The Trauma of Affair Recovery for the Betrayed Partner

You always said that you’d be out if your partner ever had an affair.

You really meant it.

But now that it’s actually happened to you, you’re not so certain. 

Absolutely, you’re shocked, enraged, heartbroken, questioning the future of your relationship. And now you also can understand glimpses of why sometimes people choose to stay. You’re not 100% certain that you’ll continue with the relationship, but you also don’t 100% see it ending.

If you’ve experienced any, all, or none of this, you’re not alone. There’s no “right” way to be the Betrayed Partner. Good grief, sometimes it’s hard enough to get out of the bed!

Let’s be clear – finding out that your partner has had an affair, whether it’s sexual, emotional, or financial – is not only a betrayal, it’s a trauma. You might have difficulty sleeping. You might be “hypervigilent” and super honed into your partner’s every move, wanting to track their comings and goings, check their phone, asking them the same questions over and over again.

You might have “flashbacks” of images of texts or nightmares of your partner’s betrayal activities, whether you saw them or not (your mind is incredibly creative, and sometimes what the mind can dream up is worse than what actually happened).

Truly, the relationship that you thought you had was shattered, and the process of afair recovery is picking the shattered pieces off the floor and deciding if you’ll choose to put them back together.

Therapy, at this point, looks like accountability for your partner in order to rebuild trust. Your work is to get an understanding for yourself about what you need to rebuild trust, but that also won’t keep you in the trauma spiral. Sometimes more information is not better. Your therapist will help you figure out what this looks like.

Sometimes, the affair is so traumatic that you might benefit from deeper trauma work. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that you’re “weak” or “irrevocably broken”, it means that your brain has imbedded the affair in the “fight, flight, freeze” part of your brain and needs help moving it to long term memory storage, where you’ll always know the details of what happened, but won’t be emotionally crushed by it every time it comes to mind. Your therapist can help with this, too.

Only after accountability and trust are addressed will the underlying patterns of the relationship be looked at so that you can put the pieces back together and create Marriage 2.0.

At Harper Therapy, we have the training and experience that you’re looking for. You can call 813-434-3639 to schedule a free consult so that we can answer your questions and make sure it’s a good fit.