Who does all the work in affair recovery: Cheaters and Consequences

A reader wrote to me asking, “In your worldview does the Cheater suffer any consequences? Or is it only the betrayed person who has to do all the work?

First, the cheater suffers consequences. There are always consequences when a person violates their promises and betrays their spouse. Whether you call it the law of sowing and reaping, karma or the tao, there are consequences for the violations that happened.

When you don’t do what you promised to do, there are consequences.

How those consequences show up, when they show up and how the cheater deals with them are individualized. When you don’t see the consequences or they are delayed, you wonder if they are experiencing them at all.

The cheater may deny having any issues or discomfort, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Some cheaters, in a manner similar to sex addicts, take a hair of the dog approach in dealing with their pain. They plunge even deeper into the affair to avoid unpleasant issues.

The structure of the question comes across as an ‘either/or’ situation. On one side is the hurt and consequences and on the other is the betrayed doing the work.

The affair situation is not so easily broken down as that. This combines the concept of cause and effect with a variation of the guilt/blame balance.

The two concepts don’t neatly fit together that way. Cause and effect, with the whole idea of consequences is a separate idea from the guilt/blame balance.

Either of you can start working on your marriage relationship. Ideally, the cheater has more work to do than the betrayed in terms of recovery.

The issue that comes into play, is that of ‘pain’. The betrayed feels the pain sooner than the cheater. The cheater is already using their cheating as their way of dealing with their pain.

Since the cheater has a way to deal with their pain, it leaves you as the betrayed holding immense pain without access to your spouse in dealing with the pain.

Typically the person hurting the most, starts the recovery process. It’s not fair, but this is real life with real emotions. Being real life, it’s not scripted and it’s NOT fair. Real life doesn’t fit into social justice fantasies.

Both of you need healing.

Many times what happens is that the betrayed starts the recovery and takes on the pain of both spouses. Rather than let the cheater get motivated by pain, they start recovery and remove the pain before the cheater is ready.

This adds to them feeling a greater amount of pain than they normally would (This is what I refer to as the pain see saw).

Although it is not up to the betrayed to do all the recovery work, they often try to do it all themselves, with mixed success. This is why it’s more important for the betrayed to focus on healing themselves rather than fixing the relationship in the early stages.

Problems arise when they focus more on fixing the relationship than getting their own healing done.

One place to start your own healing is with the video, “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the Walls and Remove the Roadblocks”.  The video guides you through an important part of your own emotional healing.

Best Regards,

Jeff

You Might Also Like To Read:

2 Responses

  1. Must have been on vacation?
    I agree, individual work first. I’m over two years post DDay and still visit my counselor alone. She also. As far as pain goes, it does appear the victim gets the short end of the stick. Weight loss, sleep loss and PTSD! While the cheater slips quickly off to sleep while gaining a few pounds! Fair? Nope! Reality? Yes!

    1. David,

      It’s always good hearing from you. The weight loss, sleep loss and PTSD make it difficult. The PTSD can keep you locked in a perpetual state of pain, which makes recovery feel more like a merry-go-round than forward progress.

      They also keep you dealing with either your own pain or the damage from the affair all the time. When you are working in therapy, the pain doubles if not triples the effort required in improving. You have to work through pain on many levels in those situations.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Popular Posts