After the Affair: Dos & Don'ts #1

Find a Licensed Therapist

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DO find a licensed therapist who specializes in affair recovery. There are as many therapists out there as there are fish in the sea. That doesn't mean that you should blindly pick one. Our therapist has years of experience helping couples work through the painful emotions, thoughts, fears, shame, and grief that accompany such deep betrayal. Without our therapist, I honestly don't know how I would have recovered from the affair.

That was the first line from last week's post, After the Affair: Dos and Don'ts, and I think it is THE most important item on the list. Without finding a skilled licensed therapist, the rest of the dos and don'ts honestly aren't as effective. At least, I don't think they would have been for us.

In this post, I want to dive into why I think it's so vital to find a great therapist to work with during the affair recovery process, and why I am so thankful we did.

Emotions were erratic when the shit hit the fan for both of us. I was livid that my husband had an affair, and also terrified that he'd leave me for his affair partner. I was crippled with a pain I'd never experienced before and didn't know how to express how it felt. There weren't words that could do my pain justice. I felt completely exposed, raw, ignorant, stupid, and used. The only thing I wanted was for the pain to go away and for the affair to have never happened. But without the ability to change the past and no way to undo the pain that ensued, I was stuck dealing with reality. And the reality was, I didn't know the first thing about how to deal with it.

My husband was reluctant to open up to me about the affair. He was terrified that doing so would be too much for me to handle and result in divorce. He felt intense shame for what he had done mixed with the desire for me to not feel how I felt. If he could just make me not feel, everything would be okay and he wouldn't have to fear losing me. He felt paralyzed. If he told the truth, it tore me apart. If he didn't say anything, he risked coming home to an empty house.

As you can see, neither of us knew how to navigate the new reality of our marriage and certainly weren't signing up for a game of Let's be Open and Honest. The one truth, however, was that we both wanted to at least try to save our marriage. I needed proof that he wanted to save us because his saying so meant absolutely nothing to me. As well it shouldn't have. He needed me to be patient with him as he unfolded the shameful truth of the affair.

Simple conversations turned into bitter wars. He would say something that hit a cord and I'd blow up in return. He'd retaliate by going silent and looking right through me. I'd get louder in an attempt to bring him back into our fight. It wouldn't work. I'd scream that I wanted a divorce with tears burning down my face and storm out of the room, only to turn around and march back with, "and another thing...!!!"

When we started therapy, I already felt defeated. I desperately needed someone to hear me and to understand what I was going through. I couldn't make sense of my life and felt like I was going insane on a daily basis. When I talked to our therapist during our sessions, she met me with compassion, empathy, and clarity. She validated that what I was feeling, thinking, and experiencing was normal for a betrayed partner. For the first time in a long time, I felt seen.

She heard my emotions screaming through my words and helped me express how the affair made me feel, and how my husband's actions affected my self-confidence, my safety, my thoughts, my trust in him, and my ability to show up for my own life.

She also heard my husband in a way I couldn't. I didn't have the capacity to even pretend to have empathy for him. He felt shame for his actions, GOOD. He was afraid I'd leave him, EVEN BETTER. He hated himself for sleeping with another woman, ICING ON THE CAKE. I wanted him to rot in his decisions. I was not willing to try to understand why he had an affair. I didn't care why. I hated him for it and at the same time my heart was broken. It's strange how you can feel such disdain for the person who holds your heart in their hands.

In one of our first sessions, our therapist asked my husband to explain how he felt about himself when he was with his affair partner. It was difficult to hear him explain that he felt respected, appreciated, important, and sexy. He said that being with her was like being on a vacation from life. He could be someone else. Hearing him say that pissed me off. What about me? I thought to myself, and eventually said out loud. "Why don't I get a vacation? Maybe I should find some young buck and go on a wild bender."

The next words out of our therapist's mouth will sit with me forever. "Brooke," she said. "You don't have to agree with him and you can even hate it, and it can piss you off to your core. But, can you understand what he is saying? And how does it make you feel?"

When she asked me if I understood while also giving me permission to completely disagree and even be angry, it somehow gave me the space to think and the ability to separate anger from understanding. Rather than storming out of the room in a fit of rage, demanding divorce, she helped me sit in the uncomfortable conversation and talk about what I was feeling.

I was able to tell him that I was heartbroken, afraid, devestated, and sad. I told him I felt useless and replaced. And instead of becoming bitter and angry, I broke down and cried.

Then she said, "Tell him what you need."

In that moment, I needed him to see me - the broken pieces of me, and I needed him to hold me. So, he did.

I remember feeling like our marriage might actually have a chance. Without our therapist helping us communicate effectively, that conversation would have errupted into another battle of the egos, leaving us both enraged and exhausted.

Don't be fooled, however, and let me make it very clear, the first six months were an emotional shit show, both in session and out. There were weeks I was so exhasted I couldn't muster up the energy to get out of bed. There were therapy sessions that made me feel like we'd taken a lifetime of steps backward and left me convinced that divorce was imminent. There were others that made me feel whole, understood, and accepted. I would see another glimmer of hope because we were able to solve a problem together, only to tear each other apart in our very next session.

It was the most exhausting and excruciating work I have ever done. But, it was also the most rewarding and beautiful work I've ever done. Through the ups and downs, the pendulum swing from stay married forever to pack my shit, shut off my phone, and move across the country, with the help of our loyal and committed therapist, we were able to make sense of not only the affair, but what led our marriage to that point.

As you can see from this post, therapy is HARD work. It takes dedicated commitment from both partners. It takes a willingness to show up in a way that makes you uncomfortable and it requires you to stretch yourself in ways you didn't know were possible. The right licensed therapist won't act as a mediator or a referee. The right therapist will meet you where you are, validate your experience while holding space for your partner's experience as well.

If you are trying to save your marriage, and you are both willing to put in the work, I emplore you to give it your all. My husband and I are living proof that healing can happen and we've seen what is on the other side of the affair. A healed woman. A healed man. A healed marriage.