I just remember standing in my living room yelling at the ceiling, “What now?! What am I supposed to do now?!!” It was two days after my husband left, and I was at one of my lowest points. I literally felt like I was climbing the walls. It was somewhere in that moment when I realized I had absolutely no control over the situation.

I had disclosed my affair more than six months before and then quickly got myself in counseling, started going to weekly recovery meetings and enrolled in a twelve-step study program. I was going through all the right motions attempting to figure out where I had gone wrong, trying to feel something. In all of that, though, I now realize I was doing nothing more than trying to maintain control of the situation so my marriage could be saved. I was more worried about my comfort level than I was about peeling back all of the ugly painful layers in the real process of recovery. I didn’t want to let go of control because I didn’t know what would happen if I did. I was terrified.

It was in my frantic searching for information about ways to get my husband to come home that I found Affair Recovery and realized that it was not just a way to get what I wanted. If I was going to do this, I couldn’t continue going through the steps of pretend recovery, I had to confront myself for the very first time, and I had to feel.

If you’re at the beginning of this awful journey, you probably don’t even know how you got here. You are terrified you are about to lose everything, and because of your selfish actions, you just might. Stop trying to get what you want, stop trying to maintain your comfort level. You have to let go and realize that you have absolutely no control. When you let go, you can finally start recovery for real, and you can do it not just to save your marriage but to save yourself.