How to heal your relationship after infidelity
If you’re going through infidelity issues with your partner you are not alone. Nearly 50% of all marriages experience infidelity. That’s a huge number of couples struggling with betrayal and all the associated trauma that comes with it!
Betrayal trauma can be an incredibly confusing and painful experience and we’re here to shed some light on the possibilities for healing. Not everyone will stay together as a couple to heal, though it is certainly possible. Whether you choose to do the work together or separated we’ll outline what each partner can do to experience the deep healing work that infidelity needs.
Here is how both partners can heal from betrayal trauma and the experience of infidelity.
Here’s 4 important pieces of advice for the cheating partner for healing their relationship:
1.Do your own deep healing work.
First, you’ll need to unpack your own past trauma, which includes any attachment wounding from your childhood years and how and why you developed a strategy based in avoiding, numbing out and escaping relationships and pain. This allows you to heal the core beliefs and shame you felt that both drove you to cheat and that you feel because of your cheating behavior. From there you can start to really understand your specific relationship dynamics and how your attachment style plays into them, and how your avoidance played a role in the action you took around cheating, lying, and hiding.
2. Do not blame your partner for your cheating.
Saying things like, “we were so disconnected” or “I didn’t feel like you loved me anymore” makes them feel like they caused you to stray. Even though you’re not trying to blame them, these subtle communications shift the responsibility off of your own actions and onto your partner. Most people who have been cheated on already blame themselves and they’re often looking for proof that they were the problem to help them understand why this happened. So, as you communicate with your partner, demonstrate that YOU take full responsibility for your actions and take care of the words you use. Of course there are 2 people participating in the relationship but plenty of people who feel disconnected or unloved don’t cheat. The cheating behavior is more about your strategy of escape and your avoidance of feelings and vulnerability than it is about the relationship dynamics.
3. Tell the truth. Don’t lie, minimize, or deflect.
It is natural to want to spare your partner from the details of your affair. You want to minimize its importance, gloss over details, and pretend it didn’t exist. It can feel too hurtful to your partner and can simultaneously kick up a lot of shame in you. But if your partner is asking for details, give them. If you lie and minimize the details your partner will not only continue to feel betrayed but they will also feel gaslit and crazy wondering, things like “not only did you betray me and choose someone else over me, but now you don’t even love me enough to tell me the truth?” It can be really hard to come fully clean, but if you want a real chance at repair this is the only way.
4. The most important thing your partner needs to hear is the WHY.
Why and how could you do this to them? The WHY that is ultimately satisfying and sincere is the one that is about YOU. It is the one that takes into account your relationship patterns, your attachment strategies, and your behavior and communication that was involved. Giving your partner the answers they need takes a lot of digging. This deep work and understanding of yourself is the only thing that will offer your partner the healing that you both need to recover.
Here’s 3 important pieces of advice for the betrayed partner for healing their relationship:
1.Unpack and heal your core beliefs.
When a partner cheats on you it triggers painful feelings of rejection which can send you into a survival response, and that survival response desperately starts trying to make sense of what you did wrong to be rejected, and looks for how to fix things so that you can prevent it from happening again and get the love that you need.
From this place we can start to believe things about who we are, what we’ve done wrong to deserve this, and what’s wrong with us that are simply not true. This might sound like, “If you were just better or more attractive, you wouldn’t be rejected. If you were different, you’d be loved and this wouldn’t have happened.”
Here are some of the common core beliefs that get exacerbated and kicked up to the surface from infidelity:
I can't trust myself. I can't trust anyone else because the person that I trusted did this to me. Somehow it's my fault, I pushed them away. I'm not lovable or I’m not desirable enough. I was too much and that's what pushed them away. There's something wrong with me and I'm crazy, like why am I having such an intense reaction to this? My needs are too much.
These harmful core beliefs are already living in us unconsciously and keep nagging at us in the background. But after something like infidelity, they get even bigger and keep you stuck in a trauma state. They become deeply ingrained to protect us and make sure that we don’t get hurt again by saying critical things to ourselves about how we were the cause of the pain and betrayal. They are trying to say, you have control here. If you’d only been better you could have prevented this. But the truth is that you never had control over your partner’s blind spots and unprocessed trauma. In most cases (and the exception is abusive relationships, if you were abusive) there was nothing you could have done. So when we work with the effects of betrayal trauma it’s so important that we look at these core beliefs that got formed in the process and really heal them.
2. Identify your needs and your attachment style.
Getting clear on your relationship needs is vital to moving forward with the same partner or a new one. You’ll want to uncover what you need to feel safe and secure in a relationship. This includes knowing what you need to feel connected, loved, seen, heard, and known by your partner. An aspect of knowing your needs will mean learning about your specific attachment style, and what you need to feel secure in your relationships.
3. Learn to trust yourself again.
As part of your healing journey, you can begin to trust yourself again. You will start to identify more clearly the things you allowed yourself to overlook in the relationship or what warning signs you picked up on that you invalidated to yourself? When you can really see that you had a gut instinct, you can learn to trust yourself again. This is an invitation to strengthen your relationship to our gut intuition.
Healing after infidelity is possible. Whether you stay together to do it or separate, the deeper work behind it offers transformation and growth beyond the pain you’re experiencing now.