Arguably, infidelity is the most devastating thing that can happen to a relationship. And while it’s true that it impacts the marriage/relationship itself, in ways that perhaps you can’t anticipate unless you’ve experienced it yourself, it’s important to remember that what’s impacted most directly and acutely is the individual who has been cheated on.
When a couple’s goal is healing from an affair, understanding how traumatic infidelity can be to the spouse/partner who learns of the affair is absolutely critical for both partners and the relationship itself.
That’s the focus of this article, and rather than take my word for how shattering an affair can be to a marriage, I’m including some thoughts from a wife who made the journey from betrayed spouse to spouse who came to trust her husband once again. Eva* wanted to share some of her impressions about her struggles after the discovery of her husband’s unfaithfulness.
(Note: although this post is organized into categories for ease of reading, it’s not meant to imply that there are discrete “stages” of healing from an affair. The fallout of an affair is different for every couple and for every individual, of course, but it’s much more like a spiral than a line.)
“I was flooded with disbelief and panic. I’d lost sight of what I always thought of as the ‘known’ in my world.”
Eva’s words encapsulate the disorienting nature of the shock: “After I found out about Ben’s affair, my marriage suddenly became an unrecognizable, dangerous place to me, as if I’d been dropped onto another planet in another solar system.”
We tend to take for granted that what’s most important to us today will be there tomorrow. You might even say it’s how humans are wired. We’ve evolved to be on the lookout for threats and potential problems; when we feel safe and trusting of something in particular, we don’t need to be vigilant of it in the same way we do of the world’s many unknowns. And you might even say that constantly assuming we might lose what we love/need most would be no way to live.
If you’ve been betrayed by your partner, you know how incredibly hard it is to come to terms with the fact that the person you knew so well — perhaps better than anyone else — has been unfaithful, and, in the process, upended a part of your life that you may have thought of as the most grounding, centering dynamic you’ve ever known. You may have thought of your marriage/relationship as the one constant in a sea of change, and discovering infidelity can cause you to oscillate between disbelief and shock.
“I didn’t know I was capable of so much rage.”
Just like any major event that wounds the human heart, the pain of betrayal will evoke different reactions in different people. But in addition to sorrow, feelings of extreme anger are common, and quite understandably so . . . especially if the betrayed partner has remained faithful for the life of the relationship, even in the face of temptation. And it’s common for the emotional pendulum to swing between anger and sadness, an abrupt change that might feel disorienting in its suddenness.
Again, the crucial piece here is understanding that this is a normal part of the process (what many betrayed partners call the grieving process). And it’s important for both partners to understand and acknowledge that. There’s nothing that stymies affair recovery more than the individual who had the affair insisting to the other that it’s time to “move on,” or that it’s time for the wounded partner to put away his/her unpleasant emotions.
Not every couple impacted by an affair makes it, but those that do make space for the messy emotional reactions to the infidelity, even when those reactions feel larger and less predictable than anything previously encountered in the relationship.
“The shame and humiliation isolated me and kept me from reaching out.”
You might think that Ben had said the above words. After all, you might argue that if anyone should have been experiencing shame and humiliation, it should have been him. However, those words are Eva’s. Irrational as it may seem, the partner betrayed by the affair is often the one who doesn’t want to tell family and friends about it, not necessarily to protect how the other partner is seen, but to protect themselves from feeling shame, from feeling like they did something (or failed to do something) to cause the affair.
It’s important to come to terms with the fact that no one can make someone have an affair. That responsibility exclusively belongs to the partner that cheated. If reaching out to trusted family members or friends (or working with a couples counselor) would help you as you deal with the pain, then it’s crucial that your partner support you in that, even if that means others will find out about what has happened.
“My mind wouldn’t stop: how? when? where? … and why?”
Despite what Eva described as periods of exhaustion so severe that she could barely speak, she said her mind never seemed to tire itself out. “I was preoccupied with questions that I desperately wanted to know the answers to, while at the same time I dreaded the answers and suspected they would bring more pain. In a word, I felt crazy.”
It’s important to remember that these thoughts are normal, however out of control they might make you feel. You’re faced with what might feel like the impossible task of making sense of something you can’t even wrap your brain around. It’s expected that you’d feel torn by a curiosity to know all the details of the affair on the one hand, and on the other, there is likely a part of your mind that wants to shield you from additional pain, and therefore wants to protect you from the answers.
There’s no magical way out of this, though in my experience working with clients who come to me for marriage counseling, it’s important to explore the expectations you might hold about what this information will offer you. When the unconscious hope is that answered questions will put your pain to rest, you may find yourself stuck in a seemingly never-ending loop of questioning that fails to bring the desired closure.
If, however, the partner who cheated is impatient and shuts down dialogue about the affair, that will likely interfere with healing. This impulse to gather “data” about the affair is normal and should be acknowledged as such by both partners when the goal is recovery from infidelity and rebuilding of trust after an affair. The painful spinning of the mind (and the accompanying chronic questioning) does fade with the passage of time and the rebuilding of trust.
The double-bind: “I needed to strike out at and be comforted by the same person.”
“It was the first time I’d ever understood — really understood — the term heartache. I mean, I guess I’d understood it in the abstract, but I didn’t know your heart could hurt like that. Prolonged and real pain, right where my heart is, as if it really was breaking.”
Eva’s words capture the extreme pain brought about by the discovery of an affair. And when you are in a long-term relationship (especially when you two share a home), when you are in pain, you automatically reach out to your partner for comfort. Imagine the additional pain when you realize that previous source of comfort is now the person who has hurt you so badly that you want to lash out at him/her.
With the passage of time, and with Ben’s repeated demonstrations of patience and commitment to working on the marriage and not repeating the devastating mistake that he so deeply regretted, Eva eventually came to trust Ben again and, when the world dealt her unexpected blows, to see him as her first line of comfort (“the one I call first when I’m having a bad day”). The way she talks about it now, she’s amazed that she could get here after wanting to strike out at him when she was in the process of healing.
The point isn’t to force yourself to get from one perspective to the other; the point is to be aware of that understandable inner conflict and that you’re not alone in experiencing it.
***
Telling you that the pain of discovering the infidelity is normal and is to be expected won’t take away the pain, but it is important for you to hold on to as you work toward healing. Along the road toward the gradual rebuilding of trust (a road that is rarely a straight line, but rather, is filled with potholes and twists and turns and doubling back and even what feel like dead-ends in the moment), it’s also important for the partner who had the affair to remember and respect the other’s pain.
Although s/he can never know exactly what that betrayal feels like, all too often the partner who had the affair is sheepish, disgusted with him/herself, remorseful and so flooded with regret that s/he cannot tolerate the other’s pain, the pain that exacerbates the remorse. However, when healing the relationship is the goal, leaving space for that pain is imperative.
[*Names and all identifying information have been changed.]
A psychologist with over twenty years experience working with individuals and couples, Richard Nicastro, Ph.D., offers online, telecounseling for individuals and couples.
