I sat in the therapist's office for the first time after my husband finally confessed his affair. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Surely I did not belong here, did I?

She introduced herself, we had some preliminary conversation, and I told her my story. I didn’t know what people actually did following betrayal, but I knew I needed help and I needed it now. The pain I was experiencing was excruciating and I could barely move through the day. My head was spinning and I desperately wanted to move past this as quickly as possible. I was willing to do absolutely anything to find some relief.

“It takes most people about two years to recover,” she said.

What? Are you kidding me? No, that wasn’t going to work for me. I came into her office thinking more along the lines of maybe two months of living like this. Maybe three. That’s it. I couldn’t deal with this for one minute longer. I was in total disbelief of her words, so I told myself I would just do it faster than all those other people.

In early recovery, most of us are in a hurry to just get through it.. No matter what side of the equation you're on, no one wants to linger one minute longer in this mess than absolutely necessary.

My husband was equally unprepared when I shared the therapist’s prediction. Neither of us really believed it, and we wondered if maybe she didn’t know what she was talking about. As the months went on and I continued to struggle, he sometimes gently noted the time that had elapsed, as though pointing it out would make me snap out of it and feel differently.

“Jen, it’s been 100 days.”

I was also frustrated, believing I must not be working hard enough or I would be doing much better by now. He was genuinely repentant, very understanding and supportive. Neither of us understood why I wasn’t starting to feel better. How could I possibly feel this terrible day after day?

“Jen, it’s been 6 months.”

We actually laugh about this now, but it was not at all funny at the time. I felt I was doing it all wrong and I would never recover. I assumed it meant I was doomed to fail. His intentions were good, he just really didn’t understand and neither did I, so I was not able to explain it to him. I thought I would magically feel better over time, and when I didn’t, I went searching for resources and encountered a few references to timelines that reflected similarities to my therapist’s remarks. Various sources described what “should” be happening 3 months following D-day, then 6 months, 9 months, at the one year mark, and so on.

I waited for the days and weeks to pass, just trying to hold on until I reached that magical marker on the timeline that said I would start to feel better. I told myself that when I got there, something would be different. It just had to. And then when the date on the calendar came and went? Nothing. I was crushed. Of course, it doesn’t make any sense that something would spontaneously change on some random date, but I had hung my hopes on it because frankly, I didn’t know what else to do. So when it didn’t materialize, I felt even more lost than before. I just wanted someone to tell me when the pain would end, so that I could crawl into my bed and just hibernate until it was time to come out and be healed.

As I passed each mile marker, I felt more and more discouraged that I wasn’t where I was “supposed” to be. I felt like I was falling behind, like I must not have the capacity to heal like “other people” did, and this conclusion only added to my feelings of hopelessness. The more time that passed without any real improvement, the less I believed there was an actual end to this pain and confusion. I lost all confidence this was going to get any better. My fear increased about being stuck indefinitely in this Recovery Purgatory, and the fear fed on itself the longer it went on. The more time that passed, the more fearful I became that I would never heal, and then more time would pass and feed that fear, and so on.

The reality is that time does not heal all wounds. Time itself really doesn’t matter as much as what we do with that time. In reality, I spent much of that time just waiting. Waiting for him to fix it, waiting for him to make it better. He was also waiting - waiting for me to be healed. Time alone was not going to do it, but neither of us really understood the work that was needed. I wasted a lot of time either trying to avoid the work, or telling myself I didn’t need it. I would do bits and pieces here and there and thought that should be enough, but it wasn’t until I really jumped into my recovery wholeheartedly that I began to experience a significant shift, and things started to really change. Time became much less important as I started to experience glimmers of healing and hope for the future.

I know we all want to look for answers and realistic expectations, but I really don’t like any of the purported timelines, since every one of us is as unique as our situations. I also think there are too many subjective variables that create a wide spectrum when it comes to how each of us even would define “healed,” so it further complicates those predictions. I know some people who are satisfied with just getting to a point of relative peace and stability, and others who won’t stop going until they truly thrive. There is no right or wrong, and sometimes the goal posts move along the way.

Now that I’m no longer in the midst of the trauma, I prefer to look at healing in seasons rather than specific time frames. The initial season of recovery is awful. There’s just no way around that. There are triggers and reminders everywhere and everything feels very raw, scary, and overwhelming. There is little peace. Speaking for myself, what came next was a season of searching. I searched for hope, for guidance, for someone to tell me what to do.

One very important thing to note is that even though it takes time to walk through recovery, the experience is not static. The pain and complete overwhelm I felt the first week is not the same as what I felt months and years later, even if it was still hard. Admittedly it may have taken me longer to gain traction than it might for others, so I was in pretty rough shape for a while. That supposed two year timeline to heal was not even close for me. I wish it had been. Even so, I can see there were shifts over time. Affair Recovery recommends taking an assessment at defined intervals (ie: every 3 to 6 months) to gauge progress since it can be really hard to discern any difference in the day to day.

For me, one straightforward gauge of progress was the impact of a “trigger” over time. Initially, triggers were truly debilitating, causing intense physical symptoms that often took me down for days at a time. A bit later on, triggers were still present and painful, but they only took me offline for an hour, then only for a few minutes, and so on. The intensity lessened. Then the meaning and impact changed. While I wasn’t yet “healed,” my experience when I got triggered was not the same in later seasons as it was in the beginning. It’s important for me to say that here, because I remember when I first started out, I heard about people having triggers years down the road, and I was horrified to think that they felt the same as I did just a couple months after D-day. That wasn’t the case at all. And it wasn’t just about learning to suck it up and put on a brave face. It was a true lessening of emotional and physical response as I continued to do the work of recovery.

So how long does it take to recover from infidelity? The exact amount of time is different for everyone, but the short answer is - it definitely takes longer than anyone would like. There is no way around it - only through it. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.” That’s all we can do. Just keep going. One day you will look back and be surprised to see how far you’ve come in your healing journey. It does get better - much better. But it also takes time. In the meantime, try to be patient, give yourself some grace, keep doing the work, and just keep going. We all get there in our own time.