Affair Recovery

Everyone loves a comeback.

The problem with comebacks is that they are hard as heck to pull off. Anything worth having is worth working for, and I’ve learned the things that matter most usually are hardest and require the most grace to pull off.

Just yesterday an old staff member of mine reached out to tell me how moved he was to see pictures of my kids and our family stable, strong, and healed. It encouraged him about life, marriage, recovery and even God’s grace. It’s not come easy but small moments like that make it all worth it.

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When we undermine ourselves, we end up being angry at ourselves for not doing what we said we would. It launches us into anger and, at times, a temporary self-hatred. Time after time betrayed spouses will feel an even greater sense of anger towards themselves as they feel like their unfaithful spouse is deceiving them yet again.  

The fact is you don’t know what you don’t know. You’ll need help to know whether or not it is safe to reengage with your spouse. Quite honestly, sometimes it’s great and much needed to be vulnerable or even physically intimate with your spouse even while in crisis, yet in other situations, it’s one of the worst things you can do....

I can be a yeller. You know, the parent that remains calm, cool and collected and then finally gets pushed over the edge and lets it rip? Yeah, I can blow it. I’ve done much better over the years and have found a new sense of momentum, but I wanted to share something with you I’ve learned the hard way about yelling.  

The fact is, the person who yells is often times yelling at themselves; not you, not the kids, not even the guy who cut them off.

We’re yelling at ourselves for doing what we’ve done.

We’re yelling at ourselves for NOT doing what we know we should have done in the first place.

We’re yelling because we feel out of control and our typical first instinct is to try to control things.

I typically yell loudest when I feel out of...

Lately, I’ve talked with several people who seem to be overwhelmed with raw bitterness and resentment. Now, there are a million slogans, quotes and catch phrases on what bitterness does and what anger does and I get that. Today I’d like to keep it simple and highlight one consequence of bitterness and resentment that’s not only dangerous but imprisoning.

Plain and simply put, bitterness and resentment blind us.  

If we’ve been unfaithful, our bitterness at our spouse (or life), blinds us to our betrayed spouse’s emotions, triggers, consequences and struggles. We make it all about us and our resentment towards our spouse or others, for unmet needs or unmet expectations which then enable our own blindness. I learned long ago that if the person I think about most is...

In my previous post we talked about wandering away, over time, little by little. No one just wakes up and has an affair and ruins their life and their spouse’s life. There are reasons an affair happens, and then there are more reasons a spouse stays in an affair and refuses to quit.  Left to ourselves, void of accountability and continual connection with our spouse, I truly believe we are given to wandering, looking elsewhere for affirmation and boosts to our self-esteem. Without a plan, we’ll eventually fall prey to some sort of call for our attention from somewhere, or as many of us here know, someone.  

As I alluded to, we have to be calculated in our recovery, even after an affair, if we want to not wander again.

I can hear many of you already saying “...

When dealing with recovery, there are three main components which must be healed and addressed. We mistakenly think it’s just about the marriage and if we can heal the marriage, we can return to safety and security and the trauma will magically disappear.

I’ve heard it a thousand times, “we need to save our marriage, it’s all about the marriage.” The problem is, there are two other primary components which must be addressed as well, or the marriage will never truly be saved or even really safe.

The three facets are you, your spouse and then your marriage.

So often we jump to trying to restore the marriage that each spouse does not get the recovery they need personally, thus putting the whole marriage ecosystem in jeopardy. If it’s just about saving the marriage...

The unfaithful cheat and then they have the nerve to be angry….how does that work?

It sounds crazy, but upon further review it makes sense.

I was angry when my affair came out. I was a lot of other things as well: numb, confused, shocked, disengaged and disconnected. My classic reasoning system was “Well, if she would have been more aware of my needs, maybe I wouldn’t have cheated.” “If I wasn’t just a fourth kid, maybe things would have been different.” Lunacy, I know.

The unfaithful typically will resort to anger as a secondary emotion. We often times feel an intense amount of guilt, shame and condemnation and instead of sharing those feelings, genuinely letting down our guard, and being vulnerable, what the betrayed see is more and more anger and hostility....

Today’s post is directed towards the unfaithful. I’m certainly hopeful the betrayed will shout a big ‘Amen’ to my thoughts today, or even show this to their unfaithful spouses. Having been an unfaithful myself, believe me when I say there are no stones being thrown at you today. I’d only be throwing them at myself as well, and to go a step further, it would be completely self-righteous to lay judgment on someone who is just like me, an unfaithful.

A concept that’s hard to really grasp for some is the reality that our actions (the unfaithful) at some level will determine what the future looks like.  Quite often I’ll ask a betrayed spouse this question: “Are you open to the restoration of the marriage?” The answers are all over the board, but one thing is pretty sure: most,...

Life comes at you fast. Between pressures and responsibilities, obligations and duties, each day carries fluctuating odds on how long it takes to sometimes lose it. I hate to sound like a downer but lately there has been a good deal of pressure I’ve been walking through. Finding the balance to manage everything has taken some work for sure.

To those struggling with the effects of infidelity, each day is a long haul. For the betrayed it’s excruciating with reminders, triggers and confusion. The task of finding hope can seem exhausting in and of itself. Rising above the roaring waves of depression to simply care for kids, go to work, or care for your self can feel like a upward trek that has no end.

For the unfaithful, their journey is challenging in that it also feels...

Pursuing recovery after infidelity is no easy or short task. It can seem insurmountable and exhausting on any given day and reduce you to hopelessness within 1/200th of a second. From reminders to triggers to thoughts of what life could have been like, recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. I believe that when you are able to sprint, sprint like there’s no tomorrow.  When the pace slows, it’s about finding a new pace. I’ve seen over the years Samantha and I find new paces. Some were thrilling and so enjoyable; some were memorable for all the wrong reasons.  Yet, in a surreal way, there was a pace to it.

As you’ll hear from both Rick and myself, as well as almost anyone who has gone through infidelity and has their head on straight, this is a long road but it isn’t...

When recovering from infidelity, emotional flooding will most certainly be a piece to the puzzle. When flooding arises, chaos seems to ensue. If you’ve ever flooded emotionally, you know it’s excruciating. Many describe it as an influx of almost uncontrollable emotions where flight or fight seems to rule the day and our heart rate spikes at least 20%. Attempting to curtail this flooding with a simple “get over it” or “what’s wrong with you” or “lookout, here we go again” ensures certain disaster. It will only intensify heart rates, emotional flooding and instability and the speed in which things like dishes, silverware, books, cell phones or anything else within arm’s reach is thrown by the spouse who is flooding.

Flooding is real. If you’re an unfaithful, I assure you this is...

While doing some recent reading on the parenting of teenagers, I came across an excellent definition for the word compassion. The word compassion comes from the Latin word ‘compati’ which literally means to suffer with or suffer together.

I wonder if we in recovery can’t take a lesson from this etymology and begin to lean in to the pain and hurt we have caused another? I wonder if we are truly suffering with our spouse in their pain and hurt? I can honestly say early on, I wasn’t ‘suffering with’ Samantha at all. I was self-absorbed with my own pain and what my affair had cost me and what my affair had done to my future, my family name, my position, and my destiny. I was also concerned with what I had done to my affair partner and her family. I was so disconnected with truth...

If you’ve been on social media today, you probably know the trailer for the upcoming movie Fifty Shades of Grey has come out in a flurry of illicit excitement. I’m pretty active on social media, and to see and read the comments by so many is a bit humorous, but also frighteningly indicative of a gaping need we have inside our marriages for this sort of eroticism.

For those suffering the effects of infidelity, the idea that this sort of intense sexual excitement can one day be active within the confines of marriage, especially a marriage after infidelity, can seem laughably unrealistic.

I’d like to take today to share with you that it is in fact possible and available.

But it takes work. After all, what’s easy isn’t usually the right road. It was easy with our...

Thank you for your many comments on my previous article “Withdrawing.” I’m glad it helped some of you and always thankful when people go above and beyond and take the time to offer positive, heartfelt feedback.

Continuing with the conversation about communicative dysfunction, I’d like to introduce another form of faulty communication patterns called Finding the Bad Guy. Rick introduced it to us and we both were stunned when he described it, as it painted the exact picture of our communication early on.

We are experts at finding the bad guy. It’s a phrase that describes when couples allow themselves to slip into a pattern of attack-defend, find out who is wrong and at fault and therefore identify the villain. If we can simply find the villain, all will be explained away...