Surviving Infidelity: Making Decisions, Recovering from the Pain

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Being young. Twice as many infidelity cases take place among people aged 18-30. Fewer cases are reported for those over age 50. She's now a liar and nothing she says can be trusted. She has no right to ask you to trust anything she says. Consult a marriage counselor. Seek help from a licensed therapist who is trained in marital therapy and who is experienced in dealing with infidelity. Marriage counseling can help put the affair into perspective, identify issues that might have contributed to the affair, teach ways to rebuild and strengthen the relationship, and help avoid divorce — if that's the goal.

An affair can be a massive weight on your shoulders that you are carrying around—so let it go. You will feel liberated and ready to move on when you can forgive. Related Reading: How to Forgive a Partner – Steps to Self Healing 12. Go for counseling Working with a marriage/couples counselor with experience in treating infidelity can help couples break the repetitive cycles of defensiveness so that healing conversations can take place. Discussions of this type help the betrayed partner feel understood and less alone in their pain. DELETING/EDITING CONTENT: Please use the edit feature to make corrections or additions to your posts but do not use it to remove the entire contents of your post. SI.com does not delete entire threads unless absolutely necessary, even at the original Author's request. Members take time to show support and deleting them would be offensive to those that responded. Please be sure you're comfortable with your post before hitting the Send button.How long it went on: Usually, a one-time sexual encounter is not as devastating to the betrayed partner as repeated sexual dalliances or a lengthy affair. This is because longer-term infidelity undercuts everything that occurred in the relationship while the cheating took place. Betrayed partners wonder: All those times you said you loved me, were you really thinking about me? Or is our whole life a lie? With longer-term cheating, the betrayed partner can’t help but question everything the cheater has ever said or done. A few issues come up when a partner engages in repeated affairs. Some questions that come up include:

The trauma phase is the most difficult stagewhen an affair is disclosed or discovered. The revelation shatters your confidence and makes you feel like your whole world is collapsing. It is advisable not to make any decisions about the future course of your relationship during this grief phase, as you are left feeling lonely, angry and confused.It’s time to reach the point of full disclosure. The betrayed spouse deserves to know what happened from the person who did it, and the guilty parties need to have an opportunity to set the record straight.

Shrout, M. R. & Weigel, D. J. (2017, April 21). Infidelity’s aftermath: Appraisals, mental health, and health-compromising behaviors following a partner’s infidelity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407517704091 With all these clues adding up, I go to the phone records (which I have never done) I start to see a phone number come up at the same time she get's off work and late night calls and they are 30 -60 minute. I am worried, so I run the number on google just to see if could get a hit. I do, it is a number to a local handyman and I recognize the name. My heart drops into my stomach. He is a friend of one of my wife's close friends from work.

She does not see her affair in a bad light. She knows it's wrong. But she also believes in the fantasy. She believes she is connected to the AP. This is where your focus should be. “You need to trust each other enough to be able to say what you’re feeling, why you might be feeling it, and to reach out to the other for help and trust that it will get a response. That’s the level of work that needs to be done. It will take sustained effort over time.” Obviously the person who cheated should apologize for cheating in such a way that the other spouse knows of a surety that they truly are sorry.

I am not a proponent of therapists/shrinks for cheaters. These people validate cheaters way too much.Then, they each must accept the other’s apologies—even if it takes some time to get to that point—so they can move on. And then both spouses need to take responsibility for any misdeeds that relate to the infidelity.