Affair Recovery

(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.

...

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...

Lately, I’ve talked with several people who seem to be overwhelmed with raw bitterness and resentment. Now, there are a million slogans, quotes and catch phrases on what bitterness does and what anger does and I get that. Today I’d like to keep it simple and highlight one consequence of bitterness and resentment that’s not only dangerous but imprisoning.

Plain and simply put, bitterness and resentment blind us.  

If we’ve been unfaithful, our bitterness at our spouse (or life), blinds us to our betrayed spouse’s emotions, triggers, consequences and struggles. We make it all about us and our resentment towards our spouse or others, for unmet needs or unmet expectations which then enable our own blindness. I learned long ago that if the person I think about most is...

In my previous post we talked about wandering away, over time, little by little. No one just wakes up and has an affair and ruins their life and their spouse’s life. There are reasons an affair happens, and then there are more reasons a spouse stays in an affair and refuses to quit.  Left to ourselves, void of accountability and continual connection with our spouse, I truly believe we are given to wandering, looking elsewhere for affirmation and boosts to our self-esteem. Without a plan, we’ll eventually fall prey to some sort of call for our attention from somewhere, or as many of us here know, someone.  

As I alluded to, we have to be calculated in our recovery, even after an affair, if we want to not wander again.

I can hear many of you already saying “...

When dealing with recovery, there are three main components which must be healed and addressed. We mistakenly think it’s just about the marriage and if we can heal the marriage, we can return to safety and security and the trauma will magically disappear.

I’ve heard it a thousand times, “we need to save our marriage, it’s all about the marriage.” The problem is, there are two other primary components which must be addressed as well, or the marriage will never truly be saved or even really safe.

The three facets are you, your spouse and then your marriage.

So often we jump to trying to restore the marriage that each spouse does not get the recovery they need personally, thus putting the whole marriage ecosystem in jeopardy. If it’s just about saving the marriage...

The unfaithful cheat and then they have the nerve to be angry….how does that work?

It sounds crazy, but upon further review it makes sense.

I was angry when my affair came out. I was a lot of other things as well: numb, confused, shocked, disengaged and disconnected. My classic reasoning system was “Well, if she would have been more aware of my needs, maybe I wouldn’t have cheated.” “If I wasn’t just a fourth kid, maybe things would have been different.” Lunacy, I know.

The unfaithful typically will resort to anger as a secondary emotion. We often times feel an intense amount of guilt, shame and condemnation and instead of sharing those feelings, genuinely letting down our guard, and being vulnerable, what the betrayed see is more and more anger and hostility....

Today’s post is directed towards the unfaithful. I’m certainly hopeful the betrayed will shout a big ‘Amen’ to my thoughts today, or even show this to their unfaithful spouses. Having been an unfaithful myself, believe me when I say there are no stones being thrown at you today. I’d only be throwing them at myself as well, and to go a step further, it would be completely self-righteous to lay judgment on someone who is just like me, an unfaithful.

A concept that’s hard to really grasp for some is the reality that our actions (the unfaithful) at some level will determine what the future looks like.  Quite often I’ll ask a betrayed spouse this question: “Are you open to the restoration of the marriage?” The answers are all over the board, but one thing is pretty sure: most,...