinction. For rebuilding to work, both the hurt spouse and the unfaithful spouse have to be strong. Much of what I'm about to say applies to the unfaithful spouse as well, but on the other side of the coin. So in addressing the hurt spouse on this issue is not to indicate the unfaithful spouse gets a free ride. As a matter of fact, if the hurt spouse follows the following perspectives, he or she will require the unfaithful spouse to be strong as well if rebuilding is to be successful. In other words, just because the hurt spouse is strong in the following ways does not mean the rebuilding will be successful. That requires the unfaithful spouse to be equally, if not more so, strong.

In what ways is a hurt spouse strong or weak in rebuilding?

1. A hurt spouse is strong when they refuse to accept blame for the affair.

Having an affair was a decision of the unfaithful spouse and in most cases, their affair partner. The hurt spouse was totally left out of it and had nothing to do with them making that decision. The unfaithful spouse, and in most cases the affair partner, are 100% responsible for taking that action and need to own it.

"But what if the hurt spouse is a horrible spouse, doesn't respect me, doesn't seem to love me, or even abuses me?"

First, if real physical and emotional abuse is going on, first thing you need to do is contact your local social services and find out what support and help you can get to leave the spouse. That is the correct response to such abuse. Having an affair is a weak response as well as further destructive to the unfaithful spouse as well. The old childhood saying, "Two wrongs don't make a right" applies here. I can understand the need to be loved, but first you have to take yourself and any children out of danger. Resolve that before you dive into another relationship.

The fact is that while an unfaithful spouse may feel justified in having an affair because their spouse is (fill in the blank) in our marriage, it is not a solution to any real or perceived problems in the marriage. Rather it is like throwing gasoline onto a fire. It only complicates or makes the problems worse. It is a running away from facing the reality of those problems by indulging in a fantasy life.

In short, having an affair is rarely, if ever, a solution to any marital problem. It is always a wrong choice.

This is why a strong hurt spouse will refuse to accept blame for the affair. The unfaithful spouse may say, "I had an affair because you never tell me I'm pretty and look down on me." Whether there is any validity to their feelings in whatever they say or not in what motivated them, the decision to violate their marital vows and bond with the hurt spouse is the path they chose to deal with it, not the hurt spouse's.

How do hurt spouses accept blame for the affair? Primarily through accepting any blameshifting from the unfaithful spouse or doing it to themselves. In the grieving process this is known as the bargaining stage, right after denial and anger. The motivation to accept some or all of the blame is often encouraged by society at large. "Well, if he had taken better care of her, she wouldn't have run off with that man." It may have been a message communicated from your parents during childhood by word and/or deed.

Indeed, hurt spouses often think to themselves, "If he had an affair because he wasn't getting enough sex from me, if I start having more sex with him, he won't stray." Sounds logical but it doesn't work that way. Sounds appealing to the hurt spouse because if true, then they see an "easy" way to fix the problem.

But that is the problem. It fails to address the real problem which is with the unfaithful spouse's failure to respond to their issues in a constructive manner. Instead, it sweeps those real issues under the rug and attempts to fix the disease by treating a symptom of a different problem. Consequently, it allows the unfaithful spouse to also be weak by not facing their real problems and it all stays under the rug--enabled by the hurt spouse--festering until the next episode of "Who wants to have an affair?" rears its ugly head again.

A strong spouse will realize the problems in a marriage are an issue to deal with, but that the unfaithful spouse's decision to deal with them by having an affair was a wrong and destructive choice they made. The hurt spouse will not accept the blame for the unfaithful spouse deciding to have an affair.

2. A strong hurt spouse will honestly evaluate their own participation in marital problems and work to address them.

Doing so isn't an admission that a hurt spouse is to blame for the unfaithful spouse's affair. Rather, if the unfaithful spouse is going to do an honest evaluation of their issues and decision to have an affair, among other things, it will be one-sided improvement of the marital relationship if the hurt spouse does not cooperate in that process.

Using an affair as an excuse to hide from the demons of the hurt spouse as it relates to the relationship is a road to rebuilding failure. Just because an affair is a really big fire in the relationship-house does not justify ignoring the smaller fires which can also threaten a marriage.

For example, let's say a spouse is hiding from their better-half some financial purchases and/or often does not consult them on purchases of significance. That is a non-transparent relationship trust issue that can destroy a marriage as well. Then the other spouse ends up having an affair, maybe even citing the lack of trust and disrespect by the secretive financial dealings as a reason the affair happened.

The hurt spouse would be correct that the financial secrecy issue did not "cause" the unfaithful spouse to have an affair. The hurt spouse would be wrong to say because of that, they should ignore that fire and focus only and exclusively on the infidelity fire before the rest is addressed.

Let's qualify that a little. When a hurt spouse first discovers an affair is happening or happened, it often puts them into the the emotional "intensive care unit." The shock of discovering it and the emotional fallout can be massive, and they will not be able to focus on much else than the infidelity for weeks to come. To use our analogy above, a firefighting team would focus on the biggest part of a fire first. Then they work down to putting out the smaller fires.

A strong hurt spouse will not hide from the fires they have created in the relationship just because the unfaithful spouse's fire is bigger. Indeed, maybe not right at first, but if the hurt spouse does not join the unfaithful spouse in evaluating the whole marital picture whether it played any direct or indirect motivation in where the marriage ended up at currently, any rebuilding effort will fall flat. The whole marriage is being rebuilt, not just renovating a room.

A strong hurt spouse, while demanding the unfaithful spouse will not rug sweep, will refuse to do so themselves and instead, pull the rug up and deal with whatever is under it.

"But what if I fix all my part of the marital problems and he doesn't fix his and we end up divorced anyway? Haven't I done all that for nothing?"

To ask that, assumes that improving one's relational skills and themselves is a waste if it doesn't save their current relationship. It should be obvious that whatever improvements a hurt spouse make to themselves are going to carry over into the rest of their life and any future relationships. While one short-term goal of working on one's marriage and fixing their part in any problems is to save and make the current marriage work, if it doesn't, the effort itself is of value to the hurt spouse personally. It makes them a stronger person, and aids in being more successful in future relationships. That isn't a waste, it should be a way of life.

3. A strong hurt spouse will place the responsibility for healing the wounds of the affair on the unfaithful spouse.

One of the big reasons I believe our own marriage rebuilding was so successful is because I did this at the very beginning. I'd not read any books that told me to do this, it just seemed natural and obvious to me.

Within the first week after I discovered the affair and we decided to rebuild, I told my wife, "My healing from this will be in direct proportion to your healing." This didn't mean I didn't have any part to play in my own healing--there are attitudes and behaviors I could have done to make her efforts ineffective. It did mean if she didn't heal herself, there was no way I could heal from what she did.

It should be obvious why this is so. The bottom line as it relates to what an affair does to the marriage is it creates a lack of trust in the hurt spouse as it concerns the unfaithful spouse. Trust is what makes love possible. It is the oil of a healthy marital relationship.

But trust is a fragile thing. It is so easily broken in seconds, but takes months and years to rebuild. The fact is the unfaithful spouse is the one who destroyed that trust and love-bond, they are the only one who can repair it by being faithful, loving, transparent, and trustworthy in all areas as it concerns the relationship. It is impossible for the hurt spouse to rebuild that trust within themselves because it is based upon an experience of being able to trust the unfaithful spouse. If the unfaithful spouse doesn't provide that foundation due to secrecy, non-transparency, remaining emotionally closed to them, the hurt spouse has no way to generate trust out of thin air.

One of the craziest things an unfaithful spouse can say to a hurt spouse, especially within the first year or two of rebuilding and longer if the unfaithful spouse has done nothing to rebuild that trust, is to say, "Why can't you trust me?" Often said when a piece of incriminating evidence is discovered by the hurt spouse. The answer should be obvious. It is because the unfaithful spouse has failed to or yet to rebuild that trust again.

Without the unfaithful spouse working hard to rebuild that trust by addressing head-on their own short-comings and failures, especially as it relates to the affair, it is impossible for the hurt spouse to heal and for the relationship to heal. If the marriage is going to be saved, it starts with the unfaithful spouse doing what they need to do to heal themselves, as I've laid out in "Healing Steps for the Unfaithful Spouse" on this blog-site.

For this reason, the strong hurt spouse will both not accept blame for the affair, nor for fixing the direct damage it has done to the marriage. It is the primary responsibility of the unfaithful spouse to repair that damage in a way that enables the hurt spouse to also begin healing and addressing their issues.

Hurt spouses, this means you cannot fix the unfaithful spouse. If they refuse to heal the cancer they caused, you cannot make them do it.

4. A strong hurt spouse will give the unfaithful spouse motivation to heal instead of viewing it as a punishment.

It isn't usually a matter of the unfaithful spouse plotting and conniving to hurt their spouse. There are some that do, but most often it was a matter of opportunity meeting inner self-based desires that countered rational decisions and assessing the consequences of those actions. In the heat of a moment, a person can find all kinds of ways to justify why they should have something they desperately want, even if internally they know it is wrong.

In most cases, not all, the unfaithful spouse is sick and needs healing rather than a criminal that needs punishing. Even in the other cases, it could be said their punishment should be motivation for healing rather than to seek revenge and to destroy them.

Which is easier? To endure the pain of cleaning out a wound so it can heal, or to be scolded and left to rot? For the hurt spouse, it is obviously an easier route to avoid assisting in the cleaning the rot out is to leave rather than staying and helping. For the unfaithful spouse, it is easier to ignore it and hope it heals on its own in time, because to even touch it creates a lot of pain, not to mention taking a cloth and antiseptic, and scrubbing it clean.

One of the most painful things a hurt spouse can do to and for the unfaithful spouse is to create an environment that motivates the unfaithful spouse to go through the struggle of cleaning out their wounds and healing them.

Providing them the promise of your love and support for them to heal themselves is not saying to them, "What you did isn't that bad, I'm okay with it," but that hurt spouse is providing them motivation to do the right thing both for themselves and for the hurt spouse. A promised reward for going through the pain of healing themselves.

Indeed, if this is combined with the other strong points, it continues to keep the ball in their court to heal. The hurt spouse is simply on the sidelines cheering them on. Of course, this is assuming the hurt spouse still wants their spouse to be healed and for the marriage to survive, that they still love them and want what is best for them.

A strong hurt spouse will not be a punisher, but desire the redemption of the unfaithful spouse and act accordingly.

5. A strong hurt spouse will not be an enabler, but a loving partner.

This means two things.

One, if the unfaithful spouse is cooperative, the hurt spouse will reward and encourage the unfaithful spouse's efforts to heal and celebrate their victories in healing.

Two, if the unfaithful spouse is not cooperative, the hurt spouse will provide corresponding consequences that encourage the unfaithful spouse to change directions and begin to heal, the opposite of enabling. By "corresponding consequences" I mean, as discussed in "Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse - Uncooperative Unfaithful Spouse" article, that for each wrong direction they take, the hurt spouse responses in kind. That includes up to if they continue the affair after adequate time has passed to stop, that the hurt spouse be willing to leave and if necessary, divorce.

"But I love my spouse! I don't want to leave him? I want to save our marriage."

If one loves a person, they want what is best for that person. That includes refusing to participate with them in behaviors destructive to them and oneself, and any family. It is selfish and unloving to enable their acceptance of having an affair because they "know she won't leave me."

Even the father in Jesus' parable of the "Prodigal Son," didn't refuse to give his son his inheritance even though he knew it was the wrong thing to do. The father let the son leave. He didn't force him to stay. Was it unloving of the father to do that, or should he have refused and locked the son up in his room so he couldn't escape? Even though it broke the father's heart, he knew his son had to go through the pain of losing it all before he'd come to appreciate what was important.

Likewise, when a spouse has an affair, whether they intend for it to happen or not, it is a call to end the marriage. If physical intercourse is involved, it is the equivalent of divorcing and remarrying the affair partner. No matter the intentions, the practical outcome of an affair is to damage and tear apart their current marriage. To respond in kind is in essence to acknowledge that damage, that they refuse to take the steps to heal it, and accept their call for a divorce because mentally and physically, they've already divorced the hurt spouse.

A weak hurt spouse will either be too focused on their own pain to be an encouragement to the unfaithful spouse to heal, and/or make the tough decisions to respond in kind whether it is due to a lack of transparency or not discontinuing the affair. It takes a strong person to decide to leave when they so desperately wanted the marriage to succeed. It also takes a strong person to accept the unfaithful spouse's efforts and successes in healing despite the pain they caused the hurt spouse. A weak person ignores and hides from either route, but takes the route of least resistance.

A Hurt Spouse is not necessarily weak by staying to rebuild a marriage destroyed by infidelity.

Are we getting the picture here? Staying to rebuild in and of itself doesn't make one weak, nor does leaving make one, by default, strong. It isn't a matter of whether the hurt spouse is "letting them get away with it" or not. That only indicates a misconception that what they did was good for them. Like getting sick enough in the head that they would accept an affair that is destructive to them and their marriage is a good thing they "got away with." Like the hurt spouse is thinking, "I never got to do that! No fair."

The reality is more that the hurt spouse is attempting to keep them from stabbing themselves and their spouse because they are sick and need healing and redemption. Running away from that task is easier, weak, and selfish if all it boils down to is avoiding the pain of healing.

Rather, the hurt spouse is strong when they face the reality of what is going on, painful as that may be, and seek to find a way to heal themselves through either encouraging their spouse to heal with them, or to heal without them, because the hurt spouse can't stay bonded to someone who continues to bond with another and expect to heal either the unfaithful spouse or themselves.

If you're staying in a relationship and healing is happening for both spouses in the wake of an affair, it is because you are both being strong enough to face the damage and work to repair it. Likewise, if you're leaving a relationship because the other spouse would not be strong enough to face their shortcomings, you are still being strong, doing what is ultimately in the best interest of both by not enabling and participating in their destructive behavior.

Being weak is hiding, ignoring, and sweeping under the rug the core issues of each person in the relationship that are contributing to the breakdown of the marriage. No one can ignore a cancer for long. They either attempt to heal it or they die. Simple as that. Ignoring marital problems, especially infidelity, by either spouse, will kill the marriage and any other relationships if not dealt with.

Now, go out and be strong.

Evaluating the Why

2015-01-31T06:51:00.000-06:00

I've dealt with the "why" question before in How Could He Have Done This to Me? article. Hurt spouses often want to know why their unfaithful spouse cheated on them. I've talked about this in my book as well.

As we've noted before, there is no answer to the question of "why" that an unfaithful spouse can give that will cause the hurt spouse to say, "Oh, I see. That makes sense. I can see why you did it."

This is compounded by the fact that often an unfaithful spouse doesn't know why they did it. While sometimes there are identifiable motivating factors that led them down that path, rarely does an unfaithful spouse understand themselves enough to identify why they chose that path.

The decision to have an affair is usually made based on emotions and desires, not rational, logical thought processes. If it is the latter, you have a psychopath on your hands. Consequently, few are the unfaithful spouses who sat down one day thinking they weren't happy in their marriage so they decided to seek out an affair partner. Rather, they are drawn into it emotionally, step by step, until desire takes over and reason is thrown to the wind. Damn the consequences. Few unfaithful spouses have rationally evaluated why they had an affair, other than justifications they may have come up with once it was underway.

One might conclude from that, then, that seeking out a why is a pointless exercise. If most unfaithful spouses don't have a clue why, and no answer would satisfy a hurt spouse, then why seek for a why?

We don't need to know the why to justify the affair or to make sense of a senseless act. We need to find out the why in order to heal both spouses from the damage of an affair.

It's like when your car breaks down. The first thing you want to verify is why it broke. What broke. So you'll know what needs fixing and take preventative steps to keep it from breaking again if need be. You don't want to know why it isn't working because you need closure or make sense of the car's motivation and reasons it decided to stop working. You don't need to know why so you can justify why the car broke down, decide who is to blame for it doing so. The goal is to diagnose and fix it.

There are two levels of why an affair happens that need to be understood to diagnose so you'll know what needs to be addressed for healing in both spouses.

1. The Unfaithful Spouse's Choices

Some angry hurt spouses put the reason the unfaithful spouse cheated is due to a selfish and uncaring attitude that it is all about me, me me! Indeed, for most people interacting with a person in the middle of an affair, that seems to be the case. While understandable that a hurt spouse would feel that way, it isn't so much the underlying principle that is wrong as it is the judgmental assigning of motives to an entire group of people. Makes it easy to "diagnose" when it is all due to one solitary reason.

But there is one overarching reason why an unfaithful spouse has an affair.

Desire met opportunity and the spouse was tempted to fulfill a "need" the desire created in an inappropriate manner, and they gave into it.

Was selfishness involved in that process. Most surely. Was uncaring an issue here? It would be hard to classify such an act as caring to the hurt spouse and the family, so yes. But that doesn't really tell us why. We can all be selfish and uncaring at times. Often in small ways, occasionally in bigger ways, so we're only speaking in degrees of selfishness.

Saying it was selfishness translates into saying they did it because that's who they are. You can't fix stupid, so there is nothing further to discuss. In essence, they are saying the degree of brokenness is so great the engine is trashed and only good enough to be thrown away. It is a diagnoses of why they are abandoning the person, not a diagnoses intended to address the cause of the breakdown and heal it if possible.

No, if you get to a real why, you get to what needs to be dealt with. Moving it from a wrong motivation to an objective evaluation of what happened brings the focus on understanding it enough to know what the medicine needs to be.

It should be noted that a lot of unfaithful spouses want to accept the why as being "I acted like a selfish and uncaring person." Because that means they don't have to dig any further. It means all the unfaithful spouse has to do is to start being more caring and less selfish, which can often be done for a period of time. But if it never goes any further than that, it ends up being as superficial as the diagnosis, and the unfaithful spouse will not make the real changes they need to avoid another round with an affair partner.

Admitting that the unfaithful spouse was tempted and gave into that temptation implies two major conditions.

One, the unfaithful spouse exhibited weaknesses and poor choices that led to giving into a temptation.

Identifying what those are and how they led the unfaithful spouse into giving into an affair will identify what areas of the unfaithful spouse needs work and what boundaries they need to hold firmly to in order to not go down that road again.

By way of example, since it is in the book, Lenita and I identified what her weaknesses were and what temptations she had that led her to cross one boundary after another until she was so tempted to cross the final sexual boundaries in her affairs that she stopped resisting. By so doing, we applied solutions to address her weaknesses and what boundaries she needed to hold fast to in order to avoid that level of temptation again, and flee from it if it comes again instead of running to meet it.

Two, knowing the cause, you can find a solution.

Identifying, for instance, that Lenita was attracted to men's attention, that she has a weakness in that area, she is more fully able to both guard her mind from thinking or caring about wanting that attention, and avoid situations that would led itself to that attention. She had been doing and saying things to encourage men to notice and appreciate her. Now she knows she can't encourage that kind of attention without consequences.

Just saying someone is selfish does not give a direction on how to fix it. It is too general. Rather, you want to know what selfish actions specifically led to allowing an affair to happen. When a couple focuses on what is wrong with what happened rather than on what is wrong with each other, then direction for healing can be evaluated.

By the way, you can fix stupid. It happens every day. If that were true, none of us would be fixable.

2. Evaluating the Needs of the Unfaithful Spouse

This is where some hurt spouses will tend to push back. They fear that in identifying the unfaithful spouse's needs, we are blaming the hurt spouse for the affair. It doesn't help that society often takes that view as well. I've had more than one person talk to me as if the affair happened because I wasn't doing my part as a husband.

That is an erroneous conclusion as will be made clear as we go. But we need to discuss the issue of blame in general as it relates to infidelity so we're all on the same page.

Blame Isn't a Seesaw

Too often, we view blame as a seesaw: the more you can blame one person, the less blame the other person carries. So the hurt spouse may feel anything identified as a need is something they failed to fulfill, making them to blame for the affair, therefore reducing the blame and responsibility on the unfaithful spouse. But it doesn't work that way.

Blame and guilt is more of merry-go-round. If you get it going fast enough, everyone will fall off. Whose to blame for it? Depends on how many and who were pushing. If only one person, then only one person's fault. If four, then it is all four's fault for the event. Among the four maybe one or two pushed harder or longer than the others, and so bear a greater degree of the blame.

Sometimes I'm asked who's fault was it for the affair, my wife's or her affair partner's? What percent goes to her and him? 50%/50%? No, that is a seesaw way of looking at it. They both decided to do it, even if enticed into it, so both are 100% to blame, except in cases where the affair partner was deceived by the unfaithful spouse as to their marital status.

"So, if I failed to meet my spouse's need that led him to have an affair, then aren't I to blame for the affair as well?"

No. True, you may have contributed to their temptation, but you can only be to blame for your decisions and that which you have direct control over. Not meeting a valid need may mean you are to blame in part for the condition of your relationship. But you cannot control whether your spouse has an affair or not. That is a decision they made unknown to you. They bear the full blame for that action. Any contribution you made to the negative condition of the relationship did not force them to have an affair. They had more ethical, honorable, and effective options available to them to respond to marital problems.

I've only see a couple instances when I would lay part of the blame for the affair on the hurt spouse. In both instances it involved the hurt spouse introducing another sexual partner into the relationship via a threesome, resulting in an affair between the other two. Does the fact they did that relieve the unfaithful spouse from blame? No. They are still 100% to blame. They could have said no to the threesome. They could have said no to an affair. Just because the hurt spouse is in part to blame doesn't lessen the unfaithful spouse's blame for the affair. Both pushed the merry-go-round.

Keep in mind what we said earlier. We're not seeking who is to blame in order to point fingers, but to identify what needs fixing. If the generator belt in your car starts squeaking, but you blame the power steering belt, you'll never fix the squeak no matter how many times you change out the power steering belt or the pump. Same here. If the unfaithful spouse decided to allow an affair because they enjoyed the attention too much, it will do little good to focus on getting the hurt spouse to wash the dishes more often. History will likely repeat itself.

That understanding leads us to more objectively examine another truth.

All Affairs are Driven by Unmet Needs

I'm not prone to making near absolute statements. There is almost always an exception somewhere. In this case, such exceptions would be very rare, so I feel safe in stating it this way.

Again, some hurt spouses will not agree, but that is because they tend to have the following incomplete definition of a "need": something needed for one's survival or wellbeing. Therefore they interpret the above statement as saying all affairs are based upon needs that need filling. Generally assuming it is needs the hurt spouse has failed to meet, thus they are to blame. If you think that, go back to the last section and re-read it.

Needs, as I'm using them here, are more broadly understood. Needs can be classified in the following categories.

A valid need that is realistic.
A perceived need that is realistic.
A valid need that is unrealistic.
A perceived need that is unrealistic.

Let's break that down.

A need can be a valid or perceived need. A valid need is a need required to be met for survival or one's well being. Food is an obvious example. A vacation might be as well for an overworked employee.

A perceived need is a desire for a non-valid need elevated to the level of a need as perceived by that person. These tend to be called addictions. "I need chocolate!" would be one benign example. It's not that the person really needs it to survive, but they want it so bad that it becomes, in their eyes, equivalent to a valid need.

Also, a need can be realistic or unrealistic to meet. It is realistic to meet the need for food in most cases. Our days are numbered if we don't. It is realistic to expect the boss to give us a week's vacation when we've earned it. Same with perceived needs. It is realistic to expect to obtain some chocolate at the store in most cases without too much cash, effort, or ethical violations.

A need can also be unrealistic to be met. Dinning at the most expensive restaurant in town when funds are limited may be unrealistic to meet. In most cases, it would be unrealistic to expect your boss to give you a 6 month paid vacation no matter how much you felt you needed it. A failing heart may not find a replacement in time; if there are none available, it would be unrealistic to expect one or to kill someone to get it.

More common, however, perceived needs can be unrealistic. Cocaine is unrealistic because you have to break the law to obtain it. If you didn't have the money for chocolate, so you shoplifted a bar, you've stepped into an unreasonable means of meeting that perceived need.

I'd add a fifth category: when meeting either kind of need is impossible. It's a silly example, but gets the point across: you have a perceived need to fly like Superman. Impossible while on Earth.

Any one particular unfaithful spouse will have most all of these. We all do. When it comes to affairs, a very high percentage of them are driven by unrealistic perceived needs. Every once in a while you'll run across an affair that blossomed from an unmet, realistic, valid need, but those are rare.

This is complicated by the reality that these needs tend to overlap at times, which is why some unfaithful spouses will say, "It's because you didn't ____________." In reality, though, that only played a minor role.

To illustrate, I'll use our example.

My wife had a valid need that we all have: to be loved, desired, and wanted. I met that need in her when we married in 1982. According to her, while I've not always effectively showed it, she felt I didn't fulfill that valid desire, even during the affair.

But due to her childhood, being ignored and made to not feel wanted, she developed a perceived need for attention. At first, I met this need too. Then as we had children, they met that need. By the time our youngest was headed into his senior year of high school, she feared feeling lonely in part because I tended to be wrapped up in my world and she in hers.

Add onto that her weight loss, and the attention she was able to attract from men by being flirty, her perceived need for attention grew into attention from men. It then became unreasonable, because she was advertising something she originally didn't intend to give.

Likewise, for me, it became impossible for me to meet her upgraded need. I could have given her all the attention she could want and it wouldn't have changed anything because by that point, she knew I wanted, desired, and loved her for over 28 years. My attention couldn't generate in her the same excitement and infatuation that another man's could, because mine was old hat.

Eventually, someone took it further than flirting. Gradually, it generated in her more perceived needs that were unrealistic to meet, right up to wanting sex with someone other than me for the experience.

We traced in her how a valid need was expanded into a perceived need, then into an unrealistic to meet perceived need and impossible for me to meet need that could only be met by other men. She now knows where her weaknesses are and what to avoid in order not to find herself headed down that road again.

So getting to the why in order to address the problem in the end involves evaluating the root needs that drove it: valid and perceived, realistic and unrealistic or impossible to fulfill needs. Once you've identified the root needs that drove the decision to allow an affair to take place, only then can they be addressed and healed.

That's why all affairs are driven by the need of the unfaithful spouse, and the majority of those are unrealistic to meet perceived needs. None of which blames the hurt spouse, nor let's the unfaithful spouse off the hook of responsibility. But it does show you how to fix it.

I've Not Forgotten

2015-01-31T03:55:00.001-06:00

For readers of this blog, you may have noticed I've been absent the last three months. It's not that I'm dead or have been locked away in prison. Nor have I decided not to write anymore post.

So what's up and what can you expect?

November I took an intentional break due to a writing project I'd hoped to make some headway with. I did make some progress on it before life got in the way. A combination of things really. My Parkinson's symptoms didn't help at times. I also did not just a fair amount of house cleaning in my wife's business, but spent a good hunk of time getting her more officially set up, do the bookkeeping and getting that caught up. Add into that the holidays, two weekend trips, getting using employees in her business set up, and the extra paperwork due by today (1/31/15, done!), and I simply didn't have enough time and/or energy to finish another blog post. I started one earlier in January, and will try to finish that soon.

My goal is to post at least two articles a month. Obviously, if I finish the unfinished one, I'll only have one this month. Unless you count this one.

So I've not forgotten this blog and will work to get out articles as I'm able.

This might be a good time to request, if I've not covered it yet, a topic you'd like to see on this blog. Put them in the comment section of this post.

Now, off to see if I can finish that article.

Key to Rebuilding: Love

2014-10-31T04:42:00.000-05:00

The driving force behind most marital relationships is love. It is the most often stated reason given why two people commit themselves to one another in marriage.

It shouldn't be too surprising, then, to realize it is also the driving force of a successful rebuilding of a marriage after infidelity. The inability to love one another and communicate that to one another may be the single determining factor of whether a couple successfully rebuilds.

Let's back up a minute and unpack that concept.

We know there are several things that need to happen for rebuilding to be successful. On the unfaithful spouse's side, they need to be transparent, maintaining no contact with the affair partner(s), working to correct their vulnerabilities to temptations that led them down this path, and their part in any marital difficulties that increased those vulnerabilities. For the hurt spouse, they must successfully deal with the emotions and fear created by the betrayal, and work though the stages of grief to reach acceptance.

So why is love a key?

We make decisions based primarily on emotion. Yes, reason is not absent in the process. When it comes down to a battle between emotion and reason, however, emotion wins out 99% of the time. No, humans are not Vulcans.

This is why affairs happen in the first place. In most all affairs, the love of a particular feeling drives them to ignore all reason not to do it. The consequences of losing their marriage, lives with their children, job, the respect of others, hurting those they say they love, doesn't even factor into the decision.

Often that love for a feeling an unfaithful spouse has is transfered to the one who is giving them that feeling. So they believe they love their affair partner, when the truth is they love how their affair partner makes them feel.

Doing the things mentioned above that a couple has to do in order to rebuild is not fun work. It is usually a struggle for both spouses to accomplish those tasks. If you don't feel passionate love for your spouse, you will have little motivation to do the things you need to do to rebuild. You'll ask yourself, "What am I rebuilding to? Is it worth it?" Without the love, the answer is usually no.

With a strong sense of love for each other communicated and felt, however, you'll have motivation to face the hard task of rebuilding. You'll feel the struggle is worth it and both spouses will find the motivation to not only rebuild, but to invest 100% of themselves into the relationship.

Love is a key because without it, a couple is unlikely to deal with, do, and to move beyond the devastation of the affair.

Unfortunately, this is often overlooked for several reasons.

1. Obviously the presence of the affair is a big hit to the love balance.

Willard Hartley in his book, His Needs, Her Needs, discusses the idea of the love bank. In short, feelings of love for another person come from them meeting important needs that say "I love you" to a person. When that happens, it makes a deposit into your love bank. Likewise, actions or words that say "I don't love you" make withdraws. Feelings of love for someone comes when their deposits exceed withdrawals and the balance builds up to a point causing you to think, "I love him."

An affair is most certainly a huge withdrawal in a hurt spouses love balance. No matter the reasons for the affair or intentions of the unfaithful spouse, such an act says to the hurt spouse, "I don't love you." No spouse in their right mind is going to feel warm fuzzy love when they learn their spouse has had an affair.

Some couples have a huge balance, and the hit, while large, doesn't reduce the balance to zero. Other couples where the love has waned over the years might see their balance go to near zero. Others with a low balance, the affair may send the it into the negative, and they may feel no love whatsoever.

Fact is, after discovering an affair, the hurt spouse certainly won't be feeling much love from or for the unfaithful spouse. Likewise, even if an unfaithful spouse doesn't want to lose their marriage, they often can't flip a switch about how they feel concerning the affair partner.

2. The hurt spouse starts in the emotional ICU, and all marital issues tend to take a back seat.

In the first weeks of discovering an affair, the hurt spouse will be in emotional trauma. All thoughts, resources, and activities are consumed with the fallout of what has happened. The issues surrounding the affair tend to take front and center stage to the exclusion of all else, including what may seem as unrelated marital issues, like love.

I've heard hurt spouses say something along the lines of, "Until the affair issues have been addressed, I won't work on the marriage."

There is a reason for that. As long as their is doubt about the future of the relationship, a person isn't likely to invest in it. Asking a hurt spouse to address love at this point is akin to telling them, "Go ahead. Stick your hand back in the fire. I promise it won't hurt this time."

While a hurt spouse will need some time to recover from the shock and initial fallout upon discovering an affair, it is also true they cannot wait for all the issues surrounding an affair to be dealt with before they address the lack of love resulting from the affair. It will take years to fully deal with the affair issues. If the hurt spouse waits that long, it is not likely they'll have a marriage to save by that point. To go through years of rebuilding requires a sense of love to motivate that rebuilding.

3. The myth that love is an uncontrollable feeling.

Romance novels foster the idea that love just randomly happens, and we don't have a say in whether it shows up to the party or not. It is either present or it isn't, and there is nothing we can do to change it.

Indeed, this idea is often the fuel for the fire of an affair. When "chemistry" kicks in between two people, they feel a draw to each other that seems to come from nowhere. An unfaithful spouse, looking for a justification for what they want, will often take such feelings of love as evidence they don't love their spouse any longer, because they may not have felt like they do with the affair partner for a long time. So obviously the winds of love have picked a new "life-long" partner.

Because of that, either spouse or both may dismiss the idea that they can somehow generate feelings of love for their spouse. It sounds silly to them, like suggesting we could adjust Earth's orbit around the Sun.

As I talk about in my article on love, however, the passionate, romantic feelings of love are based upon someone meeting your love needs, whatever those might be. They are usually different for men and women. In a new romantic relationship, the "chemistry" seems to just happen when two people simultaneously meet each other's love needs. The synergy created when two people stumble upon this event with another creates the illusion of "falling in love" as if Cupid shot his arrows randomly.

Truth is, the same thing can be created purposefully by intentionally meeting each other's love needs. First you have to find out what they are, then invest time with each other in order to meet them. As deposits into the love bank exceed withdrawals, the balance will grow to the point you both feel in love.

Likewise, for the unfaithful spouse, "falling" out of love with the affair partner happens intentionally by reversing that process. Actively shut down thoughts about them. Don't spend time with them in your head recalling what you miss or fantasizing about seeing them again. Triggers happen and thoughts will pop in, but you don't have to think on them or focus on them. By not spending time in person or in your head, the love balance with the affair partner will be whittled away, especially once you begin to see the damage their relationship with you has caused.

More info than I can share here is in Willard Hartley's book, His Needs, Her Needs. You can also find a more involved discussion in my article on love.

In the end, how well a couple is able to renew the feelings of love for one another after an affair will determine the likelihood of their success in rebuilding. A couple who wants to rebuild their marriage cannot afford to overlook this important factor. It can make or break the relationship.

Where is your love balance at? Are you willing to address its lack?

When Should I decide to Leave?

2014-10-21T18:51:00.000-05:00

In my book, I wrote a chapter titled, "Should I Leave or Stay?" Many hurt spouses are faced with that question and I wanted to offer some points for them to consider in making that decision.

While what I wrote there I still believe and support, I've become more aware of additional issues that I failed to address. This post will be an additional list of considerations, keeping in mind what I said in the original article: you know your situation and you are the only one who can decide when you're done.

The "Default" Position

One poster on the forum we frequent made the statement that divorce should be the default position a hurt spouse should have upon discovering infidelity in their spouse, and reconciliation only a viable option if the unfaithful spouse does all they should do.

In reality, there is some truth to that. When a spouse has sex outside the marriage, they've committed adultery. If you're a Christian, Jesus made it clear that committing adultery in effect meant the offending spouse had divorced you and remarried the affair partner. (Mark 10:11-12) Biologically, having sex with someone else, no matter what protections may have been used, is saying you're committing yourself to having a family with that person, as that is the natural outcome of sex if not otherwise hindered. Those whose affairs have inadvertently produced a child know this all too well. Sex does create a marital bond.

"But my spouse didn't have sex." Or so he says, anyway, which may or may not be true. You can't know for sure he didn't. But assuming he's telling the truth, did he divorce you? In many cases, yes. If he fantasized about it, if he found himself wishing he could, he committed adultery as if he'd actually done it. (Mat 5:28)

So upon discovering an affair, generally a biological divorce has already happened, along with a spiritual divorce, and frequently an emotional one as well if romantic love was involved. Only the outward social and legal aspects of marriage remain intact.

The question then is more along the lines of should we bring the social and legal into line with the reality, or hope that the reality can be healed to match the social and legal statuses?

One woman on our forum decided to divorce her husband on discovery day. She didn't want to lose him, but wanted to reflect that reality and see if he could in effect win her back. Not sure how that went, but is one option that makes some sense, if you can afford it and doesn't negatively affect one's kids' lives

The reality is, however, that on discovery day a hurt spouse may not know whether their unfaithful spouse will do what is necessary to heal. The only real way to know is give them a chance to try. Not everyone is ready to give up on their marriage as a default option. If by "default" one means to start divorce proceedings on discovery day before considering the situation, I don't think that is a good route in most cases.

The hurt spouse has time on their side. Rather I'd suggest that the default option is to keep divorce as a viable option on the table. Plan for that possibility financially and legally. Be ready to pull the plug should the situation warrant it. But I don't think for most people automatically pulling that trigger on discovery day is the best option.

What is the best option in your situation, I can't say. You might should pull that trigger on discovery day. Only you can know when. I just don't think it should be the default as in immediate route to take without giving yourself time to evaluate it.

Because of that . . .

The Default Route is to Give Yourself Three Months

There are several reasons for this.

You can discover whether rebuilding has a chance.
Gives you time to get off the emotional roller coaster, avoiding a knee-jerk decision you may later regret.
The divorce option is always there. Waiting won't cause you to lose it.
You'll need about that much time, at a minimum, to plan for a graceful exit should that be the decision you make. Waiting doesn't mean not making plans for a divorce, whether you use it or not. It just means you're waiting that long to make a final decision.
Gives the hurt spouse time to evaluate the situation and get more objective input from therapist, spiritual leaders, and close friends.
Takes the pressure off to make an immediate decision.

There are a certain number of hurt spouses who don't think waiting is a good idea. Almost without exception, these tend to be people who decided to wait based on advice they received, then after two or three years they call it quits and divorce. These hurt spouses, understandably, feel like they wasted two or three years of living in a horrible relationship and wished they had divorced him on discovery day.

We might point out that we're suggesting three months, not three years. Obviously they waited too long to come to that conclusion. But hindsight is always 20/20 vision. Most hurt spouses should be able to determine if their spouse will take the right attitude and actions in three months that will give rebuilding a chance. That's why we've listed the "Healing Steps for the Unfaithful Spouse" article. Both to guide unfaithful spouses in what it takes to rebuild, and to give hurt spouses a picture of what an unfaithful spouse who stands a chance of rising to the occasion looks like.

Also, it rarely works to generalize based on an individual's experience, whether it is myself who has had a positive experience rebuilding or those who have watched rebuilding go from bad to worse until a fiery death occurred. Personalities, circumstances, and other contributing issues are too complex to suggest everyone should divorce on discovery day, don't wait.

That said, their experience does highlight a real risk in waiting even three months. Some unfaithful spouses are experts at psychological manipulation. They can gaslight with the best of them. Given the chance, they could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo. Give them three months and they can have the hurt spouse believing it was their fault, that they are the victim here, and they will never stray again without proving it by their attitudes and actions. Some hurt spouses are more susceptible to that as well.

If a hurt spouse knows this is likely to be the case, they need to factor it into their decision. If his mind control is too hard to resist, indeed, run now, not later. At a minimum, a hurt spouse in such a situation needs to not believe a single word of "I'm sorry. I won't do it again." Only focus on whether he is making the required changes. Any hiding, refusal to discuss the affair, attitude of "what you don't know won't hurt you," is evidence that your final decision will be to say "bye bye."

If you've reached three months without coming to a firm decision one way or the other, that in and of itself is an indication of a rebuilding problem. Use your judgment, but evaluate your inability to decide. Is it because the unfaithful spouse isn't following through on being transparent and honest?

I'm not talking about whether you trust him or not. If you do in three months you either deserve the Hurt Spouse of the Year Award, or you're deluding yourself. But you should be able to measure whether his actions and attitudes are making the rebuilding of trust a real possibility or not. You simply go down the list I mentioned above and check off what he is doing, then based on that make your decision. Leave emotions and promises out of it. If every hurt spouse did that, more of them would save themselves a lot of heartache.

Even with all that, it is possible to be so convinced he's on the right path, only to discover he's still at it months or years later, maybe never quit. That is a real risk to choosing to rebuild, or even waiting to divorce. Some people are that convincing and hesitation means a lost chance to exit an emotionally abusive relationship.

Even with that, in general, most will benefit from giving themselves at least three months to process a decision. Unless you are in a physically or emotionally abusive situation, waiting will not hurt. The only warning I'd give is if he's not doing what he should in three months, another year or three is not likely to change that. Don't take three years of living in Hell before you decide to leave.

Final Thoughts

Allow me to reemphasize. No one situation is going to match another. What works for one couple won't for another. You can do everything right, and still find yourself cheated on again. Rebuilding has risks. Divorce has its own risks as well. It is up to you to evaluate those and decide what risk to take. All a blog like this or any forum can do is give you general principles to consider. It is up to you to apply them.

If your marriage sucked and you see the affair as your exit, by all means call up the lawyer on discovery day and get that ball rolling. Ignore the above advice. I can't know what is best for your situation. No one can. Hopefully this and the previous article will provide some help in making that decision, however. It is not an easy one to make.

Can Trust be Rebuilt? Part 2

2014-09-27T05:47:00.000-05:00

In part 1 of this article, we began by laying out two foundational concepts in rebuilding trust after marital infidelity: whether rebuilding trust is possible (yes, it is) and setting realistic trust expectations to rebuild to.

In part 2, we want to look at the remaining concepts in determining if trust can be rebuilt in your situation.

3. The commitment of the unfaithful spouse.

This is likely the biggest key to rebuilding and the main reason it tends to not happen. Why? Because often the unfaithful spouse is not fully committed to go through the painful task of accepting responsibility and rebuilding trust. Yet, an important truth must be kept in mind:

The unfaithful spouse is the one that destroyed the hurt spouse's trust; only the unfaithful spouse can rebuild it.

An unfaithful spouse reading this may be thinking, "But, she ignored my needs," or "Well, he ignored me, never showed he loved me." Or name whatever reason you may have given for the decision to cheat that you feel cast the burden of rebuilding upon the hurt spouse.

While I would make a difference between your responsibility in the decision to cheat and both of your contributions to the difficulties in the marriage, let's assume for the moment that is true. Your spouse's actions toward you caused you to be susceptible to the temptation to cheat, and you did.

It still doesn't change the fact that it is the actions of the unfaithful spouse's cheating that has violated the marital bond of trust. Maybe the hurt spouse has violated the unfaithful spouse's trust in other areas, like finances. In those areas, only the hurt spouse can rebuild that trust for the unfaithful spouse so affected. But in marital infidelity, unless your spouse has also cheated on the unfaithful spouse, making you both a hurt and unfaithful spouse, only the unfaithful spouse can rebuild the trust they broke.

Until the unfaithful spouse is ready to accept responsibility for their decision to break their vows, and is ready to do what it takes to rebuild that trust, there is nothing the hurt spouse can do to "get over it," "forgive you," and begin trusting the unfaithful spouse again.

It is the responsibility of the unfaithful spouse to provide an open, honest, transparent, secure, and loving environment that can allow the hurt spouse to work though the stages of grief and come to a place they are able to trust once again. Any blame shifting, avoidance of the topic, deception, or secrets mean this is not happening, and indicates that the unfaithful spouse isn't committed to rebuilding the trust they destroyed.

4. It takes time.

This is important for both spouses to realize and acknowledge. The old saying, "Trust takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy" is valid.

Different people give a new person a certain amount of trust. Usually enough to handle whatever process the relationship requires. As you gain a history with that person, your level of trust with them will either go up or down. Years of trust building can fall apart by discovering one instance of deception. The more intimate the relationship, the more the deception hurts.

For instance, when you check out at your grocery store, you're trusting that the cashier, who you may not know, is competent to ring up your bill correctly and handle the transaction. You'll gladly put your groceries on the belt and trust them to get it right. Even more true in the days when the cashier entered all the prices by hand. But if you find a mistake, or suspect they are trying to pull one over on you, your trust level with that person tanks.

When that happens, it will take many episodes of getting it right and being honest with you before you can feel comfortable trusting them again with your grocery bill.

If true with a minor event like processing your grocery bill, how much more so with an intimate relationship where broken trust creates so much more pain and damage. It is going to take a lot of the hurt spouse catching the unfaithful spouse being honest and trustworthy in years, not merely weeks or even months, to rebuild that trust back to a working level.

Don't expect to rebuild trust within a year, even two.

For the unfaithful spouse, this feeds into the last point. You've got to realize your spouse will not be able to trust you for the next few years. As time goes by and you're being fully honest and transparent with them, you'll regain that trust. But make no mistake, to rebuild trust means you are in it for the long haul.

Keep in mind, because the hurt spouse doesn't trust the unfaithful spouse, even two years after discovery day with a perfect track record, it doesn't mean the hurt spouse is unable or unwilling to forgive the unfaithful spouse. It means the hurt spouse isn't yet comfortable giving that level of trust. Be patient, and know going into it that it could take that long or longer.

For the hurt spouse, know that the likelihood your trust in your spouse will be restored to a working level within two years or less is slim. For some, that can happen if the unfaithful spouse recovers flawlessly and the hurt spouse is of a particular personality type, but those are the exceptions, not the norm. The hurt spouse must not put any artificial time limits on healing or rebuilding trust.

For both spouses, not having that trust can be frustrating. It can hinder intimacy and love.

Be patient with each other. Rebuilding trust will take a lot of time. Don't expect immediate results. You'll be tossing in the towel if you do.

5. Transparency

This word is used a lot as one thing the unfaithful spouse needs to do. I've devoted a whole article to that topic.

Take a moment to read it or bookmark it for later. Here is the gist of that article.

Most associate transparency with the unfaithful spouse giving the hurt spouse unfettered access to all forms of social communication: cell phone, email, social sites like Facebook, etc. It also means being fully honest, especially about anything related to the affair(s). It means no longer keeping secrets. The more honest the unfaithful spouse is, especially about things the hurt spouse is highly unlikely to ever know otherwise, the easier it is for the hurt spouse to rebuild trust.

Transparency is required even in areas not related to the affair(s).

This is because a loss of trust in one area affects one's trust level in other areas.

For example, if an unfaithful spouse doesn't tell their spouse about a purchase of clothing, that can be a problem for the hurt spouse. Not because they don't want you to have any clothes, but because it is a secret that you felt necessary to hide from them. If you'll keep secrets about that, they will fear you'll keep secrets about the affair as well, or your current activities.

Any deception in any area can hinder the rebuilding of trust. The more open and honest an unfaithful spouse is, the faster trust can be rebuilt. The hurt spouse needs to consistently discover the unfaithful spouse being honest and open. Any lie, secret, or deceit will do damage.

6. Trust on loan.

The reality is that the hurt spouse will not be able to trust the unfaithful spouse for some time. That creates an immediate problem for a hurt spouse wishing to rebuild.

Staying in the married relationship requires a certain amount of trust in order to function. Without it, you can't stay married. When a hurt spouse agrees to rebuild or give themselves time to decide whether to rebuild or not, it means they are putting a certain amount of trust in the unfaithful spouse that they simply don't have.

This is because no matter how good the hurt spouse looks over the unfaithful spouse's shoulder, they know they can't see and know it all. They can't be on 24-hour surveillance. The unfaithful spouse can obtain a secret cell phone, setup secret email accounts, Facebook accounts, etc. Knowing how they were discovered, they may get better at covering their tracks.

Even if the unfaithful spouse isn't doing these things and is being perfectly transparent and honest, the hurt spouse has no way of knowing that the above isn't going on. To stay married to the unfaithful spouse requires that the hurt spouse trust the unfaithful spouse to not do that when they have no basis upon which to trust they aren't.

This puts the hurt spouse into the position of trusting someone to not hurt them again with no basis for that trust other than the word of the unfaithful spouse, which has been proven untrustworthy. So what is a hurt spouse to do until they have rebuilt to a working trust?

Trust on Loan

The concept is simple. In order for rebuilding to go forward, the hurt spouse has to give some trust which they don't have. So the hurt spouse gives them that trust as a loan, expecting to be paid back by continued honesty and openness. Any deceit or new revelations puts that loan at risk of default and potentially ends the relationship. At some undefined point, when enough trust has been rebuilt, it can be declared paid in full. The unfaithful spouse is no longer living on borrowed trust, but has earned it back.

This accomplishes three things.

One, the hurt spouse doesn't feel like they are telling the unfaithful spouse, "I trust you" by staying to rebuild, which would be a lie.

Two, it squarely puts the issue of rebuilding trust in the unfaithful spouse's hands where it belongs. The hurt spouse has made it clear that paying off that loan depends upon the unfaithful spouse's honesty and openness over the next few years. Whether you stay married or not rests in the actions of the unfaithful spouse.

Three, it gives the unfaithful spouse room to rebuild. It is their second chance to repair the damage and save the marriage. It also gives them room to "hang themselves" as well.

Trust but verify.

A healthy relationship is not one where each spouse feels a need to police the other. We should be able to trust that our spouse isn't secretly chatting intimately with others behind our back. We don't want a relationship where we feel a need to be checking our spouse's texts, emails, Facebook messages all the time.

Well, guess what? In the days and months after discovering an affair, the relationship is not healthy. If the hurt spouse is going to rebuild, it requires that they be free to check these communications at will. Giving trust on loan says they don't trust you yet.

Think of it this way. When a bank loans you money, they generally make provisions to check your credit history, and to recheck it as needed, and to request updated financial information on a regular basis, to make sure you have the means to pay the loan back.

In essence, the hurt spouse has to have the means to ensure that the loan is getting paid back, that you are making payments in the form of continued honesty and openness. They need to catch you being good.

As that trust loan gets paid off, the hurt spouse will feel a need less and less to do that kind of checking. As the relationship heals and becomes healthier, the hurt spouse will no longer feel the need to check these areas. That is one of the ways you can tell if that trust loan is getting paid off or not.

In the initial month or so after discovery day, the hurt spouse will likely feel a need to check these things daily. For more than a solid month, I reviewed my wife's calls on our bill to make sure she had stopped communicating with the affair partner. In the next five months, I checked them regularly, but no longer daily. By the time a year had passed, I'd go more than a month without feeling the need to check anything. Now, after three years, I rarely check anything. If I do, it is usually just a random spot inspection to make sure she is still on track and nothing new is cropping up without me realizing it.

Some unfaithful spouses feel this kind of thing is a violation of their privacy. They sometimes feel a need to have at least one private area. If this is your feeling, then rebuilding will not work for you. Best to end it now and find someone who will allow you that luxury.

A healthy marriage is a transparent marriage.

This doesn't mean one spouse is constantly checking up on the other, but that no secrets are kept from each other and each is able at any time, if they feel a need, to check their spouse's email, cell phone, Facebook messages. Constant checking does indicate a marriage in danger. Constant ability to access each other's means of communication indicates a couple who trust each other and have nothing to hide. Big difference.

Such constant checking in the early days of rebuilding is necessary because the marriage is in danger, isn't healthy, and is the only way the hurt spouse can give that trust on loan. The other option is to end the marriage. But if progress is being made, the amount of checking will drop.

Just don't expect that you should be able to ever lock your spouse out of any means of communication with others. Any such action says you have something to hide, even if done years after the affair has become a distant memory.

Those are the main concepts a couple will need to consider in whether they can rebuild trust after infidelity.

If a couple feels they can commit to rebuilding trust, knowing the above, and follow through on it, they stand a good chance at succeeding.

It is much easier to start over with someone new. We often give a certain level of trust to a new person, and as long as they are transparent, it is easier to build to a reasonable trust level that can maintain marital intimacy than to rebuild after someone has deceived you.

But often a couple will feel that giving rebuilding try worth the potential risks because of the potential benefits of success. Whether that be due to love, kids, or a long history of investment into each other, some will feel the work and potential failure worth the rewards of salvaging the relationship.

Hopefully these two articles will give you the means to evaluate whether the risk is too great or not in your situation; whether trust can be rebuilt in your broken marriage or not.

Are their any concepts I missed?

Can Trust Be Rebuilt? Part 1

2014-09-21T04:11:00.001-05:00

This is a big question most hurt spouses try to answer after discovering their spouses' marital betrayal. And a very important question to answer. A healthy marriage relationship is founded on mutual trust. To truly be intimate and "one flesh" requires feeling secure with each other.

An affair destroys that trust and security.

In my book, Healing Infidelity, I liken it to a hurricane wiping a house off its foundation. It is gone, destroyed, the trust meter reads 0%.

Without trust, you can't have a healthy and vibrant marriage. So determining whether or not you can rebuild trust in large part plays into your decision on whether to rebuild, continue to rebuild, or cut your losses.

How do you determine whether trust can be rebuild?

To answer that, we need to break it down into several concepts that need to be considered.

In truth, I can't answer that question for you. No one on the Internet can, to be truthful. The best route is to make you aware of what you are up against, then based on what you know of your situation, decide whether the risks verses benefits are worth it or not.

The following list is not in any order of importance.

1. Some suggest that it is near impossible to rebuild trust.

Probably the prime example of that is the Chump Lady, whose tag line says, "Leave a cheater, gain a life." On her blog's About page, she clearly believes there is little to no chance of rebuilding trust once cheating has happened:

Chump Lady is not a site optimistic about reconciliation. I liken reconciliation to a unicorn, a mythical creature I want to believe in, but which is seldom seen. This emphatically is NOT a site to save your marriage — this is a site about saving your sanity.

She also admits there that this conclusion is based upon her own experience in being married to what she terms a "serial cheater" who showed little remorse or attempts to stop his affair habit. Like me, she is not a therapist who has seen a lot of cases and worked intimately with a wide variety of couples going through this.

Chump Lady, meet your unicorn. I'm a hurt spouse whose wife for seven months had emotional affairs with several people online, and two local emotional and physical affair partners. As of writing this, three years and four months after discovery day, I trust my wife and am happily married to her, and love her as much as I ever have. I'm not a mythical creature.

Though I recognize that I'm in the minority, I know I'm not the only one. I've read about others and have met others in my situation. We're not so mythical as some would lead us to believe.

I'll be quick to add, however, that Chump Lady does speak to a need that I also often see: hurt spouses who should have left their marriage long ago, due to several factors, and need that support to take the only remaining steps left to find healing and happiness. There are many who are sacrificing their sanity in a vain attempt to save their marriage.

I'm in no way going to the other extreme and claiming that everyone can or should save their marriage. Most every couple could save their marriage, if they both did everything they need to do to accomplish it. But I'm not naive enough to believe a whole lot will do it. As Jesus said, Moses allowed for divorce due to our hardness of heart. Many unfaithful spouses will not stop their affairs. Many unfaithful spouses will not repent, will not stop keeping secrets from their spouse, will continue to commit adultery.

Hardness of heart by one or both spouses will prevent any chance of rebuilding trust, any chance of saving the marriage. It is pointless to try for very long in the face of continued disrespect by one spouse for the other. Too many sacrifice their marital dreams by staying married to someone they don't trust and never will for the sake of the children or finances.

Divorce is a reality, and in many of these cases, the least of all evils.

But the truth is that rebuilding of trust can happen. I'm not going to lie and say it is easy. The odds are against you. There are many more ways it can go wrong than right. But there are enough who have done it to know that it is possible.

Willard Hartley in his book, His Needs, Her Needs, makes the statement that the standard success rate of long-term successful rebuilding of marriages after infidelity by traditional counseling methods is 40%. With his method, that success rate went up to 60%.

Even at 40%, that success rate is far from mythical. That is a substantial number of couples who are able to rebuild trust in their relationship following an affair. It is a disservice to discourage people from trying as much as it is to encourage people who should leave a marriage to stick with it.

It is all too easy for people who had a negative experience in rebuilding, especially if they did stick with it much longer than they should have, to project their experience onto everyone and make absolute pronouncements that rebuilding trust and a marriage after an affair is mythical.

Likewise, while I believe my success is repeatable by other couples committed to rebuilding, I have no illusions that most will be able to duplicate what I did. There are too many variables and circumstances to make any general sweeping statements either way.

So what are some of those variables?

2. Resetting Trust Expectations

The truth of the matter is in any relationship, but especially in a marital one, the more intimacy you develop, the greater the risk of betrayal. You are in one sense giving them a knife, turning your back to them, and asking them to shave off the hair on your back. At that point you are vulnerable. They could shove the knife into your chest and you'd be seriously injured, if not dead. But you trust them not to do that, so you give them the knife. That's the relationship between trust and intimacy. You can't have one without the other.

This very real risk is present in every marriage. However, we don't usually stand at the alter and say "I do" believing it will ever happen to "us". "He loves me too much to ever do that." We always believe what we have is special. We are unique. It happens to other people, but not us. The longer the marriage goes on with no sign of infidelity, the more confident we become that it will never happen to me.

This is what I call blind trust. It is simply inconceivable to either spouse that the other would ever seriously consider cheating on them, much less following through with it. On a scale of 1 to 100%, blind trust is about as close to 100% as you can get, like 99.9%.

After 29 years of marriage to a wife I'd always known to be faithful, I had every reason to believe it would never happen to me. We were both Christians with strong moral values. We both loved one another. Though we weren't perfect in showing it all the time, we both were happily married.

Five months before her affairs started, on our 28th wedding anniversary I asked her the question I always asked every year, "Are you happy married to me? What do we need to improve?" We both acknowledged our love for each other and our happiness with the marriage.

My trust level with her was so blind that even up until I read her words that she was having sex with another man, the thought she was having an affair never once entered my mind, despite all the red flags I'd seen. Most of which I didn't think anything about because I didn't believe she'd do that.

I'm not saying that when you marry, you shouldn't expect faithfulness from your spouse. Don't misunderstand me. But if my trust in her had been more realistic, the red flags my gut was sending out would have caused me to investigate sooner and potentially ended it quicker. Potentially before she'd had sex with anyone.

Blind trust on both our parts also allowed us to cross boundaries we shouldn't have crossed, because we erroneously believed, "I would never do that." We believed we were practically immune from ever cheating. So much so that my wife played with fire, and then got burned. And me along with her.

That level of trust in any marriage is not only unrealistic, it is unhealthy. We need to fear the fire enough that we don't stick our hands into it.

I mention this because there is a very real truth in rebuilding trust that some take to be a negative. That is the following:

You'll never get back the level of trust you had before discovery day.

This is because for many couples, their trust level was unrealistic to begin with. Not the expectation of trust, but the perfection of your spouse to never break that trust in any way.

We've already discussed blind trust. Now let's define a couple more terms.

Realistic trust: A level of trust based on expectations and commitment, but taking into account human frailty. Because we are human and not perfect, no one can be trusted 100%. No one should trust themselves to that level.

Working trust: A level of trust that enables a couple to establish an intimate relationship that produces a happy and sustainable marriage.

Now let's illustrate the dynamic. I'm going to use some arbitrary numbers for levels of trust. I'm not saying this is accurate or measurable in this way. I'm only using them to illustrate the concept.

The following levels of trust could be illustrated with the following percentages:

Blind trust = 99.9% or more.

Realistic trust = 90% to 95%

Working trust = 80% or higher.

Most couples before an affair tend to be near that 100% mark. Once an affair hits and is discovered, the trust level sinks to anywhere from 0% to 30% depending on circumstances.

Rebuilding that trust in order to save the marriage only needs to reach that 80% mark. It is reasonable to believe it can get back into the 90s. But the facade has been broken. You can never get back to 99.9% trust level, nor should you. The affair has made it painfully clear that it can happen to you. You are not unique. Neither you nor your spouse are immune to temptation.

One step in being able to successfully rebuild trust is for both spouses to adjust their expectations on trust to a more reasonable level. One that expects the other spouse to be trustworthy, but is not so blind to human imperfections that we play with fire or ignore it when our spouse is doing so.

From here on out, the possibility that it could happen again is a distinct reality. That realistic trust needs to be there to keep each of you on your toes. Indeed, if it had been that way before the affair, there is a good chance either of you would have stopped it in time, or not even allowed it to get started.

Successful rebuilding is not dependent upon rebuilding back to a near 100% blind trust.

The remaining concepts we'll look at next time in part 2.

Healing Infidelity Through Forgiveness

2014-09-11T04:44:00.000-05:00

This is a chapter excerpt from our book, Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. You'll find not only other helpful articles in that book, but our story of how my wife entered the affairs, how I found out, and how we successfully rebuilt.

------------------------

Forgiveness is one of the often difficult steps that a person hurt by the infidelity of a spouse can take. In part because the betrayal of the unfaithful partner is a deep hurt. The trust is placed in one's spouse, the commitment made to each other and to God, leaves us open to that deep hurt. The more on guard we are, the less likely someone's betrayal of our trust will hurt us. The less intimate the relationship between two people, the more walls and defenses we put up to guard against such attacks.

But we don't expect such attacks from those who love us. The risk one takes when one loves another and is intimate with him is that any hurts go deep. They strike us at our very core and affect our self-esteem and identity. So it is no wonder that when such a deep hurt has been inflicted upon someone, that they find it difficult to forgive. Yet, for full healing to take place, that is exactly what needs to happen. So let's look at the process of forgiveness in relation to the hurt inflicted by the infidelity of one's spouse.

First, let's define what forgiveness is. Webster defines it: "To pardon; to remit, as an offense or debt; to overlook an offense, and treat the offender as not guilty." The two ingredients, in this context, are an offense committed against you and the release from punishment for it.

There are some who speak of "earning forgiveness." This is a contradictory statement. One cannot earn forgiveness, for by its very definition it is an act of mercy. For example, if I owe a debt to a creditor, and they decide to forgive me that debt, that means I don't need to pay it back. If I earn that money back and pay the debt off, then there is no need to forgive me the debt. One can't earn forgiveness. As soon as you do, it is no longer forgiveness by definition.

What I believe people really mean by that statement isn't conditions upon which a spouse will forgive the unfaithful spouse, but the conditions upon which the unfaithful spouse can receive that forgiveness and benefit from it for saving the marriage. We'll examine that in a minute, but in this case the unfaithful spouse doesn't "earn" it, it is what he needs to do to apply the forgiveness to themselves.

For example, let's say you need to hammer in a nail, but you don't have a hammer or anything that will work for one. But your good friend holds out a hammer for you to use. In reaching out your hand and taking that hammer, have you "earned" that use of the hammer? Of course not. Neither is doing the actions to receive forgiveness earning it. It is simply holding out your hand.

Likewise, that the spouse has to do those things to receive forgiveness doesn't have any bearing on whether the hurt spouse forgives or not. We examine why below, but just as God stands always ready to forgive, so are we called to do, no matter what the offender does or doesn't do.

There are some natural conclusions that can be drawn from this understanding that we'll address as we go through this information. But first, it may be helpful to address what forgiveness is not.

One, forgiveness is not a denial of the wrongness or hurt that an action brought about. Notice the above definition. It says, "treat the offender as not guilty." It doesn't say the offender isn't guilty, but you are going to treat him as not guilty by way of not punishing him. In truth, it acknowledges that you do have a right to punish him because of his offense. If you didn't, there would be no point to forgiveness. Forgiveness is an act of mercy on your part, not a denial of the offense itself.

Two, forgiveness does not mean the offender will not be punished. What it means is you are not going to do the punishing! A sin like adultery hurts the adulterer as much, if not more, than the hurt spouse. That may seem contradictory as we tend to think, "He had the fun at my expense!" But adultery isn't a sin because it is fun to do. It is a sin because it causes some very serious damage to one's soul and life. That is why Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6:18, "Flee fornication. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits fornication sins against his own body."

Three, forgiveness does not erase the consequences of the offense. As mentioned above, by showing mercy and forgiving the offender, it only means you will not add your punishment to the natural consequences he will endure. Take the example of King David. He committed adultery and murder to cover up his sin. Psalm 51 is an example of what true repentance is about. According to the Scriptures, God forgave David. But he still had consequences due to that sin. The baby that resulted from that sin died. His sons ended up fighting and dividing the kingdom, even rebelling against David. David suffered the consequences of his sin. So will the unfaithful partner suffer for their sins, even though God and you forgive them.

But by this point, one might ask, why is it necessary to forgive to heal? Isn't part of healing that justice is served? Shouldn't he know I'm not going to put up with this behavior? Won't forgiving the offender be sending the message, "I'm not offended or hurt"?

There is a difference between not putting up with a behavior, and the message of forgiveness. As noted above, forgiveness does not negate the consequences of his actions. One of those consequences, if he persists in his sin, is the loss of his spouse. Forgiveness is not a "Get out of jail free" card, rather it is both an opportunity for the offender to change his behavior before worse consequences set in, and the release of the offended from their own sins.

If the offended spouse were to mitigate the consequences of the sin, and not merely forgive, then that would be sending the wrong signal. It is one thing to say, "I'm not going to beat you over the head with this offense you've committed against me for the rest of our lives," but quite another to say, "I will stay by your side and support you, no matter how often you have an affair." One can forgive the spouse for his infidelity even while separating from him because the spouse refuses to give up his infidelity. This allows you to forgive, but not enable his sin by erasing the negative consequences of it.

But forgiveness is more about you than about the offender. It is his opportunity to repent and make right the wrongs he's committed against you. But you can no more control his responses to your forgiveness than you could prevent him from cheating on you. All you really have under your control is yourself. Forgiveness is absolutely necessary for the healing of the offended much more than it is about healing for the offender.

For one who will not forgive is also one who is not forgiven for his own sins. Jesus states this clearly in the parable of the servant who owed his master so much money, there was no way he could ever pay it off even if he worked for the rest of his life. The master forgave the servant the debt. But the servant, either not accepting that he'd been forgiven or too selfish himself, refused to forgive someone who owed him a small amount of money, and had him thrown into prison. The master, upon hearing this, reinstated the money the ungrateful servant had been forgiven because he refused to forgive. Jesus' conclusion to the parable was, "Thus also My heavenly Father will do to you, if you do not forgive each one his brother their trespasses, from your hearts." (Mat 18:35 EMTV).

Jesus also states this clearly in the Lord's Prayer, when we ask God to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." By refusing to forgive, we cut off the grace for our own forgiveness from God. This is because forgiveness is like a river of running water. For the river to flow for you, it must flow for those down the line. That is in part why in the early Church, the prescription for baptizing someone was, if at all possible, to do so in running water. Sins are washed away by the flow of grace. Stop the flow, and you have stagnant water that grows stale and dirty.

It should be noted that this is not so much God saying, "What? You won't forgive? Well, then, I'll show you!" No, God is always ready to forgive. But what happens is if you cannot forgive others, it demonstrates you are unable to receive the forgiveness that God offers. It is like you have the faucet open and water is coming out, and you are drinking it, but the moment someone else wants that water from you, you shut it off so they cannot get any. But then, neither can you get any. So in your refusal to give someone your forgiveness, you cut it off for yourself as well.

It is for this reason that when the woman caught in adultery was put before Jesus by the Pharisees, attempting to trap Jesus, He replied that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. Because they had sins that needed forgiveness, they either forgave her or stood condemned themselves. They all forgave her, and so did Jesus. (John 8:3-11)

Therefore, forgiving is necessary for your own healing, but it is also necessary for the healing of the marriage, if there is to be a chance for that to happen. Forgiveness takes the bitterness and hate off your shoulders for what the other person did to you. If you are going to rebuild the marriage, one key component of that rebuilding is to release yourself from the anger and hate for what they did to you. As long as that is festering, it will not be possible to restore the relationship.

This is why God Himself forgives us in order to restore our relationship with Him. If God was not willing to forgive, there would be no hope for us but death. But because He is willing, there is hope for eternal life with Him. So it is for the spouse. If a spouse remains bitter and hateful to the other, rebuilding will be impossible and the marriage will suffer. Healing will not take place.

For these reasons, it is necessary for the hurt spouse to heal within themselves, and for the marriage to be healed, as well as releasing the unfaithful spouse to have opportunity to heal, that we must seek to forgive the individuals in the affair.

Even the affair partner. You need to forgive them for your own healing. For the bitterness and hate it can generate will poison your spirit and will carry over to the unfaithful spouse. The affair partner is an easy target since you are not reconciling with him, and you hope to never see or speak to him. But the unfaithful spouse and the affair partner, in most all cases, willingly participated together, even if one seduced the other or took advantage of the other's weakness. Hate for the affair partner will transfer to the unfaithful spouse by the fact that he or she joined with him against you. So even harboring unforgiveness toward the affair partner while forgiving the unfaithful spouse will block rebuilding efforts.

This is often seen when the inability to forgive results in the hurt spouse's obsessions over the affair partner, seeking revenge on him, or wanting to punish him. It puts the focus on the affair partner and the wrongs he committed against you and the marriage, instead of on the marriage and working with your unfaithful spouse to heal it. The best way to focus on the marriage and its healing is to forgive the affair partner and then take them off the radar screen.

What about forgiving yourself? Sometimes you see an unfaithful spouse talk about their difficulty in forgiving themselves for what they did. But you can't really forgive yourself. You didn't commit the offense against yourself, but against the hurt spouse and God, as well as the affair partner. What most people who ask this are really concerned about is being able to receive forgiveness. They face their guilt, and have trouble believing that anyone really forgives them for that act. They don't accept that their spouse has forgiven them, or that God forgives them. That can result in shame which causes a "death spiral" affect of encouraging the unfaithful spouse to repeat the unfaithfulness. The only way out of that cycle is to come to a place of accepting forgiveness.

There are two aspects of forgiveness as it relates to infidelity that need to be kept in mind. One, that forgiveness is a process and not a one-time event. Most people will not be ready to forgive upon discovering the affair. Most must go through the stages of grief as it pertains to their loss, and the stages of denial and anger don't lend themselves to an attitude of being ready to forgive. The pain is too fresh and the hurt still being processed to expect an immediate forgiveness. Some can do that, but it is also true that some may short-circuit the grieving process by forgiving too quickly, and in effect end up failing to deal with their anger and hurt. There can be an initial desire to forgive, while not yet knowing all that it entails.

That leads to the other part of the process. We can often think we've forgiven, but then a new layer is peeled back and we must continue to apply forgiveness. We may be faced with the details of what we had forgiven, whereas previously it was generic actions, and feel the hurt once again. Fresh hurt should remind us of our commitment to forgive and applying that fresh each time to release the bitterness and hate it would engender, and the depression that can trip up rebuilding a marriage.

Two, that forgiveness is only effective in healing the marriage if the unfaithful spouse accepts and allows it to change him and the situation. For the problem has never been whether God will or can forgive us for our sins. No, it has always been about whether we are able to accept His forgiveness. For as long as we are not, His forgiveness does us no good.

That is why God gives the following conditions for His forgiveness to be active in healing us in 2 Chronicles 7:14, and therefore what the unfaithful spouse needs to do for the hurt spouse's forgiveness to be effective in healing the marriage:

Humility – if we do not lower ourselves before God, if we think we know better than He does how to live our life, our pride will prevent us from receiving His forgiveness. Indeed, the one key to why most people cannot receive forgiveness nor give forgiveness is their own pride. Pride says, "I don't need your forgiveness, I'm right," to God, and to those we've offended, "My rights have been violated, and I will be given what is due me in retribution." If the unfaithful spouse maintains an attitude of pride and not owning their responsibility in the affair, no forgiveness will be received by the unfaithful spouse.

Pray – if we do not ask, due to that pride, if we do not make request for forgiveness, it shows our unbelief that the offended is or can forgive us. It means you don't believe the forgiver when he says, "I forgive you for what you did to me." So you refuse to even ask for it.

Seek my face – if we do not face the one we've offended and look them in the eye, if we refuse to face the guilt in our lives and desire mercy for what we've done, if we avoid him, don't want to talk about it, ignore him, then we cannot receive his forgiveness and have it be active in healing us and the marriage.

Turn from your wicked ways – if the unfaithful spouse refuses to stop the affair by making no further contact with the affair partner(s), is more concerned about the feelings of the affair partner than he is about his own spouse, if he continues the affair or returns to it, and does not stop doing that which is hurting his spouse and destroying their marriage, the hurt spouse can forgive all he wants, but it will do no good for healing of the marriage. To not stop is to say, in pride, "I am not wrong. I want to do this, my way."

If these things are done, however, we are promised that God will forgive our sins and heal our land. If the hurt spouse is able to get to the point of offering forgiveness to the unfaithful spouse, unless the unfaithful spouse is doing the above, he will not be helped by his spouse's forgiveness nor will he and the marriage be healed.

Forgiveness is not an option if the goal is healing of the hurt spouse, the unfaithful spouse, and the marriage itself. While the hurt spouse may not be ready to forgive immediately, it does have to happen at some point in the healing process for the relationship to be restored as it should be. Additionally, the unfaithful partner needs to do the things necessary to receive that forgiveness or they put their own healing and that of the marriage in jeopardy.

Jesus stated it clearly: Then Peter came to Him and said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy-seven times." (Mat 18:21-22 EMTV)

To heal, we must forgive and accept forgiveness. It is not an option if the goal is to heal.

Serial Cheaters

2014-09-01T05:21:00.000-05:00

The term serial cheater gets thrown around a good bit. Often I think people misuse the term. How do you know if someone qualifies as a serial cheater, and if they do, how can it be handled?

What is a Serial Cheater?

I've searched, but not found an official definition. So I've compiled one by adapting the definition of a serial killer. The standard definition of a serial killer is:

A serial killer is, traditionally, a person who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time (a "cooling off period") between the murders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_killer

My adaption would read:

A serial cheater is a person who has committed acts of marital infidelity--against a person they are bonded to physically and/or emotionally--with three or more people separated by time-gaps between each one.

This would differ from a cheating spree where a person commits infidelity with three or more in rapid succession, or from mass cheating where affairs happen concurrently.

There is a little more gray area, however. When someone is murdered, the fact the victim died is pretty black and white. He either is or he isn't. While the definition of cheating is fairly well held, there are a lot more variations. There are boundaries one can cross that tend to lead to cheating but in and of themselves are not.

I'll use a personal example. I frequently had lunch with a female coworker for a period of time. Neither of us wanted to eat alone. Frequently it would just be me and her at a restaurant.

Strictly speaking, we were crossing a boundary that often leads to cheating. Yet, we never discussed any marital problems, or anything about sex, or ever went any further with the relationship other than being friends who worked together and ate lunch together often. I never cheated, but a third party might have decided we were cheating because so many in that situation easily fall into it.

So even though I have a definition, people could differ about whether a particular person fits this definition based on their understanding of what cheating is.

Why Do We Need to Label People with the Term?

It shouldn't be for the sake of labeling someone, rather to know how to treat and help the unfaithful spouse. There are different types of cheating and the type of solutions that will address it will vary.

One night stand
Prostitution
Online chats, text or video
Phone/chat sex
Sharing photos or other intimate things online
Phone/Skype emotional relationship
Physical, sexual play
Adultery
Multiple affairs
Serial Cheaters

The motivation for serial killers easily applies to serial cheating:

The motivation for serial killing is usually based on psychological gratification. Most of the killings involve sexual contact with the victim, but the FBI states that motives for serial murder include "anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_killer

Let's look at the FBI motives in more detail.

Anger

Anger derives from feeling your "rights" have been violated. What one considers their rights comes from how they were raised, their own experiences, as well as expectations that have developed as they grew up. Often these are informed by parental influence. It derives from the violation of one's sense of righteousness.

In terms of serial cheating, ongoing anger with one's spouse could be prompting a serial cheater to continued cheating. Whenever things aren't going exactly as they'd like, their response to dealing with it is anger, and then lashing back in a passive-aggressive manner by cheating on their spouse. It becomes the means to sooth the anger in them.

If this is the motivation, learning new responses to anger via anger management help can break them out of their cycle of destructive response patterns.

Thrill

There are several types of thrills that could fall under this motivation. In all cases, it involves a person succumbing to the temptation of an addictive thrill, and repeating it enough until it becomes a psychological addiction. Following are three of the common thrills.

The "new relationship" thrill is well documented. Otherwise known as infatuation. Often mistaken for "true love," given time the excitement dies off, and the serial cheater becomes vulnerable to the next opportunity when "chemistry" shoots the thrill-factor red-lining again. Then it's onto the next person that provides that thrill.

Another common thrill is the sexual thrill. Often, especially men, the serial cheater is addicted to getting the next sexual high. The longer they have sex with someone, like their spouse, the more "ho hum" it becomes. Due to the Coolidge Effect, a new sexual partner can provide a sexual high that the long-time partner can't hope to compete with. Someone addicted to this thrill will always need a new partner if they hope to get the sexual high they crave.

Some serial cheaters are addicted to the sense of power provided by the affair. One, the desire, and often manipulation of the affair partner to keep them on the hook. Two, the power over their spouse based upon pulling off an affair behind their backs. The thrill of secrecy gives the serial cheater a sense of power over their spouse who is kept in the dark. Knowledge is power. To get away with it without being caught provides its own sense of superiority.

The solution in this case will require extensive help to break the addictive pattern, establish boundaries, manage temptations, and restructure one's thinking patterns and life to find alternate means of satisfaction.

Financial Gain

For cheating, the most obvious financial gain is prostitution or the porn industry. A popular motivation for women, but affecting many men as well. Selling one's body and getting paid for it can fuel continued cheating for a spouse desiring that money.

But that isn't the only way. Some people seek out affairs, especially with a person who has some disposable income, in order to get financial help from them. They've discovered that when someone is deep in infatuation, they will "loan" money more readily, or flat out give it away for a perceived need. The affair partner will buy them things, take them out to eat, and lavish other gifts, often without asking.

Serial cheating in this case can also be long cheating sprees and/or mass cheating. The more they can juggle, the more money they can get. The solution to heal this type of cheating is a reordering of priorities, and learning how to adequately take care of financial needs through legitimate means.

Attention Seeking

This one is a bigger factor in serial cheating than it is in serial murders. Even non-serial cheating often starts with this desire. Based upon a low self-esteem, such people find the interest and desire of others for them exhilarating. It could be listed as another type of thrill mentioned above.

Such a serial cheater craves the affirmation of others that they are worth something. To have someone admire their body, pursue them, thus indicating that they can sexually attract someone, is affirming to their self-worth. The spouse's affirmation is often insufficient because they have been that way for maybe several years. It is old news. However, the continual stream of new people who find them desirable is exciting.

The end result of frequent flirting and encouraging this type of relationship with people is some are going to take the flirter up on it. Not only is someone saying they want the flirter, but they are ready to do it with them. It creates a more intense attention-seeking response from the cheater, making an affair hard to resist and inevitable. If you play with fire, you will eventually get burned.

The route to healing this type of serial cheating is through building a stronger self-esteem, establishing firm relationship boundaries, and seeing the need for attention as a negative impact upon their life and desire to change that thinking pattern with help.

Not All Cheaters are Serial Cheaters

Some people sling the label "serial cheater" around too freely. There are two dangers to doing so.

One, the diagnosis of a stranger on the Internet based upon little information can label someone in such a way they don't believe there is hope for themselves. Someone who has cheated once, or even twice, doesn't fit the profile of a serial cheater as defined here. I'd also include multiple on-line emotional affairs grouped into a limited time period as not being a serial cheater. It might classify them as having had a cheating spree, but not necessarily serial. But I often hear someone labeled as a serial cheater because they cheated twice, often with the same affair partner.

Two, even if the label applies, its use can denote to the cheater that their situation is hopeless. A serial cheater is just who they are, so they might as well go with the flow. Many of them have given up fighting it a long time ago if it has been chronic. The label confirms in their mind that they are hopeless, so why even try to do something about it?

If the label applies, they need to realize they can change. With a lot of work and dedication, they can break out of the serial pattern of behavior if they seek out help and dedicate themselves to the process.

If the label doesn't apply, applying it can cause someone who isn't one yet to become one by giving up and accepting the meaning of the label as who they are.

While one can talk about serial cheating in general as I've done here--to help someone realize they need to get serious help--it is best to leave the diagnosis of specific individuals to qualified therapists and psychologist. It is too risky to become responsible for contributing to someone's lack of healing through applying defining labels that do little to help the other person.

How would you define serial cheating?

Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse - Uncooperative Unfaithful Spouse

2014-08-07T14:48:00.000-05:00

------------------------

In the two previous articles, we've discussed the general healing steps for the hurt spouse, and the healing steps for the hurt spouse who has a cooperative unfaithful spouse. Now we want to turn our attention to the healing steps a hurt spouse can do when their unfaithful partner isn't so cooperative.

Keep in mind what we mean by cooperative, and how sometimes there are gray areas. But in general, he is uncooperative if he is not doing most of the healing steps for the unfaithful spouse, like being transparent, maintaining no contact with the affair partner(s), being willing to answer the hurt spouse's questions and concerns, etc. In other words, he is doing more rug sweeping, blame-shifting, and excuse making than working to face and deal with the affair issues head on.

When an unfaithful spouse isn't cooperative, many of the steps outlined in dealing with a cooperative unfaithful spouse will either not be effective or perhaps counterproductive. Consider the following example. You come down with cancer. After some screenings and tests, the doctor says that the cancer is spreading through the breast. So he recommends waiting to see what it will do.

"What?" you may say. "You're crazy! Operate now and cut out that breast before it spreads further!" Wait very long, and the patient isn't likely to survive. But what if the doctor said instead, "There is some cancer, but it appears to be in remission. Still, I recommend cutting out the breast." Well, that isn't much better. If it is in remission, wait and see if it goes away on its own, or gets localized enough that a simple surgery to remove the mass will effectively get rid of it. No need to lose the breast when you don't need to.

In short, the treatment for a more severe situation wouldn't work so well with a "cooperative" cancer, and likewise the treatment for a less serious cancerous situation would be too little, too late for a severe situation. The treatment should match the situation. Same for this.

Using these steps on a cooperative unfaithful spouse could backfire, causing them to lose hope. While using the steps for a cooperative unfaithful spouse on an uncooperative unfaithful spouse will either do little to promote good healing, or could make the unfaithful spouse think everything is going good when it isn't. The hurt spouse could end up sending the wrong signals to the unfaithful spouse.

The goal of these steps is to move an uncooperative unfaithful spouse into being a cooperative unfaithful spouse. In other words, if these steps are successful, they will be temporary and not long term solutions. Once the unfaithful spouse starts being cooperative in an area, you will want to shift to the cooperative steps, at least for that one area.

The only situation where these become permanent is if the unfaithful spouse doesn't respond, never becomes cooperative, and the marriage ends in divorce. That possibility should be kept in mind. There are no guarantees that an uncooperative unfaithful spouse will respond positively to these steps and become cooperative. If he is too far gone, he may push further away instead of change course. In which case, there is little you could have done anyway.

However, there is another goal in these steps. We spoke of it in the general steps. You want to approach the uncooperative unfaithful spouse with the same attitude and control as with a cooperative: using respect, confidence, and a sense of your own security established, even if you don't feel it is there. These steps help you to take a reasoned approach and response. If you react with yelling, fighting, extreme emotions, that will not be effective in demonstrating the attitude needed to convince the unfaithful spouse that he needs to take stock and change course. Let him yell and show anger. But if you remain calm, collected, and controlled, what signal does that send?

One, you are serious and not playing around. He either gets on board or he's going to find himself one spouse short. Nothing is more unsettling than someone stating something serious without yelling. Think of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. He didn't yell it, but you knew he was about to pull trigger if you pressed him when he said, "Go ahead, make my day." It will be even more unsettling if your normal mode of operation has been to yell and fight when these subjects come up. It will say to your spouse, "I'm done playing games. This is it."

Two, it shows that you are not making decisions based on emotion, but reasoned thought. If you are yelling, he'll figure you'll get over it. You're just flying off the handle, and you'll change your mind within an hour or day of cooling off. But if there is no emotional display, he will realize this comes from something deeper than just being hurt, but an inner decision that you are emotionally disconnecting from him. He is no longer worth getting angry about. That will create even more unnerving because it sends a clear signal to the uncooperative unfaithful spouse that the time clock is ticking, and he'll either need to make a strong commitment and stick to it, or watch as the train pulls out of the station without him.

It might help if we look at it using the analogy Shirley Glass uses in Not Just Friends. In that book, she uses the analogy of windows to show how even an emotional affair ends up stealing intimacy from one's spouse. For when an unfaithful spouse opens a window to another person that should only be opened to his spouse, he will end up closing that window to his spouse. Each secret is a window closed, and each transparency point a window opened into his soul. When he opens a window to another person that he knows his spouse would not approve of, he'll tend to hide it from her, closing her off to that part of his life. Because of that, the unfaithful spouse distances himself from their spouse, even if he never tells and the spouse never finds out. He ends up having a dark secret that he won't tell the person he's supposed to be closest to.

Take that concept, and put it in the hands of the hurt spouse. By closing some windows on the unfaithful spouse, you are communicating to him two things.

One, that you are reflecting the reality of the situation. He is closed off to you, so you respond by closing off from him. The more open he is with you, the more open you are with him. The more closed off he stays, the more closed off you become. You are simply reflecting reality back to them.

Two, you are creating in him a feeling of distance from you. This realization of a growing distance between you convinces him of something many unfaithful spouses have told themselves wouldn't happen in their affair fog: their spouse will leave them. When they begin to get the sense it is headed down that road, it serves as a wake up call for many unfaithful spouses. What they didn't think would happen is happening, and the abstract idea turns into a concrete reality. Failing to make a commitment to rebuild ends up making the decision to leave if he doesn't act. That is exactly what you want to accomplish. To stop the rug sweeping of the issues and force him to face and deal with them so that healing can move forward. Because until that happens, not much else can.

You'll see some relationship between these steps and the 180: a series of steps to help someone recovering from an affair. The same principles apply there as they do here, to hopefully move the unfaithful spouse to a more cooperative posture with the hurt spouse in healing, and if not, to emotionally prepare the hurt spouse for the eventual separation. So here are the steps I'd recommend a hurt spouse take if you've determined that your unfaithful spouse is not being cooperative in rebuilding:

1) Respond to emotional distance with emotional distance. As mentioned above, it communicates the reality to the unfaithful spouse. It often isn't easy to see what you are doing or communicating to another person until that same message gets communicated back to you. What you don't want to communicate to the unfaithful spouse is that everything is okay. That is unfortunately what many hurt spouses end up communicating. They try to win the unfaithful spouse back, which only pushes them away further. Why? Because that affection either rings as not true ("How could you feel that way after what I did to you?") or as confirming that he is on the right track because he is being rewarded for the path he is on.

The bulk of the 180's suggestions are designed with this idea in mind. Don't call him frequently, don't talk about the future, don't plan dates with him, etc. Instead, you make as little contact as possible and when you do, stick to the business at hand or the kids. Avoid any conversations about the relationship or where it is going. Only open up as much as he opens up to you. If he opens a window, you open a window. If he shuts one, you shut one.

2) Be clear and honest in how you feel. That might seem to be going against the first, but not really. When he does open a window, be clear in your feelings. Avoid blaming, pointing fingers, but say what you really feel. Don't pull any punches. You don't want to beat around the bush about how you feel when the opportunity arises to do so. But again, convey them in as unemotional a manner as you can. Think of Sargent Friday's "Just the facts, ma'am" attitude and demeanor. If the unfaithful spouse starts responding in anger or blame-shifting, all you need to say is, "I don't agree, I'm only telling you how I feel." He can't really argue with how you feel. You feel what you feel. If he doesn't know how you feel, he can't be expected to adapt himself to address it.

3) Schedule some events without the spouse. Schedule an outing with friends or relatives. Don't set up any kind of dating relationship. Avoid feeling like you want to get back at him by showing him how it feels. It is too easy for you to end up falling into she same trap as he did and puts you on his level, greatly complicating any chance of rebuilding and saving the marriage. But do go out and have some fun without him by your side. It will send him the clear message that you will be able to have fun and move on with your life without the unfaithful spouse if that's what it comes to.

4) Separate your financial accounts. Set up and fund your own bank account that your spouse doesn't have access to. Add money to it regularly as a financial security blanket. This has a practical as well as motivational basis. Not only does it make clear that you are becoming more independent, but if the unfaithful spouse doesn't become cooperative and the marriage comes to an end, you won't be left holding an empty money bag.

Additionally, in many cases the unfaithful spouse is spending money on the affair partner. Sequestering some or most of the money away ensures he won't end up spending it all and leaving you with unpaid bills. "But won't he be doing the same thing?" Yes, and it is likely he has already done so before you found out about the affair, in order to hide his spending and tipping you off about the hotel bills you don't know about. Because he is doing that, you need your own as well. Remember, respond in equal portion to the degree he is responding to you.

5) Have an initial consultation with a lawyer. "But I don't believe in divorce," you may respond. "I don't need to do that step." You may not believe in it, but that doesn't mean your spouse won't push you into one. It takes two to make a marriage, and if one spouse has given up, for whatever reason, no amount of not believing is going to stop the divorce from happening.

What you want to do here is prepare for the worst. The unfaithful spouse doesn't even need to know you've done this. But if push comes to shove and the divorce comes, either because you or the unfaithful spouse decide he wants out and won't consider anything else, you need to be aware of your options legally in your state and/or country. If you don't know, you are at a disadvantage if and when it happens. As long as the unfaithful spouse is uncooperative, the possibility of ending in divorce is always present. Better to be prepared and not need to use that information than to be caught flatfooted and lose some important concessions you could have had.

6) Assume the unfaithful spouse is still cheating. The only way you can be assured that the unfaithful spouse is maintaining no contact and the affair is over is if he is totally transparent and ready to talk about it. If he is hiding anything, it is a sure sign he doesn't want you to see something incriminating. He'll say it will hurt you, which is all the more reason to consider the affair still ongoing. Until the unfaithful spouse becomes cooperative, there is no way to verify that the affair is over. There is no trust level that the hurt spouse can have in any statements by the unfaithful spouse to the contrary.

If the affair is really over, his actions would demonstrate that. You can't believe any denial of a continuing affair until he's proved himself by opening up his full life to you without reservation. Even then, it will take some time for the hurt spouse to stop feeling like he might still be cheating. But as long as he is closed off and uncooperative, assume he is still cheating. Then future revelations will not be such a surprise and you will keep a real distance from him that reflects the reality.

7) Refrain from a sexual relationship with the unfaithful spouse and get tested for STDs. This one goes along with #1 above, in that obviously if you are creating emotional distance, refraining from sex is one way to do that. But it can be one of the harder to do depending on the person and has more consequences, which is why I'm highlighting it.

First, if the possibility exists that he is still cheating (see #6), then you do not want to reward the unfaithful spouse by also having sex with them. He needs to know that he cannot have both. Until you feel secure that the affair has ended, it would be counter-productive for you to continue a normal sexual relationship with him. Because sex is a commitment to another person, whether he means it that way or not, to be bonded with him, to have children with him. Because even in the most careful situations there is always the possibility of a child that binds the two together. Even an abortion doesn't erase that fact. Having sex with someone other than one's spouse destroys that bond with the spouse. Until you can know you are the only one, it is destructive to the other spouse to continue to give yourself to him sexually.

But the more practical reason is also because if the unfaithful spouse is still sleeping with others, there is the potential at any time, if not already true, that he could pass an STD to you from someone else. Even with a cooperative unfaithful spouse it is a good idea to get tested for any STDs, but especially if you feel he hasn't ended the affair yet. If you do have any STDs from the affair(s), it could be a bone of contention in any possible divorce proceedings. If the tests don't reveal any STDs, you at least don't want to continue subjecting yourself to the "Russian Roulette" of the STD gun by continuing to have sex with your spouse. Not until you are confident he has stopped any relationship with another, has been tested for STDs, and is clean.

When you do feel the unfaithful spouse is ready to commit to a totally exclusive relationship with you again, make it clear that by having sex with you, that he is making an irrevocable commitment to you of fidelity, and that failure to keep that will have serious consequences as far as the marriage goes.

"But what if you believe they've had only had an emotional affair and there was no sexual relationship?" First, can you really trust that he hasn't? Many unfaithful spouses do the "trickle truth" where they don't tell you everything up front, so they'll say they talked, maybe held hands, but didn't have sex. But then in a few months you find out evidence they met in a hotel room, or other piece of evidence that suggests the likelihood of a sexual relationship was high.

Keep in mind, we're only talking here about an uncooperative unfaithful spouse, not a cooperative one. If he is still hiding things from you, the likelihood he has told you everything is slim. If he is not being cooperative, you can only assume he is still hiding the full story from you, and you'll have to assume there was physical contact until the time you feel fairly confident there wasn't. Which usually doesn't happen until some months have passed in a healthy rebuilding with a cooperative unfaithful spouse. Once the unfaithful spouse has become cooperative and has made a firm commitment to rebuilding the marriage and not being with anyone else, only then can the hurt spouse feel confident in resuming sexual relations with him.

Second, an emotional affair in most cases involves mental adultery. That is, even when one has refrained from sex with an affair partner, there is usually an inner desire to do so, whether it ever gets fulfilled or not. Sometimes it is denied by the unfaithful spouse even to themselves, but other times it is a conscious thought, "I would love to get her in bed."

My wife sex chatted with several men during her affairs. I happened to read through some of the communications she had on MySpace. One in particular she sounded like she was ready to hop into bed with him. When I told her about that, she denied it. Said she would have never done anything with him, and didn't think she encouraged him. I told her she most certainly did encourage him. When she went back and read the message in question, she couldn't believe it. She literally had told him when he talked about coming to our city to meet her and what he would do to her sexually, that she would really like that experience. She hadn't realized at the time just how much she really sounded like she wanted to have him.

But the fact is, if there is desire, it is an adulterous affair even if the deed is never done. Even if the person only liked their company, spending that amount of time texting and talking, having much more intimate communication than with his spouse opens a marital window to someone other than his spouse and is moving toward the eventual destination of at least wanting to have sex with this person, if not actually doing it.

8) Use separation if needed. Sometimes it is hard to establish minimal contact with the unfaithful spouse due to tight living quarters, both working from home, or other issues. It is generally recommended if you find yourself in shouting fights with the unfaithful spouse and hard to avoid them, a time of separation is in order.

The downsides to separation are you can no longer keep track of the unfaithful spouse's activities as before. There is no easy way short of hiring a private investigator to keep watch over his apartment, to know that his affair partner isn't stopping by for regular visits. He is free to go out on the town and stay out until the wee hours of the morning without worrying that you'll find out about it.

Even if the affair partner is sleeping over, there is one reality that the unfaithful spouse experiences in all of this: what life will be like without the spouse and the children, if any. It may take a while, but at some point he'll feel the loss of his marriage and the kids. That can also get contrasted with the now easily available affair partner. Waking up to them may not be as exciting as those secret meetings in the night.

I wouldn't try this first thing, but if putting some emotional distance between you yields no significant results, then if it simply hasn't sunk into the unfaithful spouse's head that the marriage train is about to leave the station and he hasn't boarded it, this can make that reality more real. A final warning shot over his bow saying, "I'm not waiting much longer. Either get aboard or it's bye bye." If a separation doesn't wake him up, then there's not much that will.

If he decides to come back from a separation, this is your opportunity to lay out the conditions for their return. Write down a "contract" of sorts, listing out your expectations, the length of time any will last if applicable, and what happens if the unfaithful spouse fails to live up to those expectations. It is easy to say, "Yes, I'll be transparent," but much harder when the hurt spouse has their hand out, wanting their cell phone, to give it to him because the unfaithful spouse may have some embarrassing material on it. Once he is back in the house, it will be much easier for him to go back on their commitment thinking you won't really follow through or throw them out for it. So be prepared to do just that, should it come down to it.

What you don't want to do is have him come back in without extracting some serious commitments about how things are going to be. The only way to move them to being a cooperative unfaithful spouse is to establish the steps he'll need to take to get there. Moving back in from a separation is the most leverage you will have as a hurt spouse to accomplish that goal. Don't waste it.

9) Reward movement toward being cooperative. Assuming these steps have the desired affect, and the unfaithful spouse becomes cooperative, respond by also opening that window so that he will know he is on the right track. But you may need to open the window slowly, in shifts, until it is fully open.

For example, let's say the unfaithful spouse has been reluctant to become fully transparent. But due to you not being full transparent with the unfaithful spouse, he begins to realize if he wants to keep you, he needs to do that. So he lets you see his cell phone, text messages, Facebook account, giving you the passwords, etc. Let's say you set up that private bank account. You may at that point decide to tell him that you have it. You might avoid telling him at what bank, or how much is in it, or any other details. But you've cracked the window open.

Then a couple of weeks down the road, you discover a secret Facebook account that he didn't tell you about. You shut the window back down and say nothing more about the bank account. Wouldn't even hurt to use a little gas lighting on them, "I never said anything about a bank account. You must have been dreaming." Or maybe after a couple of weeks, it appears nothing new has come about, and you can find no evidence of further hiding, you might reveal which bank the account is at. And so on.

You may not want to use a secret bank account to start with, this was just an example of what I meant by opening the window in phases and rewarding the unfaithful spouse. It could be anything, to more willingness to discuss the marriage, to sharing your email and Facebook passwords as well. As he moves in the right directions, you want to reward him by opening your own windows in response to him opening his. Remember that a window open to you is one closed to the affair partner.

10) Keep the goals in sight, and avoid shifting to new one's. What I mean by this is sometimes in dealing with these type of steps to gain emotional distance in response to the unfaithful spouse's emotional distance, it can lead a hurt spouse to shift their goal from saving the marriage to getting out of it. Sometimes it is a subtle shift, but a shift nonetheless.

You can detect it when you fail to respond to the unfaithful spouse's positive advances in being cooperative. Instead of opening windows, you keep them shut. The emotional distance can feel like freedom to a hurt spouse filled with anger, who is having trouble dealing with the reality of what the unfaithful spouse did. The hurt spouse may find safety in not depending on the spouse for their sense of security. In the beginning days, it is natural to feel that way. He's hurt you, and you don't trust him to not do it again. So when he makes that movement to more honesty and openness, it isn't easy for the hurt spouse to feel good about opening himself up in response.

But when the hurt spouse stays there for weeks, months, or even years, whether he has consciously made a decision to rebuild or not, it is in effect a decision to end the marriage. Just as an unfaithful spouse needs to be cooperative for rebuilding and healing to work, so does a hurt spouse need to cooperate and respond with the unfaithful spouse. If the goal to help the unfaithful spouse move toward being cooperative and rebuilding the marriage is lost sight of, and the hurt spouse gets stuck in the security of being distant so he doesn't get hurt again, that is in effect a decision to end the marriage. It might take a while, but at some point the unfaithful spouse will give up and the marriage will end.

Unfaithful spouses need to be aware that it may take the hurt spouse some time to deal with what has happened to him. These are situations that take months to heal, and that's if everything is done to heal as discussed earlier. If it takes a few months for the unfaithful spouse to open up and be transparent, willing to discuss all aspects of the affair until the hurt spouse is satisfied, and for the unfaithful spouse to really accept his responsibility in the affair and work diligently to heal himself, that adds onto the time it will take for the hurt spouse to heal. For he can't heal until the affair is over. For the hurt spouse, it isn't over until he feels it is over.

That said, hurt spouses have a responsibility if they have committed to rebuilding the marriage. It isn't a good idea to say, "Yes, I'm willing to rebuild," but then when it comes down to it, shift goals on the unfaithful spouse. There are always things that the hurt spouse doesn't anticipate, feelings he didn't realize he would have. Obsessive thoughts that he has a hard time dealing with. Those are all going to happen, and if the unfaithful spouse is fully on board with rebuilding, he will expect and stay with you as you go through them. But if the hurt spouse stands in the way of healing, at some point the unfaithful spouse will lose hope and stop trying.

If, however, you keep the goals in mind when you are doing these steps, they will become ways to help the unfaithful spouse see your seriousness about the broken marriage and get serious himself, and if possible, move him from an uncooperative unfaithful spouse to a cooperative one. Because the ultimate goal is healing, and an uncooperative unfaithful spouse will not bring healing.

That concludes the three articles on the "Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse. They are not intended to be comprehensive by any means, but will give the hurt spouse some stepping stones to further progress and perspectives to see the next steps to be taken.

Also, use these steps in the three articles at your own risk. That is, these are my best steps to healing, but there are no guarantees when dealing with people, nor can I foresee every possible outcome from using these steps. They may or may not work for any one individual situation. Each person, knowing their circumstances and those involved, should evaluate and use them at their discretion, and preferably with the aid of a counselor. But I think in general, these are the paths to healing for the hurt spouse. I pray they will be helpful.

Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse – Cooperative Unfaithful Spouse

2014-07-29T04:31:00.001-05:00

------------------------

The previous chapter looked at the general steps a hurt spouse needs to take for healing to occur. In this chapter, we want to take a closer look at the specific steps a hurt spouse can take toward healing with an unfaithful spouse who is cooperative.

First, what do I mean by cooperative? Does that mean he does everything he should do, right off the bat, perfectly? No, since few will ever do it perfectly, and the healing process is more a series of steps. By cooperative, I mean an unfaithful spouse who is actively working toward healing by consciously taking the steps to heal. Those steps are listed in the "Healing Steps for the UnfaithfulSpouse". His attitude should be one of humility and repentance, rather than sweeping it under the rug and blame shifting. If he is willing to face the consequences of his actions and stick with it for however long it may take to help the hurt spouse heal, up to at least two years or more, and he takes the steps in progressive manner, he is cooperating.

An unfaithful spouse may start out cooperative but grow weary of the struggle and pain. It isn't easy. He may give up and withdraw at some point and become uncooperative. Likewise, an unfaithful spouse can start out uncooperative, but become cooperative as the affair loses its hold on him. Sometimes an otherwise cooperative unfaithful spouse on some issues will become uncooperative on others.

A warning is appropriate here. An unfaithful spouse can sometimes appear cooperative, but is doing it as a front to please you, to get you to settle down, but he is still either planning on getting back with the affair partner or is still secretly seeing the affair partner. All you have to go on is what you can see until you discover evidence to suggest he is putting on a front and being manipulative. You'll have to judge his attitude and decide which path to take. When he gets caught still headed down the wrong road, and you realize he hasn't been honest in his cooperation, then shift over to the uncooperative unfaithful spouse's path.

When it comes down to it, trust your gut. Maybe he appears cooperative on the outside, but the sixth-sense in your gut tells you something is not right. Get evidence before acting on it, but if your gut is sounding a warning, pay attention to it. Start investigating the warning. It will generally give you a good clue whether your spouse is being cooperative or not.

Also, an explanation about this path. It may seem to some that by doing some of these things, you are giving the unfaithful spouse a "free pass" and letting him off easy. But that is not the case. If your unfaithful spouse is responsive to rebuilding, the goal of these steps is to give the unfaithful spouse the best chance at succeeding. The rebuilding process for the unfaithful spouse is painful enough if he does it like he should. But if he doesn't respect the opportunity you are giving him and he violates it, then you move to the next list. But as long as he is doing what he needs to, the goal is to entice him to continue to do the right things, to work on rebuilding, and to stay honest with you about what is going on with him.

As mentioned in the previous article, the better he does, the more freedom he gets. If they blow it, then the restrictions get a little tighter to motivate him to straighten up, that this is serious, and you will not allow him to walk over you or your feelings. So keep in mind that these are steps with an unfaithful spouse who is cooperative. The steps change when they are no longer cooperative.

Also, this is assuming that you have already laid out expectations and consequences as mentioned in the previous article. Here are the steps.

1) Think in terms of stages in healing. There are things you expect to happen pretty quick after discovery day. Most will list that the unfaithful spouse must become "transparent," which means he gives the hurt spouse the passwords and user names for all his accounts that are allowed to stay open, their email, social networking sites, and any cell phones and cell phone bills. Also, he is willing to discuss all aspects of the affair as needed. The unfaithful spouse has lost trust, and this is the only way to earn it back.

Also, the unfaithful spouse is expected to break all ties and contact with the affair partner pretty quickly. He is usually given a chance to tell the affair partner that the affair has been discovered and is cutting off all contact with her. But after that goodbye, nada. That is usually hard for the unfaithful spouse. From the hurt spouse's point of view, it is an illegitimate relationship that should have never happened in the first place, so the hurt spouse tends to not have much sympathy for the unfaithful spouse's struggles. But you can have empathy here as we discussed in the previous article, and know that because it isn't easy, most unfaithful spouses will have a period of time in coming to terms with this. Yet it is expected to happen fairly quickly after discovery day. The unfaithful spouse needs to understand that for the hurt spouse, until no contact is established, the affair is not over and no healing can happen.

But there are other things that the unfaithful spouse may hold onto at first, but need to change at some point. Whether the hurt spouse is willing to wait for those to happen would be spelled out in the expectations you've discussed with him. To avoid a lot of words to describe what I mean, I'll give an example from my experience.

Lenita had some pictures of both Clyde and Bubba. I told her early on that she needed to get rid of them, but she was reluctant. At that point, she still felt like she wanted to keep something to remember them by. I could have demanded she delete them and forced her to comply. But I also knew that doing so might push her to save some in a hidden place because she wasn't ready. Also, I had an ulterior motive for not pushing her. I wanted some things left to her decision so I could gauge whether she was making progress or not. I knew if she came to the place where she was ready to get rid of them, not only would she actually get rid of them all, but I would know she had arrived at a milestone. That didn't happen until around three months after discovery day.

As time went by, she dug deeper and made other changes that served to cut off remembrance of the affair partners that I couldn't have possibly known about or demanded so easily. She started guarding her thoughts, so when her thoughts turned to thinking about the affair partners, she took steps to distract herself and not focus on them.

It will mean more if your unfaithful spouse comes to some things on his own volition. Doesn't mean you don't express your desires on a point, as I did with Lenita, but I didn't press her to do it right then. If he is moving in the right directions, assume he'll get there, and it will confirm he is on the right course when he does it.

It is also important because you can only focus on so much at one time and implement it. Throw too many changes at someone too fast, and it can backfire. The more you can change together, cooperatively, the better.

As you evaluate things, decide what needs should be implemented immediately, and what types of changes you want the unfaithful spouse to make later when they are ready. If he is cooperative, then you are working together, so you want the minimum number of ultimatums possible. Only those things that have to happen to solve the immediate crisis of the affair trauma and to start the required healing should be required within the first weeks of discovering the affair. But if a certain item is causing you additional trauma, then communicate that a trigger is preventing you from healing. Be open and honest with the unfaithful spouse. You need to be transparent with him, just as he needs to be with you.

2) Praise successes. Make note of them. Highlight them. They will encourage you both to acknowledge progress. It is easy for the hurt spouse to allow negative emotions to overpower any and all positive movements forward. The hurt spouse will have a tendency to avoid praise for fear of seeming to act like the affair wasn't that bad. However, if an unfaithful spouse never receives acknowledgment for what he's done right, he can become disheartened over time and give up. Don't hand out false praise, but acknowledging his successes in rebuilding not only encourage him to keep moving forward, but encourage you as well.

3) Focus on healing the marriage as well as the affair. This one is critical. Sometimes, due to an uncooperative unfaithful spouse, healing the marriage gets put on the back burner. But with a cooperative unfaithful spouse, while not accepting that the affair was caused by marital problems, you will want to take this opportunity to deal with those issues. You have more motivation now to make major changes in the way you relate to each other in marriage than ever before.

Aside from the obvious benefit to the relationship itself, there is an affair related reason to focus on this when you have a cooperative unfaithful spouse. It significantly increases the chances of rebuilding succeeding. Willard F. Harley reports in his book, His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage, that in his practice of working with couples who have experienced infidelity, using the traditional methods of therapy, he had about a 40% success rate of them staying together, which is average. Some of those not happily staying together. But when he started focusing on helping them to rekindle the romantic fires in their relationships and working on the marriage itself, his success rate rose above 60%.

When you think about it logically, it makes sense. The stronger your marital bonds emotionally, spiritually, and physically are going into an affair, the more stability you have to weather the storms that an affair brings to the marriage. Marital problems may not be the cause of an affair, but focusing on them is part of the solution.

One of the key events that needs to happen for successful rebuilding is for the couple to "fall in love" again. Renew the fires of romance. Because there is no better healing for the hurt spouse than to feel his spouse is excited about him once again and wants him exclusively, and no better antidote to the unfaithful spouse yearning for the excitement of the affair partner and missing them than a burning love for his spouse. Several of the following suggestions will be toward that goal.

4) Spend around 15 hours a week together, minimum. Think about it. When you both first started your relationship, when you dated and became engaged, what did you do, primarily? One, you spent every bit of free time together, and two, you thought about each other all the time.

For the unfaithful spouse, this should be obvious, because that is exactly what he was doing with his affair partner. The reason that seemed so new and exciting was because he probably spent minimal time with his spouse, and when he did, it was often dealing with unpleasant things. "Honey, take out the trash. Honey, pay the bills. Honey, when is dinner going to be ready? Honey, do you have the money for Johnny's band trip?" Often the time is not spent gazing into each other's eyes over a romantic dinner, but dealing with the day to day stuff, and otherwise focused in your own worlds.

When you and he first met, naturally you focused on each other. You wanted to talk about your issues, thought the world of him and he of you, and he became the focus of your world. That was exciting. So what did you do? You spent as much time as possible with him. On the phone. Texting. In person. Emails. Facebook. Wherever you could fit it in. I can bet that you didn't talk about bills, trash, kids, or other such responsibilities for any length of time, if any.

"What are we going to do?" You'll need to figure that out, but in reality, it doesn't matter. If you can find an activity you both like, great. If not, let her pick one that the man will do with her, and the man pick one that she'll do. The point being, begin treating him as important, worth spending your time with. He should be the most important person in your life. How you spend your free time should reflect that priority. Then when the other person picks up that they are important to you, it will translate into the same excitement, and return that importance back to you.

What you'll find, whether it is just sitting at a Sonic sipping a coke, or working out together at the gym, or shopping together, or participating in a sport together, or having sex, is that it will engender those same romantic fires that originally got things rolling when you started dating. And please, don't focus mostly on the day to day stuff or once past the first month or two, on the affairs. Focus on your relationship, your future together, what you want to do, what your goals are, share your dreams.

At first, the affair will likely dominate your discussions, but at some point, you'll want to move beyond that. Bring up issues when needed, but remember, the goal is to rekindle romantic fires here and draw you both closer together, not always focusing on the hard and painful things. But if you spend that kind of time together, you'll find it easier to talk about the things that need talking about, and reestablishing the emotional bonds of marriage that will be a reward, making stronger bond to deal with the more painful parts of the rebuilding process.

5) Go to marriage counseling. If you want to discover from a more objective view where your marriage is weak, a great place to start is a marriage counselor in addition to seeing a counselor for individual help. They can help you spot weaknesses, and offer ways to improve them. The affair will likely play into it at first as far as issues to deal with, and the vulnerabilities in the marriage can highlight why the unfaithful spouse was tempted to allow an affair to happen. But it should move onto focusing on the marriage itself. The marriage counselor can also give you good books to read and other helps.

Going to a marriage counselor can also give opportunity to discuss some of the harder things in a more controlled environment. If communication often turns into fights and storming off, leaving the issues unresolved, a counselor can help to establish helpful patterns of conflict resolution that will enable you to talk to each other constructively rather than destructively.

A good idea is to commit to go to at least a month or two of weekly meetings. Too often, because one partner didn't like the initial visit or two, he doesn't want to keep going, especially if he is having trouble facing his responsibility for the affair. If a particular marriage counselor isn't really doing the job for you, find a different one. Don't use that as an excuse to not do it. But commit to giving it time to work.

6) Read some good books together. In addition to the book listed in the last chapter, here is an additional reading list you'll find helpful.

Not "Just Friends": Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity by Shirley P. Glass. This book has a lot of good info on how to deal with the aftermath of an affair, but the strength of this classic treatment is assessing the motivations and experiences both hurt and unfaithful spouses go through. An excellent book for a couple to read together in evaluating each other's strengths and weaknesses in dealing with an affair, and what to do about them.

His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage by Willard F. Jr. Harley. You may not be ready for this book immediately after discovery day. You will probably need to wait until you have more emotional stability, until you're out of the emotional ICU. But the earlier you can read and process what is in this book, the quicker and smoother rebuilding will happen.

This book doesn't focus so much on dealing directly with the affair, but on expressing a passionate love to one's spouse in a way they can "hear" it, in order to heal the marriage. As mentioned earlier, this book had a profound impact on how Lenita and I interacted with one another. I learned what I had done that failed to tell her she was important to me, and how she failed to do the same to me. We both made some major adjustments, not just to fill the needs she unconsciously sought out during the affair because I wasn't doing so, but because I did love her but wasn't communicating that truth effectively for years. Instead, I'd often told her by my actions and decisions, "You're not that important to me." She did the same to me. This is no longer the case.

Without that sense of "he loves me and I'm important to him" communicated through actions, rebuilding is much less likely to succeed. It is the oil that provides the motivation to struggle through the painful process of rebuilding and offers hope that there is the reward of a happy future at the end. Ideally you'll want to read and discuss this book together.

How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair: A Compact Manual for the Unfaithful by Linda MacDonald. This book is the first book recommended for the unfaithful spouse to read because it will give him a fuller understanding of what the hurt spouse is dealing with, establish empathy, and the needed steps to help her heal, not to mention himself. I'm listing it here for the hurt spouse, however, because it is good to have a clear picture of what the unfaithful spouse should be doing. Not only to evaluate when your spouse is being cooperative or not, but also in evaluating what you are responsible for to make their efforts productive.

I would suggest if at all possible, you read these together. One reads while the other listens. It opens up times of discussion and is one way you can spend some of that together-time profitably. But if that is not at all possible, an alternate way is for one spouse to read the first chapter, and the other to then read the same chapter. Alternate each chapter that way. Then when you are together, have a discussion time over what you've read. What helped you, perhaps what you didn't agree with and why, etc. In other words, make this as interactive as you possibly can. Don't one of you read it through, then the other and not really dig into the book or interact with each other over what insights and questions the book revealed.

7) Be willing to give "trust on loan" to the unfaithful spouse. This is a concept I came up with shortly after discovery day. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and why I think it is important.

Trust on loan simply means that I am granting a certain level of trust to the unfaithful spouse. It doesn't mean I trust the unfaithful spouse. It only means if rebuilding is going to succeed, I'll have to trust him to some degree or another. Because no matter how much checking I do, spying, or other activities the hurt spouses tend to do to verify that his unfaithful spouse is staying true, if the unfaithful spouse wants to, he can get back with the affair partner and learn to hide it that much better. If you caught him by using a key logger on his computer, he'll stop using his computer for any type of contact. If you spotted problems in the phone bill, he may get a secret second phone. If you caught him in a certain location, he'll make sure they only are together in a more secluded area. In most cases, the hurt spouse will not be able to eliminate all opportunities and monitor the unfaithful spouse day in and day out enough to ensure he has absolutely no chance to cheat. One spouse reported her husband cheated on her by having lunch-break fun with a co-worker at his job in the parking lot. How would you know about that short of hiring a private detective to follow him around all day?

But what it doesn't mean is you're giving the unfaithful spouse trust like he had prior to the affair. The key is it is "on loan," which means it has to be repaid. He repays it by doing the things that rebuild trust. But he will default on that loan if he violates that trust again. So the trust is not blind trust. It doesn't mean the hurt spouse isn't going to verify. Rather, it is like President Ronald Reagan said, "Trust but verify." If the verification shows a default on that loan, then the borrower is in deep, hot water, and is certainly not shown to be cooperative.

But giving them this loan is also a level of hope for the unfaithful spouse. It means there's an end to this somewhere down the road. A point at which the hurt spouse will feel the loan is paid back. Don't think that will mean you'll feel the same type of trust you had prior to the affair. That trust level is forever lost. You cannot and should never return to that type of trust. Rather, it will be a cautious trust. A trust born out of respect for the temptations and human weaknesses we all bear. When red flags pop up, they will be given stronger attention and concern than they ever did prior to the affair.

For the hurt spouse, it really is what you'll have to do anyway simply by matter of necessity. However, stating it up front with the unfaithful spouse like this will do two things. One, it will make it clear with the unfaithful spouse that while you're giving them room, if they are not diligent, it could end up being room enough to hang themselves. They are rebuilding on borrowed trust. Not free trust. They blew that with the affairs, and now they have to earn it back, loan or no loan.

Two, it will provide some sense of the hurt spouse letting go by handing them some level of trust. You'll check on them, but maybe you won't obsess over it as much. If they are truly being a cooperative unfaithful spouse, they will take this opportunity to pay back that loan because they want that trust back.

When my unfaithful spouse was given this loan, she stated earning it back. One of the primary ways she earned it back was twofold. One, she's been totally transparent. Two, she's told me things she could have easily hidden from me and I'd never known. Mostly about times her affair partner has tried to contact her. Even yesterday in writing this, she reported to me an incident when the affair partner pulled up beside her and waved at her. She could have said nothing to me and I'd never known the difference. If they were getting back together, she would have never told me this information. But she told me as soon as she returned home. By doing this, she pays off the loan each time it happens, because it is evidence she's being honest.

8) Pray together. If you are spiritually oriented, participate together in your religion's spiritual disciplines. For a long time, I would go to Saturday night services by myself. It is a 45 minute trip there and another 45 back. She always felt it more important to not miss TV shows, or just too much to get dinner ready and go to church. But after discovery day, she goes to church with me nearly every time I go. Not just Sunday mornings like it used to be. Not only does she get the spiritual time with me, we can also talk and read our books on the way there and back.

If you've been lax in your faith, but you do have faith, now is a good time to refocus on that together. It can not only help develop closer spiritual bonds with each other, but provide more time together and can be a social outlet with other people as well. Don't forget, a good marriage has a strong bond spiritually as well as emotionally and physically. For the same reasons focusing on strengthening your marriage will help rebuilding to succeed, so will strengthening your spiritual bonds.

Some of the same principles listed above for strengthen the marriage apply toward strengthening the spiritual bonds. Talk to your pastor/priest/spiritual leader as it concerns your faith. If you fear the ostracizing of the unfaithful spouse, go to a neighboring spiritual leader you trust. Get some spiritual counseling in dealing with the affair constructively. Likewise, reading good spiritually enriching books together can be helpful as well.

9) Show thankfulness. A cooperative unfaithful spouse is a blessing for a hurt spouse. Too often the unfaithful spouse wants to hide from his responsibility, or sweep everything under the rug and not talk about it. Or he becomes so busy, he finds it easier to avoid dealing with the issues by not giving them or you time to focus on it. To have an unfaithful spouse who fully cooperates means healing can happen easier and faster for both of you. The more the unfaithful spouse feels you are appreciative of his efforts and struggles, the easier it will be for him to face the more difficult aspects of what he is dealing with.

10) Don't forget to focus on yourself. If the unfaithful spouse is fully cooperative, it means nothing if you get stuck in a bad place. Often hurt spouses get stuck because something has been swept under the rug and not dealt with. Frequently it is the unfaithful spouse that does this, but sometimes the unfaithful spouse can do everything right, but the hurt spouse can't get past a stage of grieving and fails to heal. Go back to the general steps and make sure you are doing them, and working through the stages of grief so that you can arrive at acceptance. Once that takes place, you are in sync with the unfaithful spouse and can take what they are doing in a more constructive manner. But if due to not guarding your thoughts, or remaining angry because you've been wronged, and unable to forgive enough to let go of the righteous indignation, rebuilding will be greatly hindered.

As mentioned previously, if you're going to rebuild, commit yourself to it. You'll have to trust that the unfaithful spouse is working on his end. What you don't want to happen is to get lax in your own efforts so that he heals and you don't. Then the marriage is still in danger and all the work of rebuilding will have been for naught.

Other steps could be added, but these should cover most of the bases on dealing with a cooperative unfaithful spouse so that you give both of you the best chance to succeed in the rebuilding efforts. Next up will be the steps in dealing with an uncooperative unfaithful spouse.

Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse - General

2014-07-18T05:27:00.000-05:00

------------------------

While true that the unfaithful spouse carries the bulk of the work to rebuild from an affair, what types of things aid a hurt spouse in this? It is tempting to sit back and think the hurt spouse doesn't need to do anything to help heal from the hurt, that it is the unfaithful spouse who needs to change and fix everything. But this is not true. If rebuilding is to work, both spouses need to invest in the rebuilding 100%, or it will likely fail. That means the hurt spouse also has to be on board with making the necessary changes. In this section for the hurt spouse, we'll examine the actions and principles that the hurt spouse needs to heal from the affair.

I need to add some disclaimers before we start. One, everyone's situation is different. I will be, of necessity, speaking in more general terms. But something here may not apply to certain situations, or I may not list something that is needed in others. So take these as guides to check and make sure you are doing the things that will benefit you and your rebuilding efforts the most. Not as hard and fast rules to follow. Adapt, adjust, or throw out as needed.

Two, I've broken this up into three areas. A general area, when your unfaithful spouse is responsive and cooperating, and when he is not. The approach between the two are different, and when an unfaithful spouse becomes responsive, it may require a shift in approach if you determine it is genuine. But you will have some unfaithful spouses that are also cooperative at first, but later shut down. Some cooperate in certain areas, but not others. So depending on the situation, you may need to apply one set at one time, another at another time, and sometimes, a mixture. This chapter will be the general steps most hurt spouses will need to take into consideration.

1) First, realize you are not at fault for your spouse's affair. Many times an unfaithful spouse will attempt to say you are, and no doubt in their mind that is how they justified their decision to give into temptation, but the truth of the situation is the following. Despite whatever issues they had with the marriage or with you, cheating doesn't fix any of them. It only complicates and destroys things further. Therefore, the decision to cheat is never a good response to marital problems. Because of that, it is never your fault, no matter how bad of a spouse you've been or how difficult the marriage has been. Take responsibility for your part in the problems of the marriage, but not for their decision to cheat.

2) Don't automatically assume you have been rejected, and that there is something wrong with you. It is natural to feel they chose the other person over you. Because obviously as far as actions, that appears to be the case. It is usually a source of confusion to the hurt spouse why, if the unfaithful spouse says they love them, they could do something like this. How could they risk the marriage, the family, your sexual health, etc., on a fling? On a secret lover?

But the bottom line is this: in most cases, the unfaithful spouse never says to themselves, "You know what? I don't like X and Y, so I'll just go find someone else to have sex with." It happens, but the majority of cases is the unfaithful spouse becomes vulnerable due to their personal issues and needs, and gives into temptation without thinking about the consequences. As a matter of fact, the mind that is being tempted in this way is not rational at all. If it were, the person wouldn't do what their desires are wanting.

This state of mind is called a "fog" for good reasons, because the unfaithful spouse can't see anything other than what he wants right now. Though somewhere buried in the back of his mind he know this will hurt the marriage and his spouse, the strong desires he has, which may be sexual desires, ego stroking, attention, companionship, or a mixture of those, the desire for meeting those perceived "survival" needs blinds him to taking a serious accounting of the potential consequences. The stronger that desire is, up to an addiction, the less the later consequences play into the decision.

What happens for many unfaithful spouses is they give in at a moment of temptation without thinking through the consequences. As a result, they often come away feeling the victim, that it just happened, and so they start looking for reasons why. Often the finger is pointed at the spouse because he didn't do X, Y, or Z. They often don't feel like they consciously made a decision to cheat. What they miss is failing to recognize the decisions that led to the temptation to cheat, like choosing to flirt, believing it to be "innocent fun."

Often he didn't intentionally reject you by having an affair. He was tempted and let it happen. He gave in to his desires. That is often why he doesn't bring up his desires and needs with the spouse, because he doesn't identify them that way. Not too many unfaithful spouses wake up one morning and think to themselves, "Wow, I really have a need for intimate conversation with my spouse. I could talk to them about it, explain how desperately I need this, and we could go to marriage counseling. Or I could have an affair. Hum...the affair sounds like the best option." Usually those needs are ignored or erupt in anger and fights instead of constructive cooperation, and the unfaithful spouse isn't always directly aware they have become more vulnerable to temptation because of them.

So even if the unfaithful spouse says things like, "She made me feel better than you ever did, that's why I cheated," don't give into the lie that he chose her or him over you. Chances are the unfaithful spouse is coming up with reasons because he is too deep in the fog to believe it is his fault and accept blame for it. People cheat because of their own character shortcomings, not being able to deal with their problems in constructive ways. It is more a rejection of who they are than you.

"But she said she loved him, and she can't stop thinking about him." Yes, that happens. Unfaithful spouses all the time mistake infatuation for true love. They often get in it so deep they have a hard time realizing what they feel isn't love, but a feeling they enjoy and desire. Wearing the rose-colored glasses of infatuation, their love for their spouse will seem to pale in comparison on the passion level. But that isn't the fullness of love, and it cannot compete with real, unconditional love for each other if your relationship is based on more than passion and friendship, but a self-sacrificing love for each other.

In short, what he is often in love with isn't the affair partner, but in how the affair partner made him feel. He is in love with a feeling.

3) Realize that the healing process and rebuilding trust will take time. Two years minimum, maybe longer if the unfaithful spouse isn't fully cooperative, or you have trouble getting past issues. During that time, you'll have periods when you're making progress, and periods when it feels you've sunk back to day one. Even the best of rebuildings will experience periods of depression and a sense of loss on a recurring basis. Don't expect even two or three years down the road to be "past this." As time goes buy, assuming you both are dealing with the issues instead of shoving them under a rug, incidences of feeling the loss and the hurt will become less and less, duller and duller. But that takes at least two years or more, about the amount of time it takes for a couple to feel the changes in their life have become the "new normal." Even if the rebuilding goes well, don't expect the pain and hurt to be totally gone even at two years.

4) Know the stages of grief so you can work through each stage, avoid getting stuck, and find acceptance. You can read up on them in this article. Realize that these emotions and struggles are normal and needed to heal, as painful as they are. Bottling them up and ignoring them can prevent healing.

5) Work toward a healthy and strong sense of self. Affairs can be big blows to one's self-esteem and sense of knowing who you are. The affair changes the relationship significantly from what it was before. Both in how you look at your spouse, but also in how you perceive yourself through your spouse's eyes. It will never be what it was prior to the affair.

Get individual counseling, read good books, and keep the following in mind. While you may have blame for some marriage problems, you are not to blame for the affair. That is fully owned by the unfaithful spouse and his affair partner. The reason they cheated, no matter what he claims the reasons were, are due to his inappropriate responses to issues he is facing within himself. There is a character flaw in him that allowed, maybe even sought out, the affair as the way to deal with his needs. It is not a lack in you, it is a lack in him that is the problem.

Therefore, to get your view of your self through him is going to be a very distorted picture. Don't rely upon it. Assume his view of you will be filled with distortions and exaggerations. He has proven himself untrustworthy in hiding the affair from you, he will be untrustworthy in other areas until he takes ownership of his wrongs and gets out of the fog enough to think clearly.

6) For those of faith, seek out spiritual counseling from your pastor/priest, or spiritual leader, or even a close friend who you feel is strong in the faith. While generally this is a tragedy not readily shared, especially among church members, and there can be some shame felt even by the hurt spouse for the fact it happened to them, you will need someone who is not emotionally impacted by the affair to keep your feet on solid ground.

For those of faith, this can be a time of faith crisis. Why did God allow this to happen? Why did my prayers for him not get answered? Approached the wrong way, some could lose their faith in God over this. Or, they will find their faith a firm foundation in the midst of the raging sea of emotions, hurt, and struggles to rebuild. Having someone that can give input and guidance to what you are going through can make the difference between healing and letting the pain crush you. If nothing else, you need a listening ear. You don't want to carry this struggle alone. Also your spiritual life is just as important, if not more so, than your emotional life, because it will impact your emotional life and can be the difference between a successful rebuilding or ending in divorce.

A disclaimer. Not all pastors or priest are adequately trained in dealing with affairs. Don't expect them to be marriage counselors unless they have a degree or certification in that area. But hopefully they can provide spiritual guidance. Some have unhelpful ideas about marriage and affairs based on their interpretation of the Bible. If one pastor or priest isn't helping you, seek out another who can. Some communions have more resources to deal with these things, or the pastor will know good counselors you can contact.

7) For successful rebuilding, you will want to eventually reach a stage of empathy with the unfaithful spouse. This won't happen quickly, certainly not right away. You are going to be too focused on your own pain, and your anger at what they did won't allow much empathy to take place. But in due time, as you work through the stages of grief, and if rebuilding is going to be successful, eventually you'll need to get there.

Notice, I did not say sympathy for them. Two different things. Sympathy is "feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune." Empathy is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Sympathy says you have pity on them and feel sorry for them. Empathy says you understand that their pain exists, even if you can't care about it or deal with it adequately right now. Empathy acknowledges that the other person has real needs, concerns, and difficulties in this journey as well. But for the hurt spouse to move past an obsession and focus on self and their own pain, they have to reach a place where they are able to understand the pain the unfaithful spouse is going through.

I’m not talking here about understanding the why or reasons for the affair. I'm talking about his hurts and pains. Believe me, he has them. Some of them are good at covering them up, even from themselves, and not focusing on them or dealing with them. While some unfaithful spouses are good at fooling themselves so that they seem to be immune to sorrow and repentance, they are just as damaged by the affair as their hurt spouse is. In some cases, even more so.

He has to deal with the reality that he committed an act against the one they love (if that's the case) and who he doesn't want to lose. He has been spiritually and emotionally damaged by living in the fog. As the Scriptures say, unlike other sins, fornication and adultery are sins against one's own body and person. He may try to cover up that pain by blame-shifting, gas-lighting, sweeping it under a rug and refusing to talk about it any longer, sticking his head in the sand by keeping busy, etc. to avoid facing up to it, but it is there.

He also has the initial pain, if the affair was ongoing when discovered, of breaking off a relationship he was enjoying, usually before he was ready to do so. One of the hardest things for the unfaithful spouse to do is break that relationship whether or not he felt he was "in love." Think back to an early relationship that broke up of your own, and how emotionally devastated you were.

Except here, there is the added hurdle to overcome, that he shouldn't talk about it or show those feelings to the hurt spouse because it further hurts them. So many unfaithful spouses struggle through that alone. Many cases, it leads them to reconnect with the affair partner. But the unfaithful spouse who successfully breaks that contact will experience a major loss. Though that is not what the hurt spouse wants to hear, that's the reality of the situation. He could no easier not feel that loss than if they had lost one of their parents to a car accident. It is one of the many negative consequences for being unfaithful.

For the unfaithful spouse who really puts forth the effort to fix themselves, he must endure the painful and slow process of facing his sins and misdeeds, owning them, staring their guilt in the eyes, repenting, and working on himself to ensure the sin doesn't happen again. Rebuilding for the unfaithful spouse is a painful process if he really invest himself in it. It too will take years, not weeks or months, before it is conquered. He will always live with the reality that he did this to the one he loves, and face her everyday with that knowledge.

Until you reach a stage of empathy for the unfaithful spouse, until you can find the ability to care for what they are going through, rebuilding will not happen. For what you are rebuilding to isn't just an existence with each other, but a rekindling of the love you have for each other. Without empathy, that will never happen.

8) Don't obsess over the affair partner. I know, it is natural to do so. Most hurt spouses at one point or another expresses anger over the other person who their spouses cheated with. They are convenient targets of hate, because you are not trying to rebuild with him. To express that blame and hatred to the spouse would be counter productive to the rebuilding. Also sometimes unfaithful spouses will not tell the truth about their affair partner, to deflect blame from themselves. "But Honey, she seduced me when I was depressed."

So often hurt spouses will want to meet the affair partner and tell them what for, or punch them, or destroy their property and lives. But this will not be productive. It will only destroy you and keep you from healing, and take your focus off where it needs to be: on your spouse.

The only concern you should have about the affair partner is to make sure your spouse has broken all contact with him and then treat him as if that person doesn't exist. The affair partner becomes invisible. The goal should be to get him out of your lives as cleanly, quickly, and as forcefully as possible. The more you stir things up with him, the more likely he is to reestablish contact with your unfaithful spouse and stay in the picture, and continue to seek after what he once had. Because the only way the unfaithful spouse can break the bond he has with the affair partner is to go for a long time with no contact. The more contact he has, the less likely he'll break that bond, and the more likely he'll return to the affair partner.

9) Guard your thoughts. This is something that is learned. Many hurt spouses have instances of flashbacks, can't get the picture of their spouse in bed with the affair partner out of their head, imagine all sorts of scenarios that probably never happened between the two, usually blown out of proportion. But these thoughts tend to be obsessive. They intrude into your daily life, sex life, and when something triggers your memories of the affair. At first, these will be strong and need to be faced. But at some point, they become obsessive and can prevent the hurt spouse from healing. To do that, the hurt spouse (and the unfaithful spouse for other reasons) needs to learn the art of guarding your thoughts.

One method is to use distraction. One simple way is to have a phrase you say to yourself when those thoughts arise. For the more religiously inclined, a simple one to remember is what is known in ancient Christianity as the "Jesus prayer." The simple form is, "Lord have mercy," which is a response in prayers at many churches. The fuller form of it is "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." But even if you are not religious, you can find a phrase that can help distract you. A saying like, "Que sara, sara." That is, "Whatever will be, will be."

A second form of distraction is music or talk radio. Get your mind engaged in a song or discussion so it won't wander to the wrong thoughts. Strike up a conversation with someone. Give someone a call.

Another form of distraction is to do something physical. Many use exercise of some form. But that alone may not occupy your mind, though it can help burn off some steam. My wife was instructed to use a rubber band around her wrist, and when thoughts she didn't need to be thinking of arose, to snap it so that the pain would distract her from her thoughts.

Another method is reclaiming. This is especially good for triggers. If there is something that tends to make you think of the affair and other obsessive thoughts, reclaim that event. For example, my wife met her primary affair partner at the local gym. I didn't go, obviously, or it wouldn't have happened. Once I discovered the affair, I had two options. I could forbid her to go to the gym any longer, for fear she'd met him there again and this would keep going, or I could start going there myself to ensure he and no one else would hit on her. I opted for the later, in part because I didn't want remembrances of the gym to be her private domain of good thoughts about the affair partner, and I wanted to claim that joy they shared for me and her. So I went. Yes, the first time or three were awkward. But now I don't ever think anything about it. Driving by the gym holds pleasant memories of us working out and swimming together instead of remembrances of "this is where they started their affair, worked out together, swam together." Seeing the gym isn't a trigger to the affair as it would have been had I taken the other route.

A third method is to substitute positive thoughts for the negative. When the obsessive thoughts arise, have ready some positive thoughts to direct your mind to. If, for instance, images of your spouse in the arms of the affair partner arise during sex, causing you to lose all interest, have ready images of you and your spouse to shove in front of them.

All these things take some practice. At first you'll forget and suddenly remember, "Oh, I'm not supposed to be thinking on these things," and you'll do one of the things above. At first, it will have to be a conscious decision. But after a few weeks of doing these, they'll start to become automatic and natural. What you are doing is retraining your mind to not go there. In the first weeks after discovery day, forget it. You can't avoid thinking about it day and night, all the time. But as you move on, and some of those thoughts won't leave, you have to work to get them out and learn how to guard your thoughts so you control them, and not them, you.

10) Interact with the unfaithful spouse in a straightforward, clear, and business-like manner. Yes, at first your emotions are going to be running wild. Everyone's does. You'll probably say things that you later wish you could take back. But once you settle down from the initial roller coaster ride, you'll want to accomplish the following things in communicating with your unfaithful spouse.

First, what your goals and expectations of him will be. Include as short but complete of a list as possible. Transparency and what that practically means. Financial. Availability to answer your questions, and maybe an agreed upon method to do that. That he will allow you to vent and relate your hurt without him becoming defensive or shutting down on you. Read books together like Not Just Friends. Go to marriage counseling, committing for two to three months at least. Communicate that rebuilding will take years, so he doesn't have the idea it will blow over in a month or two.

The above are examples, you may have more depending on the situation. But the important thing is to make it clear what he will need to do to meet your needs to heal from what he has done to you.

Second, list the consequences of these not happening. One thing you will need to do, despite beliefs in never divorcing, is to leave the divorce option on the table. For some unfaithful spouses, they have convinced themselves that you would never leave them, and it gives them motivation to just get through the initial fallout from the discovery before picking back up where they left off. For them to be shaken out of their fog thinking, they need to feel you could really leave them. But draw that line carefully. Make sure you are ready to do that should it go that far. Nothing worse than drawing a line in the sand, to back up and draw a new line when that one is crossed. Then the lines mean nothing.

So I would suggest breaking them down in stages as much as possible, both loosening up as he does better, and tightening down if he falters. So, for instance, maybe one consequence of either not being transparent and/or of breaking no contact is he is forced to hand in his smart phone and get an old fashion, no frills, basic phone with no texting ability. Or he allows spyware to be installed on his phone so you can fully monitor him. Then after a period of time has passed, say six months as an example, and he's been good, that gets taken off his phone or restored to being smart. Or you first take an extended trip to a relative, and if that doesn't reverse things, separate. If he falters again, divorce after a certain amount of time has passed without resolution. Break it down into progressively more restrictive stages as required, and back them down as he becomes more cooperative.

Third, write down something similar for yourself, dependent on him or her doing the above. Be transparent yourself. Good marriages are transparent without an affair. Maybe you'll wash his clothes and fix his dinner. Find out what his needs are and seek to meet them. Don't assume they are the same as yours, because they won't be in most cases. Certain ones can be taken away if he isn't cooperative. Not to be manipulative, but to reward behavior that will help rebuild, and discourage behavior that will end in divorce court. The idea is you are joining him to work on this together, not just him doing all the work.

The idea is to have good communication. Don't rely upon hints and "he should know what I want" type ideas. Be clear about your needs and wants. He can't be expected to meet them or change for them if you don't voice them clearly. The communication needs to happen in a calm, rational manner. Not threats, ultimatums, and screaming. You also need to be firm and confident. A no-nonsense manner of "this is the way it needs to be if we're to make it. Are you with me or not?" Also allow the unfaithful spouse to communicate clearly to you as well. Make it a discussion, not a lecture. Not all of your goals need to be given at one time. You may start with a basic list, but add to it over time as new things pop up. Think in terms of short-term needs and where you want the relationship to be over time.

11) Get help through counseling and good books. Too many spouses have a lone-ranger attitude. I know, because that was me. Until Lenita's infidelity, I'd never been to a counselor for anything. Despite there were times we should have done so in the past. However, I knew this time I wanted to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to rebuild. I knew we had one good shot at healing. I knew we were in over our heads. We were treading new territory and needed a guide to avoid as many pitfalls as possible.

Since you are reading this book, it is likely you already have sensed the same thing. But perhaps someone shoved this book into your hands and you've reluctantly read it, though by this point you have no doubt discovered the value of this type of help or you would probably not still be reading by this point.

Books can be a major source of help in rebuilding both yourselves and your relationship. I'd recommend the following book to begin your healing journey.

Getting Past the Affair: A Program to Help You Cope, Heal, and Move On -- Together or Apart by Douglas K. Snyder. The strength of this book is it gives you some practical steps to take in dealing with the affair, including the initial days and weeks after discovery day. It is based upon a sound understanding of the dynamics in rebuilding relationships, and can help if rebuilding doesn't succeed as expected or isn't the ultimate choice of either spouse. Also includes steps for the unfaithful spouse as well as the hurt one. For these reasons, I recommend reading this book first to get some immediate guidance and direction, including finer points on what we've talked about here.

While books like these and the one you are reading now are helpful, they can only be of a general help. The author(s) cannot cover every conceivable circumstance, nor address your specific situation. A person reading these books still needs to take the general principles and apply them to his relationship.

Because of this, it is also strongly suggested to obtain individual and marriage counseling as soon as possible. Both spouses need to evaluate how these events have affected them based on their history, how to rebuild their sense of self-identity, and what will be the best approach, given their specific circumstances, to proceed with rebuilding the marriage.

Once, I attempted to change the ball-joint on an AMC Pacer. I followed the instructions in a book, but a frozen bolt refused to come lose. It was then I read in the book, "This is not a 'backyard mechanic' type job." I thought, "Now they tell me!"

In the same way, rebuilding a marriage and yourself after an affair is not a do-it-yourself task. If you go it alone, chances of success go way down.

When you look for a therapist in your area, search for those with experience in helping with infidelity. Once attending sessions, if it is clear they are enabling rug-sweeping, blame-shifting, or other tactics which divert you from dealing with the issues, feel free to change counselors until you find one that can truly help you. Not all counselors are created equal, or in some cases, you just don't mesh well with a given counselor through no fault of either person.

These are some of the general steps. I could continue on and get more detailed, but this gives a broad overview of the general steps that can help a hurt spouse deal with the aftermath of an affair. Next we'll look at the steps a hurt spouse can take in dealing with a cooperative unfaithful spouse.

Healing Steps for the Unfaithful Spouse

2014-07-04T05:34:00.000-05:00

------------------------

This chapter is for those unfaithful spouses who wish to rebuild their marriages after having committed an act of infidelity. Many unfaithful spouses who have ended an affair and want to save their marriage don't always know what they need to do, what approach they should have, or understand fully the damage to the hurt spouse. Usually, the “natural” reaction is the wrong one to successfully rebuild. My wife, Lenita, who is an unfaithful spouse and has successfully rebuilt our marriage, wrote an article on what the unfaithful spouse needs to do to help the hurt spouse heal. I'm taking the core outline from that article to write this chapter.

This chapter assumes that you have told your hurt spouse about the affair and that he knows the general details of the affair. Now you are asking: what are the ways in which you can best help you and your hurt spouse heal and save the marriage, if indeed that is your goal? Here are the main areas that need your attention to potentially succeed.

1) Be prepared to invest yourself 100% and more into the rebuilding of the marriage. That means two major points. One, rebuilding will not be easy, especially for the unfaithful spouse. To help your spouse heal means facing the pain of what you've done, examining it, and dealing with it until the wound has healed. These are hard things for anyone to do. Unless you are totally committed to doing whatever it takes, you will tend to falter when, for instance, you debate whether to tell your spouse about that chance encounter with the affair partner or not.

Two, realize this will take years, not weeks. Too often the unfaithful spouse wants to put it all behind them. He doesn't want it thrown into his face regularly. That is understandable. But keep in mind that while you have known this secret for weeks, months, or even years, for the spouse it is fresh and new information that has to be processed, the loss grieved over, and the trust that has been violated to be rebuilt over several months. To do that, he needs to talk about it, deal with it, and process it to the point of satisfaction that he can move past it. That will not happen quickly. Doing the following will help it to happen as quickly as possible, but even in the best of circumstances, don't expect everything to be "back to normal" until a minimum of two years. In some cases it may take even longer. No two individuals are the same. But unless you realize you are in it for the long haul, it will be easy to get discouraged when after three or four months, he is still bringing up issues about the affair. He has to deal with the affair, and if he isn't allowed to, then he is prevented from healing.

2) Develop an attitude of healing. Lenita listed several examples of what that attitude needed to be:

I will own up to what I have done and place none of the blame on anyone else.

I will never try to 'gag' you but will listen bravely without flinching away and answer/discuss anything you need to, anytime you need to.

I will be humble.

I will show you my heart.

I will understand that I must be responsible for helping you heal and that I must work diligently to heal myself.

I will not be defensive concerning the affair or the affair partner.

Without these attitudes, the chances of rebuilding are slim. This is because for healing the marriage to take place, the bulk of the work will be with the unfaithful spouse. The bottom line is you have hurt your spouse, and now it is your job to heal that hurt. You are the only one who can heal your spouse, because only you can rebuild the trust that has been stolen from them. To not do the above is the equivalent of shutting the door on the marriage. If you said to point #1, "Yes, I am committed," then this needs to be the first place you take a stand. Because if you approach it with any other attitude, the following steps will not only be harder, but you'll not implement them as fully as you should to really heal your spouse.

3) Break all contact with the affair partner. Until the hurt spouse feels secure that there is no more contact of any kind going on between you and your affair partner, for him, the affair isn't over. As long as that door is still open, however slightly, the hurt spouse will live in fear that if the affair hasn't restarted, it is only a matter of time until it does. Contact means the emotional bonds are still alive. Only complete and utter no contact will allow the hurt spouse the ability to start healing. To not do so magnifies the odds against any rebuilding efforts being permanent.

Unfortunately, this is one step many unfaithful spouses find hard to follow through on. Especially if they were caught while the affair was ongoing. It usually means a sudden end to a relationship that at that moment, neither of you were ready to end. Maybe one goodby phone call and then to never speak or see them again sounds harsh and drastic. When someone has fallen in love with another person, even if inappropriately, to stop all contact is the equivalent to saying to the affair partner, "I don't love you, leave me alone and never talk to me again," when that is the exact opposite of how you feel. Yet if you want the affair to be over for your spouse so that healing of the marriage can begin, this is a necessity.

Remind yourself that if you are experiencing the sudden loss of a relationship with someone you were with for a few days, weeks, or months, how much more is your spouse going through when they are feeling the loss of a relationship they've had for years with you? At this point, you have to chose and invest yourself in whichever path you wish to go. In either case, that means cutting off all contact with the other you are leaving. No matter how much you love him. Bottom line: this is one of the hard consequences of allowing yourself to have an affair.

"But I work with the affair partner. How do I deal with that?" You may find your spouse is one of the rare ones who can deal with that situation, but with 99% of the hurt spouses, even if they acknowledge the financial stress of losing a job you've held for years, maybe nearing retirement, and the unpredictability of finding new work, the chances of successfully rebuilding the marriage goes down drastically if continued contact of any kind is retained.

Until contact is cut off, the affair is still going for the hurt spouse, even if in truth it isn't. The hurt spouse has no means to know you are being faithful even while making frequent contact at work. He has no way to know you aren't meeting in a closet or room or car. He has no assurance that you aren't sharing lunches together and discussing personal issues. Rebuilding trust in a situation like that is next to impossible. It's like telling someone to put out the fire with water while you continue to blast it with a flame thrower.

As Lenita often told me when she faced something painful, "I asked for this, you didn't." When you allowed an affair to happen, you put at risk everything. Your marriage, your children, your job, your stability. There may come a point that you have to sacrifice your job security for marital security. That can be one of the costs of having and affair. Which will you chose?

There may be solutions. You can ask for a transfer from your department if the company is large enough. Preferably to another building. Your spouse would even by happy in most cases to hear the transfer meant a move to another town. But if that doesn't work out, and there is no choice but to either quit or stay in contact with the person, it may mean making that hard choice to find another job. We again go back to points #1 and #2. It may mean less money, or financial hardships. That's when you have to ask what is more important to you? Your marriage or your job? If it comes down to a decision between the two, and no compromise can be worked out, it may mean making a decision of which one to sacrifice. No contact is that important.

No contact also extends to mementos you have from your affair partner. Pictures, written letters, emails, or other items bought for you all constitute links to the affair partner. These should be deleted or thrown away to complete non-contact. Both because they can be triggers to the hurt spouse, but also triggers for you, causing you to recall him or her and the "good" times. The goal of no contact is to let the affair partner fade into the past, so you can focus on your spouse, your marriage, and your family.

4) Become totally transparent. What is meant by this is to open yourself up in all ways that relate to rebuilding trust in the aftermath of the affair, so that your spouse can see everything he needs to see to feel secure that contact is not still ongoing, and that you are being truthful.

Think of it like this. The hurt spouse just discovered that you've broken your wedding vows to him, and in most cases lied about it, hid it from him. You've stolen something precious to him: his trust in you and his security in your love for him. Any "secret," any request for "privacy" to him is translated that you have something more to hide about the affair. He has no reason to trust you at this point.

It will take months of constantly discovering that you are telling the truth to begin to trust that you are actually doing that. The only way he can see you telling the truth is by being transparent.

There is a saying, that trust takes a lifetime to build, but seconds to destroy. Trust is the glue that holds a marriage together. By opening yourselves to each other in the most intimate of ways, you have made yourself vulnerable to being hurt. Trust means "I trust you enough not to hurt me. So I open my soul to you." The moment that perceived truth is broken by being hurt, the natural reaction is to pull back and not trust. After many positive examples of truth-telling, gradually he will start to trust again. Even then, it will never be the same innocent trust he had prior to the affair. Like an accident victim, he will tend to flinch inwardly when anything that even looks like the same threat darkens his path. That will be with him to some degree for the rest of his life. The only way to rebuild that trust is to no longer hide anything from your spouse that would be of concern to him or her.

What does “no longer hide anything” mean? We're not talking telling him what you ate for lunch, or all the thoughts that go through your mind everyday. Rather, there are two questions you can ask yourself that will determine if it is something you should tell him: “If I were him, would I want to know this?” and “Is this something I don't want him to know?” If you answer “yes” to either of those questions, then to be transparent, you should tell him.

On the practical side, transparency translates into actions like giving your spouse the user names and passwords to all social media accounts you have. All email accounts. All cell phone's and their bills. When your spouse asks to look at them, you readily give them over without the need to "erase" anything. Likewise, one of the best trust rebuilding activities you can do is to tell him things he could have never discovered himself. For instance, my wife told me about any and all encounters with her affair partner, who for some months kept attempting to contact her. Most of those I would have never known about if she hadn't told me. But she wanted to be totally transparent with me. Having her tell me that aided in my rebuilding of trust in her.

Some spouses expect a level of privacy and are unwilling to give this up. However, this is unhealthy, even for a marriage that has not gone through an affair. Even more so once one spouse has hurt the other by having an affair. Some secrets a spouse has are harmless. Maybe you were called a nickname by family or friends when little, and you've never told your spouse out of embarrassment. Understandable. However, once a couple is married, the old saying, “No man is an island” takes on an increased meaning. Any activity you do can affect the marriage and relationship, and each spouse has the right to know about it. That right supersedes any rights to privacy a spouse may think they have. Bottom line, if you have information you don't want your spouse to know that affects the marriage in any way, financially, socially, emotionally, sexually, or spiritually, you don't have the right to keep that from him, and he has every right to find out, even spying, if he has probable cause.

Without consistent transparency, you severally limit the ability of the hurt spouse to rebuild trust in you and the marriage, and drastically lower the chance of success in rebuilding.

5) Avoid "rug sweeping" at all costs. There are two ways and motivations for wanting to take the issues generated by the affair and sweep them under the proverbial rug so you don't have to look at them or deal with them.

One, what you did is painful to face. It is easier to say, "Okay, that's in the past now. It's over. Time to move on," and clam up about the affair, expecting him to do the same. We've already discussed in the previous steps why this is dangerous. It prevents the hurt spouse from dealing with and healing from what has been done to him. He is not able to find closure. It also causes him to sense that you are continuing to hide something from him. Making it near impossible to rebuild trust again. Doing this will ensure the marriage will fail at some point because the hurt spouse will not heal.

Two, it also ensures that you, the unfaithful spouse, will not heal. You will help your hurt spouse heal in large part by healing yourself. He needs to know that you are working to not only discover what character issues as a person allowed you to treat any problems and fulfill any unmet needs in the marriage in such a destructive way, but that you are also working to fix those issues, to make the changes in yourself to prevent another occurrence from happening again.

If you refuse to face your issues and instead keep them out of sight, you will not heal. Indeed, by ignoring the need to face these issues and do the hard work to emotionally and spiritually heal yourself from this destructive event, the likelihood of it happening again is substantially higher. Your spouse knows this instinctively. If you are hiding from the issues, the fear that it will happen again is much greater than if he sees you wrestling with what you've done to him and yourself, and working to fix it.

6) Take advantage of counseling. Being willing to not only go to individual counseling to help you sort through your issues related to the affair, but also marital counseling, is a key component of healing for both of you. Especially important if your skills at communication are less than ideal. A counselor can help to facilitate constructive communication and conflict resolution. But even if you have good communication and you felt your marriage before the affair was good, this is still important.

For us, our marriage counselor helped point us in the right directions. Our first thought was my wife was dealing with a sexual addiction. But we didn't understand that term in its full clinical sense. Our counselor pointed us to where we needed to work on our marriage. I realized after the fact that claiming Lenita had a sexual addition was more a way to blame it on something rather than her bad choices. Self-diagnosis isn't a good idea. An objective, informed guide is much better for seeing where you are at and helping you through the maze of feelings and options you'll encounter.

That said, not all counselors are created equal. Many are not that experienced in dealing with infidelity. I've heard more than my share of stories where a counselor gave out bad advice. Sometimes enabling the unfaithful partner to violate many of the needed tasks listed above. If you have a counselor who does that, feel free to change. Not merely because they ask you to do hard things, but because they aren't helping one or both of you to heal. Get a second opinion. Find out if they have experience counseling couples involved in affairs. There is too much on the line to stick with someone out of some sense of loyalty to them if they are not helping either of you to heal.

7) Read books on dealing with the aftermath of affairs and marriage. For the unfaithful spouse, the following is required reading. Get a copy of How To Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair: A Compact Manual For The Unfaithful by Linda MacDonald. Read it, follow it. It is not a big book, but goes into much more detail than we can in this article. It is very practical, blunt, and tells you exactly what you as an unfaithful spouse needs to do to help you and your spouse heal. You don't need to have the hurt spouse read this book, though he certainly can if he wants. This book is for the unfaithful spouse, and is spot on in guiding you to what is needed if you wish to save the marriage.

After that book, I have three more highly recommended books for both of you to read. The first is Getting Past the Affair: A Program to Help You Cope, Heal, and Move On -- Together or Apart by Douglas K. Snyder. This book will take both of you through a process of healing, step by step. Very practical on issues like communication, and based on sound principles.

The second is Not "Just Friends" by Shirley Glass. This is the best book for gaining insight both into what happened in the affair for both parties, and the steps each needs to take to help heal from it. It is down to earth, easy to read, and very practical. The author has years of work in the field, and her understanding of the reasons why this happens and what needs to be done to change it are on target. Both spouses will greatly benefit reading this book.

The other is His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage by Willard F. Harley. This book attacks another issue that commonly plagues marriages that have gone through affairs: the need to show each other love in a way they understand it. Some people might balk at the idea of working on the marriage until the affair issues have been dealt with. But what Mr. Harley found out in his own counseling practice, is that the success of rebuilding was greatly increased when both spouses were able to effectively communicate the feeling of love to the other person.

If you think about it, it makes sense. The more in love you feel with your spouse, the more motivation you'll have to face all the hard tasks of rebuilding. Likewise, the more your spouse feels you love them, the more likely he'll be able to not only get past the damage of the affair easier, but also motivated to have empathy and forgiveness for what you did. Honest feelings of love become the oil in a marriage racked by an affair that speeds healing and makes all the efforts you do to rebuild that much more effective.

These last three books we suggest you read as a couple. Preferably reading to one another. This not only provides opportunity to bond and participate in an activity together, but provides many chances to explore the events of the affair in a non-threatening manner, and see them through the light of another person. You'll find out your "unique" experience isn't all that unique.

Once done with these, seek out other books. Not just about affairs, but marriage enrichment in general as well. It will keep you both focused in building and maintaining a healthy relationship.

8) Don't neglect the spiritual dimension of healing. One of the advantages those of faith have is ways to deal with the moral and ethical guilt created by an affair. Often disciplines and perspectives can help a person not only deal with the guilt of what he's done, but the spiritual attitudes and practices that will aid in the healing process.

My wife, being a Christian, acknowledged her growing distance from God leading up to the affairs. She mentioned how she kept God in a closet much of the time during her affairs, and how hard it was to approach Him after it was all discovered. Then, as she emerged from the fog and faced the reality of what she'd done to me and herself, the immense guilt overtook her for months.

During all this time, our priest was instrumental in her spiritual recovery. This was key because it directly influenced her recovery in all other areas of the marriage. It also allayed one of my big fears upon discovering her sin, that we'd spend eternity apart from each other if she didn't change course. Key also is the fact that seeing her struggle spiritually enabled me to see she was working on all parts of her life, not just emotional or practical boundaries, but making herself stronger spiritually, which reinforced in me the sense that she was doing all she could to fix herself.

If you are or have held a faith, this is the key time to bring yourself back to that faith for support and strength and help in dealing with all the hard issues you have to face. You need to hear from God, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more," just as the adulterous woman heard that from Jesus. You'll never hear that by avoiding God. Only by coming to Him in repentance and humility. But dealing with this can be a long road. There are many consequences to work through. As Scripture also says, the sin of adultery is, at its heart, a sin against your own body, your own self. Healing that will require spiritual aid as well as the other steps discussed above.

One practice I gave my wife was to memorize Psalm 51 and say it everyday. If you don't know, Psalm 51 is often referred to as the psalm of repentance. In the case of adultery, it is on target, because this is a psalm King David wrote upon being convicted of not only committing adultery with another man's wife, but having him killed so he could have the man's wife for himself. I knew she would need the constant reminder not only that she could repent and be forgiven by God and me for what she'd done, but the humble attitude needed to rest in God's forgiveness. It became one of the spiritual crutches that helped her through the months when the guilt weighted heavily on her soul as she worked to accept His forgiveness.

9) Work to fall out of love with the affair partner(s). If you felt you loved your affair partner, this is a hard one and will take many months to accomplish. But it is important for the following reasons.

One, the relationship was immoral and should have never started to begin with. It is important that the unfaithful spouse do all they can to erase the improper relationship from their lives. Your love for the affair partner is an affront to your spouse.

Two, no one can love two people and give 100% to only one. The love for the affair partner(s) is love stolen from your spouse who you pledged it to.

Three, as long as you remain in love with the affair partner(s), you are susceptible to temptation to reignite the fires of that relationship. Time alone will not kill off love. You can be ten years of no contact, and if the love never died, it can fire back up into another affair.

At first, it will be hard to do the following, but as you establish no contact successfully, and you gain some distance from the affair, you'll want to make sure you do the following.

One, make sure no contact is fully established, including getting rid of any items or messages or pictures associated with the affair partner. These items serve as remembrances, and provide a link to keep the flame alive.

Two, as you emerge from the fog induced by infatuation, make a list of all the negative things you ignored about the affair partner. In Lenita's case, he had more of an anger problem than I do. I'm very emotionally stable, and she is highly sensitive to anyone being angry to her. He would have, at some point, crushed her love and self-esteem. But in the midst of the affair, she didn't think about it and he remained on his best behavior.

Three, practice guarding your thoughts using distraction and other techniques as described in the "Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse" chapter. You can't so easily stop thoughts of them from popping into your mind, but you can work to not dwell on them. They slip out as soon as they arrive. The less you think about them, the faster you fall out of love with him.

Four, focus and work on loving your spouse as fully as you can using the resources mentioned in the "read books" step. Investing yourself into loving your spouse will not only regenerate feelings of love for him, but also make feelings you had for your affair partner pale in comparison.

There are many other details we could go into, but the books listed will have more of that than we could ever hope to squeeze into one chapter. But the above are the core issues to deal with to help your hurt spouse heal and save your marriage. It is a lot of work and will take a long time, but the reward can be very worth it both in terms of your own healing and growth as a person, as well as a fuller and richer marriage, despite the negative affects of the affair.

Transparency: Soul Windows

2014-06-19T03:58:00.000-05:00

There are two primary losses a hurt spouse endures: the loss of intimacy with their spouse and the loss of trust. Trust is the heaviest casualty in an affair.

As bad as it is, an affair can be ended and in due time, forgiven by most spouses. The transgression can end, no contact established, and it can become a distant memory in time. If that was the sum damage done by an affair, you'd have fewer broken marriages over them.

But it is trust on several levels that does the most damage.

Lack of trust, if not successfully rebuilt, will linger and poison a marriage long after the affair has become ancient history. Time will not heal it, only multiply it. Here is how:

1. Lying during the affair. Few unfaithful spouses are in a frame of mind to confess during an affair. They will often go to great lengths to hide it from their spouse, including denying any accusation, gas lighting, creating marital drama to artificially get angry with the spouse, lying about where they're going, been, what they did, etc.

2. Lying when they get married. Committing infidelity involves breaking one's wedding vows, making what was vowed before witnesses a lie.

If an unfaithful spouse confessed shortly after ending an affair, or in order to end one, that would be the extent of the deception. A definite blow to being able to trust one's spouse, but rebuildable in most cases. Unfortunately, many unfaithful spouses compound that deception by doing the following:

3. Lying after the affair is over. A majority of unfaithful spouses don't confess to the affair to their spouse. Usually in the mistaken belief they are saving the spouse from being hurt. Too late. The damage has already been done. Lying to one's spouse about the condition of the relationship only compounds their hurt. Should the spouse find out about it, as is often the case, the consequences of the deception will grow like interest in a high-yield investment account.

4. Lying after discovery day. Otherwise known as the trickle truth. The unfaithful spouse, fearing losing their spouse or hurting them further, only tells as much as they believe they have to. But each secret is like a land mine waiting to go off during the rebuilding of the marriage. Each new revelation to the hurt spouse destroys trust more than it would have if told at the beginning, making rebuilding trust much less likely to be successful.

A healthy relationship is founded upon mutual trust, honesty, and respect. Destroy that, and you destroy the glue that holds a marriage together. If an unfaithful spouse sincerely wants to rebuild their marriage, rebuilding that trust is the number one priority. Fail there and the rest either won't happen or won't matter.

The antidote to deception and the quickest route to rebuilding trust in a marriage where trust has been destroyed is transparency.

Transparency, as well as no contact with the affair partner, is one of the immediate task an unfaithful spouses is expected to do to rebuild once the cat is out of the bag. This is often translated to mean the unfaithful spouse must allow the hurt spouse full access to all communication venues: email, cell phones, Facebook and other social sites, at any time they want, without the need to sanitize it first.

That is part of it, but it goes further than that. Shirley Glass in Not Just Friends uses the analogy of opening and closing windows. When an affair happens, the unfaithful spouse closes some windows to their spouse in order to open them with the affair partner. Each closed window into the unfaithful spouse's life represents an area of their life closed off to their spouse. It lessens the intimacy and hurts the bonds of marriage.

How, you may ask? As listed in my marriage articles at the beginning of this blog, the marital bond is composed of several strands: physical, emotional, social, legal, and spiritual. Each type of bond represents a degree of intimacy. For example, the legal bond represents the willingness of both spouses to be legally recognized as one entity with its legal benefits and responsibilities. It indicates a higher degree of commitment to one another because it cannot be so easily broken.

An emotional bond is strengthened by closeness, openness to each other. In other words, transparency. The more of your secrets you tell someone, the closer and more intimate of a friend you are to that person. It is that closeness that creates the emotional feelings of being in love with someone.

So the more windows that are closed to the spouse, the more secrets a spouse has that the other is not let in on, the less intimacy and emotional closeness the relationship will have.

This dynamic is often illustrated in affairs themselves. It is frequently the case that the unfaithful spouse and the affair partner share more of their emotional lives with each other than the unfaithful spouse does with the hurt spouse. In my case, my wife talked with me only 5-10 minutes a day prior to discovery day. Meanwhile, she spent hours everyday via phone and text conversing with the affair partner.

Granted, that window, prior to the affairs, wasn't open too much, but once she opened that window to her affair partner, he knew more of what was going on with my marriage than I did. In effect, they shared a transparency that I didn't. I was clueless while the affair partner even knew how often my wife and I had sex.

Soul Windows

True transparency is deeper than giving your spouse your passwords to everything. It involves opening windows to your soul to share with your spouse. It means not only providing openness to your forms of communication, but allowing them to see you as you are, faults, mistakes, good points and all.

It means keeping few, if any, secrets. Most certainly keep no secrets about the condition of the marriage. The more such secrets are kept, the less emotional connection you'll have, the less emotional love you'll feel. The less trusting the hurt spouse will be.

There is the key to transparency: to allow the hurt spouse into your soul and life so they can feel they know you again.

They can experience the honesty and the real you. Without that, giving the hurt spouse passwords and access to accounts will only be a band-aid on a gaping wound. If they still don't feel like they can trust the unfaithful spouse, they'll assume there are hidden accounts and cell phones they don't know anything about.

How Can I Open Soul Windows?

First, spend more time communicating. Just talking more won't insure opening soul windows will happen, but without it, it simply will not happen. You can't have quality time together without also having some quantity. A good goal is to spend 15 hours a week together. A good bit of that time can be conversation.

Second, read good marriage and infidelity books to each other. Pause to discuss points or participate in exercises suggested. My wife and I have had some of our most productive discussions this way.

Third, participate together in marriage counseling. Sometimes a guide can help discuss issues that need to be brought out in the open that a couple might be blind to.

Fourth, participate in activities together. Transparency and opening soul windows involves more than talk, but sharing your time with each other. Transparency of your life.

Fifth, set aside some time to discuss issues that need to be addressed concerning the affair. The hurt spouse needs to only ask questions they really need to know the answer to, and the unfaithful spouse needs to answer them as honestly and completely as possible.

One good suggestion is to create a discussion jar. The hurt spouse can write their questions on pieces of paper and put them in the jar. The unfaithful spouse can look at them as needed. When the time comes to discuss these issues, the unfaithful spouse can draw out the question(s) he wants to answer. A virtual discussion jar using an email and storing them into a folder could accomplish the same thing.

Does this work? Think about it. These are the kinds of things the unfaithful spouse and the affair partner were doing that fueled their fantasy and made it exciting. They spent massive hours each week communicating. They did things together. They shared themselves with each other heart to heart. Is it any wonder they fell in love emotionally?

In short, they were flinging soul windows open to each other. They were becoming transparent to each other while the relationship with the hurt spouse grew less intimate, more closed windows, less feelings of love. Which is exactly where the saying comes in, "I love you but I'm not in love with you." In other words, I love you in my mind, but I'm not feeling it.

To rebuild trust, the unfaithful spouse needs to shut those windows to the affair partner (no contact) and open them fully to the hurt spouse. Over time, if the hurt spouse senses they are seeing the real you, that you are being honest, faithful, and repentant, trust can be rebuilt.

Likewise, the hurt spouse needs to be willing to open their windows in response to the unfaithful spouse's open windows. While it may not happen immediately (you're gun shy), it will do the marriage little good if the unfaithful spouse opens his window but the hurt spouse never does. Unfaithful spouses need to be patient, but transparency in marriage is a two-way street. When transparency is one-sided, it becomes the means of emotional abuse, like infidelity.

What are other ways you've discovered to become more transparent with your spouse?

Pull the Trigger on Triggers

2014-06-07T05:30:00.000-05:00

Dealing with emotional triggers is a common problem for hurt spouses. Repentant unfaithful spouses establishing no contact also deal with triggers.

What Are Triggers?

Triggers are any reminders of an emotional trauma that renews the negative emotions of that trauma.

For example, someone involved in a wreck with a semi-truck will feel the emotions of fear while driving in the vicinity of a semi on the road. Seeing a semi on the road serves as a trigger to activate that fear and hurt again.

For hurt spouses, triggers vary widely depending on the circumstances. What triggers one spouse may not trigger another hurt spouse. Not everything that could be a trigger becomes one.

Nor do hurt spouses chose what will trigger them. It is an automatic emotional reaction to something that they experience. They cannot will to not feel that way. It just happens. Most of the time, the hurt spouse wishes they did not have these triggers. They don't want to experience that pain again.

There are three main classifications of triggers for hurt spouses.

Words used during the affair.
Things used during the affair.
Events/places that are related to the affair.

Words are grouped into three sub-categories: words/phrases used on the affair partner, used on the hurt spouse particularly during the affair, or words that appear deceptive and non-transparent.

If the unfaithful spouse referred to his affair partner as "Sweetie" and the hurt spouse knows this, and has never been called that before, being called sweetie post-discovery day could trigger a hurt spouse into recalling the betrayal.

If the unfaithful spouse said, "You're my wild flower," during the affair to the hurt spouse, continuing to use it could remind the hurt spouse of the affair.

Telling the hurt spouse, "Hold on. Let me do a couple things before you use my cell phone," can sound like the unfaithful spouse is hiding something, precipitating the suspicions the hurt spouse felt in the days leading up to discovery day.

Things can be any physical object used during the affair. Gifts given to or by the unfaithful spouse and affair partner, vehicles used--including color, make and model--, a bed, mementos retained by the unfaithful spouse, music listened to, or a credit card, just to name a few examples.

Events and places can be any holiday that was tainted by the affair--like discovering the unfaithful spouse was with the affair partner on Easter. The couple's anniversary, a job, the gym, a restaurant, sex, or company picnics.

Unfaithful spouses also have triggers involving two main areas: guilt/desire for the affair partner, and once guilt for the affair sets in, the same list for hurt spouses can remind the unfaithful spouse of what they did, triggering shame and more guilt.

How To Deal With Triggers

There are seven main ways of dealing with triggers.

One, realize they are going to be there. All hurt and unfaithful spouses will run into these triggers. The main strategy is to minimize and deaden them as much as possible.

Two, remove as many as you can. This might involve getting a new job, a new vehicle, new furniture, avoiding restaurants that are triggers, deleting/getting rid of mementos, moving to a new city, etc.

Three, get back on the horse, even if the affair partner was riding it before. My own example is my wife met the second affair partner at the gym. I started going to the gym with her. Initially, it was awkward and uncomfortable. But after a week or two, I relaxed, and no longer felt triggery about the gym. Creating new memories with her at the gym rendered it ineffective as a trigger.

Four, invest new meaning into a trigger. Anniversaries--both marital and discovery day--tend to be big triggers. As our first discovery day anniversary approached, we'd been successful at rebuilding so that we both had a lot of hope for the future. A year prior to that, I didn't know if we'd still be married by that point. So our first discovery day anniversary became a celebration that we'd made it that far in good shape.

If you can't do that, due to a rough and uncertain rebuilding, treat it as a memorial, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor is nationally. Be grateful for lessons learned and any progress made, no matter how small, while acknowledging the losses.

Five, hang on, they do deaden with time if not reinforced by new occurrences of the affair. Time may not heal the wound, but it will lessen the impact of the wound emotionally. The safer the hurt spouse feels as time goes by without new cheating, the less impact triggers will have.

Six, focus on strengthening your romance. Couples who feel in love with each other will not be as negatively affected by triggers. The book, His Needs, Her Needs is an excellent tool to aid in that process.

Seven, both hurt spouses and unfaithful spouses should realize that feelings are not controlled directly by will power and reasoning. They can influence emotions, but can't turn them off and on like flipping a light switch. It takes time to modify emotions. This is true whether we're talking about feelings of pain and anger from a hurt spouse, or the unfaithful spouse feeling in love with their affair partner. Because a trigger flairs those feelings up from time to time doesn't mean the person has gone back to square one.

There are perhaps other methods of dealing with them. What has worked for you?

Fogville

2014-05-30T08:04:00.002-05:00

If you read up on infidelity and frequent support forums, you're bound to run into the concept of the affair fog. There are plenty of misconceptions about the fog from both hurt spouses and unfaithful spouses. Some believe it doesn't exist, others think it is an excuse for cheating.

What's the truth? Allow me to take a more in-depth look at the subject.

What is the Fog?

The fog is used as an analogy or metaphor for a mental state a person sinks into when their desire for something blinds them against any reasons not to seek it. Like someone in a thick fog, all they can see is what they want, and the only reasons they see are those that justify obtaining it.

We all experience this dynamic in our lives. When I was 9 years old, I had received a record player for Christmas. One of my favorite bands was the Monkees, and my favorite song, "I'm a Believer."

I'm dating myself now, but back then cereal boxes had singles you could cut off the back of the box and play on a record player. Finally, after waiting for a long time, a new box of Honey Comb had my song on the back. Only problem is Mom had a rule. You couldn't get the prize until the whole box of cereal had been eaten.

I wanted that song so bad, I single-handedly ate the whole box of cereal in one sitting. It was hard stuffing the last couple of bowls into my stomach, but the goal was in sight. I finished the box, cut out the record, only to discover the record was scratched.

Then the consequences I had not seen due to my foggy mindset hit me. It became obvious when Mom took me and my brothers to get ice cream cones. I didn't want any because my stomach was churning. She wondered about me, but not for long. Because it all came up in Exorcist style on the restaurant floor.

When our desire for something gets strong enough, our mind has a way of helping us to justify getting it, no matter how illogical, illegal, or who it will hurt. All arguments as to why we shouldn't get it become ineffective. The stronger the desire, the more true this is.

The Affair Fog

Due to the addictive qualities of many affairs, those in an affair tend to be deep in this fog. Even if they have no intention of leaving their spouse or hurting them, the reality that their actions will do just that is ignored. In the back of their minds, they know this is the case, but the desire for what they want is so strong such concerns are about as relevant to them as what a bird is eating on the other side of the world.

I've seen this happen multiple times on the forum unfaithful spouses visit to seek support. Someone comes there either about to have an affair or in the very beginning of one. The more experienced who have been where this person is, attempts to warn them of the pain down that road. How much it will hurt their spouse, their family, their affair partner, and themselves, describing their experience.

What happens?

Rare is the person in that situation who says, "Oh man, you are all right! What on earth did I think I was doing? This is stupid. I'm dumping him today." Instead, they will ignore all that and justify their need to do what they want. They may demonize their spouse. Or feel their spouse will never find out. Or no one will get hurt, that they are the exception to all the horror stories. Or, they feel the "love" (that is, strong desire for their affair partner) is so good any cost will be worth it.

I've seen this time and time again. Logic won't sway them. The warnings from those who've been through it before fall on deaf ears. Only in the aftermath do they discover all the warnings were right. Then it is too late.

The Invisible Fog

The interesting factoid is how when people are in foggy thinking mode, they don't realize that is what is going on. They are blind to the fact that they aren't perceiving the whole picture. It isn't until they are extracted from that mindset that they can see their reasoning ability was impaired by their desire.

My wife experienced this. Now, over three years after I discovered the affair, she looks back at what she did during those months and is not just disgusted and greatly sad at what she did, but can't hardly believed she did it. On this side of the fence, she sees it as one of, if not the most stupidest, series of decisions and actions she's ever committed. At the time, however, it all felt logical, justified, and any thoughts of consequences were ignored or dismissed.

It is this aspect which makes the fog so hard to break through. Reality has been altered into a fantasy holodeck-life. Immersed in it, the unfaithful spouse sees it as the reality. Attempts to convince them otherwise is like telling someone the life they are living is a fake and giving them the choice of pills to take to wake up or not, like in the Matrix.

The Thinning Fog

Another truth about the fog is that it isn't something that usually vanishes all in one brief moment. Rather it gradually thins out over several months or years. Sometimes, the fog stays in areas like settling into the low valleys among hills. For some areas, the fog may stay firmly ensconced for years, or a lifetime.

On discovery day, the fog thinned out for Lenita a good bit. Enough that she desired to heal our relationship and was immediately willing to do the hard things to accomplish it.

However, it took about three months before she was defogged enough to start feeling the guilt. The fog hides the guilt, because guilt of what they are doing to their spouse and family would prevent them from getting what they're desiring. It took about that long before she decided to get rid of all memorabilia of her affair partners. It took almost two years before she began to feel anger at her first affair partner and call what he and her were doing as evil. Not just think it, but feel it.

Another key area this is seen is in the tell/don't tell debate among unfaithful spouses who haven't been caught, even among those who's affair is over. Some of them believe they are no longer in the fog because they can see the thick foggy thinking they've left behind, but not realizing they're not totally out of the woods.

Despite the very compelling and logical reasons to tell, the unfaithful spouse is so driven to avoid the pain of facing the full consequences of their actions that they ignore those realities and justify not telling usually by suggesting it will "unnecessarily" hurt the spouse to do so, or that their spouse will leave them.

The main logical reason? Simply put, hurt spouses say their are two reasons that learning of an affair hurts them and the relationship. One, obviously, is the betrayal of love and trust by becoming intimate with another. The second, and often listed as the worst of the two, is the deception.

I can vouch for that. As I stated in our book, I felt a real loss to know that she was having sex with another man, something she'd never done in her life. I was her only lover in life, and she is the only one I've had.

With that as a given, the one thing that really shook me was how she could do what she did, not feel guilty about it, act like everything was normal, and that she was devoted to me. I didn't think she was capable of that kind of deception. That shook my trust and ability to rebuild it more than any other aspect. I stood over our bed, watching her sleep, and wondered how she could sleep knowing what she was doing. She had become a stranger I didn't know.

While discovering the affair itself was bad enough, the deception compounded it greatly. Blessed is the hurt spouse whose unfaithful spouse has the courage to confess rather than let them discover it themselves and struggle to find out what happened.

But the fact that the affair has already hurt the spouse and marriage, and healing it can only happen when they are aware of it, or that keeping that information is a way to control the hurt spouse who deserves to know so they can make their own decisions is pushed aside due to foggy thinking, even when they believe they are out of the fog.

If the hurt spouse doesn't know, it is highly unlikely that the fog is gone. There will always be a reason one can find to not do the right thing. I know, confessing is a hard thing to do. No one likes to tell on themselves. No one likes to confront the consequences of their actions, and experience the pain in another you know you've caused. But that doesn't justify continued deception, continued hurting of your spouse.

Foggy Excuses?

Some suggest that there is no such thing as the fog. That it is an invention to make excuses for the unfaithful spouse's infidelity.

It is true some unfaithful or even hurt spouses may use it in that manner. But such thinking is a fallacy. So dismissing it on those grounds is a fallacy.

The reality that strong desires for something can cause one's mind to block all feelings, logic, and arguments against getting it, and accept all justifications to do so is well documented. Prolonged exposure to giving into one's desires in that fashion ingrains the false reality in the mind, forming an addiction. So a drug addict will rob and kill to get their next fix, or a gambling addict will risk their life savings, mortgage, and the kids college funds to gamble.

The fallacy is in believing the fog let's the unfaithful spouse off the hook. That they couldn't help it. That if they were magically transported back to before the affair started, knowing what they know now, they would still have the affair because they can't change due to the fog.

This isn't true. It is still the unfaithful spouse who fed that desire, who waded into the quicksand, who justified crossing boundaries they should have known better than to do so. No matter the pull of one's desires, one can always say "no." I'm not saying it is easy, but it is within each person, even in the middle of the fog, to recognize they are not thinking right, and turn against the demand of their desires.

Animals have no choice. Humans always do. They do not need to be enslaved to their desires and the fog like an animal. They can avoid it, or acknowledge their wrong thinking and purposefully exit the fog. We have the ability to ignore our desires when they are destructive, and do what we know is best for those we love, not just ourselves.

How to Get Out of the Fog?

Three main steps.

One, confess. To both God and the one you've hurt. Facing the full consequences of your actions will go far in heading one out of the fog. Nothing destroys fantasy land and fogville faster than bringing it all into the light.

Two, take responsibility. Be honest about what happened. Agree to discuss it as needed, and face the sin head on. This, in addition to the first, will shatter the fog's illusion.

Three, repent. That means more than feeling sorry for what happened, or saying you're sorry. It includes actions that take effective measures to address why you gave into the temptations, and ensure that it won't happen again. Focusing on addressing the sin will continue to counter the fog until your desires give up.

In short, you're taking responsibility for which mindset you feed. The more you feed your desires without restriction, the stronger they are and the thicker the fog it creates will be. Starve them and feed desires for the good things in your life, the stronger you'll be against the affair fog.

When have you experienced a desire so bad you ignored warning against fulfilling them?

Changing Normals: Three Years

2014-05-09T04:13:00.000-05:00

This post I decided to write more of a personal note, much as we've done in our book, Healing Infidelity.

This Sunday, May 11th, marks our third discovery day anniversary. Three years ago, May 11, 2011, I discovered, to my horror and total shock, that my wife of 29 years had been having a series of affairs over the previous seven months, both emotional and physical, both online and real life.

Life has never been the same.

I know a lot of hurt spouses will read that as mostly negative. And there are some negative changes. Can't escape all those no matter how well rebuilding goes, no matter how well one heals. There will always be a scar. There will always be that memory of utter disbelief at what I was reading, and feeling my stability crumble under my feet as my worst marital fears materialized:

The intimacy I'd lost with another man in the relationship. The deception she'd hid from me for seven months that I never thought she'd be capable of. The innocent trust that could never be regained. The realization that this could be the end of our marriage.

Some changes were positive.

But we both became less selfish. Our lives and marriage became focused on each other instead of our separate interests. We spent more time together. Sacrificed ourselves for each other. Romance reignited and we learned how to keep it going instead of letting it die.

By year three, the "new normal" isn't so new anymore. I look back at the man I was and I've changed so much, mostly for the better. Like the song says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I'm much more focused today on what really matters than I was then. That old me seems so foreign now. The old me is dead, and in many ways, that is a good thing.

Lenita has totally changed. Her interests pre-affair and post-affair are like night and day. I know what she spent her time doing pre-affair, as well as during the affairs, is much different than what it is post-affairs. Her attitude toward me, our marriage, and her own life is why we are still together.

You see, when I discovered the affairs, their existence said to me that she didn't love me anymore. How could she do that to me and still say she loves me? While she said it, I couldn't believe it. She'd been lying to me and cheating behind my back for seven months, dead set on keeping that truth from me. How could I trust a word that came out of her mouth? I couldn't at that point.

So what changed my mind that she did love me?

Watching her unflinchingly face what she'd done, own up to it, and refuse to shift the blame onto me or anyone else. Struggle for months with her guilt and wrestling with what was wrong in her heart and soul that allowed this to happen. Seeing her go to confession for almost a year every week. Watch her strengthen her spiritual life, so much so, that she put me to shame. Experiencing her consistent attention, affection, truthfulness, honesty, and commitment to me. Making me the most important person in her life after God.

I saw what lengths she was willing to go to in order to save our marriage and keep me.

That convinced me that her love wasn't merely words, but real. Discovering the affairs said she didn't love me. Experiencing the extent that she went to keep me revealed how much she loved me.

If it wasn't for that drive of hers to do all she could to repair the damage she'd caused, I wouldn't be here writing this blog post right now. We'd not have written a book together on how we not only rebuilt after infidelity, but created a vibrant and stronger marriage in its wake. We'd likely have divorced by this point.

We're headed off on a weekend anniversary trip. Both to celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary (May 15th) and having made it three years since discovery day in not only good shape, but with a renewed and vibrant marriage.

I wish everyone approaching their third discovery day anniversary were in the same boat. Part of my mission with the book and blog is to help as many as possible make that boat before it sails.

On our trip, we'll spend time discussing what has changed in this past year and look forward to planning for the coming years. We've changed. Even during this past year. "Normal" is never a static state of existence. The question is never what should our normal have been, but what will it be in a few months, years, and when we're in a nursing home some day?

I don't know what the future holds, but I know right now, despite what happened, there's no one I'd rather grow old with than Lenita.

Happy anniversaries, Sweetie!

The Stages of Grief and Infidelity

2014-04-17T05:46:00.000-05:00

This is a chapter excerpt from our book, Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. You'll find not only other helpful articles in that book, but our story of how she entered the affairs, how I found out, and how we successfully rebuilt.

------------------------

Both the hurt spouse and the unfaithful spouse go through the stages of grief. Sometimes one or both will get stuck in these stages for various reasons. I am taking the classical stages of grief and applying them to the loss of infidelity to help both hurt spouses and unfaithful spouses understand what they are going through, so you aren't blindsided when these emotions and feeling arise. They are part of the healing process.

These are usually associated with tragedies of various kinds like a death in the family, someone getting cancer, loss of functionality due to an auto accident, etc. The loss of an affair is a little different in that the beginning of grieving toward healing may not be able to get fully underway until the parties involved feel fairly confident that the affair is over, which for some couples can be months, years for the determined, or never.

Hurt spouses suffer the loss of trust, the loss of security in the relationship, the loss of innocence, the loss of who they viewed their spouse to be, loss of feelings of love, if not loving commitment, and other related losses. Many suffer loss of self-esteem because they feel the affair was some deficiency in them, and the spouse must not love them as much as they thought because they chose someone else over them. Additionally, if it ends in divorce, the loss of the whole relationship itself.

The unfaithful spouses will, upon hitting discovery day, at least experience the loss of their secret life, and if they successfully cut off contact, the loss of those relationships. Additionally, they'll experience the loss of their marital intimacy and the trust of their spouse. They'll also experience the loss of their self-respect and self-esteem for what they did (many respond to this in various ways, including denial, shifting guilt, acting like everything is okay, or not wanting to talk about it because they don't enjoy being whipped up on). If it ends in divorce, they also can experience the loss of that relationship.

There are five general stages of grieving most people who suffer loss go through. Not everyone will experience all of these, and they can overlap, or one may feel they've gone beyond one stage only to find themselves back there again. There aren’t any neat lines and boxes when one goes from one to the other. You can experience two or three of these things all in one day. But there is a basic progression, and how well you heal from it for yourself (not taking into account any exterior circumstances that could delay or prevent it, like the unfaithful spouse having another affair or the hurt spouse leaving, never to return, etc.) will vary on successfully progressing through these stages.

Denial

This is the usual first stage. The event doesn't seem real. It can't be happening. There must be some explanation. She would never do this to me. Hurt spouses are especially vulnerable to "gas lighting" during this phase, because they are already predisposed to doubt what they are realizing has happened, even with solid proof sitting in front of them. At this stage, the hurt spouse wants to believe there is a reasonable explanation.

I remember my first reaction upon reading Lenita's online confession. I said, "No! No! No!" I had to look away from the computer and sit in a chair, trying to take in what I had just read. It was just so out of character for her, I couldn't believe it was true. Yet, there it was, staring at me in black and white. Though I knew inside it wasn't likely to be the case, I hoped like wildfire that when I confronted her, she would go, "OH! You must have read what I wrote last night to that guy! I was just saying that to play along with him. It was all a big joke." Or, "I knew you installed that key logger and wanted to get back at you. Ha ha! Got you good!" Which would have been a very mean trick, but I would rather that had been the case.

For the unfaithful spouse, the denial may be more along the lines of not believing they'd been caught, and the gig was up. They had convinced themselves that they would never be caught, that they could keep this hidden. Suddenly, that's all falling apart, and for the first time perhaps, they are thinking about what discovery means and its ramifications. But they don't want to consider that. It is what they've hid from for the length of the affair, thinking the two lives could remain separate and not affecting the other. Initially, they may not have wanted the affair to end, and deny that it has, even if he also, at the same time, wants to rebuild with his spouse, which is where much of the ambivalence comes from. They don't want to let go of either life, lose either life, and they are in denial that it has come down to that choice.

Anger

Once it sets in that the affair has happened, and denial is more an emotional disconnect than a mental reality, the anger sets in. For the hurt spouse, the anger is obvious: How could you do this to me? I thought you loved me? You broke our vows! You deceived me! How dare you put my life at risk with unprotected sex behind my back!

The unfaithful spouse can experience anger, even if it appears irrational from the hurt spouse viewpoint: Don't talk about him that way! He is a human too. Why do you keep whipping me about this over and over, I said I was sorry! Why don't you work on yourself more, the marriage isn't all about me? I had needs too! He met them! Pride can easily keep an unfaithful spouse defensive rather than cooperative. He can also be angry at himself or the affair partner for allowing the discovery of the affair.

The point is, both experience loses, and anger is one reaction for many in dealing with the causes or perceived causes of those losses. How easy it is to get over that anger can be due to several factors, including the repentant attitude of the unfaithful spouse, the personality of the hurt spouse, and whether one or both can empathize with the other's feelings of loss. The ability to do the later is usually the opposite of being angry, so the more one is able to look past their own pain and be concerned for the other, the less anger will have a hold.

At some point, the anger begins to feel pointless, as it becomes evident that it is doing more harm to the one who is angry than it is to the other. But in the beginning, the hurt spouse especially feels almost an obligation to be angry, to not appear to let the spouse off "easy." But if it is held onto, it can prevent the hurt spouse from moving toward healing even if the unfaithful spouse does all the proper steps and heals.

Bargaining

One stage some go through is bargaining. This is traditionally thought of in a death loss, usually the person saying something like, "God, if you'll just bring her back, I'll go to the mission field," or some other deal.

In an affair, this is more likely to be reflected in an attempt to get back to the pre-affair life. In hurt spouses, it may be along the lines of "If you'll do these things, I'll stay and rebuild the marriage." Or in drastic cases, the hurt spouse might even say in not so many words, "Just don't flash it before my face, and I'll look the other way. Do what you want as long as you don't leave." Sort of a mixture of denial and bargaining. Or, "God, why did you let this happen to me? Fix him and I'll be the best wife ever."

An "in the fog" unfaithful spouse may think, "If I tell him this much of the truth, I can keep the affair going," or "If I don't tell him everything, I won't have to deal with his hurt and pain, and my shame and guilt." Post-fog unfaithful spouses may say in effect, "If I do everything she wants me to do, be the best husband I can be for a week, six weeks, six months, [insert whatever perceived time frame], then she'll stay and things will go back to 'normal'." Of course not realizing that this is called "rebuilding," not "remodeling" for a very good reason. What is built back won't look like the original, and it will take a good two years minimum to accomplish under the best of conditions.

Depression

Once the hysterical bonding dies down, and the reality of what is appearing to be the new normal has set in, depression can start to build. Fostered by changing identities, unresolved issues from the affair, or marital issues magnified by the affair, the hurt spouse or unfaithful spouse begins to feel that these are never going to get resolved or fixed. This grows even worse if the hurt spouse discovers continued contact with the affair partner, a new affair has started, or the unfaithful spouse hasn't told him everything and more truth trickles out. The things he thought would "fix" the marriage don't seem to be working, and during this time it can seem the hurt spouse and/or the unfaithful spouse take ten steps back for every step forward.

But even in good rebuilding, when things seem to be going well, there can be a time of depression. It can be experienced early in the process when you are unsure if he is going to break contact with the affair partner, or he doesn't seem repentant, commit to rebuilding like he said, or other related issues. Likewise, later in the process, as you gain perspective with the movement of time, you will look back and lament the losses you've sustained, and that will end up being expressed as depression.

It is in this stage that many couples in rebuilding can hit a wall. The one in depression will appear to have suddenly gone from being hopeful and happy about the marriage to despairing that it will ever work. They lose hope either from being tired of the constant effort and struggle of the rebuilding process with no seeming signs of things getting better, or have unrealistic expectations of how long the rebuilding process would be and how hard it is to go through.

Some will end up giving up at this point, fearing things will never improve or work, and getting out of the marriage is the only solution left. Others can get stuck here for months, even years, effectively halting a full healing and restoration of the relationship. If the couple realizes this for what it is, a natural part of the grieving process, and are patient with each other through it, and work to get past it, it usually leads to the final stage where a fuller healing can begin in earnest.

Acceptance

Here, both parties have come to terms with their losses, and accepted them. They no longer are obsessed with them and desire to look ahead rather than focus on the mess behind them. They are tired of being angry and depressed over it. A new "normal" is on the way to being established and identities formed that offer security and trust strengthened to functioning levels. They have let go of the hurts, that even though they are still there, aren't allowed to guide their lives and rule their thoughts. Forgiveness plays a part in reaching this stage, as injustice and anger is released and replaced with a more optimistic outlook for the future.

The key point becomes, that though it will always be there, the hurt and events of the affair are now considered "in the past" and the focus is on the future, whether one is rebuilding or in a divorced situation. That usually allows the couple to more fully focus on themselves, or the individual on a new relationship to spend their future with.

Hopefully this will be helpful in understanding some of the issues being dealt with by both sides of the affair, and strengthen the chance for healing and rebuilding to be successful.

The Top 5 Traps of Hurt Spouses

2014-04-04T07:03:00.000-05:00

Rebuilding a marriage from infidelity is hard work for both spouses. Granted, the bulk of the work falls to the unfaithful spouse. They destroyed the hurt spouse's trust. Only the unfaithful spouse can rebuild that trust over months and years. Way too often, the unfaithful spouse is not willing to make the commitment and do the work necessary to create the emotional security for the hurt spouse to heal and "get over it."

With that as a given, there are traps that a hurt spouse can fall into that prevents healing from taking place despite heroic efforts by the unfaithful spouse. For hurt spouses, you'll want to make sure you avoid these traps when possible so if the rebuilding fails, you can confidently say it wasn't because you didn't do all that you could to heal.

1. Staying in Victim Mode

Yes, the hurt spouse is a victim of the unfaithful spouse's cheating and deception. While they may not be a victim in other marital rough spots, when it comes to being cheated on, rare is the instance when the hurt spouse is in part to blame for the unfaithful spouse's decision to cheat.

That said, being a victim isn't the same thing as living in victim mode. Being a victim is a fact. Living in victim mode is to wear that status as a manipulative tool to guilt your spouse into submission. Especially if the unfaithful spouse is already feeling guilty, it can be tempting for the hurt spouse to take advantage of that emotional insecurity.

In so doing, however, you prevent the healing of the marriage by creating an unequal relationship dynamic. Instead of partners, you lock someone into emotional slavery until they can't take it anymore and leave. The unfaithful spouse will not likely heal because instead of repentance-producing guilt they'll feel unredemptive shame.

For sure, the hurt spouse will naturally live in victim mode in the days and weeks following the discovery of the affair. Unfaithful spouses will need to be patient, understanding their spouse is dealing with trauma levels of emotional pain during this time, and they are a victim in this case.

The hurt spouse will need to leave living in victim mode if rebuilding is to succeed.

2. Claiming Moral Superiority

No two ways about it, cheating is morally wrong, sinful, and destroying to all involved. Most unfaithful spouses who have lived through the aftermath of what they've done get that. Even some in the midst of their affairs know this is true, but give into the passionate romance of it anyway.

Because of that, the hurt spouse can develop an attitude of moral superiority over the unfaithful spouse, using it to manipulate the unfaithful spouse. It is the flipside of the coin for point #1. Instead of manipulating with guilt, the hurt spouse manipulates with their own "holiness." Bring up past failings is not effective because everything else pales in comparison to the huge sin committed by the unfaithful spouse.

This trap prevents successful rebuilding for the same reasons as #1: it creates an unhealthy relationship dynamic. It is tempting for the hurt spouse because they've been out of control for the duration of the affair. Exerting control over the unfaithful spouse gives the hurt spouse a temporary sense of security.

In the end, it destroys any chance for the unfaithful spouse to rebuild real security back into the marriage.

3. Having Your Own Affair

There are many reasons a hurt spouse may be tempted to have their own affair. Revenge. Entitlement. Giving up on the marriage. Perceiving the door is now open to do what they always wanted to do. Believing the mythical "this will make us even" justification. Attempting to bolster the lack of self-esteem from the affair, just to name some popular reasons.

The problem with all those reasons is cheating is not wrong because people and culture says it is, but because it is so destructive to all involved, including the unfaithful spouse. One doesn't heal by inflicting more damage upon themselves and their spouse. It only complicates the ability to rebuild.

4. Bigotry

That is, bigotry against unfaithful spouses as a group. Generally this is reflected by applying labels to the group as a whole, often in absolute terms. "Cheaters are narcissistic. Cheaters are abusers. Cheaters are morally bankrupt. All cheaters don't give a damn about anyone other than themselves." Etc.

Such conclusions are often reached by spouses whose marriages are falling apart due to the affair, getting a divorce, or forced to live in a loveless marriage. They tend to generalize their experience onto all unfaithful spouses. Such labels can give hurt spouses a sense of explaining the why of the affair but in very straightjacketed terms. It can also feed into #2 above.

If a hurt spouse in rebuilding picks up on that attitude and "explanation" from such sources, it does what any bigotry does: treats people as an impersonal classification instead of as individuals deserving respect. That creates an "us vs. them" dynamic that will short circuit any rebuilding attempt.

5. Getting Stuck in the Grieving Process

To progress toward healing from infidelity, the hurt spouse will progress through the grieving process until they come to a point of acceptance. Acceptance is the point where the hurt spouse no longer focuses on the pain and loss of the affair, but looks ahead to the future. Doesn't mean the hurt spouse never thinks about any of it again, only that their life is not defined by a preoccupation with their loss.

The general stages of grief leading up to acceptance is denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. A chapter in our book is devoted to this topic. Each stage has the potential to trap a hurt spouse and keep them from progressing.

For some, denial is their security. They are the ones likely to say, "I wish I'd never discovered the affair," and promptly attempt to forget it ever happened. The issues never get dealt with, and the unfaithful spouse has no motivation to make the changes they need to make. Rebuilding doesn't even get off the ground.

Others get stuck in bargaining. They end up enabling an unfaithful spouses inappropriate behaviors by making deals as if it is their fault. "You cheated on me because I wasn't giving you enough sex? Okay, I'll give you all you want, then you won't cheat on me." Or insert whatever reason the unfaithful spouse might indicate as to why they had the affair. Such a spouse believes if they just make them happy, they won't leave them.

Then of course depression is a big trap. The hurt spouse laments the loss of how life used to be. The blind trust they had. The joy they experienced. The innocence lost. Lost health can factor into it if STDs are involved. It is here that moving on means coming to acceptance. Many hurt spouses are afraid to give it up. For some, they can't because the unfaithful spouse isn't rebuilding trust. In other cases, releasing that mourning feels like suggesting it wasn't important what was lost.

Until acceptance manifest itself, healing will not happen. Most hurt spouses will need to go through most of these stages to get there. Some of them may take longer than others. But allowing yourself to stay in a stage longer than necessary stalls not only the grieving process, but also the rebuilding.

Those are my top five traps that can keep a hurt spouse from healing, and therefore, keep the marriage from surviving the affair.

Can you think of any more you'd add?

The Key to Communication in Marriage

2014-03-30T04:36:00.000-05:00

The ability of spouses to communicate effectively with each other plays a big role in not only a healthy marriage, but in successfully rebuilding from infidelity. If a couple misunderstand each other, don't really hear each other, or attempts to communicate always turn into heated arguments, it will be near impossible to rebuild the trust and security needed for a vibrant marriage. Even communication that is only occasionally misfiring will cause problems.

So, How Do Spouses Improve Their Communication?

There are lots of places on the web, lots of books you can buy, seminars you can attend that can help with this. This is one aspect of marriage counseling. Having your therapist spend some time on this topic, especially if this is a sore spot in the relationship, is money well spent.

So that I'm not leaving you totally without guidance in this department, this article on "Effective Communication" at HelpGuide.org is a good start. I've read through the article, and I liked what it says. However, I don't know this site. It may be good, or not. So linking there isn't an endorsement of the site, but this article is good. Use your own judgement.

My Checklist of Communication Problems

Before we divulge the key to effective communication, this is my list of behaviors that cause most communication problems.

1. Not listening.

Too often our attention is not fully on the person speaking. Either because we are planning our next statement/point, checking text or other activities while "listening," not making eye contact, or our mind is off on a rabbit trail.

2. Not talking clearly.

Frequently, people hint, generalize, or leave cleaver clues, hoping the other person will pick up on what the speaker really meant. This derives from a desire not to confront. Instead of simply saying what your problem is, you shoot all around it hoping they'll get it without having to come out and directly say it. Problem is, if you don't clearly communicate what is on your mind in a constructive manner, don't expect them to get it. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

3. Not being honest.

If you have something to hide from someone, you'll tend to not communicate clearly, and say things you don't mean to cover for the secrets. It is much more likely you'll send contradictory messages. To communicate effectively means saying what you really feel about a topic. Be real.

4. Not engaging a person's points.

When you ignore the other person's contribution to the topic at hand by failing to address it, staying focused on your point(s), answering the question you think they intended to ask or should have asked instead of the question they did ask, it tends to either shut down communication and/or cause the conversation to chase its tail. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I made our points over and over again to each other, because neither of us felt the other was addressing their concerns and points.

This is by no means a complete list, but they all are examples of violating the following key to effective communication in anything, especially a marriage.

Effective Communication Happens When Spouses Demonstrate Respect for Each Other.

That's right. When you respect someone, you respect their opinion and feelings enough to honestly care about what they have to say, actively listen to what they say, and incorporate what they are saying into the dynamic of the conversation. When you respect someone, you'll be honest and transparent with them, and communicate clearly what you honestly think and feel about a subject. You'll do all that in a non-judgmental manner, as well as not becoming offended yourself, and jumping to the conclusion that they are being judgmental.

Indeed, some reading this will be thinking to themselves, "Oh, yes. This is what my husband does to me. Bad husband!" No, this is not a rod to beat your spouse over the head with, but a tool for self-evaluation! You can't control how he will respond, but you can work on your communication skills. Yes, if possible, lead him to water, but only he can decide to drink. Invite him to grow with you. But instead of using this information to judge your spouse, use this and the above article to help you communicate more effectively. Both to speak and to hear and to respectfully engage each other.

The key is to honestly respect your spouse as a person of worth, whether you like them or not. Do that, and all the skills mentioned in the above linked article will follow.

Love in the Affair Lane

2014-03-14T09:33:00.000-05:00

Love is a many splendored thing, so we are told. Except when it becomes violated by an affair. Both hurt spouses and unfaithful spouses deal with issues of love.

For the unfaithful spouse, there is the issue of loving their affair partner, and sometimes ambilvance causes them to not be so sure about loving their spouse. Or the more complex feelings of loving both the affair partner and the spouse at the same time.

For the hurt spouse, there is the issue of whether they can still love their unfaithful spouse, and if so, what does it look like? They often bounce between feelings of love and hate for their spouse, especially if the spouse does not do the necessary steps to heal.

To understand the following, you will want to read the article, "Am I in Love?" to get a good picture of what love is in its fullness: passion (eros), companionship (philio), security (storge), and sacrificial (agape). Real love involves all of those, even if one doesn't start out with all the first day.

However, when one speaks of love between spouses, what makes a marriage, we automatically think of the romantic, passionate love. Two people who are crazy about each other and act like it! However, by itself it is a poor substitute for love as it should be.

Passionate love is like lighter fluid for a relationship.

It kindles the fire between two people. As noted in my above linked article, it triggers the dopamine-reward system, and so can become addictive. Most of us can think back to dating our spouse and see the difference between how much time we spent together and how we treated each other then and now. Negatives in our spouse to be were not noticed then like you do now.

The problem is this type of love is very selfish in nature. Because of that, once the logs on the fire that seem naturally lite up with fire run out of fuel to keep it going, there isn't much motivation to put more logs onto the fire. That's work. That requires sacrifice. That requires thinking of the other person before yourself.

Passionate love is a strong desire for the feelings you get from a person. The fullness of love is loving the person, independent of feelings.

Upon the initial burst of passionate love you experience, you will think you love that person. But at that point, the only reason you feel love for that person is because of how they are making you feel. You may barely know anything about them. The only reason you believe you love them is because of the fireworks going off, because you feel attraction, because they act and talk like they want you, because they make you feel important. If it were not for those feelings, you'd give them no further consideration than any other man or woman walking down the street.

Ideally, what should happen is passionate love motivates us enough to develop a sacrificial love for that person. It should lead to the thought, "I like how she makes me feel. Therefore, to treasure and enjoy how she makes me feel, I will invest myself into her and this relationship." From it, the fullness of love can develop that commits one's self to ensuring fresh logs are continually put on the fire by meeting each other's needs sacrificially.

Too often, however, the passionate love is the totality of love for one or both spouses.

They only are in the relationship as long as it meets their needs. Meeting the needs of their spouse isn't a priority. That's not what they married for. They married for how he made them feel. Once they no longer feel that "love," they determine that they have fallen out of love.

This is often attributed to various things. Responsibilities pulling the two apart. Being too tired when you do have time together. Not cultivating common activities together. Allowing work or career to dominate your life and push your spouse away.

The term you'll hear for that is people change. They grow apart. They were compatible, now they are not. Their interest change, are no longer the same. Their values diverge from each other. Etc. What it boils down to is one or both didn't move beyond loving the feeling of love to loving the person. It never grew to sacrificially maintaining the fire of passion in each other, so it burned out.

This can happen even when sacrificial love is present. Complacency and taking each other for granted shove sacrificial love to the backyard and keep selfish love as the front door guard. This allows a couple to drift apart.

If passionate love is not united to true sacrificial love, it remains selfish in nature and destined to fall apart.

What you'll eventually end up with is "He/She no longer makes me feel loved." Therefore, the conclusion is that you are no longer in love. It is true you may no longer experience passionate love with that person, but the fault isn't that two people merely drifted apart. The drifted apart because they were too focused on what they wanted and wasn't getting than in what the other person needed and then providing for it.

That provides the foundation of why a marriage can become susceptible to an affair. It is why, upon experiencing the excitement of a new relationship, an unfaithful spouse perceives, according to how the affair partner makes them feel compared to their spouse, that they must have fallen out of love with their spouse. Or feel like they love two people.

It is also why the hurt spouse feels a loss of love with their spouse and takes a self-esteem hit, because they no longer feel important to their spouse. They feel replaced. If the marriage had already grown cold, the revelation of an affair can put the nails in the coffin.

It is the presence of sacrificial love on the part of both spouses that can not only get a couple through the rebuilding from an affair, but also rekindle the fires of passion through sacrificial giving.

If it is sitting in the backyard, it can be brought back into the house to sacrifice for each other. Without it, you'll have two people pulling at each other instead of working together.

Some may interpret what I've said above as saying that passionate love is not real love. That would be inaccurate. The feelings of love are real. They are powerful. They are needed to motivate you onto developing sacrificial love in its fullness. It needs to be present.

However, by itself, it is but a shadow of what love is. It is the motivation of love without its substance. It should grow into full love, but often does not due to lack of commitment to each other. This is where the rub comes in for unfaithful spouses and their affair partners. The fire that should draw them to commit to each other is there, but rarely can they commitment to a full sacrificial love and grow from it. Because, at least one tends to also be committed to another. At least one cannot openly and fully commit to the other person.

Passionate love is mostly what fuels an affair relationship in many cases.

They only way to free passionate love to develop into sacrificial love in an affair is to divorce one's spouse so they can fully devote themselves to the other. Statistics show that happens only a small percent of the time. So most affairs stay stuck in the passionate feelings of love, and never mature. Ending only when light is shown upon them, or the passion dies out and the relationship ends under its own weight.

On the other side, the hurt spouse may feel some level of love, but no passionate love. They may go through a hyper-bonding phase, but when that dies off, they are left feeling nothing. They may still feel some security love, comfort like an old, worn shoe they don't want to throw away, but the affair has killed off the passion if it was there to begin with.

That too will take a good dose of sacrificial love to find that desire to not only rekindle that lost passion but to feel enough empathy to meet their needs. The hurt may cover that up for a time. The unfaithful spouse needs to be patient with the hurt spouse, even as the hurt spouse needs to be patient with themselves.

It is the same sacrificial love that will enable the unfaithful spouse to face the pain, not run away, not sweep issues under the rug, own the error, and then do everything possible and needed to heal themselves, rebuild trust and love in the hurt spouse, and fix the damage done from the affair. It won't feel good. It's going to hurt, but if you really love your spouse with that love, you'll do it.

Then watch out. You may find you've fallen in love with your spouse again.

Am I in Love?

2014-03-07T05:02:00.000-06:00

The following is a chapter from our book, Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. It is an attempt to discern what it means to say "I love you" especially in the context of an affair and spouses rebuilding.

-------------------------

A common statement among unfaithful spouses is that they fell in love with their affair partners. I've heard them say statements like, "She made me feel more alive than I ever have." The rush of an affair-generated love can be addictive. But is the unfaithful spouse really in love with his affair partner? Also what does he mean when he says he still love his spouse despite that?

Likewise, when a hurt spouse discovers the affair, his love for his spouse can take a hit. Some, over time, end up "falling out of love" with their spouse. This causes them to be less motivated in rebuilding or even caring about their spouse. If they stay in the marriage, it is more for the sake of the kids or financial reasons than loving their spouse. Some hurt spouses are unable to ever get over the rejection that the affair caused them to experience, either due to the unfaithful spouse not doing the needed actions to help them heal, or sometimes because the hurt spouse is too wounded from it to heal.

In either case, love or the loss of it becomes involved. It is therefore important that we look at what love is and within the context of an affair and rebuilding, how it can help or hurt as the case may be.

I intend to show why we feel love of various kinds and how they interact to form a full experience of love, and how when extracted from that context, get perverted into a false love. To do this, we need to first understand the four types of loves. C. S. Lewis, in his book "The Four Loves," lists four Greek words most common to understanding love: storge, philio, eros, and agape.

I know, I know. Many of you have heard all this before. Before you jump to conclusions about what I'm going to say, press reset for a moment and let's take a fresh look at these in the context of infidelity.

Eros

We're starting with this word because out of the four, it is the most misunderstood word. Perhaps because it is never used in the New Testament, the word tends to be restricted to sexual love. But this is too restrictive, not only in classical Greek usage—Plato uses it in non-sexual contexts—but in the Early Church Fathers, who often used the Greek word, eros, to describe our love for God.

The word that sums up the meaning of eros is passion. It is emotional, and a strong desire that moves us to action. It excites, activates, and moves us to act.

This is the type of love that appeals to help the starving children. Most any appeal, to be successful, has to pull this type of love from you. Seeing pictures of starving children is designed to get you to donate because your pity motivates you, gives you enough passion to move you to act. This is why the Church Fathers used the word in relation to God. We were to have a driving passion for God, and without that, you wouldn't have the motivation to stand up and be martyred for Christ.

Passion itself is a misunderstood term. It comes from the Greek as well and means "to suffer." So the "passion of Christ" refers to the suffering of Christ. How does this get from there to excitement that motivates? Simple. All passion is driven by suffering a lack of something perceived to be needed. In short, when you see something you want, you are suffering because you don't have it. You are in "pain" and are motivated to resolve it by fulfilling that desire.

Added to that, God has built into us a survival mechanism, usually related to hunger and other desires that we need to live. Sex falls into this realm too. When the brain perceives a feeling as pleasurable due to the infusion of dopamine firing off the brain synapses, it stores that as a need. If the dopamine levels are high enough, the brain can rate it as highly needed for survival. This forms the addictive pattern which can eventually—if reinforced enough times—lead one to having an addiction to a specific desire.

This dopamine response pattern can be fooled into perceiving something as a survival need that really is not. Nowhere is this more evident when an unfaithful spouse perceives he can't live without his affair partner, that dumping her means he is missing out on an important part of his life. This derives from the brain seeing the feelings the person receives from his affair partner as a "survival need" when in truth, he will survive just fine without her. Especially evident when he consider that he once felt that way about his current spouse, which is why he married her.

At its heart, eros or passion is a selfish love. It is having a need and seeking to fulfill it. But the other side of the coin is if we don't care, perceive something as not a need, we neglect that object and leave it to rot. Without this love, rebuilding will be much harder simply because we are not motivated to do the hard work of rebuilding. We don't perceive it as a need. Meanwhile, the unfaithful spouse still feels that passion for the affair partner. He has an eros love for the affair partner, but a different kind of love for the spouse.

Eros love, then, is a desire and need based love. It is motivated for what we will get out of it. Ideally, in conjunction with the other loves, we are also giving to someone else what they need for their passion. When that happens, you have what is generally termed as "romantic love" in our day. This gives us some insight into how this love works both in marriages and in affairs.

Romantic passion usually starts up in a relationship automatically. That is, most people feel that it happens naturally, without any effort on either person's part. Often it is described as a chemistry between two people. Or the most common term, "falling in love." For true marital love, this love acts as the priming of the marital love pump.

We usually refer to this experience as infatuation. When romantic love fires off between two people, they are both excited about each other. They both fail to see the failings and negative aspects of each other, or if they do, they make excuses or believe they will change, because this powerful love they feel will conquer all, or so it seems.

It should be noted this is the same type of love that one feels during an affair. It produces the "fog" we spoke of in Part 1. The feeling of new love is so powerful that it tends to put blinders on a person so that he cannot see the negative aspects of what he is doing. He only know one thing: "I can't live without having this feeling of love in my life. I must have it." Like a drug addict who is willing to spend their life's savings on the next high, those in affairs don't consider the negative consequences of what they are putting at risk in an affair.

But whether we are talking about a relationship that ends in marriage or one that ends in an affair, eventually this love dies if left unattended. This especially is true with a marriage because of the many distractions. Jobs, bills, children, sports, hobbies, school and many other responsibilities of married couples work to kill off romantic love. Passion dies off like a fire running out of fuel. But even for an affair relationship, eventually it gets old, is not new, the excitement dies off and the two at some point start to feel a responsibility to each other, not to mention the constant worry that they will be discovered and it all come to a sudden end.

This dynamic, the excitement of a new relationship, has led some to conclude that we were not made or created to be monogamous. Most who posit an evolutionary creation of man, point to this as the basic instinct of man that allowed him, especially when man was a small number, to spread his seed as widely as possible for the survival of the species.

However, this fails to account for the totality of love. It places eros, passion, romantic love as the only real love, at least as it relates to marriage and creating a family. As we will see, this is an incomplete picture of love. It is only one part, important as it may be. A part that can easily be perverted toward destructive actions in the name of love just as much as the drug addict is willing to steal and kill in the name of his love for the drug.

Because this love is based on an emotional needs-based feeling of well-being, it will naturally go up and down over a period of time. The "honeymoon" eventually dies off. So if we need this type of love in a marriage, how do we keep those fires burning?

This is where the book, His Needs, Her Needs: How to Affair-proof Your Marriage by Willard F. Jr. Harley, comes into the picture. This topic is way too big for one article, so I would highly suggest this book be obtained and read for a full understanding, but here is a summary that applies to what we are discussing here.

Men and women tend to have different needs to feel love for someone. One person may perceive a hug as saying, "I love you." Another may feel that when the other does some type of act of service like washing the dishes for them. Another when the person joins them in an activity like a sport or a hobby. While men and women tend to have opposite needs, each person is different. What makes one woman feel loved is not the same for another woman, or one man to another.

Doing the actions that say "I love you" to someone causes them to feel love, and fills what Mr. Harley calls the "love bank." As long as the deposits exceed the withdrawals—doing something that doesn't make them feel loved—the romantic fires are kept going.

The reason that it feels natural in the beginning of a relationship is because each person has an excitement about the relationship that causes them to invest as much time as possible with the other person. When that happens, it makes the other person feel loved. You are each motivated to do for the other the things they want to do. You find yourself spending every spare minute with them.

When I dated Lenita, we were together every evening unless otherwise prevented. When we were together, we focused on each other. I'm sure if I added up the time we spent together, it amounted to at least four to five hours a day on the average. That means we were together, focused on each other, for around 28 hours a week.

But what happened to us? Like all marriages, jobs and children pulled us apart. Over the years, our time spent with each other shrank to minutes a day instead of hours. Often those minutes weren't focused on each other, but on daily issues, taking care of this or that, or attending church. We rarely took time to make deposits into each other's love banks. We had some of the other loves we'll be talking about, so we felt we loved each other, but this love became neglected over the years. It would get fed only on special occasions like Valentine's Day or our anniversary. But nothing like we did during our dating time.

The key then is spending quality time together. Not focused on responsibilities, the children, or a job, but upon each other. Only by spending enough time together can either of you hope to make deposits into the love bank "naturally." Filling those needs comes through quantity of contact. Mr. Harely recommends spending at least 15 hours a week together. That can seem like a lot, but it is an issue of priorities. If one's marriage is important, one will make the time just as easily as you make the time to watch a football game or meet with the guys or any other number of hobbies we may have.

Since discovery day and reading His Needs, Her Needs, we've gone from spending a total of one or two hours a week focused on each other to over 15. The result? Despite the affairs, I've never felt more in love with my wife. Even more so than when we were first married.

What occurs naturally at the beginning of a relationship is spending time with each other long enough that we naturally do the actions that say to the other, "I love you." Words are good, but those actions make it real. But as the relationship moves forward, the time together naturally goes down unless the couple makes a conscious effort to counteract it. This requires more than having a night out once a week, though that is a good start. But to make a difference will require spending 15 hours together at least. Find activities you can participate together in.

For instance, here is our usual weekly schedule. Most nights find us swimming at the local gym for around one and a half hours on average including drive time. That amounts to a weekly total of 7.5 hours. Weekly we spend our time on Saturdays going to church together. The car ride is 45 minutes each way, for a total 1.5 hours. Usually she reads a book on marriage enrichment or initially about affairs and dealing with them. That ups the total to 9 hours. We have a weekly eating out together, which invests another 1.5 or more hours a week, bringing it to 10.5 hours a week. Every week, I help her with a cleaning job at an office 30 minutes away. Another hour of drive time alone together, making it 11.5. She usually calls me on her lunch breaks and when she's traveling between jobs, and we talk. This is harder to estimate, but that amounts to at least one hour a day. Add five hours to the total and we spend at least 16.5 hours a week together, focused on each other.

We could add in more smaller pieces, like our texts back and forth, our time in the room when we share things we've found on the computer or discussing some of the issues we've run across on the support forum, but you get the picture. Whereas before the affair we were lucky to spend five minutes focused on each other a day, now it is back to hours. Invest that much time into a relationship, and it becomes hard to not feel loved by them because you are both saying to each other, "You're worth investing my time to be with." Not doing that can't but help to say the opposite.

But that shows how eros love works in an affair and why some people become so addicted to that new-relationship excitement, not knowing how to keep it alive, they end up going from one person to another each time the relationship seems to lose its spark and excitement. They don't realize that if they would simply invest the same amount of time with their spouse as they want to do "naturally" with the affair partner, that they would soon feel the same exciting romantic love for them as they do their affair partner.

Romantic, passionate love will rise and fall through a marriage, but if a couple doesn't learn to preserve the time for each other in the face of the other demands, it will fall and rarely rise up. What was natural, spending loads of time with them, now has to be done intentionally. Or more appropriately, the couple needs to intentionally preserve that space and not let other, less important responsibilities, overgrow the love in a marriage. Like weeds need to be pulled from a garden to keep the plants healthy, the marriage has to be tended after planting the seeds through infatuation. Failing to do this is saying the marital garden is not worth saving or preserving.

The danger for the unfaithful spouse, on the other hand, is failing to realize the love they often feel for their affair partner is mostly, if not all, passion, but not the fullness of what love is. The infatuation is the starting gun to trigger a more fuller love, which we will discuss in the next sections. But too many, when they experience this exciting new-relationship romance, mistake it for what love is. By itself, it is a fickle and emotional response to having one's love-needs met by someone else. It is the instinctive response to those triggers that gets romanticized in popular culture as to what love is.

Phileo

The keyword to describe phileo love is friendship. Most people understand this one well enough. It contains elements of the other loves in a unique combination. Like eros, it deepens and is enriched only when we spend time on it. Another more descriptive word, however, is companionship. Unlike eros, it isn't totally need based, can involve sacrifice, and isn't sexually oriented.

It is when one combines phileo love with romantic love that one hits a version of marital love. Yet, even this is not the fullness of marital love. It requires more ingredients. Yet, a marriage that lacks a sense of companionship is a weak marriage indeed.

One of Lenita's songs she always said was our song was "You're My Best Friend" by Queen. We've always had a sense of that friendship, and the subsequent love. But we allowed the companionship to die. We still felt we were friends, we still felt we loved each other, but we had allowed our zest in our relationship to shrivel. It was that lack that her second local affair partner filled, as he talked with her and spent time with her while I was involved in my own world, oblivious to it all.

This thin line between friendship and romantic love is the premise behind the most popular book on the topic of infidelity, Not Just Friends by Shirley Glass. Friendship can entail intimacy to a degree, and intense love for the other person, only minus the more sexual overtones and romantic love. If two people who become close friends find they are becoming romantically attracted to each other, it becomes very easy to justify to one's self that "we're just friends." As Lenita thought at the time, "I can handle this and not let it evolve into an affair," all the while she was already neck deep into the affair. Blurring the lines between friendship and romantic love is the fertile grounds for affairs to blossom.

How does one identify if a friendship is moving into romantic love? One can identify it by answering the following questions. Do either of you flirt with the other? Do you spend more time talking and interacting with the friend than your own spouse? When you talk, do you regularly discuss intimate details like marital problems you are dealing with, or sexual preferences? Do you make contact via text, phone, or email/messages multiple times every day? Do you think about them daily? Do you sense an attraction to them, or what many people would call "chemistry"?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, it should serve as a warning flag that this relationship has the potential to be more than just friends, and you should take steps to establish firm boundaries and prevent alone time. Limit contact and use techniques to guard your thoughts so as to not allow the spark to start a fire.

If you answered yes to several of these questions, you are likely already involved in the early stages of an affair, whether you've even kissed or held hands yet. Pulling back and dialing down the contact to once or twice a week is the only way to preserve the friendship and avoid damaging your marriage.

True friendship is a great blessing. Each person in the marriage can benefit from having friends outside the marriage. As John Gray says in Why Mars and Venus Collide, it is important that each spouse find other sources of friendship outside the marriage so that the spouse isn't left to provide all of one's well-being. Women need other women to talk to, and men need other males to interact with. Our society has more and more limited friendships, especially among men.

When dealing with friendships of the opposite sex or any person one may be attracted to, boundaries are important. It is usually the ignoring of those boundaries that leads to a friendship evolving into a romantic relationship. Avoid spending alone time with such an individual. Always have someone else with you. Avoid discussing marital issues or other intimate details reserved for a marital relationship or professional therapist. If he wants to text or contact you frequently, send signals you're not available all the time, like waiting for a few hours to answer a text, or a quick text back that you are involved in something and can't chat now. Enough of those and he'll get the signal in most cases.

When you see several of these warning signs growing, that is the time to run. Don't think you can handle it. You're already hooked if these things are happening. The deeper in you go from there, the harder it will be to stop the affair and the more danger to your marriage as the addictive nature of what you are feeling takes over.

Perhaps you have heard some unfaithful spouses say they just wanted the sex, not a relationship. In effect, they wanted the eros love without the phileo. They want the pleasure of sex without the entanglements of a relationship. They are in love with the feelings, not the person. Therefore, they don't care from whom they get them, just so they get them. Is this possible?

In short, yes, to a degree. It is possible for someone to want only the sex and not love the person involved or desire a friendship with them. That was the attitude of Clyde, Lenita's first affair partner. He didn't want to know about her, her family, or any details of her life and history. He just wanted sexual favors, period. In effect, he didn't want to be one with her emotionally. This is the basis of prostitution. A man can pay for it, and not have any strings attached. He may never see that girl again.

However, to say this creates no emotional or marital bonds is a secular view of sex as a form of recreation and not much more. Only when it is linked with love for the person does it take on any meaning whatsoever in a bonding fashion, per that view. As we will see in the next chapter, this is an incomplete picture of sex. Rather, sexual intercourse involves making the two into one flesh. Whoever one has sex with, joins with them in the basic act of matrimony. A bond is created, no matter how much love is or is not felt for the person. In other words, yes one can avoid phileo love with another individual, but eros love has its own bonding with the other that cannot be escaped.

Storge

The two words that describe this type of love is comforting affection. Its use in Greek is mostly restricted to family relationships, but can expand into a more broader "family" among friends.

In the popular TV show of the 80s, "Star Trek, the Next Generation," one of the characters was named Data, a sentient android. In seeking to define a friend or even romantic relationship, he described it as, "My neurological pathways have become accustom to your presence." This is the essentially the definition of storge love, but in a more biological sense. We become accustom to those around us, extended family and friends, and develop an affection for them that we find comforting. We enjoy being with them because we find security in their presence. It also tends to include biological connections, though not exclusively.

Often when a hurt spouse learns about the affair, he will bounce between hate and love for his unfaithful spouse. He is angry that the spouse chose someone over or in addition to him, equating to a rejection of his love. This negatively affects his romantic and companionship love. Yet, he is accustom to the unfaithful spouse's presence and doesn't want to lose the security of that relationship, especially if they have been together for years.

This love also interacts in concern for the children. Not wanting a broken family, some stay together for the sake of the children. Storge love is involved in such decisions. The hurt spouse doesn't want to deny the children the relationship with their father or mother, so for the sake of the children and keeping the family whole, they stay together even if the love between them is dead or dying.

The unfaithful spouse experiences this love when he feels he loves his spouse and doesn't want to divorce, but he no longer feels "in love" with the hurt spouse. What he means is he no longer feels any eros love, especially when compared to the excitement of the affair partner, but he still feels the bonds of storge love with his spouse, the mother or father of their children. That relationship is familiar, comfortable, and provides security. There is a history to that relationship, unlike with the affair partner.

In a healthy marriage, this love grows with time spent together. As the years pass, each grows accustom to the other's presence. With the advent of biological children, this bond grows exponentially. A family is created, and the love for one's child extends to the spouse who is also a parent and who contributed their DNA to create this child bonding the two into one, literal flesh.

To the degree Lenita and I felt true love for each other before the affair started, this and the next love, for me, defined why we felt we loved each other. We didn't take into account, as important as this love was, that it was not the totality of what marital love should be. After 29 years and three children, our storge love was very strong. But our phileo, eros, and in Lenita's case to a degree, agape love had waned.

Agape

Agape is also one of the loves little understood. Most think of it in terms of divine love, or non-sexual love as contrasted with eros. But these ideas only skirt the foundation of the word and its corresponding love.

If there is one word I would list to describe what this type of love involves, it would be martyr. Unlike eros, it is not based on filling one's needs. Unlike phileo, it doesn't require companionship. Contrasted with storge, it is not based on family bonds or a comforting presence. Rather, this love indicates one who is willing to sacrifice themselves for another, a cause, or a belief.

In classic Greek, the term was rarely used, and was a more generic word for love without a lot of meaning attached to it. The writers of the New Testament infused the word with the meaning of love that God has for us. But there are three times in the Bible when the word is not used of divine love, but inappropriate love. It is the highest form of love one can have. It willingly sacrifices what one wants in favor of the needs and desires of the one loved. This is why Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (Joh 15:13 ASV)

The term became attached to divine love because God's love so often uses the term. Because Israel so often committed adultery against Him, and He forgave them and took them back. Because we so often seek other "gods" in our lives than Him, and yet He waits with open arms to receive us again like the father did the prodigal son. For sure, the pure example of agape love is God Himself, who willingly became incarnate as a man, so He could give His life, to defeat death, and restore life through His resurrection. In spite of the fact that we, as a whole, had rejected Him.

None of us can hope to have and exhibit a pure agape love, but we can participate in it through Him. Our love involves selfish desires, need-based companionship. We can't get away from that, and indeed, should not. For us, agape love transforms those loves into an integrated whole of what love should be.

St. Paul exhorts the Ephesians in relation to marriage: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it;" (Eph 5:25 ASV) Marriage is at its ideal, a sacrifice of each other on the altar of their new spouse. In the Orthodox Church's marriage ceremony, this is illustrated with crowns the groom and bride wear on their heads, known as crowns of martyrdom. This same spirit is shown in the traditional Western marriage vows, "...for better or for worse."

This type of love does not waver with one's feelings of love. It does not rely upon being treated fairly or justly by the other spouse. It does not even depend upon whether one's spouse is abusive or not. Once one has agape love for another, it is there forever.

Note, I'm not saying this love puts up with abuse or injustice anymore than God puts up with sin. Simply that one loves the other, and has their best interest at heart no matter what happens or what sacrifices need to be made.

Allow me to illustrate this with my own situation, at the risk of sounding puffed up and wanting praise from my readers. For I don't count this as something I did through great effort, but was simply there and natural, so I attribute it to God working in me when I needed it most.

When I first discovered Lenita's affairs, among the shock, denial, and disbelief that I would ever find myself in this situation, one desire rose above the others. I realized she had committed a mortal sin that could destroy our marriage and her. While not denying my pain and struggle, my first concern was for redeeming her if at all possible.

So much so that when I called my priest the next morning, he asked me whether I wanted a divorce or not. I said without hesitation, as if there could be any doubt so why ask, that I did not want a divorce. The idea of divorcing her hadn't even entered my mind, though I worried that it could end there depending on where she was at. I readily forgave her, and that has stuck. I've never dangled her sin over her head as a punishment.

That said, agape love would have demanded that I leave if she continued to reject me. If she had not repented within a reasonable amount of time, like the sinner cannot be with God in heaven, I would have had to leave her. That in itself would have been a sacrifice on my part because I wouldn't want to do that. Yet, if she stood any chance of healing, it would require at some point for me to release her like the father did the prodigal son. But no matter what, I would still love her, no matter what she did. For that, my pain would be all the more deep. But it is far less than the pain God has for the many who have rejected Him, and He still so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten son to rescue us through the sacrifice of death.

It is agape love that ties the other loves together into a full, complete, and holy love that goes beyond ourselves. You cannot "fall out of love" with agape love. The heart of a marital love is this self-sacrificial love.

Allow me to put it in the negative. Many look at love as merely a feeling, an emotional attachment. It is that, but by itself, it falls far short. So when during the marriage, the one spouse isn't getting the sexual love he wants or expects, instead of being willing to sacrifice for a time, he goes outside the marriage to find his fulfillment. When one spouse neglects the other, and someone comes along who pays attention to him, he mistakes that attention for true love because he doesn't have a sacrificial love for his spouse that no matter the temptation presented, he will abstain. Agape love does not ebb and flow with circumstances, but with one's commitment to be a martyr for the benefit of the other person.

I know what some are thinking. Doormat. No, not quite, as I illustrated above. Agape love doesn't shield the object of love from the consequences of his actions, but loves him, even when that love says you must release him in the hope that he will eventually repent and return with a true change of heart. That is often harder than staying and shielding him from the consequences of his actions, and ends up enabling his sin instead of healing it.

What is True Marital Love?

All love contains elements of each flavor of love. It is not like you can take love and neatly divide it into these black and white categories. Storge love for a child involves a level of eros passion for him. The parents sacrifice often for the well-being and benefit of the child, exhibiting true agape love. All human agape love is connected to eros, phileo, and storge love.

In each action, one type of love tends to dominate over the others in time, while for a full love, all comes under the umbrella of agape love in general. For if love doesn't mean to give of one's self for the betterment of the other, then in what manner is it true love? In what manner is instinctive and needs-based love really love in the full sense of the word if it does not have as its final goal the best for the other person, even at your expense?

The ironic aspect of a full love of this nature is that one gets more than what the other loves can give by themselves. Our fulfillment doesn't come from getting, but in giving. It is the nature of this type of love to establish love as a lasting love.

While in my story I've attributed several aspects of what Lenita did to rebuilding as key in my quick recovery, if there is one reason why I healed as fast as I did, much quicker than most people in my support group, is that this sacrificial love caused me to be more concerned for her than for myself. I was more focused on her healing than my own. I forgave her readily, even though I didn't know if her commitment would stick. As I write this, not even two years past discovery day, I don't think about the affairs much. It is always there, but I don't hurt as much from it. I don't get depressed over it anymore. Our relationship is better than it has ever been. I'm exceedingly thankful that she was able to repent and turn from the path she was headed down. It has been a long and painful process, but a rewarding one for both of us.

To put it bluntly, without a strong sense of love embracing all the loves, especially agape love, I would still be hurting today. I would feel the injustice of what she did to me, the grief of what I had lost would still weigh heavily on my heart. Despite the fact she'd done all the right things so that other hurt spouses on the support group vocally wish their spouses were like her, I would still hurt deep inside, not feeling free to relinquish my pain for fear it would let her off the hook. I would not have easily forgiven her. If it were not for a love that didn't depend upon her behavior to exist, I would not have sacrificed my own selfish desires for what was best for both of us. Instead of enjoying a fulfilling relationship with her now, we would live in doubt and stress, fearing the next slip up and that love would shatter with the next sin.

If passion love, family affection love, and companionship love do not lead one to sacrificial love, then that love is a shadow of the real thing, and not fully love. If love can so readily changed based upon feelings and actions of others, then it is not true love, but selfish ego-protecting desires.

As St. Paul states: "Love is patient, love is kind; love does not envy; love does not boast, is not puffed up; does not behave disgracefully, does not seek its own, is not provoked to anger, thinks no evil; does not rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."(1Co 13:4-7 EMTV)

Are you in love? Let that love be the mark by which you measure if you are there. If we are honest, none of us exhibit it perfectly. But we strive to do so, and if we don't, only then have we lost.

------------------------

Check out the full book, which includes the story of how Lenita ended up in a series of affairs, how Rick discovered it, and how both rebuilt their marriage into a vibrant one, as well as many other good articles like this one to aid in Healing Infidelity.

The 180 for Unfaithful Spouse

2014-03-01T03:19:00.001-06:00

The 180 is a list of behaviors from Michelle Wiener Davis, the author of Divorce Busting, a book about how to save a marriage headed toward divorce. I’ve not read the book, but it does have four stars out of 74 reviews on Amazon as I write this.

The 180 was originally written for spouses dealing with an uncooperative spouse who is headed for the divorce door. It has become popular among infidelity support groups in helping hurt spouses deal effectively with their uncooperative, unfaithful spouse. Follow this link if you are looking for The 180 for Hurt Spouses.

The goal of the 180 is to project confidence, self-esteem, non-reliance upon the other person, and that the spouse is ready to move on without them if necessary.

Recently on the support forum I frequent, an unfaithful spouse asked if the 180 was for cheating spouses or betrayed spouses? It dawned upon me that with some tweaks, these could be used to help unfaithful spouses establish and maintain no contact with their affair partner.

First, let’s define what no contact means. There are two levels of no contact with an affair partner: external and internal.

External no contact means that the unfaithful spouse does not initiate contact with the affair partner and avoids responding to their contact attempts as much as possible. If they text you, you ignore them. If they call, you don’t answer. If you answer not knowing it is them or bump into them publicly, politely say, “Sorry, I can’t talk with you,” and hang up or walk away. Ignore and avoid any attempts to communicate with you.

Establishing internal contact will take much longer than external. Effectively establishing external no contact is necessary before you can ever hope to establish internal no contact.

Internal no contact means the unfaithful spouse reduces and minimizes points of indirect contact that keeps love and feelings for the affair partner from dying and fading into the past. This involves getting rid of any reminders of the affair partner including pictures, gifts, mementos, old messages, letters, or the like. Even deeper it involves not dwelling on them nor in any way continuing to care about them which can include feelings of guilt for hurting them through the affair and/or no contact.

The 180 for unfaithful spouses is a list of behaviors that the unfaithful spouse can focus on to establish and maintain external no contact.

It is emotionally hard enough to break up a relationship when one or both of you decided to end it. Even harder when neither of you were ready to end it. The path to successful no contact in these cases is to focus not on what you feel, which is often not easy to change, but to focus on actions and behaviors despite how you feel.

An unfaithful spouse who developed feelings of love for the affair partner will not feel like doing these behaviors. It is understood, especially for affairs stopped by the hurt spouse discovering the extra-marital relationship, that going no contact with your affair partner will seem counter to what you want emotionally and be one of the hardest things you’ll do in your life.

That said, most unfaithful spouses agree to this to preserve their marriage. It becomes a matter of priorities and knowing the two relationships cannot exist side-by-side. No matter which way you chose to go, you’ll hurt someone. If you love your spouse too, you’d have the same issues going no contact with them as you would with your affair partner. It is one of the consequences created by having an affair.

Following these behaviors, even if you don’t feel like doing them, will help you to not only show your commitment to rebuild your marriage with your spouse, but over time the sense of independence, empowerment, and self-respect it develops will aid in establishing internal no contact and having the self-control to not go there again.

Some of these behaviors will feel radical. That’s because often the unfaithful spouse feels bad about a sudden and abrupt break with the affair partner. They want to slowly break off the relationship. Problem is, this rarely works. It is a delay tactic by the addicted brain to keep a foot in the door because it doesn’t want the relationship to end. Likewise, such a tactic creates more pain over the long haul with not only the spouse, but with yourself and the affair partner.

A clean break is the least painful and most effective way to establish no contact. It is like pulling a bandage off a hairy arm. It hurts much less when removed as quickly as possible. Likewise, in any past breakups with former girlfriends or boyfriends, were any ever done slowly? Rarely.

Following is the 180, tweaked for the purposes of the unfaithful spouse establishing and maintaining no contact with the affair partner. If you slip, don’t despair. Pick yourself up and get back on track. It may take some patience with yourself to fully implement all of these. Not all will apply to everyone. If the shoe fits, put it on.

The “No Contact 180” for Unfaithful Spouses

Don’t initiate phone calls. If they call, tell them you can’t talk with them and politely hang up. Don’t entertain answering any questions or discuss how you feel.

Don’t initiate messages of any kind, and don’t respond to any of the affair partner’s attempts to contact you.

Don’t pursue “closure” or “resolution”. It is a myth that only brings about less closure and resolution if attempted.

Don't follow them around on social sites like Facebook.

Don't ask for help from the family members of your affair partner.

Don't say, "I Love You!" to them or within yourself, even if you still feel you do. Saying it creates an expectation of dependency instead of independence.

Do more than act as if you are moving on with your life; begin moving on with your life.

Be cheerful, strong, outgoing and independent.

Don't sit around waiting on your affair partner. Get busy. Do things. Go out with friends. Enjoy old hobbies. Find new ones. Stay busy.

Your affair partner needs to believe that you are moving on with your life without them.

Don’t give into acting like a moody, needy, pathetic individual but a self-assured individual, secure in the knowledge that you have value not based on their love and affection.

Do not entertain any questions about the relationship either in your mind or with the affair partner. Initiate no such conversation.

Be patient and learn to see the negatives in the affair partner. List them out, as it will help clear foggy thinking.

Listen and then listen some more to close friends, therapists, and support networks to help you maintain no contact.

Learn to back off, keep your mouth shut, and walk away when you want to contact them, no matter the provocation.

Take care of you. Exercise, sleep, laugh, and focus on all the other parts of your life that are not in turmoil.

Know that if you can do this 180, your smallest consistent action will change your feelings far more than sweeping issues under the rug and hoping for the best.

Do not be openly desperate or needy even when you are hurting and are feeling totally desperate and needy.

Do not give up no matter how dark it is or how bad you feel.

Do not backslide from your hard earned changes. Remain consistent. It is the consistency of action and attitude that delivers the message to your spouse that you are committed to them and to the affair partner that it is really over.

When expressing your dissatisfaction with the behaviors of the affair partner or spouse, never be judgmental, critical or express moral outrage. Focus on the pain that their acts caused you.

This is the kind of behavior that shows you are not afraid to move on with your life.

More important, given enough time and consistency of behavior, it will convince yourself that you can move on with your life and convince the affair partner that you’re serious about ending it.

In instances where the unfaithful spouse has contact—such as working together, sharing parental responsibilities of a child, accidental encounters, a persistent affair partner trying to make contact, or other similar situations—keep the following 180 behaviors in mind should contact happen:

Don't pursue, reason, chase, beg, plead or implore.

Only discuss required business issues and nothing else.

Don't point out "good points" in the relationship.

Don't encourage or initiate discussion about the future.

Don't ask for reassurances.

Don't buy or give gifts.

When the affair partner engages you in person, be short on words. Don't push any issue, no matter how much you want to. End the conversation as soon as possible, don’t encourage extended discussion. Interrupt if need be, gracefully bow out, and leave.

If you were in the habit of asking your affair partner how they are doing, ask nothing. Seem totally uninterested in their life.

Don't be overly negative, reactionary, or excited to see them—just pull yourself back. Don't be available for anything other than required business. Your affair partner will notice.

No matter what you are feeling today, only show your affair partner happiness and contentment.

Do not allow yourself to lose your temper. No yelling, screaming or name calling ever. Be cool, act cool; be in control of the only thing you can control: yourself.

Refuse to argue at all. It shows you care.

Be strong, confident, and learn to speak softly.

Do not focus on yourself. Don’t discuss how you feel.

Do not believe any of what you hear them say and less than 50% of what you see. Try to remember that they are also hurting and desperate to make contact, and so they will say anything to justify their behavior.

By focusing on doing the above behaviors to the best of your ability, it will send the right message to both your spouse and your affair partner: you are committed to rebuilding your marriage. As months pass, feelings will align with actions. You’ll gain more self-confidence and self-respect. You’ll realize you can do the right thing, even when it is hard and painful. That will go a long way to restoring the love and trust between your spouse and you.