My Spouse Cheated; Now What?

My Spouse Cheated; Now What?

You’ll never forget that moment when you discovered it. Maybe you had feared or suspected, but the moment you know your spouse has indeed been unfaithful, it can feel as if the world has stopped spinning and time has stopped. What can ever feel normal again? All hope of happiness or normality seems forever gone.

Trauma is an event that overwhelms your ability to cope. Betrayal is a trauma that happens in significant relationships. Because the relationship matters so much, because the life you’ve built together is crucial to your sense of purpose and wholeness, the sadness of marital infidelity can crush you. You thought your spouse was forever, and now your person has hurt you more profoundly than anyone else could. The intensity of emotion after infidelity is beyond what anyone can handle alone.

When you suffer any kind of trauma, support is crucial. You need a safe other to process the pain with. You need a place to grieve and question and get angry. If you keep the emotion repressed, if you try to carry on without anyone knowing and without acknowledging the immensity of the pain, you will not move through the trauma to healing. You will get stuck, and your nervous system will continue to replay the event, the discovery, the evidence, as if it happened just yesterday. The hurt will last longer if it is not processed with the support and guidance of a stronger, wiser other.

If you need individual support after betrayal, a counselor can help. But if you and your spouse decide to heal together, you need a relationship therapist who can help you find true emotional support and safety with each other once more—maybe for the first time ever.

Though your spouse is the source of the intense pain, who else can understand the complexity and heartache like them? It can be disorienting that you simultaneously despise and long for your spouse. How can you find your way back together to grieve and repair? How can you find forgiveness or carry on with life together?

Attachment injury therapy is a slow and deliberate process. We never want to intensify the pain by going too quickly to resolution. We first want to stabilize the sadness and grief; we will care for your heart as if it’s been in an accident: Are you eating? Are you sleeping? How can we support your basic functioning in the early days or discovery?

We will then seek clarity on what everyone wants next. The betraying partner must decide whether they can commit to wholehearted repair: Will they break ties with the other person definitively and immediately? Will they commit to honesty and transparence with their spouse? Will they offer reassurance every time the spouse needs it? Will they own their actions and the choices they made?

If the offending spouse is leaning out of the marriage and unsure about ending the emotional or physical affair, then marital healing cannot begin. Individual support is indicated instead. To have the emotional safety required for couples therapy, each partner must see the affair as a wake-up call, a call to action, a reason to fight to regain the intimacy and emotional connection that has atrophied over time.

Either partner might hesitate when deciding the next best step. It is wise to limit those you talk to about the affair during this period of discernment. You do need a few close, trusted others who can help carry your pain, but you do not want too many opinions in your ear. And you do not want to give family and friends information they can’t unlearn if you decide to stay and work on the marriage. You want minimum bias toward the offending partner so that you are both free to do what is right for your relationship—not what Mom, Dad, Sister, or BFF says is right.

Are you in this place of confusion and pain? Would you like to talk through the steps to healing that are right for you? If you are in Atlanta—anywhere in Georgia—I can offer you a free consultation to talk about the betrayal pain. Reach out to see if betrayal trauma therapy could be right for you.