YES. Protesting the infidelity and NOT participating in day to day niceties wtih your spouse increases teh chances of ending the affair.
Expert opinion on infidelity suggests that the affair must end before any signifiant steps to repair the marriage can ever take place.
MWD approach chooses to ignore the infidelity and work on improving the marriage despite this fact.
I reccomend a protection phase... Below is an exerpt from Penny Tupy's text that will explain to you what you are doing to damage your chances of getting things back to normal. Many many many people on this forum try db LRT for months or even a year or more (myself included) and it doens't work. You just end up with post traumatic stress disorder and seriously ILL. Once you decide to combat the infidelity with exposure and END CONTACT with your spouse you start to feel a LOT HEALTHIER and your spouse starts to MISS YOU... How can your spouse miss you with minimal contact when he sees you every week?
Sorry, but your strategy just doesn't make any sense to me, and likely to other members of this forum, we see flavors of what you are doing here week after week and they don't work.
From Overcoming Infidelity : Book One
In my experience, continuing to have minimal co ntact is one of the risk ier str ategies. Unfortunately it is the one that, intuitively, seems to make the most sense. So let‘s take it apart a little and see if I can help you understand why this strategy has the power to be destructive to the go al of saving your marr iage.
Minimal co ntact that is conflicted and ad versarial does nothing to heal the relationship; it o nly ser ves to drive a bigger wedge between you and your partner. I think we‘d all agree that‘s pretty obviou s. What may no t be so obvious is that min imal adversar ial contact has po ssibly a more adverse affect on the betrayed mate than the o ne having the affair. Remember the Great Race that I mentioned earlier ? Ad versarial and co nflicted co ntact is very likely to accelerate the betrayed partner‘s readiness to throw in the towel.
Minimal co ntact that is calm and courteous, then, seems like the best po ssible solution. Instinctively and intuitively it‘s what you‘ ll be dr iven by yo ur own attachment chemistry to maintain. Do n‘t be fooled. Minimal courteous contact can be deadly. A few thing s happ en which, combined, create a dangero us biochemical time bo mb.
First, you send a lo ud and clear message to your spouse that the affair really isn‘t all that devastating to you. After all, if yo u can inter act pleasantly, then
you must be doing just fine. You must be accepting the inevitable break up of yo ur marr iage. Even if you have said so mething to the contrary, your actions are where the real message lies.
Seco nd, you derail the attachment chemistry we want to trigger in your spouse. When a relationship is threatened (even a relatio nship we claim to no longer want) the instinctive reaction is to find it suddenly more attractive. But in or der fo r this to happen there must be a perceived threat to the status quo. When you r emain in co ntact and you give the appearance of being calm and at peace, there is no perceived threat to the relatio nship.
Yes, I understand that your wayward partner says they don‘t want the marriage, or perhaps they say they need to make up their mind about it. Those kinds of statements are made within the context of having all the co ntrol over the destiny of the marr iage. Yo u‘ve already made it abundantly clear that you want to save the marriage and that yo u‘re willing to do what it takes to do so. But when you take back so me of your personal empower ment and remo ve yourself fro m a situation which you find unacceptable, yo ur partner understands at a very basic bio logical level that he or she is no lo nger in total control of the outcome. This triggers the reactio n of needing to hold o n to the marriage more rather than less.
Think about being in junior high or high school. We all had friends, or maybe you yo urself did this, who wanted to dump a bo yfr iend o r gir lfriend first œ before getting dumped. It‘s the same so rt of reactio n. We want to have the final say on the
relatio nship- it doesn‘t matter if we‘re fourteen or fifty- fo ur. Everyone wants to be the dumper and not the dumpee!
Third, yo u short circu it the dynamic of forcing the affair partners to rely entirely upon each other. In almost ever y triang le the spouse plays a certain role and the affair partner plays another. The straying mate has two people vying fo r his or her attention and do ing all they can to entice him o r her to choo se. Removing yourself fro m that dynamic now puts the burden entirely o n the shoulder s of the affair partner. Almost always he or she comes up short, but your spouse won‘t find that out until you step away entirely.
And finally, staying in min imal contact keeps you from fully detaching and healing. It keeps you stuck in that p lace of hur ting and obsessing. When the affair ends, and your spouse is ready to talk about reconciliation, you will need every ounce o f strength and calm you can muster. This isn‘t possible when you are caught in the chao s of the betraying spouse‘s affair drama.
If you are wo rr ied about giving the impressio n that you‘ve mo ved on with your life and are willing to accept the new relationship, min imal courteous co ntact is the worst thing yo u can do. Even if you made verbal or written statements to the contrary, your actions will speak volumes drowning out your words entirely. Minimal co urteo us co ntact says lo ud and clear, —I‘m fine now that yo u‘ve left, and I really don‘t find it all that distressing. In fact, I‘m quite happy to accept your new life and yo ur new partner.“
