Archive for the ‘Affair, Emotional Affair & Infidelity’ Category

The emotional fallout from an affair is extensive, and the healing process can be a long and bumpy road. Couples committed to this healing journey should be mindful of what’s ahead for them as they try to rebuild their relationship. One of the most sensitive and painfully triggering issues for post-affair couples occurs when they try to re-establish a sexual relationship. Sexual intimacy has the potential to turn into a painful reminder of the events that happened with another person.

Here’s how Janice (whose husband John had a three-month long affair with a coworker) describes her experience:

“It was a little over a year since his affair ended. We were in counseling and doing well and I was feeling much better. We were communicating and we started becoming more affectionate with each other, so the issue of sex came up and we attempted to make love. I thought I was ready, but instantly, I was flooded with waves of anger and hurt and insecurity. It was like the affair had just happened….”  ~Janice, married four years.

The challenge for couples (especially for the betrayed partner) is to remain emotionally present during love-making—to exist fully in the here-and-now of the sexual experience. Worries, distractions and preoccupations will only pull you away from the moment, dulling the sensory pleasures and the emotionally gratifying aspects of sex. Awareness of the potential challenges of re-establishing a meaningful sex life with your spouse/partner can go a long way in the post-affair healing process.

Relationship Help: 5 hurdles to Post-Affair Sex

The betrayed spouse/partner may struggle with the following intrusive thoughts (and related images) during sex:

1) Did you do this (sexual act) with her/him?

2) Did you do something with her/him that we’ve never done together?

3) Is s/he a better lover than me?

4) Do you find him/her more attractive/sexy than me?

5) Are you thinking of him/her while we make love?

While the five thoughts above are posed as questions of possibility, sometimes the betrayed may experience these worries as absolute truths: “You must have done this with him/her”; “S/he must be more attractive than me or you wouldn’t have strayed.” The common denominator behind these thoughts/worries is a debilitating sense of insecurity—a feeling that you must not have been enough (physically attractive, sexually adventurous, interpersonally charming, etc) because your partner cheated. 

Don’t Suffer in Silence. Go at Your Own Pace

At times, it may not feel like you have control of these (and similar) thoughts—they can take on a punishing quality because you cannot escape their seemingly never-ending onslaught. While painful to endure, it’s important to remember that this is a common part of the healing process and that these intrusive thoughts are a result of the emotional trauma you experienced.

If your partner is supportive and patient (which will be essential to the healing process), discussing your insecurities with him/her can help you slowly regain your emotional footing. Don’t just suffer in silence–allow him/her to help you shoulder the pain. Feeling you should be “over” the pain just because a certain amount of time has passed, or feeling like you need to protect your partner from your wounded feelings because s/he is starting to lose his/her patience can become a significant hurdle to the healing process. Avoid both of these traps by giving yourself permission to go at your own pace and to communicate your emotional progress with your partner.

Don’t Rush Into Sex

Re-establishing a sexual relationship may involve a step-wise approach rather than immediately pushing yourself into trying to recapture past sexual experiences. Also, pressuring yourself to meet your partner’s sexual needs for fear that s/he may stray again has the potential to backfire (communicate these fears with your partner). One couple I worked with spent several months touching and kissing each other before trying to engage in more intense sexual experiences. This allowed the betrayed partner to be more present emotionally and talk about her worries when they interfered with her ability to give and receive sexual pleasure.

Finally, be compassionate and patient with yourself. Healing from an affair takes time, and set-backs (while extremely frustrating) are normal and will occur.

Marriage/Relationship Resources

I’ve created several workbooks and resources for couples who want a stronger relationship, was well as resources for couples healing after an affair. Click Relationship Workbooks for more information.

Wishing you peace and healing,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

Todd is frustrated with his wife Erin’s “doom and gloom” attitude about their marital future and with the emotional distance he feels she’s created between them. He says, “I recently messed up big time. I’ve acknowledged that and I’m really trying to make things better, but nothing seems to work. She’s gotta cut me some slack, or honestly, I’m going to give up.”

Todd and Erin’s story isn’t uncommon: a couple trying to rebuild their relationship after infidelity or a significant marital crisis of some sort.

And while marriage and relationship problems are often a complicated amalgam of both parties consciously and unconsciously contributing to a break-down of a relationship (though this isn’t always the case), there are many circumstances where one partner has betrayed the other with devastating fallout. 

In this situation, you have the wounder and the wounded, the betrayer and betrayed, a victimizer and victim.

Let’s look at the healing process when this occurs.

Relationship Healing:

Step one in the healing process

The recipe for healing usually involves one spouse/partner acknowledging what s/he’s done to injure the other partner. Taking ownership for his/her actions that have wounded the other has the potential to be a significant reparative event.

Reactions that get in the way of this step include denial (failure to take ownership), minimizing the other’s hurt (“It wasn’t that big of a deal”; “Can’t you get over it already?”), projecting blame (“If you weren’t so hard to deal with, I wouldn’t have cheated”).

Taking ownership is a humbling experience that involves tolerating difficult emotions, the reality that you hurt someone you love, feelings of shame and embarrassment for acting in ways that violate your own values and ideals, anger at yourself. Without the ability to experience and tolerate these intense feelings, you’re likely to move back into denial or projecting blame as a way to undo the distress that comes with taking ownership.

Taking ownership for your actions can also make you feel liberated and free from the debilitating effects of secrecy and self-denial. Self-healing (as well as relationship healing) can result from full ownership.

Step Two in the Healing Process

This involves showing and not just telling: Saying you’re sorry is one thing; Acting like you’re sorry is a totally different ballgame.

The worse thing couples can do at this point is go back to the pre-crisis status quo of the marriage/relationship. Rather, they must build (or partly build) a new relationship that corrects whatever contributed to the previous marriage/relationship problem(s).

What is the betrayed looking for from his/her partner?

Total transparency, since s/he cannot currently trust your motives.

The betrayed is suspicious, anticipating further hurt, and s/he is in self-protective mode (e.g., keeping you at an emotional distance by being aloof), but the betrayed is also very vigilant of any attempts on your part to make amends. Setbacks occur when the betrayed partner perceives that anything is being kept from him/her. Secrecy and hiddenness are toxins to the healing process. 

Consistency and predictability.

When the betrayer changes for the better after taking ownership, the betrayed is monitoring how reliable and trustworthy these changes are. S/he may anticipate only a transient change and fears that at some point, things will go back to the way they were. Because of these fears (which the betrayed cannot help struggle with), one slip-up can undo weeks or even months of hard work and “good behavior” on the part of the betrayer.

Too frequently this level of scrutiny makes the betrayer feel hopeless about the relationship ever improving, and it makes him/her feel that the positive attempts don’t really matter in their partner’s eyes. A real danger exists that s/he will give up at this point. The rule of thumb here is persistence and understanding of the betrayed’s uncontrollable fears—fears that can go from zero to ninety in a split second. In the above quote from Todd, he doesn’t realize that his wife is a victim of her own fears, that she cannot (or is not ready to) let go of her defensiveness for fear of getting hurt again.  She’s not sure if she can fully trust the changes she’s seeing in Todd.

Todd needs to remain consistent in order to help slowly erode Erin’s fears.

Step Three in the Healing Process

This should actually be part of the healing process throughout: Open communication and structured time to process the events that led to the marital/relationship crisis.  The injured may need to repeatedly talk about his/her feelings about what happened for some time. Repetition helps with the “working through” process—here the need is to make psychological sense of the upheaval that has occurred. 

This can be a very frustrating experience for both partners: The injured partner desperately searching  for that nugget of information that will help him/her reach emotional closure so that s/he can  finally put things to rest—only to hear a story or explanation that feels incomplete at best; the injurer feeling badgered, thinking, “We’ve been over this a thousand times already!”, wondering if the injured will ever be able to move on.

In this regard, the healing process may always feel incomplete because at some point a leap of faith must occur on the part of the injured, and while s/he is looking for a soft place to land (which the injurer must provide), the guarantees of total security may never be realized. No relationships, even the best, offer such guarantees. 

It is at this point in the healing process where a conscious decision must be made to move toward the other partner with more emotional openness—this doesn’t have to be an enormous leap, but at least a step is required so that the new relationship can be tested, so that new interactions and ways of being with one another can be realized.

Marriage/Relationship Help Resources

I’ve created two resources that can help couples move past emotional wounding and back to emotional connection.

1. Check out my workbook on how to make effective couples communication a reality;

I’ve also created a workbook that helps couples make forgiveness a regular part of their marriage/relationship.

2. Check out my workbook on forgiveness in marriage.

All best,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

Welcome to the third part of the affair-proofing your marriage series.

Whenever you hear about someone having an affair or cheating (whether it’s someone you know personally, a politician or a celebrity), the affair is almost always sexual in nature—it wouldn’t be front-page news if Tiger Woods or Arnold Schwarzenegger were caught “having feelings” for someone other than their spouses.

But the truth is, many of the wives and girlfriends I see in marriage/couples counseling report that it would be more hurtful knowing that their partner’s infidelity also involved intense feelings for another person. As one wife shared, “I’d be hurt and angry if he slept with someone else; but I’d be absolutely devastated if he fell in love with another woman.”

Emotional affairs are more common than you might think and many couples don’t realize just how  vulnerable they are to traveling down the path of  emotional infidelity. For this reason, it’s essential for all of us to be aware of the emotional affair warning signs.

Click emotional affair warning signs to learn more about the top ten signs of emotional infidelity. Use these warning signs to protect your marriage/relationship from falling victim to the unnecessary suffering caused by an emotional affair.

Welcome to the second post in the How to Affair-proof Your Marriage series.

The first post on marital infidelity highlighted the five danger zones that can make a marriage/relationship vulnerable to an affair. The indiscretions of high-profile figures (David Letterman, John Edwards, and most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger) raise awareness of the vulnerability that all couples face when it comes to long-term commitment and monogamy.

It is not only the rich and famous who are susceptible to having an affair. In my marriage/couples counseling practice, I see many couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity (both emotional affairs and sexual affairs): These couples aren’t unique– in many ways their struggles are similar to the struggles all couples face.

Today’s theme focuses on why men are more likely to be unfaithful than women. Understanding these dynamics can lead couples to work together on building an affair-proof marriage/relationship. Click Why Men Cheat to discover five reasons that men have affairs.

Even if you tried, it’s nearly impossible to avoid hearing about Maria Shriver’s and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s separation and his disclosure that he was unfaithful, and as a result of his affair, fathered a child. While the family is left to make sense of and cope with this devastating information and the painful changes likely to result, many couples are left wondering about the security of their own marriage/relationship.

In my marriage/couples counseling practice, spouses/partners who have remained faithful and committed to each other (despite their particular struggles) are now wondering about the causes of infidelity, whether or not affairs are preventable, and just how affair-proof their relationship really is.  As one wife recently said, “Anyone I’ve ever known who had to deal with an affair once believed that it could never happen to them…”

Do you believe your marriage/relationship is immune to the slippery slope of infidelity? 

To read more about building an affair-proof relationship, click Marital Infidelity: 5 Danger Zones that Can Lead to an Affair