The Post-Affair Crisis: What to Expect

There’s no doubt about it: the discovery of an extramarital affair comes with psychological and emotional upheavals. It’s as if a bomb has gone off in your marriage/relationship, and the only thing you can be certain of is that a trauma has occurred and there are casualties. 

During this extremely difficult time, it can be helpful to know what to expect, to have a way to gauge your emotional reactions. Sometimes knowing you aren’t unusual in how you’re feeling, and knowing that many others have felt/are feeling things similar to what you’re experiencing, can offer at least a small measure of comfort during a period when everything else seems up in the air.

The emotional storm after the discovery

Disbelief and shock may occur soon after the discovery of the affair. You might feel like you’ve entered a dream-like reality. The world as you’ve known it has been turned upside down and inside out. As a result, your surroundings and experiences may not feel real. You might even feel strange in your body. These reactions — “derealization” and “depersonalization” — are common when someone experiences a psychological trauma.

You might feel battered by a wide range of emotions; anger, rage, sadness, tearfulness, panic, despair and hopelessness are commonplace. It can feel like your ability to control your emotional life has been completely lost as waves of intense feelings crash over you.

Anxiety is often part of the post-affair picture. The knowledge that the person you’ve loved, trusted and counted on has betrayed you can sink you into the depths of insecurity. And with heightened insecurity comes a host of reactions/behaviors that may not be typical for you: repetitive questioning about what happened and whether the affair is still occurring; questions about your partner’s whereabouts, who s/he spoke to today, if s/he is thinking about the affair partner, and so on.

These strong reactions can negatively impact the major areas of your life, including concentration, sleep, appetite, work performance, friendships and other relationships, and even your ability to care for yourself.

Your mind in overdrive (obsessive thinking may temporarily set in)

It can feel like your mind has been hijacked, pulling you in different directions without warning. You can feel overwhelmed by thoughts about the affair, thoughts about what “really” happened, questions about why the affair occurred. You might feel plagued by obsessive thoughts that ask whether you know the whole story or whether your partner is withholding information from you.

The mind in post-affair overdrive cannot be easily quieted. This can feel torturous, especially when the answers to your questions only lead to more questions. It’s like you are starving but cannot be satiated.

This type of mind-in-overdrive is a trauma-based reaction. Your mind is trying to make sense of what happened; you are attempting to quiet the pain through information, by connecting the dots so that you can begin to put what happened to rest.

It might be your way of attempting to bring what was hidden into the light so that you can assess the extent of the problem and figure out what your next steps might be.

Broken trust, suspiciousness & hyper-vigilance

The relationship foundation of trust sustains us. Our shared trust with our spouse/partner becomes a part of who we are, an internal anchor that grounds us. We launch from and return to this “secure base” of trust without necessarily being aware of how much it stabilizes us.

An emotional free-fall starts once our internalized anchor of trust is severed from its moorings. The things we were able to take for granted now assault us.

When the bottom of trust drops out, insecurities flare up: “Where is he right now?”; “Is she telling me the truth or lying again?”; “He seems different, he must be thinking about [the affair partner].”

Heightened suspiciousness is a symptom of broken trust. Too often, the spouse/partner who cheated constructed a secretive world built out of lies. Your partner may have looked you right in the eye and convincingly lied about where s/he was going or where s/he had been. When this becomes part of your shared history, it can feel impossible to know for sure if and when s/he is telling the truth.

This is a recipe for suspiciousness that can reach paranoid proportions.

Hyper-vigilance (a heightened focus on how the other is behaving) is also common when trust is lost. This intense focus and scanning for any signs of threat (e.g., continued lying; inconsistencies; evidence that efforts to rebuild are fading) is exhausting. It’s as if all your psychological resources have mobilized into monitoring your partner.

This trauma-reaction (like the other post-affair trauma reactions) does start to settle through the trust-rebuilding process, but initially it can feel painfully unrelenting (and you might feel like you have little control to turn it off).

Self-doubt & self-blame

We all doubt ourselves from time to time. “Did I make the right decision?”; “Should I have handled that situation differently?”; “Maybe I shouldn’t have…” are examples of what might be called “healthy self-doubt.” Such self-questioning shows an appreciation for the complexities of life, and an awareness that decisions sometimes have unforeseen consequences.

The self-doubt that results from an affair is different, especially since it is always unhelpful to the person who needs healing, and can actually prolong healing.

The infidelity-betrayal can lead to debilitating questioning about yourself as a spouse/partner; you may now start to reevaluate past relationship events that you assumed were benign (“He seemed distracted on our last vacation, was the affair going on then?”) or you may question the very core of the relationship (“Did she ever really love me?”) .

Where certainty may have existed, uncertainty may now reside. The instincts you’ve relied upon your entire life may now offer little in the way of comfort and guidance. This level of self-doubt can become all-consuming and lead to varying levels of anxiety. 

Some people fall victim to self-blame when faced with the knowledge that their spouse has cheated. In these instances, the partner who was cheated on locates the reason for the affair within themselves — a perceived shortcoming as a partner or an internal flaw that must have driven their spouse/partner into the arms of another. 

Punishing refrains like: “I must not be enough [attractive enough, sexually desirable enough, young enough, engaging enough…]” can spiral you into a serious depression, a painful psychological cocktail of self-loathing and insecurity. While not everyone falls into this kind of downward spiral, it’s important to be aware of this possibility, especially if you’ve struggled with self-esteem issues in the past.

The loss of what was

Grief is central to the work of healing from an affair. There is a loss of what was; the marriage/relationship as you knew it is not the same; you may now see your partner differently; the person you once knew and trusted seems transformed into someone who is unfamiliar, maybe even unrecognizable. This is deeply disorienting.

This is why depression (the deep ache of sadness) is often part of the post-affair fallout. It feels like something has died, and as a result, you are grieving.

This grieving process shouldn’t be prematurely shut down in an effort to “get over it.” The pain of grief should be acknowledged for what it is, and once fully acknowledged, the rebuilding process can begin and start to gradually occur.

Healing and the unfolding of grief go hand-in-hand.

Entering the rebuilding process

The above are some of the struggles that may ensue after infidelity is discovered. While the discovery of a sexual affair leads to significant distress, it’s important to note that an emotional affair is just as painful for many individuals. “But we didn’t have sex” offers little comfort to someone who feels betrayed by emotional infidelity.

If you are experiencing any or all of the above, know that you are not alone. You have been traumatized by what has happened; you are in great pain, a pain that will not remain a constant in your life, but when you’re in the grips of this level of suffering, it’s hard to see beyond it. But know that your reaction isn’t a sign of weakness, it isn’t a sign of mental illness, it isn’t a sign that you’ve been overly dependent on your spouse/partner.

Rather, it is a sign that you love deeply, it is a sign that you trust deeply, and it is a sign that your commitment and loyalties are values that run through your core. The reactions described above are normal reactions to the deep betrayal you’ve experienced.

Understanding that these reactions are to be expected can help you as you heal from the fallout of the affair, whether or not you and your spouse/partner are working to rebuild the marriage/relationship. 

Dr. Nicastro offers online counseling for individuals and couples.

Rich Nicastro, PhD is a clinical psychologist based in Austin, Texas. Dr. Nicastro has twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and couples, as well as offering psychodynamic supervision/consultation to other therapists. 

He offers online individual and couples counseling (teletherapy) for residents of Texas. 

**In addition to Texas, Dr. Nicastro is now offering teletherapy to people residing in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Washington DC, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.**