“Are you planning to join the resistance? ”
Hearing a question like this may strike you as odd. You may even wonder, “What does that have to do with affairs or affair recovery?” My answer is ..”more than you think”.
The moment you start recovering from an affair you will encounter resistance. The resistance comes in many forms. You will resist making changes, your spouse will resist making changes and whatever changes the two of you begin making, resistance will be pushing back.
The ‘push back’ of resistance is something that occurs naturally in relationship dynamics. This is simple physics. It is a matter of force and countering force. Not only will you encounter resistance, the strength of the resistance will equal the force of change. What that means is the the more radical changes the two of you start making, the greater the resistance you will encounter.
Any therapist or counselor worth their salt knows about the power of resistance that slows down the healing and recovery process. Like keeping your foot on the brakes, it keeps your relationship from moving quickly into unfamiliar or new territory. Taking steps to improve intimacy and opening communication in real ways will change your marriage which some of you may find scary. The scariness is more about it being unfamiliar than about it being threatening.
There will be a point in time, when you have to decide whether to join the resistance or continue making recovery progress. The two forces will be cancelling each other out. You may be tempted to give up, return to the familiar or go back to your old routines. Those old ways may be what you are used to, but they also contributed to the situations leading up to the affair.
When that moment hits, you may not realize it. It often creeps up on you with the temptation to make soft easy choices of going back to doing things the old way or returning to old patterns where you don’t have to think. It happens as simply as wanting to go back to where you no longer have to work at making things better.
The temptation often happens a little at a time at first, then all at once it hits you like a tidal wave. After it hits, you find yourself back where you started but without any motivation to work on your marriage.
This point is a ‘crisis point’. You and your spouse will make a decision on whether to continue working on your relationship or stop working on moving forward. The decision make be either conscious or unconscious. When you reach this point, choosing to do nothing is a choice to join the resistance.
