Focus on the friendship as part of the recovery

When recovering from an affair, you have to heal the relationship as well as to recover from the betrayal. Find time to focus on renewing the friendship. It will make the hard work of the recovery much easier.

Tip of the Week

People don’t just fall out of love in a marriage. If love dies, it is because they did not make their marriage a priority.

Tip of the Week

Never draw a line in your relationship because you may then be trapped into taking a step that you really do not want to take. Allow yourself time to calm down, process and talk out loud a lot about your concern before taking any action.

How long must the conversation go on!?!

Last week I met with several new couples who are in the beginning stages of recovery from an affair. There is a common theme among those who were unfaithful … “let’s move on” and for their partners it is “we have lots to talk about.”

So .. The question for the therapist is often “how long DO you have to talk about the affair”?

The answer, of course, is different for each situation and couple but generally her are some guidelines:

* Talk about it until all of the “Who, what, when and where questions” have been answered.

* Talk about it until the hurt person feels like their spouse has a full understanding of how hurt, disappointed and angry they are.

* Talk about it until a sincere and honest apology has occurred and been acknowledged.

* Talk about it when the hurt partner needs to for the first few days. After that, find ways to limit the conversation to much smaller amounts of time in order to allow the relationship to recover.

Punishment is not the goal, recovery is most important.

Affairs Develop Because of Opportunity

Studies on infidelity show that the vast number of those having an affair met their partners at work. More women are in the work force and, as they are able to earn more, they are less dependent on their husbands. This independence translates into making more independent choices which can lead to infidelity.

A recent study noted that, while problems in a marriage are high in cases of infidelity, a full two-thirds of them developed as a result of the changes in the relationship brought about by the affair.

More and more people are not planning affairs, rather they seem to occur as friendships develop and boundaries blur. Many experts agree that the biggest predictor of affairs is opportunity.

Counseling Relationships Online
Couples Counseling of Louisville.

Sharing the basic details of an affair, the "who", "what", "when" and "where" is more protective of a spouse than keeping those details from them..

Can I Ever Forgive Myself for the Damage I Have Done

Often when we see couples affected by an affair, it is the person who had the affair who has the hardest time with forgiveness.

Smart people do dumb, inconsiderate and painful things to another person and affairs have ways of luring even the smartest people into acting in ways that they never thought were possible.

When people get their normal thinking ability back, they often wonder how they could have made the choices and decisions that they did and find it hard to forgive themselves for acting so irrationally and destructively to their marriage and their spouse.

This may not be the first emotion to surface. Sometimes it is much later in the process as those who have affairs may spend a lot of energy defending their actions and blaming their spouse for the affair. Nevertheless, when they really work hard on themselves and their marriage, then reality settles in and the effect that their behavior has had on their spouse becomes more prevalent.