If you’ve cheated on your partner or spouse, you are probably witnessing the emotional and behavioral rollercoaster of a betrayal trauma. Like any challenging path, the journey toward healing is not without its twists and turns. The commitment to surviving infidelity requires both individual as well as relational understanding and healing.
It can be daunting to figure out where to begin the affair recovery process. After the initial shock of the betrayal, you might be grappling with questions like: Should we consider couples counseling, or couples counseling plus individual therapy? What supports are available to us, and who should and shouldn’t be told about the affair? With all the information on the internet about surviving infidelity, what are trustworthy relationship-help resources?
The commitment to surviving infidelity requires both individual as well as relational understanding and healing.
These and many other questions might be swirling in your head as you attempt to make sense of the turmoil caused by the betrayal. Surviving infidelity is a relational and an individual journey. In my therapy work with couples and individuals struggling to heal from the trauma of infidelity, the following themes often arise in the therapy with the unfaithful partner.
Surviving infidelity: understanding the unfaithful partner/spouse
In order to survive infidelity and rebuild a trusting marriage or relationship, it’s essential that the person who cheated undertake an inner journey toward greater self-understanding. This effort to gain insight about what made you vulnerable to having an affair (whether the affair was sexual, emotional or both) is an important step in gradually helping the betrayed partner feel secure that they won’t be betrayed again.
There are three themes that are important to explore in the individual therapy of the spouse or partner who was unfaithful—while these themes are often examined in infidelity-focused couples counseling, working with the unfaithful partner in individual therapy can lead to important insights that facilitate the affair recovery process.
Therapy goals for the unfaithful partner
Why did I cheat?
This is one of the central questions the unfaithful partner must explore, a question that rarely can be answered by any simple cause and effect explanation. This exploration can be framed in the following way: what experiences in your childhood, life and relationships made you vulnerable to being affair-prone?
Attention should be given to any patterns or struggles with compulsive, out-of-control sexual behaviors. The deleterious affects of early pornography on one’s ability to connect emotionally and sexually are an increasing problem in our society. In addition, experiences of trauma and neglect can have a significant impact on your ability to form a meaningful and fulfilling connection with your partner.
The long arm of unresolved childhood emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse can shape one’s adult relationships in profound and complicated ways. One potential outcome from a difficult childhood is the formation of an avoidant or disorganized attachment style that makes it challenging for you to give and receive love. These deeply ingrained relational patterns can keep you at a comfortable and familiar distance from your spouse/partner—a distance that feels normal (and may not even be experienced as distant or problematic).
What may manifest over time is the experience of feeling lonely or unfulfilled in your relationship (or unfulfilled in life in general) without the awareness of the underlying dynamics that are leading you to feel this way. These issues can be explored and made sense of in therapy in ways that can hopefully lead to a deeper connection with your partner.
What are my blocks to ongoing empathy?
The paradox of surviving infidelity is that the betrayed spouse/partner (at some point) needs to rely on the partner who cheated for relationship healing. The now dangerous attachment figure (the unfaithful partner) needs to prove over time that they are indeed safe and trustworthy. For obvious reasons, this is a slow process.
The now dangerous attachment figure (the unfaithful partner) needs to prove over time that they are indeed safe and trustworthy.
Central to the convergence of the unfaithful partner/spouse into a secure attachment figure are patience, empathy, caring and responsiveness, which must become a reliable part of the relationship landscape. This is no easy task over the long haul. Patience tends to run thin after being on the receiving end of intense anger and despair over an extended period of time. Don’t let your good intentions to be there for your hurting partner prevent you from preparing for these challenges. Understanding the reasons that prevent you from maintaining an empathic stance is vital to sustaining the work needed for deep healing to occur.
It’s important to note that at the beginning of the surviving infidelity process, your emotional well may be overflowing with the desire and intention to give your traumatized partner whatever they need. No one starts this journey thinking, “After about a year my patience and empathy are really going to be exhausted.” To the best of your ability, prepare for this possibility so that you can work toward the self-care needed to maintain the patience, empathy, caring and responsiveness required to rebuild.
How can I manage my shame and guilt over what I’ve done?
Some level of shame or guilt are normal reactions to hurting someone you love and care about. You might also feel considerable anger toward yourself. And if you have a history of being self-critical, the fact that you were unfaithful might turn up the volume of your inner critic to unbearable levels.
It’s easy to feel punished by your inner critic and the guilt and shame you feel. As a result, you might find yourself shutting down or pulling away from your partner in order to reduce your distress over what has occurred.
…it is the unfaithful partner’s difficulty with managing their own emotions in relation to what the betrayed partner is feeling that shuts down the healing process.
This all-too-common pattern has the potential to send the message to the wounded partner/spouse that their feelings no longer matter or that they should be “over it by now.” In these instances, it is the unfaithful partner’s difficulty with managing their own emotions in relation to what the betrayed partner is feeling that shuts down the healing process. In short, if you cannot tolerate your own distress, you will not be able to hold a healing space for your spouse’s/partner’s reactions.
The unfaithful partner cannot be attentive to their partner’s needs while in a shame-based spiral. If you get caught in cycles of self-condemnation and shame, the potential exists that these inner struggles will derail the healing process. The betrayed partner will feel dropped as you repeatedly fall back into self-attack. And if your self-attacks morph into anger projected at the betrayed, an unsafe environment is created that will prevent forward movement.
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When an individual or a couple are recovering from an affair, one question that demands attention is why the affair occurred in the first place. Many unfaithful individuals are baffled by their own actions and often seek therapy to answer the “why did I cheat?” question.
In my infidelity counseling work, I often shift this question to: What factors in your life might have made you vulnerable to becoming affair-prone?
In my experience, this alternate question invites and opens up a greater space for self-exploration that isn’t linear, an investigation of one’s life that takes into account family of origin dynamics and early trauma, any patterns of neglect or emotional abuse, as well as the ways in which a person had to psychologically accommodate the difficulties they faced.
Some ways we adjust ourselves to the challenges and traumas of life include avoidance of feelings (and our inner world in general), steering clear of making oneself vulnerable with others, self-medicating, compartmentalization, secrecy, compulsive drivenness and overly busying oneself, to name a few. These same efforts are often the unconscious solutions to the troubles we faced early in life that can make us vulnerable as adults to betraying those we love (and in doing so, betraying ourselves as well).
Exploring the three themes discussed above can help you gain traction as you navigate the rebuilding process. Surviving infidelity and building a stronger union require greater self-understanding, acknowledging your blind-spots, and preparing and making efforts to weather the relational storms that are inherent to affair recovery work.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD., is a licensed clinical psychologist with over twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and couples. He offers teletherapy sessions to clients throughout the United States.
