How to Cope with the Initial Trauma of an Affair

by: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

When you learn that the person you built your life around was unfaithful to you, the sense of betrayal can be almost unbearable. In a single moment, you are ripped from a life you have counted on and felt safe in. You may feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under you and now you are standing on nothing at all. Your relationship was a foundation for your life; now that it is gone, what can you possibly do?

In the midst of this, you look outside for reasons this happened. You demand explanations for what has happened to the life you worked so hard and took so long to build. You tend to focus outward, hoping that something will happen to make the pain you feel go away or, at least, subside for a little while.

More than anything, you probably just want it all to go away. You want to go back to the life you knew, to the life you thought was safe; to the stable life you thought you had with your loved one. If this is what you want, it is possible. In fact, it is possible for you to actually build a better relationship than you have ever had with the person with whom you share your life. But this journey will take some time and effort.

The first step on this path to recovery is to stop looking outside for emotional healing and start looking within. It may seem contradictory at first, but you must accept that the affair has happened and take a careful look at how it is affecting your thoughts and feelings. Once you have done this, you can start to help yourself heal from the emotional trauma you are experiencing right now.

Shockwave #1: “How could this happen?”

On the one hand, the question reveals a kind of disbelief on the part of the injured. Never in their wildest dreams would they have believed something like this could happen to them. Most people can’t.

Shockwave #2: “How long has this been going on without my knowing it?”

People often ask this question because they feel foolish and blind for missing the fact that their partners were having affairs. Not only do people feel deceived, they often feel betrayed or played like “suckers.”You are being too hard on yourself if you are criticizing yourself as a dope for being deceived. The fact that you trusted your partner and didn’t “see it coming” isn’t a detriment to your character.

Shockwave #3: “How many people know about it?”

You may find yourself wanting to know if other people in your circle of friends and family know about the affair. You may even feel betrayed if you find out they did know about the affair and didn’t tell you about it. These feelings are all very normal.

Shockwave #4: “How could my partner do this to me?”

This is the ultimate question about betrayal. And it isn’t an easy nut to crack. In the course of the work on which you are embarking in this system, you will be offered an answer to this question. It isn’t as distinct as you might hope. For now, I encourage you to leave questions of this nature out of your exploration about the affair and how it has impacted your life as best you can. Turn the energy spent on this kind of questioning inward, and start looking for ways you can heal from the terrible damage done to you by the affair. Focusing inward rather than outward will be much more rewarding.

Shockwave #5: “How can I ever trust my partner again?”

This is a very reasonable question. When you count on one person to provide a safe environment for you to love them and that person betrays your trust, it might seem you will never be able to trust them again.

Shockwave #6: “Have there been other affairs or is this it?”

This is one of those questions for which you might never get a satisfactory answer. The sad truth is that when a cheater cheats once, they are more likely to do so again. This is particularly true if they had a “good” experience with the first infidelity. If that was the case, it can easily establish a strong reinforcer for doing it again.

Shockwave #7: “Am I overreacting?”

The short answer to this question is “No, you aren’t.” If you are having powerful negative feelings about the fact that your partner cheated on you, this is perfectly normal.When fidelity is violated, it might feel as though the fidelity itself was solely responsible for the safety and stability you felt in your relationship. If this trust is broken, it can feel as if the whole world suddenly became an unsafe place. In some ways, it has. Your world is less safe than you once knew.

Shockwave #8: “Am I being a doormat?”

You have to know that this is your life. No one else is going to live the consequences of your decisions and actions. The love you feel is special and perhaps too rare in this world. If you want to make your relationship work, you can – but not by yourself – it definitely takes both of you working to improve your relationship to make it successful. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you are a doormat; you might just be the bigger person.

Shockwave #9: “Does this mean the relationship is over?”

Not if you don’t want it to be. If you are invested in this relationship and want to make it work, you can. You can make it better than you ever dreamed possible.

Three Steps to Clearing Your Mind from Negative Thoughts After the Affair

What follows is a 3-step program for looking at your negative thoughts, challenging the believability of these thoughts, and replacing them with more self-affirming statements. If you tend toward skepticism, it might be difficult for you to believe that these techniques are effective. However, these techniques are adapted from the core of cognitive therapy, a psychotherapeutic healing modality that has proven effective in helping people that suffer from all kinds of negative thinking in study after study. Please take your time and work through each step completely. If you do this, you will amplify the effect of the work that we are about to do.

Step 1: Track Your Thoughts

Thoughts drive your feelings. When you think about something negative you tend to feel bad. On the other hand, if you think about something positive, you tend to feel good. This is simply common sense. Everyone knows this. However, when you are wrapped up in difficult, negative emotions, it isn’t always easy to see what thoughts are behind your painful feelings. When you have been injured in an affair, this is often the case. You are so overcome with feelings of betrayal and rage that you sometimes fail to see what thoughts are behind these feelings. If you feel like you are having a hard time distinguishing your thoughts from your feelings, or even one thought from another, thought tracking can be an immense help to you. Even if you don’t seem to have these kinds of problems, this first step will help you get a good track record of what you are thinking and will allow you the opportunity to see if there are any consistent patterns to your thoughts.

Step 2: Challenging the Believability of Your Thoughts

Now that you have a fairly good record of your negative thoughts about the affair and you have examined various patterns in your thinking, it is time to start challenging these thoughts. In order to do this, we are going to take various negative thoughts you had over the last week and put them to a reality test. You can certainly use this process for thoughts that are coming up for you right now as well. However, it is useful to start practicing this skill on a thought you already recorded. Once you hone the skill, you can put it to use at your command.

The Reality Test

Choose one of your challenging recurring negative thoughts. The thought that you choose should bring up some discomfort and negative feelings for you. Our goal in this part of the exercise will be to undermine that discomfort by disproving the reality of the thought. Write down the thought you have chosen to work with. Then, ask yourself the following questions:

» How realistic or logical is this thought in the world at large?» Is there an argument against the thought?» What actual evidence do I have that this thought is true?» Even if it were true, what would it practically mean for me and my situation right now?

Try and answer these questions as objectively as you can.

Step 3: Using Self-Affirmations

Self-talk is a powerful influence on the way people think, feel, and act. Self-talk is the stuff we internally say about ourselves all the time. Everyone has a certain amount of self-talk going on most of the time. We constantly judge ourselves and talk to ourselves (in our minds) about these judgments. In today’s society, the idea that you can “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” makes most of us shudder a bit. We are cynical and skeptical enough to believe that any attempt at encouraging positive thinking in our lives is a losing battle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing can help you more in your situation than to remind yourself that you are a worthwhile, lovable person. Of course, we will temper these self-affirmations with a bit of reality. I am not going to try and have you convince yourself that you are the single greatest person on the planet and that you deserve to be the queen or king. It is unlikely you would buy that anyway. But I am guessing that right now you are feeling more like the lowest person on the earth, and that isn’t a healthy or realistic place for you to be.

What I would like for you to do is take the same thought that we worked with in the last exercise. Do some reality testing on it as you did before. Ask yourself whether the thought is realistic or logical and whether you can find an argument against it. See what evidence you have to support the thought, and what would practically change for you if the thought were true.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years. He is also the author of How to Survive an Affair, a step-by-step healing system that can help a couple repair their relationship after it has been shattered from an affair. If your relationship has been damaged by an affair and you would like a step-by-step system for repairing your relationship, then please visit Dr. Gunzburg's site for more information: http://www.surviveanaffair.com

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