When you are walking through a difficult chapter after infidelity, addiction or another significant crisis, you are likely looking for a few things: healing, peace of mind, clarity, understanding, personal restoration and perhaps even relational restoration. Ultimately, what we really want is transformation. We want this agony to be transformed into healing and joy.

We have a choice: We can either transmit our pain or we can transform it. We can do the recovery work that we need to do, we can get the expert help that we need to get, we can go through this difficult healing process and actually experience transformation — both personally and possibly even relationally. What I’m going to offer you today are four stages of personal transformation that apply to both the wayward spouse and the betrayed spouse.

1. Waking Up

For the unfaithful spouse, this stage is easy to describe: It’s waking up to the reality of what our choices have done to our significant other. Waking up is breaking free of the fog and beginning to understand: I am unhealthy, and I need to get healthy.

• If you come from faith, you start to realize your union with God or the deity your honor needs to be repaired.
• If you don’t come from faith, you start to wake up to the fact that you need to heal yourself in order to become whole.

Waking up after infidelity is understanding that you need to take action and get the right help in order to fully heal and transform your pain.

For the betrayed spouse, waking up looks a little bit different. It’s a moment of clarity, it’s a moment of saying, “You know what, I’ve had enough of mourning and I’m going to embrace what is. I’m going to accept the life that I have, even though it’s not what I want and certainly didn’t ask for.” Accepting where you’re at makes room for personal transformation to begin.

2. Standing Up

Whether you’re the wayward spouse or the betrayed spouse, there comes a point where you have to stand up to the trauma, the pain and the hurt. Standing up after infidelity sometimes means being a little bit selfish and taking care of yourself, prioritizing yourself, in order to facilitate your healing.

There came a time for me when I realized I had to stand up and fight back against the hopelessness, the despair and the self-pity. I had to stand up and do the recovery work I needed to do because healing was not going to be effortless. If you’re the betrayed spouse, you may have to stand up in order to be prioritized in this relationship. You may need to get help to work through your trauma, and you may need to enforce boundaries to protect yourself.

Standing up means fighting for your healing, your recovery and even your relationship, and it means taking whatever steps you need to take so this pain no longer controls your life.

3. Growing Up

After infidelity, we go through a maturation process when we realize healing is our responsibility and no one else can do it for us. Your spouse cannot carry your trauma, your pain or your hurt; they can help you and support you, but it’s on you to get healthy. When we get to this growing up stage, we encounter several truths that require us to evolve

• We can’t hide from this pain.
• We can’t change what happened.
• We can’t live in denial.

Growing up also means embracing some new principles that we may not like. In his book “The Art of Loving,”* Erich Fromm says this:

“Love and labor are inseparable. One does not labor for something one does not love, and one does not love something that has not required labor.”

Part of growing up is embracing labor, embracing the fact that healing requires work, intentionality and labor. After infidelity, you cannot get away from the fact that recovery work is needed to move forward. It’s going to be hard and laborious at times, but it’s absolutely worth every single minute, tear, moment for you to be healed and experience restoration.

Showing Up

The reality is this: If you want to have a relationship with meaning and value after infidelity, you need to show up. If you can’t show up for your partner, they’re going to feel alienated, rejected and abandoned. If you can’t show up for yourself, you’re going to remain stuck in your pain.

This is intimidating and exhausting, I’m not denying that, but you need to show up and do the recovery work or you risk missing out on those opportunities for healing, restoration and transformation.

Showing up is meeting with your significant other and saying:

“I’m here, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I don’t know what the answers are or what it’s going to cost — emotionally, mentally or financially — but I’m here and I’m all in.”

Whether you’re the wayward spouse or the betrayed spouse, it is your job to show up for yourself. And if you don’t show up for the relationship, how can you know what could happen? If you don’t show up, how do you know what breakthrough could be there? If you’re the wayward spouse, you may be faced with the reality that it keeps getting harder as you show up. I’m going to be honest with you: Keep showing up until God or your heart tells you otherwise.

You can’t control what they do, but you can sure control what you do. You want to be able to look back and say, “I showed up, time and time again. I may not have been perfect, but I never quit showing up.” I hope and pray that you will show up, first for yourself and your well-being, and second for them if you’re still in a relationship. They need you to show up, and you need you to show up for yourself.

I hope you can go forward today with a little more courage, grit and insight on how to not keep transmitting your pain but, rather, to experience the biggest transformation you may have ever known.