Hope may be a diminutive word on paper, but the meaning that fuels it is mighty. In my work with individuals and couples healing from infidelity, hope is rarely overtly discussed, and sometimes, when it is, the betrayed partner sees it as a naive or childish concept under the circumstances.
This article makes the case for hope in affair recovery. Because hope is a deceptively simple idea frequently used in everyday life, it’s easy to overlook it as passé or wishful thinking. “Where there’s life, there’s hope” might feel like a cliche because it’s so common. But cliches get that way for a reason—they’re circulated like currency; they speak to people.
This is an invitation to explore the role of hope when you and/or your relationship are healing from infidelity. And part of the exploration will be to strip away what feels tired or overgeneralized about the concept of hope and apply it to the specifics of your recovery journey.
Whether you and your partner are committed to working on repair as a couple, or whether the relationship has not survived the affair and you as the betrayed partner are in the process of healing, this article will highlight the place for hope along the way.
The turmoil of infidelity often feels deeply hopeless
If you have experienced the devastation of betrayal by your intimate partner, you don’t need me to tell you how destabilizing, disorienting, and disheartening the post-affair period is. Clients have likened the fallout to an earthquake, a tsunami, an obliteration, one they were not able to predict and therefore were not able to prepare for. They’ve described the pervasive feeling of “losing my grip on sanity,” and they’ve also talked about the unique pain of looking back on the happy times, before they learned of the affair, and wondering if any of it was real.
I’ve so often heard some version of this from a betrayed partner:
“I used to have such high hopes for the future. Those have all been brutally dashed. Now I see how stupid it was to hope at all.”
Indeed, by its very nature, hope is forward-looking. Hope can be nourishing and uplifting and comforting. And yet, when you’re dealing with the deep pain caused by your partner’s affair, it’s likely that hope is nowhere to be found. . .for you or the relationship, which may feel irrevocably shattered. The cruel paradox about infidelity recovery is that when restorative emotional experiences—like hope—are needed most, they can feel beyond reach. And maybe it even feels like they’ll never return.
By its very nature, trauma narrows our experience, making us feel like there is nothing outside of our pain. Trauma plunges us into survival mode. In contrast, hope expands our perspective, offering us a window beyond the pain of the present moment. This is why it can be so hard to access hope in the acute phase of infidelity trauma. But when you’re ready, hope can be a beneficial companion as you recover.
Let’s start by debunking some common misperceptions about hope, along with some concerns people often have about reaching for hope when healing from infidelity.
Hope is not denial
“But if I hope, doesn’t that mean that I’ll be ignoring reality?”
I’ve worked with spouses/partners who are worried that if they “give in” to hope, they’ll be in denial, and their pain will be even more intense down the road. It’s true that denial can block our engagement with what we’re experiencing, and there are times when briefly denying something can serve as a protective defense mechanism. But feeling hope for a better future than what you’re feeling in the present fallout of infidelity is not necessarily denial.
This does not mean that you should try to force yourself to feel hope if you’re not ready. Not only can we not force genuine emotions in the first place, but attempting to—and perceiving yourself as having failed when you can’t—can prompt you to become unduly frustrated with yourself.
Also, denial is not a facet of hope when you and your partner are working together to repair the relationship. Denial could cause you to miss important red flags. For instance, if your partner has promised to be forthcoming about their whereabouts but suddenly begins to have unexplained absences from home or work or refuses to let you see their phone, and you chalk that up to coincidence, that’s denial speaking, not hope.
Additionally, the work you do as a couple is the foundation for relationship repair. If you both nurture hope that the union will survive the breach of trust and ultimately be stronger for it, you will share the future vision for your marriage/relationship and will find motivation to keep going, even when you hit the inevitable snags along the way. Hope can feel like a reason to believe, even when things otherwise feel bleak.
Hope is not minimization
“But isn’t hope a means of dismissing the trauma?”
You can feel hope and acknowledge how traumatic the pain of infidelity is. Hope is not meant to minimize or dismiss the intensity of the emotional upheaval caused by the affair. Because stepping into hope can give you more breathing room, can remind you of how you felt before the infidelity trauma, can help you feel a surge of nourishing optimism, you might confuse it with minimizing the pain.
The truth is, hope strengthens and sustains you so that you have the capacity to fully feel the pain and withstand the waves of pain, not artificially shrink the pain. And as a couple, hope can serve to remind you of what the relationship was before the affair, and an incentive to reach that level of mutual trust once again.
Many couples report that their relationship can never be exactly the same post-affair, but the strengths of their union before the infidelity do return in time, sometimes even stronger.
Hope is not giving away your power
“But won’t I be making myself dependent on someone else if I hope?”
We all know that we cannot control anyone else. We’ve learned that lesson a myriad of ways throughout our lives. And the corollary to this is that it’s unwise to hold rigid expectations for others. If, after the infidelity trauma, your only hope is for your partner to repair the breach of trust and save the relationship, then you would be, in a sense, giving away your power. But that is not where the strength of your own hope lies.
Hope that is aligned with your own healing journey is the expectation that you will heal from the trauma of infidelity, even if you don’t fully understand how and you don’t know exactly when. . .and (this is important) whether or not the relationship survives.
When you put your own emotional wellbeing first during this incredibly difficult time, you are retaining your power and using hope as a beneficial tool for recovery.
Shared hope is also powerful
And for the couples working together to save the relationship:
When the wayward partner is truly remorseful about the infidelity and has ended the affair; when the wayward partner is genuinely willing to do the hard work of reestablishing the trust they shattered, and willing to work at this for as long as it takes; when the wayward partner continues to demonstrate accountability and trustworthiness without complaint or cageyness, then the betrayed partner can join with the wayward partner in hoping that the efforts toward repair will heal the relationship.
Shared hope is a powerful motivator, and it’s not dependent on what your friends/family say or do, nor is it dependent on whether or not couples you know were successful in saving their relationship. Creating a mutual vision for future possibility with your partner is keeping the power in your relationship, rather than diluting it with messages from others (that may or may not be helpful).
Also, a common dynamic is that both partners are not able to hold hope at the same time, so one carries the hope while the other cannot. This is a typical pattern during infidelity healing, one partner keeping the torch lit for the other, till they can enter the hopeful space together.
Individual hope is powerful, personal, and unique. Just as is the shared hope of a couple in relationship recovery.
Hope is not gaslighting
“But won’t I be emotionally manipulating myself if I hope?”
Feeling hope, giving a voice to the part of you that still believes in a future where you regain wholeness, is not a way to gaslight yourself. Hope does not make you think that you’re not seeing reality clearly, that you can’t trust what you know occurred in the relationship, that you can’t rely on your own memory or powers of reasoning.
Hope does not cause you to contort your own inner knowing until you don’t recognize what’s fact and what’s fiction. Quite the contrary, leaning into hope can help you gain clarity when confusion feels overwhelming. When you remember that you are not responsible for the infidelity, but you are steering your own healing journey and can trust your own self-knowledge and self-advocacy, you are doing the opposite of gaslighting.
This also applies to couples working together. Hope does not generate gaslighting. Hope is not emotionally manipulative. Deception generates gaslighting. If one partner is trying to twist facts into pretzels and question their mate’s perception, the commitment to heal as a unit will be compromised.
An important note: Beware of the wayward partner using hope as a cudgel. If the partner who cheated tries to force hope onto the victim of infidelity, that is a another facet of gaslighting and not true hope at all.
Perhaps the wayward partner started from a place of hope but lost patience when recovery wasn’t happening according to their timetable and then began guilting or shaming their partner into choosing to focus on hope for the future rather than the very real pain caused by the infidelity in the present. This is an example of hope morphing into gaslighting, and it can also be indicative of the wayward partner shirking their responsibility for doing the hard work necessary for longterm relationship recovery.
Hope is not a crystal ball
It’s a myth that we need to know exactly how something may turn out in order to harbor hope for a particular future. You can have hope without knowing all the steps for attaining that future at the outset.
While an important part of affair recovery is gaining knowledge about the causes of the infidelity and how to affair-proof the relationship going forward, there will be times during the healing journey when you will be challenged to sit with not knowing. This is inevitable. All too often, individuals can lose hope in those moments, rather than realizing that the task at hand is to learn to tolerate that not-knowing.
What about when you don’t have hope, but there is cause for hope?
It’s not uncommon for betrayed partners to feel afraid to open themselves up to hope, even when the wayward partner is working very hard to reestablish trust and is clearly committed to repair. This is a way to protect a broken heart. It requires vulnerability to hope again, and it’s understandable when victims of infidelity don’t feel ready to be vulnerable.
Hope here is an individual struggle caused by the betrayal (these same people struggling with hope may have easily and regularly felt hope prior to the affair), even when there is evidence that hope is warranted. Fear can act as a barrier to hope, and the fear that progress made by the wayward partner is unreal or unsustainable may obscure hope for long stretches. This is normal and expected.
Also, hope does not have to be so forward-looking that it leaps you into a year or five years into the future. When it feels right, you might feel hope for the day, for the next day, for a week. Actually, at times it might be enough to merely touch hope for an instant, for a moment. And then you might need to retreat back to protective mode.
The awareness of this repeated oscillation (brief hope for the future followed by feelings of hopelessness in the present) is important in affair recovery. It’s also helpful to discern between times when anxiety caused you to pull away from hope and when something your partner has done (or failed to do) triggered the retreat from hope.
Self-reflection is key here: it can be helpful to think about what has made you feel hopeful in the past. Historically, has hope come easily to you? What has filled you with hope in your life overall? What has caused you to lose hope? And what does your partner need to do to nurture hope in you?
When hope for the relationship may be unwarranted/misplaced
In a different dynamic, there may be a wayward partner who is very inconsistent when it comes to repair. At times they seem committed and genuine, while at others they behave with impatience toward the betrayed partner (“You should be over this by now!”), or are sending mixed messages about their followthrough (sometimes exhibiting transparency about where they are and who they’re talking to, other times behaving in a secretive manner and not sharing their whereabouts or communications).
In these cases, it’s important to listen to that part of you telling you not to hope. This is also a protective mechanism, but in this instance, it’s one that can shift hope from expecting your partner to do the work repair requires to focusing on your individual healing journey, apart from the relationship.
One of the most robust predictors of relational healing from infidelity is the wayward partner consistently showing up with an open heart and true attentiveness to the betrayed partner’s pain. This type of reliable, emotional presence creates a level of safety where hope can germinate.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience supporting individuals and couples as they navigate betrayal trauma and other emotional challenges. He offers teletherapy to clients throughout the United States. To work with Dr. Nicastro and join his waiting list, please email him at Rich@RichardNicastro.com.
