The Danger of Despair: How I Sabotaged My Own Healing

I remember telling my wife, well into our recovery journey, “If nothing else, we never have to question whether we love each other because two people would have to love each other an enormous amount to go through this much pain in an effort to heal together.” I know from personal experience—I have been both betrayer and betrayed—that the pain is felt by both parties, although in different ways and with different effects. I also know from personal experience (my first marriage ended in divorce due to mutual infidelity) that sometimes even that isn’t enough, and either party can end up alone and suffering in just as much agony.

People can tell you that time heals all wounds. In reality, it takes time and effort, at least if you want to truly heal. It did help a bit, when my wife and I were at the lowest points of it, to hear and read the stories—and even to hear them live from new people we met through Affair Recovery—of people who had been where we were and had come out whole on the other side, with relationships that were even better than they had been before. It was good to know that was possible. Often, though, in the moment, the pain was so unbearable it was easy to feel it would never end, and that everything was hopeless. That could be true for either party in the flooding moments—when the sobs and the rage and the screams coalesce into a maelstrom of emotion that is impossible to adequately describe in words. It can also be true in the quieter moments, when despair seeps down into the core of you and you don’t know how you can endure. Such moments can make either or both of you even more susceptible to the darker angels of your nature. And in some ways the hardest part is that, even if you are able to acknowledge the possibility of healing, there is simply no way to know how long it will take.

I had an emotional affair with a former girlfriend. After D-Day, my wife and I discovered Affair Recovery and did EMS Online. After that we continued (with the one couple from our group that was willing) with Married for Life. We learned a lot—but I didn’t learn enough, or at least it didn’t take as well as it should have. A year-and-a-half after D-Day, and a year after finishing EMS Online, my wife was still flooding just as intensely and as often as ever. I started giving up hope on things ever getting better. I kept asking myself, “Is this what the rest of my life is going to be like?” I knew she was asking herself the same thing. Then the Covid lockdown came, and two weeks later my little brother died of a fentanyl overdose and we weren’t even able to have a normal funeral service to say goodbye. I was devastated. I found myself desperately longing for comfort and reassurance—but my wife was mourning doubly, for the brother-in-law she had come to love like her own flesh and for the life I had promised her, and she was simply too wounded to give the way I wanted. She could not just turn off her own feelings. Everything started to feel incredibly hopeless to me. And that can be dangerous.

I started yearning for the way my affair partner used to build me up, even though I knew it had really been a fantasy relationship on both our parts. I had an incredible urge to reach out to her. I knew it would be a mistake, and I didn’t do it—at least, not directly. I had secretly kept some photos of her from when we had dated fifteen years earlier, before I met my wife, and I doctored them into pornographic images that I looked at when I craved contact. It was more about emotion than purely about sex—but isn’t it almost always, in some combination? My wife found the pictures, and it was terrible. The pain it brought her seemed to be even deeper than the actual emotional affair had been, and we were set back to square one if not even farther. That’s what led me to Hope for Healing, and eventually to a much healthier mind and spirit…but I reflect often on the irony of it.

My inability to handle my despair and hopelessness about the situation led to me making the situation far worse. If I had not done that—if I had held on just a little longer—we would have reached the good place we are now much, much sooner. I share this perspective with the men in the Hope for Healing groups I lead. Learn from my example, I tell them: giving in to feelings of hopelessness can undercut what hope was actually there, and make it all so much harder.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. I gained a lot of tools in Hope for Healing, and a lot more from my individual therapy. I started seeing a trauma specialist at that same time, as a lot of my issues arose from my troubled childhood, and we met regularly until he retired five years later. We started with a lot of behavioral therapy, and I learned ways to calm myself in the moment. That is in many ways a fundamental need, as we have to master those techniques before we can progress to deeper healing—which we did, first with EMDR and then with Internal Family Systems therapy (which I learned about from Wayne at Affair Recovery). We also learned techniques to apply to those quieter moments of desperation, which I’d like to share with you now because they were so helpful to me.

My therapist introduced me to the Sedona Method Questions. When you are feeling anxiety or any other overwhelming emotion, don’t suppress it or run away from it—my go-to approach all my life, when I wasn’t seeking distraction from the touch or words of other women. No, allow yourself to feel it completely. And then ask yourself a series of questions. Is this feeling something I am capable of letting go of? Not am I willing, am I capable. Next—will I let it go? Do I choose to do so? And if so—when? This sequence allows you to express feelings to yourself in a controlled environment, giving them less hold on you.

The next step is not part of the official Sedona approach, and I am glad my therapist introduced me to it because it has proved to be one of the most helpful techniques I have learned. I wish I had known of it before I relapsed.

My final step: Can you imagine a time when this feeling/problem has been resolved and you are no longer troubled by it?

If you can’t, I encourage you to, well, try. And then let yourself feel that moment—that future time when the pain is gone, or at least minimized. Imagine what that feels like, and then feel it right now. It’s amazing how peaceful I felt when I learned to do that. I am not a trained therapist, but I can tell you it helped me enormously. However you’re able to do it, and whether you are betrayer or betrayed, find the tools to navigate and rise above your feelings of hopelessness.

Your healing depends on it.