The Loving Truth

Healing After an Affair: The Two-Step Process

• Sharon Pope • Episode 165

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“Healing after an affair is possible. It’s just really hard work. But so are most things that are really important to us.”

I’m sharing my two-step process for healing after an affair.

I want you to know that while healing can be incredibly difficult, it’s absolutely possible.

The first step is what I call “stopping the bleeding.”

This is when we focus on addressing the immediate trauma and the deep pain of the betrayal. 

The second step is all about understanding how the affair happened, what made the marriage vulnerable, and then beginning to rebuild trust.

I won’t lie, this is hard work, but with the right support and a clear process, you can heal and move forward—whether that means healing your marriage or making the decision to move on.

Struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you’re serious about finding that answer?

Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Loving Truth Podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host relationship expert and certified Master Life Coach, sharon Pope.

Speaker 2:

Hello, loves, this is Sharon Pope and this is the Loving Truth. Today I'm going to share with you my two-step process for healing after an affair. You see, there are very few things that can shatter a marriage the way that an affair can, and what I want you to know is that healing is absolutely possible in your marriage if that's what you want. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not even saying it's going to feel like healing, especially at first, and it's going to be incredibly uncomfortable, to the point that you are going to want to run away at some point. But what I can tell you is that healing after an affair is possible. It's just really hard work, but so is so are most things that are really important to us. So the first thing I would tell you is get really clear in advance about why you're doing this work, both as an individual and as a couple. Why would you go through this really challenging work? And I think you know individually why would you do this.

Speaker 2:

It's some version of you don't want to carry this behavior or hurt into a future relationship. You know, for someone who has been cheated on, sometimes future relationships it can be difficult to trust, and for the person who cheated. You don't want to keep doing this over and over again. You don't want this to be your go-to. And you might be thinking well, wait a minute, I thought we were talking about healing a marriage. Why are we talking about new relationships? I think of this as, even if you remain with your current partner, with your spouse, you're going to have a new relationship with them. Because you have to have a new relationship, it has to evolve to a new place, and in many ways, the relationship you had is now dead, and so you have to evolve into something new if you're going to remain together. So I think of that as a new relationship. So, as an individual, you don't want to carry either the hurt from this forward into this new relationship, or you don't want you know, if you're the one who betrayed your partner next time things get hard, because they're going to get hard again. That's the nature of relationships. You don't want to just turn to an affair, okay, so that's why you might do it as an individual and as a couple. What you're trying to do is heal the relationship and evolve it to a new place where you don't ever want to turn away from it, where it feels that good, right.

Speaker 2:

So there are two important steps to my process. The first step is what I like to refer to as stop the bleeding, and here's what I mean. Imagine that you were just shot. You have a gunshot wound right, and so you don't need a lot of words. You need a doctor. You need someone who can take the bullet out, who can repair the tissue around the wound and who can stitch you back up. That is the only thing you need.

Speaker 2:

And so, when an affair has been discovered, it's essentially a trauma, the equivalent of a gunshot wound, and so the person who was betrayed is standing there bleeding, okay, and so that's where a lot of the focus goes is on the person who is bleeding at that moment in time. Now, if we extend that metaphor a little bit, like the person who shot another person, do they need help and support? Yes, of course they do. It's just not the first thing we're dealing with. We're dealing with a person who's hurt. Now, the person who cheated also needs some attention, and the reason why is because they're going to be facing themselves and they're not gonna like everything that they see. They're going to need to understand their motivations. They're going to need to be able to trust themselves again. They're going to want to be a better partner and they want to be able to trust that they can be a better partner and, to be honest, they may be in mourning. They may be grieving what was lost in the affair, because there was some reason that they had the affair, and so what you need in this first phase is you need someone who can help you move through the impact and the trauma of what has happened, and you need a space to be able to safely process the full range of emotions that you're going to feel, because you're going to feel it all. You're going to go from despair to anger, to doubt, to sadness. You're going to be all over the place with your emotions worry, anxiety, all of it and so you need a safe container to be able to feel those feelings. And because you're going to be spinning and disoriented and in quite a bit of intense pain, even if you're the one who cheated, seeing your partner in that much intense pain will cause you pain. That's normal, but you need help in remaining grounded through that process. You're going to need someone to be able to reassure you when you doubt and someone to be able to encourage you when you feel like giving up, because of course those days will come as well.

Speaker 2:

Now, during this phase one. Phase one is not the time to be making lifelong decisions. You know, if you choose to end the relationship which of course you can do I just want you to be able to do it from a more conscious place, not from a knee-jerk reaction based in hurt and despair and anger and betrayal. I want you to be able to do it really consciously and if you're like, yeah, sharon, I hear what you're saying, but I cannot see how I can get from where I am today and how I'm feeling right now to a place where this is actually healed and we're doing great as a couple, and I get that. You can't see that. To me that's like a hundred miles away from you right now. And if you walked out your front door today, you couldn't see a hundred miles from where you are. It's impossible. You couldn't even see a mile from where you are. But if you had to see you know a hundred miles from where you are before you ever got in your car you would never get in your car, you would never go anywhere, you'd never do anything, you never get outside of your block. So just understand that even though you can't see it, it doesn't mean that it's not there.

Speaker 2:

Okay, now, phase one is all about the questions. Okay Now, phase one is all about the questions. This is when all the questions get asked and most of the questions are around some version of why or how could you do this to me? And here's what I want you to know when your partner is asking you how could you do this, why did you do this? Why now, all of that they're not asking because there's some answer that you could give them that would make them understand and go oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now I get why you cheated. Now I understand why you had the affair. Like there's nothing you could say that would make them really understand.

Speaker 2:

But Mira Kirschenbaum, in one of her books, says they just want to know that it's some other answer besides, I don't matter to you, because that's the monologue in their head. Is the reason you did this is because I don't matter, and so they're looking for some other answer. Now I need you to be really conscious of the questions that you ask in phase one. Okay, a lot of times we just start asking the questions that are running through our brain, and a lot of those questions aren't necessarily productive, right. So some of them will cause irreparable hurt for you and damage to the relationship. So you've got to be really conscious about what are the questions that I'm asking and that I genuinely want and need the answers to so that we can move forward. Right, I want to ask the question so that I can understand what happened, so that we can move forward. That's really the key.

Speaker 2:

So you should not ask questions like were you ever thinking about him or her while you were with me, or was the sex better with them than with me? Don't ask what was the most intimate thing you did together. I had a client who she asked her husband that and he told her and it was. He washed her hair in the shower and she could never unsee that. She could never unhear that. She now had a visual image of her husband washing another woman's hair and it felt so intimate you know, more so than sex, just having sex with her that she could never get over that image in her mind and their marriage ultimately ended because of that.

Speaker 2:

Now, the kind of questions you should be asking are things like how did the relationship make you feel, and why do you think that? Was the affair a function of something missing inside of our marriage, and did you see a future with that person? Those are the kinds of questions that help you understand what this was and what it wasn't, and they help you be able to know how are we going to move forward from this. What are we going to do with this information? So be careful of asking questions that you really don't want the answers to, because the stories that you hear and the images that that creates, you have to carry that forever, and so there's a. You don't ask everything and you don't certainly not ask nothing. There's a happy medium not happy medium, but there's a healthy medium that exists that can be helpful.

Speaker 2:

Now, the one who cheated phase one is really really hard for you. I'm just going to let you know that right out of the gate, because you're going to see your partner in tremendous pain and all of that pain and blame is going to be pointed right at you, and so you're going to see your partner in tremendous pain and all of that pain and blame is going to be pointed right at you, and so you are going to want to very quickly get to wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why can't we talk about how we got here and what made us vulnerable to having an affair? What made me vulnerable to having an affair? How was I feeling? How was I feeling about the marriage? You're going to want to get there very quickly. That's phase two, and you cannot get to phase two until you get through phase one.

Speaker 2:

And the way you get through phase one is that your partner needs to know that you hear them, that you validate their pain, that you really understand. So your job is to listen to the point where they really get, that you understand their pain. And if you rush it, if you try to rush through them feeling their pain, it's going to last longer. So don't get impatient. Don't say things like when are you going to get over this? Why can't we move forward? Those are things that make them feel unheard and, to be honest, it's really indicative of like someone who would cheat again because they're invalidating the pain that they caused. Also, don't make it about you. This isn't about your pain. I know that you have pain as well. I know that you do, but, as one of my clients told me, she said look, I'm open to understanding your experience, but you can't lead with that right now. Right, and I think that that's right. You can't lead with that. Yes, the person who shot another human being. They need help, but they're not the priority. During phase one, the priority is really on the person that was betrayed and who's in a lot of pain.

Speaker 2:

The second phase is the healing phase. So once the bullet has been removed and you've been stitched back together, the doctor's probably going to keep you for a few days until you are stabilized, and then you're going to need time to heal and rehabilitate. I mean, let's say that you know, maybe you were shot in the back or the leg or something and now you need to learn to walk again. So there's a whole rehabilitation period that needs to happen and a whole healing period that needs to happen. The way I think about this is that you know when someone is bleeding, you have to deal with that. You don is bleeding, you have to deal with that. You don't have any choice but to deal with that.

Speaker 2:

But some people think that the other parts are optional, and I think that's sort of like the sandwich around this, because what we do in phase two is understand how did we get here and where are we going to take this from here is understand how did we get here and where are we going to take this from here. And now that we're in a much calmer place, we're better able to understand how did we get here and where are we going to go next. But we had to do phase one so that the pain was felt and validated in order to get to a place of where phase two is really productive. And so phase two is where we address what made the relationship vulnerable to an affair, or what made at least one of you vulnerable inside of an affair. Also, what is the impact that the affair has had on your marriage and is currently having on your marriage. We address the triggers of how are you going to deal with the triggers, because you're going to trigger each other and they're going to come out of the blue, and how do we not create more problems on top of those challenging times. This is the place where we rebuild trust between you, because trust has been broken and it's not going to magically come back. You have to rebuild it, and that comes through consistent action.

Speaker 2:

And then the last phase is really around. What now? It's one of my favorite questions Now what? What are we going to do with this? And so, through this phase, what you need is structure and a process to move through. That's why having some support and structure around you is really important.

Speaker 2:

This is the heavy lifting phase. The healing phase is the heavy lifting phase and that's why most people want to skip it, because it's really hard work to heal something like this. But I also don't want you to put your head in the sand and hope that time is what's going to heal it, because then all you're going to end up doing is hoping and praying and worrying and obsessing that it'll never happen again. But there's always some part of you that's sort of holding on to it could happen again, and so you're sort of walking on eggshells for the rest of your life. And so I'm telling you how difficult this phase is. I haven't told you yet why it's so difficult.

Speaker 2:

The reason why it's so difficult is because you know, taking responsibility for the conditions that created this vulnerability inside of our marriage. That's hard right, and this is not about like. This is certainly not about blaming the victim. It's not about placing blame at all. It's just, you know, we were both doing the best we could and we both fell down in a myriad of ways inside of our marriage and it made it vulnerable. But the more we can understand that and we can see it and we can learn from that and evolve to a new place, that's how we can heal it. So taking responsibility for the conditions is hard For the person who betrayed, who cheated, taking responsibility for your choices and actions is really hard. And how you rationalized those choices and actions, being able to articulate that, that's hard stuff. Those choices and actions. Being able to articulate that that's hard stuff. And being able to make yourself vulnerable and face some of the what I would call darker parts of ourselves, that we all have some dark parts, but being able to share that with someone else is really hard stuff.

Speaker 2:

And the phase of now, what is really all around? You know we're writing this book. We're writing this next chapter in our book. What is it going to say? We get to define it. We get to tell the story. Is it going to evolve into a new version of our relationship that feels connected and loving and trusting and honest and open? Like what is it? What is it going to feel like? Or are we going to end it, because that is still a possibility. And you might think well, wait a minute, if I go through all this hard work, sharon, you're telling me there's no guarantee that we might still come out the other side and end it, and that is true. But I will tell you, if you ended on the other side of this, you'll be doing it from a much more conscious place, and the way in which you end it is going to look and feel dramatically different than had you ended it at the very beginning.

Speaker 2:

And so I think it's really important just to say this upfront is that you need support If you're going to try to heal your marriage after an affair. You need some support, because you don't have a map, you don't know the way through this, so I don't know how you do this without some support, and specifically support in the area of affair. So I don't care if it's a coach or a therapist or counselor or whatever, but, like someone who has a good amount of experience in working with couples through an affair or individuals through an affair, because I will tell you this, this might be your first affair, but for me it's my 10,000th Right, because it has impacted so, so many of the relationships and the people that I work with. So so many of the relationships and the people that I work with. All right, I hope that you understanding the path through this gives you some comfort that it's possible.

Speaker 2:

I think sometimes when you just see the map ahead and you say, okay, now I know what's in front of me, so now I know that it's possible, now I'm willing to step onto that path. But when you don't really know what the path looks like, or where it is, or where it begins or where it ends, we never really get on the path. So healing is possible. It might be some of the hardest work of your life, but it also might be some of the most rewarding. I hope this has been helpful for you. Until next time, please take really good care. I hope this has been helpful for you.

Speaker 1:

Until next time, please take really good care. If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a Truth and Clarity session with a member of my team. On the call. We'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to clarityformymarriagecom to fill out an application now. That's clarityformymarriagecom.