After The Affair - Repairing Emotional Connections
After The Affair - Repairing Emotional Connections
There is but one critical element when it comes to surviving infidelity and that is to repair, develop and then deepen your emotional connection with your spouse.
A marriage is a bond and like any bond it can break. This break comes about when both yourself and your spouse are not committed to the never ending task of building, strengthening and maintaining a connection to each other and if your spouse has cheated, a marriage bond has suffered a devastating rupture.
Read and understand these 3 rules today to begin healing the severed emotional connection with your spouse after the affair.
Repairing the Emotional Connection
The last thing you want your marriage to be is miserable. That is why you need to work doubly hard to survive infidelity. It is very hard and you may be wondering how get your relationship back to that common ground where both YOU and your spouse can be comfortable with each other again, a place where you can feel that you have built the foundations for a wonderful, strong relationship that can be enjoyed in future years.
But right now, you are probably hurting and may not know how to get from this particular point to the next. A conversation with yourself might produce the following:
"Will I ever be able to have a normal, intimate, intelligent conversation with you again, or will we always be arguing about the affair details, always in anger with one another?"
"What can I say to him (her) that can help us move our marriage forward, something that doesn't mean I have or will let him (her) off the hook for cheating?"
"Our marriage is in a shamble, so I am at a loss to see how we can ever get back to having a healthy, normal, loving relationship."
"She / he will probably never change, which means our relationship might as well be over, it is doomed."
It is a common fact that after a spouse has cheated, the victim of the act is engulfed with thoughts and doubts about their own or their spouse's ability to repair their relationship and move on. The victim often ends up blaming themselves and thinks that if only they had done this or that differently it would have never turned out like this.
These feelings are devastating and are nothing but negative after effects that are brought upon by the loss of trust. The need to build this trust again may even seem like an insurmountable task, but it needs to be done for you to move on.
Learning to trust your spouse again will take time. It can not happen overnight, it may not happen in a week or even a month - especially if the discovery of the affair is recent. For both victim and cheater, there is a lot of internal work needed. This internal work needs to be done before being able to work on healing the marriage.
Building anything - especially a broken marriage - takes time, effort, and a stubborn attitude that says, "This affair does not define me, nor does it define my marriage, and we will move past this."
Here are 3 simple rules to help you begin rebuilding after the affair...
Rule 1: Be 100% Honest and Maintain Full Transparency
The first and probably the most important rule to implement is Rule 1 - All communication between yourself and your spouse will be based on 100% honesty from this point on. Thus creating an open-door policy, meaning NO MORE SECRETS!
If you have ever had the notion that someone you know, including your spouse but not limited to just your spouse, WAS NOT telling you the complete story? Or you may have felt that something was bothering them, but when you inquired, their reply was 'It's nothing'.
You knew that there was more to the 'It's nothing', but this person will not share with you what the 'more' is. This creates doubt, so by following a 100% honesty regime and by maintaining full transparency, neither you nor your spouse will be left in doubt.
Rule 2: Set Questioning Ground Rules
Contrary to advising you to use 100% honesty, it is also necessary to caution that honesty can sometimes leave a bitter taste. If you are going to ask questions that you think you are not sure you want the answers to, it is better not to ask until you have prepared yourself for an honest answer.
Also, if honesty is being misused to inflict more guilt onto the cheater, understand that this is not constructive. If (and it should be) your long-term goal is to heal your marriage, try not to get caught up in a rinse and repeat cycle of emotional backlash.
In the early stages it will be helpful for you and your spouse to decide on a list of questions that are okay, also a list of questions that are not okay. Also, when confronted with a question, try to give the most direct yet honest answer that you are able to.
Rule 3: Arrange a Specific Talk Date
The after-effects of an affair are extremely difficult and it is a challenge to communicate even on the most basic of levels. If the victim wants to talk, but the cheater just happened to have a bad day at work, the cheater may inadvertently snap at their spouse. This can really damage communication as well as the momentum needed to continue moving forward, and just creates an additional setback.
The best thing to do is make an appointment, set a time and choose a place to meet and talk, a place where you can both be comfortable and focus on each other. It may seem odd, but if your marriage is worth saving, your conversations will need to be appointed and then structured until the time comes when they can be easily created and feel natural again. A pre-arranged time gives both spouses enough time to prepare themselves emotionally and psychologically, it allows time for both spouses to clear their minds of any other matter that may be distracting them and creates an ideal scene for positive conversation.
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