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Does Affair Pain Ever Go Away?

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It’s estimated that a staggering 20-40% of marriages face infidelity, according to an interview published by NPR. Infidelity can have a severe impact on marriages and romantic relationships, not to mention a person’s self worth and mental health, but affair recovery is possible if both partners are committed.

At Well Marriage Center, we believe that marriages and relationships can heal, even after trust has been broken in such a painful way. In this blog, we explore how to heal from infidelity trauma and discuss what you and your partner may experience after an affair.

Why Do Marriages Fail After Infidelity?

Marriages often face challenges after infidelity because affairs break trust. However, not all marriages fail after an affair. There is hope for couples that want to heal their marriage. To understand how, we first have to look at how affairs reflect relationships. 

Relationships—especially marriages—are built on trust. Think of the things you might rely on your partner for, or that your partner relies on you for:

  • Providing emotional support
  • Earning income
  • Maintaining your home
  • Caring for children and/or pets
  • Managing finances
  • Planning dates and vacations
  • Continuing to build a meaningful life together

Some of these tasks carry more weight than others, but when your partner breaks a major point of trust, it can be difficult to rely on them in other aspects of your relationship. Suddenly, you’re not just worried about loyalty, you may also doubt their ability to handle financial matters, health concerns, and household chores while considering your needs. Partners doubt that they are building anything meaningful together anymore. In other words, after your partner has an affair, it might feel like you’re no longer in a partnership.

Affairs can drastically alter your relationship dynamics. In fact, long term infidelity effects can severely  affect both physical and mental health, and affairs can impact people outside of the relationship. When working to heal from an affair, you and your partner may encounter some of the following effects:

 

  • Mental Health: An affair does more than break trust, it can also change how your brain operates. Infidelity may reduce dopamine levels, worsen depression and anxiety, weaken self-esteem, and even cause symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. 
  • Physical Well-Being: When an affair affects your mental health and household routines, it can be difficult to maintain your physical health. In some cases, victims of infidelity can even be more likely to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance abuse and disordered eating, according to Patient. The constant emotional strain from affaird PTSD damages us physically.
  • Altered Relationships: When dealing with an affair, you may experience turmoil in more relationships than with just your partner. If you have children together, it can be difficult to communicate why their parents’ relationship has a different dynamic. If you have overlapping social groups, then your mutual friends may feel the need to choose sides.

 

While dealing with an affair can be a daunting time in your relationship, it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of it. It’s still possible to heal as a couple and build back trust, as long as both of you are willing to put in the time and effort to move forward.

Do You Ever Really Get Over an Affair?

While an affair is a significant moment in a relationship, couples can stay together after infidelity. Hope is very much alive. However, getting to the stage of your relationship where betrayal trauma is no longer the main focus takes time, intentional effort, and possibly professional help.

Before a relationship can get back on track after an affair, the victim must process the 5 stages of grief of infidelity, which are:

  1. Denial 
  2. Anger
  3. Bargaining
  4. Depression
  5. Acceptance

Working through these stages can be painful, but it’s necessary to process the emotions of each stage of grief before moving forward. Otherwise, you can find yourself getting stuck in the past and the hurt you experienced. These negative patterns can become part of your deeper psyche, and spill over into future relationships and damage your self-esteem for years or decades to come. Scheduling sessions with a couples therapist can provide a safe space for both you and your partner to express and understand each other’s difficult feelings, which can help you find ways to heal your relationship. You can read more about these stages and this process here.

*Because of the traumatic nature of infidelity, we recommend working with a skilled couples counselor or marriage therapist even if you don’t decide to stay together after the affair. A specialized therapist can help each partner process the hurt and damage, and come out on the other side stronger, without having to carry the baggage forever. However you decide to handle the situation, we’re here to support you and your relationship goals.

How Do I Stop Hurting After an Affair?

One major step to healing after an affair is to understand what went wrong in the relationship. This can be a painful and often triggering process, but uncovering any underlying issues can help you both communicate what you want in your relationship moving forward.

Although forgiveness is the ultimate goal of affair recovery, it likely won’t happen quickly—and that’s okay. As we stated above, infidelity can trigger the grieving process, and it’s important to give each of those emotions the space they require to work through. Working with a neutral third party mediator, like a couples therapist, can help both of you voice your needs and feelings without fear of escalation or retaliation. 

Does Affair Guilt Go Away?

Oftentimes, emphasis is placed on the victims of infidelity to forgive their partners, but it’s just as important—if not more so—for the partner that had the affair to work through their emotions. Similar to the stages of emotional betrayal, the partner who had the affair also goes through stages of guilt after cheating: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

The relationship can’t move forward until trust is rebuilt, and that’s difficult to do if the cheater is still resentful or insecure about their ability to stay in a faithful relationship. They often also carry feelings of humiliation, inadequacy and a host of other damaging emotions that can lead to or deepend pre-existing negative coping mechanisms. Working with a skilled therapist can be key in getting to the root of these issues and behaviors.

How To Stop Thinking About an Affair Partner

When infidelity impacts your relationship, it can be hard to stop thinking about the third, “other” person—but the best way to move forward is to give that external person less time in your thoughts. That may sound counterintuitive, but think about it this way: if you spend all of your time thinking about the other person, then they’ll always be at the front of your mind. This obsession can overpower your relationship, even if your intentions are to move past the “other” person.

A common way to help change your mindset is to change your routine with your partner. Starting fresh can remove connections that the other person had to your life. You and your partner can also meet with a marriage counselor to discuss solutions that are specific to your individual challenges. 

Rebuilding Trust After Infidelity

Affair recovery is a slow and steady process filled with forward progress, setbacks, and for many couples, the ability to trust each other once again. To give your relationship its best chance at healing, it helps to work with specialized professionals. At Well Marriage Center, we provide support and guidance to help free couples from the past and build a better tomorrow. The path forward starts with a small step together. Schedule an appointment today.

 

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What Boundaries Should Be Set After Infidelity?

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Infidelity, one of the most harmful lies in a relationship, occurs between 20 to 40% of married couples. This doesn’t even include partners that aren’t married. Many people are surprised by these numbers, but affairs are something that happen across cultures and generations, for any number of reasons. People generally don’t set out to hurt each other, yet it happens and each situation is unique.

The good news is that affair recovery is, in fact, possible. When both individuals want to continue, heal, and process after the trauma of infidelity, and with appropriate counseling, around 60 to 75% of couples are able to improve communication and rebuild trust as they work through the stages of healing after infidelity, primarily:

  • Discovery of (and reaction to) the affair
  • Beginning to forgive
  • Recommitment and reconciliation

Let’s take a look at the importance of setting—and respecting—effective boundaries in the aftermath of infidelity.

What Is the Importance of Setting Healthy Boundaries?

The importance of developing mutually-agreeable relationship and marital boundaries—whether infidelity has occurred or not—is difficult to overstate. Boundaries serve an essential purpose in establishing a healthy and balanced relationship. They create an environment where each person can feel heard and understood without one person needing to “win.” These, of course, aren’t physical boundaries; they’re better considered as behavioral and emotional boundaries.

When infidelity has occurred, it’s a sign that a relationship’s boundaries may have been compromised—if they were even set in the first place. Luckily, affair recovery counseling is designed to explore those boundaries, understand where their vulnerabilities lie, and reset them as needed. Our team of qualified professionals at Well Marriage Center provide strengths-focused affair recovery services that can help you set healthy boundaries, process through the trauma and strong emotions of the cheating, rediscover or rebuild your love, and get your relationship on a healthier track.

What Are Examples of Boundaries in a Marriage?

“Boundaries” can mean a lot of different things, but when applied to any relationship, they outline ground rules in areas like:

  • Communication and honesty
  • Domestic life
  • Finances
  • Individual autonomy
  • Privacy and personal space
  • Relationships with in-laws and other family members
  • Reliability and trust

As a couple works together to develop boundaries that respect each partner’s expectations, it creates space for healing and establishes a strong foundation for the relationship moving forward. 

What many people don’t realize is that setting boundaries isn’t just important in the aftermath of an affair. In reality, healthy boundaries can apply to various stages of affair recovery, from infidelity prevention through reconciliation. Next, we’ll take a closer look at how boundaries can apply at three different stages.

What Are the Boundaries After Infidelity?

Some broad examples of healthy boundaries in a marriage or relationship that relate to affair recovery could include things like: 

  • Creating plans for taking “timeouts” when emotions are running high.
  • Determining what kinds of boundaries, like allowing phone calls or visits, should be in place between the cheater and who the person they cheated with.
  • Setting ground rules after cheating for when—and how often—you will discuss the affair.
  • Considering a temporary physical separation.

How Do You Go About Setting Boundaries During Reconciliation?

Working with a licensed counselor to establish boundaries during the reconciliation process empowers each partner to explore and unpack their feelings in a safe environment. It’s important to know that you don’t have to “go it alone” during this emotionally-charged time. 

When we learn about and react to the discovery of the affair, we experience strong emotions like shame, unworthiness, confusion, anger, and PTSD. The cheating partner often experiences inadequacy, shame, guilt, and sadness. It’s important to work through these emotions with an experienced clinician to minimize long-term, damaging effects and misguided coping mechanisms.

While this might be your first experience with infidelity, our team knows what it takes to survive an affair and can help you at every stage along your path to healing.

While you could take a shot at boundary-setting without working with a couples or marriage counselor, that approach can get messy. Working with a therapist helps to ensure that you and your partner maintain mutual respect throughout the entire reconciliation process. A counselor can help you zero in on the types of boundaries you should be setting—and how to implement them.

How Do You Set Boundaries to Prevent Infidelity from Happening Again?

As you set healthy boundaries in your marriage, a marriage counselor can help you to identify the root causes of conflict in the relationship in a way that can work toward preventing infidelity in the future. The boundaries you develop through couples and marriage counseling should improve future communication, account for each partner’s needs and expectations, and, ultimately, rebuild trust. 

Of course, once these boundaries have been established, there will still be work to do. Here’s an analogy:

Let’s say you’ve always wanted to be a competitive marathon runner. You’ve spent months, if not years, training for your first race. At some point, you experience an injury. 

You really want to run this marathon, right? So you go see a sports medicine specialist, who helps you to rehabilitate your injury through physical therapy. In the short-term, it helps get you in the kind of shape it takes to just get back out on the road. 

Over time, though, the specialist helps you to determine the root cause of your injury, whether it’s wearing the wrong kind of shoes or the need for surgery. That way, you’re less likely to suffer the same injury as you’re ramping back up.

Once the injury heals, you don’t just resume your training from where you left off. Instead, you have to be vigilant to correct the causes of your injury so you don’t find yourself hurt, again, a few months down the line. 

And it’s like that with affair recovery, too. Yes, it’s important (in the short-term) to address the hurt feelings, but it’s also important to guard against future problems as well. A couples therapist helps individuals meet and honor each other’s expectations in a way that doesn’t compromise anyone’s boundaries.

Ready to Get On the Road to Recovery?

Infidelity doesn’t have to mean the end. Whether an affair has just been discovered or you’re looking for reconciliation after infidelity separation, the team at Well Marriage Center is ready to help. Our patient, empathetic, and strengths-based approach is designed to help you rebuild trust, commitment, and ultimately make your relationship stronger for the future. Learn more about our affair recovery services, or schedule an appointment today!

 

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What Are the Stages of Affair Recovery?

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If you’ve cheated or been cheated on, you’re not alone. According to Psychology Today, “about 20 percent of men and 13 percent of women report that they’ve had sex with someone other than their spouse while married.” 

Why do people cheat? It can happen for a range of reasons, like feeling neglected, growing bored, or simply one partner falling out of love with the other. Often, it’s not easy to even figure out the root cause or causes, making affair recovery a tricky endeavor—and one that’s best left to a qualified marriage or couples counselor. 

While people’s reasons for cheating may be complex and difficult to untangle, there’s hope. The aftermath of an affair is a rollercoaster of painful emotions that can have devastating, long-term effects if not handled appropriately. Once you understand the stages of healing after infidelity and find the right counselor to help you navigate them through your unique situation, recovery should start to feel like a real possibility.

Note: we use “marriage” and “couples” counseling interchangeably, as we’re here to support any committed relationship that is in distress. We hope you can find this information useful, regardless of legal status or how you personally label your relationship.

How Do You Start the Healing Process After an Affair?

Even though it can cause deep feelings of betrayal and hurt, infidelity does not have to mean the end of the marriage or relationship. That being said, getting past the initial trauma can feel overwhelming in the early stages after an affair has been discovered.

The best advice in the immediate aftermath of affair discovery is to work past the urge to lash out, which typically only makes things worse. Instead, it’s important to take a breath, give each other some space, and avoid making any rash decisions in the moment.

When you’re ready to begin the process of mending the relationship, you’ll want to bring a couples therapist into the conversation. Especially if they specialize in affair recovery, a counselor will be able to help guide you down the path toward reconciliation and healing. The best part? “When both partners are committed to real healing, most couples survive and many marriages become stronger with deeper levels of intimacy,” according to Mayo Clinic.

Even for couples who have decided to split after the discovery of infidelity, working with a specialized clinician can help people overcome the damaging, long-term emotional and mental distress that follows.

 

What Are the Stages of Healing After an Affair?

The five main infidelity recovery stages, which run parallel to the general stages of grief, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

  • Denial: In this stage, both partners struggle to make sense of what’s occurred. For the cheater, this might mean being surprised by their own error and the hurt they’ve caused. For the partner who’s been cheated on, this stage involves processing the initial feelings of betrayal after an affair. A counselor will help you to better understand the reasons the affair occurred, a crucial first step in the healing process. 
  • Anger: Understandably, the partner who’s been cheated on is going to be in a great deal of pain, with feelings of anger, embarrassment, and a drop in self-worth. The cheater likely feels some guilt and shame, too. Anger, often considered a secondary emotion, is likely to have its roots in deeper feelings like hurt and confusion. Working with a counselor helps to ensure that discussions remain civil and that each partner can work through their thoughts and feelings in a safe, judgment-free environment. 
  • Bargaining: During this stage, partners are likely to question various circumstances and possible causes behind the affair. Left to their own devices, many people internalize the blame, thinking things like “If only I had (or hadn’t) done [X], maybe this wouldn’t have happened.” It can result in a series of negative thoughts that ruminate in your mind if you’re not careful. When you work with an affair recovery counselor, they’ll help to make sure each partner feels heard and understood—and that neither partner falls into any sort of unproductive blame spirals.
  • Depression: As betrayal’s full impact comes into focus, depression tends to follow. What does it feel like? It feels like hurt, sadness, and doubt. You can begin to doubt yourself and others.  It can even feel hopeless and like the past was a lie. An affair recovery counselor understands how to navigate these proverbial seas of pain and can help couples to keep lines of communication (and healing) open. This way, neither partner is left to dwell too long in this stage.
  • Acceptance: While no quality counselor will tell you to just “accept” what happened or to “get over it,” their job is to help determine what healing looks like for your unique situation. This stage is more about reflection and potential forgiveness than it is about finality or closure. Part of acceptance can also be accepting what was broken in the relationship before the affair, and creating a tailored plan with your therapist to make sure the next stage of your relationship journey is stronger and more vibrant.

For a deeper dive into each of these stages and how to work through them, this Gottman Institute article is a great resource.

What Kind of Trauma Does Cheating Cause?

The intense feelings of betrayal that follow infidelity define a particular type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) known as post traumatic infidelity syndrome. Symptoms of this disorder can include:

  • Rumination and recurring thoughts
  • Traumatic recall (flashbacks)
  • Emotional numbness
  • Avoidance, isolation, and withdrawal
  • Anxiety and depression
  • Insomnia
  • Erosion of trust

It’s important to note that the list above is not necessarily complete, but goes to illustrate the wide range of effects infidelity can bring about. Working with a qualified marriage counselor is the best way to explore and begin unpacking the effects of trauma. A counselor will also help you build a better, more sustainable future through the development of better communication, trust, and intimacy. Gaining insight and creating a plan with a specialist will help keep you and your relationships with others from being defined by a traumatic affair.

How Long Does It Take To Recover From Infidelity Trauma?

While every couple and every marriage is different, experts generally agree that it takes “months, even years, to successfully rebuild trust” after infidelity. Trauma is a tricky, tricky thing, and everyone experiences it differently. Some people are predisposed to feeling deeply hurt in certain situations, while others might have more resilience or an ability to “move on” more quickly. 

Working with a marriage counselor who specializes in affair recovery helps with this process by:

  • Understanding and validating each partner’s feelings, needs, and priorities
  • Finding common ground between partners
  • Setting clear expectations for the recovery process
  • Helping to determine root causes and appropriate solutions
  • Creating a safe environment for vulnerability and sharing
  • Identifying what boundaries should be set after infidelity to rebuild trust

Affair Recovery Starts With a Single Call—to Well Marriage Center

At Well Marriage Center, our affair recovery counselors are ready and waiting to help couples start the healing and reconciliation process and work toward rediscovering their love. 

We take a strengths-based approach to affair recovery, one that’s designed to rebuild trust and help couples reconnect, get back on track, and develop strategies to help ensure that you can stay on track. It doesn’t have—and shouldn’t—feel hopeless! 

Even for couples who do not choose to stay and work on their relationship after an affair, a specialized counselor can help one or both partners unpack, heal, and plan for their futures, so the baggage of affair trauma doesn’t snowball into longer-term issues.

Every journey begins with a single step, so get in touch with our team today.



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