Affair Recovery

The older I get, the more life throws at me and the older my kids get, the more I understand that life is filled with pain.  Some is intense and at the top of the scale like infidelity, shame, moral failure and the destruction our choices create.  Other pain can be smaller like the pain of rejection from a child, or a failed business deal, or the inability to provide the way you’d like to for your family. 

I like to deaden my pain.  I really do.  One of my favorite books I’ve read in the last 10 years is Shattered Dreams by Larry Crabb.  I highly recommend it.  Take for example a quote of his: 

“People who find some way to deaden their pain never discover their desire for God in all its fullness.  They rather live for relief...

This is a tough one. A short blog makes it impossible to be exhaustive, but I’ll be as specific as space and time allows.

Fact is you don’t make anyone have an affair. An unfaithful spouse cheats because of their own inability to face up to their marital situation and perceived dissatisfaction and handle it a better way, the right way.

Yes, my marriage had some vulnerabilities. Samantha admitted she rejected me emotionally and sexually pretty frequently. She also admits that she was disapproving and I was treated like a second or third child depending on what year of marriage we were in. I felt like I was treated like royalty everywhere outside of my home, but inside my home I never could do enough or be enough. I was frustrated. I was selfish and self-absorbed. Yep: I...

It’s very common. As a betrayed spouse learns of whom the affair partner was, the lights start to come on a bit. If the affair partner was a good friend or best friend of the betrayed spouse, the whole situation becomes a ‘double betrayal’ for the hurt spouse. They’ve now been betrayed by both their spouse and their friend.  It really is one of the toughest situations to face within the world of infidelity.  

Eventually, the betrayed is faced with raging emotions and a sense of violation. Often times the affair partner will not quit or go away quietly either. It’s at this point that the betrayed many times will start to tear down and trash the affair partner. Don’t get me wrong, they may deserve it, but it’s a no win situation.

In what seems like a knee jerk...

First of all, most affairs are based upon fantasy, and a fantasy is always more alluring than reality, especially when you add about the years spent together, the resentments that have built up, and the responsibilities pulling you in multiple directions to that reality. Add kids, mortgages, mood swings, PMS, menopause, financial pressures and you have a recipe for potential disaster if help is not sought out soon enough.  Affairs are based upon another life that is free from the pressures of life and reality. It’s easier (albeit selfish and cowardly) to have an affair than it is to do the work to fix your marriage or yourself.

The grass always looks greener after about 5 or 10 years of marriage, and we don’t make the connection early enough sometimes that if we’ll nourish...

(Nagging Questions Continued)

For some, the question finally arrives: why not just divorce my spouse and move on?

I’ll never forget, Samantha and I were in our room talking, and she launched out into a pretty good rant about how angry and hurt she was.  In a defining moment, through tears of very defining sorrow she said to me “if we didn’t have kids, it would be easy: we could just divorce and move on. But now, I don’t know…..”

It not only hit me like a ton of bricks, it sobered me up a bit to the reality that she was considering all options, including separation and divorce. I didn’t want her to consider all options. I wanted her to simply say “I want to work it out. Let’s ride off into the sunset of ‘Another Chance’ and be happily ever after.” Nine years...

(Nagging questions continued)

It’s a valid question: can you and your marriage have what your spouse and the affair partner had? To attempt to cover all bases I’ll approach from both sides of the marriage.

For the Unfaithful: I’ll never be able to have with my wife what I had with my affair partner. What I had in the affair was more fantasy than reality. Very little responsibilities, the ability to come and go as I pleased with little to no expectations, the newness of the physical intimacy, no kids to get in the middle of our time together, no bills to pay, and no ‘real life’ pressures. I was only around for the great parts of the affair partner and was celebrating the top 20-30% of her personality, not the entirety of her as a person. In an affair, I’m simply using...

In a conversation the other day, an unfaithful spouse said to me “I really do want to want to save my marriage…..but I’m so deep in, I feel lost.” 

He expected me to be angry or upset with him, but I simply affirmed him and said I’m thrilled you want to want to.  After all, at least you’re being honest with someone after 4 years of back and forth, in and out of your marriage, two different affair partners and a litany of excuses and lies. 

Coming clean and getting healthy is always messy.

“I want to want to” sounds like a cop out.  It is, to some extent, but we, the unfaithful do not know that yet.  It’s like we’re saying, I want to do what’s right, and I should know what’s right, but poor me, I don’t have the “want to”. ...

It seems like not a day goes by I don’t talk to a spouse who is dealing with a spouse who is ambivalent or undecided about where they want to be. I wish it was limited to just the unfaithful, but it happens to both spouses alike, unfaithful and betrayed. You just aren’t sure what you want to do or where you want to be.

The unfaithful become ambivalent about where they want to be. Should they pursue the illicit life of the affair with what seems to make them happy and fulfilled or should they return home to see if there is a future and a hope with their spouse?

The betrayed wonder if they can ever trust their spouse again and is it really worth it in the end? Should they be willing to expose their heart and vulnerabilities all over again, only to be raked over the coals...

If you’re a regular on my blog, you’ll note that I make no excuses for my infidelity or anyone else’s.  Bad marriages don’t cause infidelity, bad choices do. Betrayed spouses often believe if they would have just had more sex with their spouse, or paid attention to their needs, they wouldn’t have cheated.  That reasoning is flawed entirely. Sure, sure there may have been vulnerabilities within the marriage, yet the fact remains, we cheat out of selfishness and dysfunction.

It’s at this point however that we must note the battle the betrayed must fight. It’s a battle against seduction. Typically, I see the betrayed seduced by bitterness, anger and resentment. Don’t the betrayed have a right to be angry? Absolutely. However, what I’m speaking to is the seduction to be...

As I’ve written before, recovery is a journey. It’s been nine years and I’m still learning. Rick said just last month at one of our EMS Weekends, “It’s been almost 30 years and I’m still learning.” Recovery, I believe, is a progression as we return to understanding and a sense of ‘wholeness’ after our demise. If we’re open and malleable, I believe we’ll find healing for all of our wounds we’ve encountered in life, including infidelity and even childhood.

It’s a terrible childhood memory which is my backdrop today. It certainly ties in to my approach post-infidelity but some background will serve a purpose first.

My father and mother divorced when I was about a year old after he returned from fighting in Vietnam. My father would remarry a couple times till his death when...

Life caters towards pity parties. There seems to always be something going wrong and there is always someone to blame. Part of me says if we’d blame ourselves a bit more, we may take more responsibility for our own actions and the world would be a better place.

However, I have met and pastored and talked to hundreds who blame themselves too much and in an arbitrary way. Blaming ourselves for too much can be equally destructive. I’ve blamed myself for a ton in life to the point where I’ve had to realize life is not always about me. There is a sort of false humility which is not enjoyed by anyone, least of all our spouses. Shame is also a dark and deceptive culprit which likes to make things all about us.

Early on in recovery, a man I met encouraged me to say to myself...

Everyone loves a comeback.

The problem with comebacks is that they are hard as heck to pull off. Anything worth having is worth working for, and I’ve learned the things that matter most usually are hardest and require the most grace to pull off.

Just yesterday an old staff member of mine reached out to tell me how moved he was to see pictures of my kids and our family stable, strong, and healed. It encouraged him about life, marriage, recovery and even God’s grace. It’s not come easy but small moments like that make it all worth it.

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When we undermine ourselves, we end up being angry at ourselves for not doing what we said we would. It launches us into anger and, at times, a temporary self-hatred. Time after time betrayed spouses will feel an even greater sense of anger towards themselves as they feel like their unfaithful spouse is deceiving them yet again.  

The fact is you don’t know what you don’t know. You’ll need help to know whether or not it is safe to reengage with your spouse. Quite honestly, sometimes it’s great and much needed to be vulnerable or even physically intimate with your spouse even while in crisis, yet in other situations, it’s one of the worst things you can do....

I can be a yeller. You know, the parent that remains calm, cool and collected and then finally gets pushed over the edge and lets it rip? Yeah, I can blow it. I’ve done much better over the years and have found a new sense of momentum, but I wanted to share something with you I’ve learned the hard way about yelling.  

The fact is, the person who yells is often times yelling at themselves; not you, not the kids, not even the guy who cut them off.

We’re yelling at ourselves for doing what we’ve done.

We’re yelling at ourselves for NOT doing what we know we should have done in the first place.

We’re yelling because we feel out of control and our typical first instinct is to try to control things.

I typically yell loudest when I feel out of...