Website with articles on affairs

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I'm glad to hear others found the site helpful. I thought it had some nice bits of information.

Here are some specific things that helped me with where I'm at:


The slow, jerky road to recovery
by Peggy Vaughan

It's easy to get discouraged at the slow pace of progress in dealing with an affair. But no one goes through a neat 1, 2, 3 step process. That's just not the way it works. It's more a matter of two steps forward and one step back—with occasional times when it feels like things are right back where they started!

Surviving this jerky road to recovery may be a little easier to bear by understanding that this is absolutely common. And that while at times it may seem hopeless, with consistent effort at working together to deal with it, you can eventually succeed.

(For a visual depiction of this process, see this Graph of Recovery
excerpted from the last page of our book, Recovering from Affairs.)

Here's an excerpt from "Beyond Affairs" where I describe the way it felt for me when we were in the middle of this effort:

"This yo-yo up and down in my ability to cope with his affairs continued to keep me off balance for two or three years. There were times when things would be great and I'd think I was over the hump and had adjusted. Then...Bam! I'd get knocked all the way back down into a depression.

"I frequently wished I could have amnesia. That seemed to be the only way I could forget the past. Also, I wished for time to pass. I'd always heard that time heals, but I never heard just how much time it takes. I didn't know whether I could last long enough.

"We spent many, many hours talking about our feelings and trying to get a handle on the whole experience. Little by little it got easier to handle the emotional aspects too...Finally, one day the pain just slipped away when I didn't even notice."

(end of excerpt from Beyond Affairs)

Note:
As described above, this entire process took a couple of years, despite both of us making a tremendous effort to do it more quickly. In the final analysis, there are no shortcuts; this issue can not be buried or "gone around;" it just has to be gone through.

While no one would "choose" to go through this; it can, as with many life crises, be used as an opportunity to develop a closer, more honest, more trusting relationship than you ever had before--or than you could have had without doing this kind of joint work in dealing with this issue.


Excerpt from Handbook for Recovering From Affairs

Dealing with extramarital affairs is a life-altering experience. It's more than just dealing with the affairs themselves (as if that weren't enough). It's dealing with the fact that nothing is the way you thought it was. Your dreams of the "perfect marriage," however unrealistic, have been shattered. In essence, your world has been turned upside down and you must begin to make sense of this new world. Your innocence is gone and you need to face this new reality and learn how to cope with it. There's a long-term legacy to an event of this significance in your life. And it calls for a long-term effort.

Long-term Efforts Necessary to Recovery

•
Accept the fact that it happened. This doesn't mean "liking" it; it just means giving up focusing on " if only" and dealing with "what is."

•
Work to understand what happened in terms of the societal factors that contributed to it—in order to overcome the idea that it's only due to personal failure.

•
Talk about what happened—not just for the sake of talking, but in order to move the process along—since hiding it reinforces the feelings of shame.

•
Deliberately focus on dealing with it.

•
Believe it's possible to recover.

•
Allow time to heal. Time alone won't bring recovery, but it does require time and patience to work through this experience.

The importance of this last point—time and patience—can't be overstated. There are no shortcuts; the only way through this situation is to face it head on and deal with it. Even then, it will be difficult for everyone. Certainly, no one (either the one who had an affair or their partner) wants to drag this out; it's so painful and uncomfortable that everybody wants it to be over quickly, but it just doesn't work that way.

The way through the emotional turmoil of affairs is through—not over or around. The process of healing and growth is not the steady, smooth progression we would like it to be. It's more often a series of ups and downs, dramatic improvements and depressing backslides, progressions and regressions—a moving back and forth between periods of clear thinking and emotional confusion—with an occasional plateau thrown in.

By knowing in advance that this is the normal progression of recovery, you can avoid being so depressed or devastated when these inevitable setbacks take place. The moral is, persistence will pay off. Allow for down periods, and view each one as a fork in the road. One path leads to further decline, the other to continued change for the better.