Your goal is recovery! The next step is ending the mental affair.
Ending the physical affair is not the final goal. <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah, welcoming you back to Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad you’re with me today because we’re going to be talking about something that is quite interesting. And I think that it’ll be very useful as well. We’re going to be talking about ending the mental affair.
I mention this as an issue because when you stop the physical affair, that doesn’t mean everything is over, and that life is back to normal. Because after you stop the physical affair, you’re going to have to stop the mental affair.
Keep in mind that there are more nerves in the brain than there are on the external part of the body. That means inside your head is where a lot of the action is going on. Likewise, with the cheater, a lot of the action’s going on in their head. More so than in their body.
Bear in mind, like the name of the program, the goal is recovery. After the physical affair ends your next step in reaching that goal is to end the mental affair. You’re going to have to realize that’s the ‘main’ goal.
A lot of times what happens, people like you, will start addressing the affair issues. Once the physical affair stops, they think “oh, my job is done, now we can get on with life.” NO! Your job is not done.
Because, like for instance, when you go to bed with your spouse and they’re still fantasizing about cheating, and during the night they’re dreaming about it, you’re not getting any closer to them. You’re going to have to realize that. That’s why it’s going to be important to end the mental affair.
Ending the affair, we’ve got some solutions for you today.
- The first thing to do is to ‘reduce any romanticizing of the affair’. I use the term reduce because with some cheaters it’s going to be a very difficult task to get them to totally 100% reject any romanticizing of the affair.
For that reason, if you can get them to reduce it, you’re making headway. Because the affair didn’t start overnight, it’s not going to end overnight. I wish it would, but it takes time.
When you reduce the romanticizing, and by romanticizing it’s that whole idea of making it sound better than it was. Of making things sound like they were happier than they really were. A lot of times it’s real easy for them to take off into that la-la land of thinking life was better with the affair.
No. You’ve got to stop that. One of the ways to go ahead and reduce the romanticizing is to change the narrative, or if you prefer using the word meaning, of the affair. By changing the meaning of the affair, or the narrative, it will change their thinking. And that’s what you’re going to have to do.
If, whenever they talk about the affair, it is with some kind of affection, I mean you can look in their eyes and look on their face and see if that’s the case. If they still have little mementos of the affair hanging around the house, be they simple things as a CD or a movie or a little trinket, you want to get rid of those things. Anything that causes them to take off and be romanticizing about it, you don’t want that around. That’s going to cause you more grief.
Focus on reducing any romanticizing of the affair going on.
2. You’re going to want to emphasize the cost of the affair over the benefit of the affair. Many times when they are romanticizing the affair, the cheater is going to be looking at how they benefited. How it left them feeling, how it gave them a renewed sense of energy and things like that.
You’re going to have to drill into their heads what it was costing. What it cost in terms of your family, what it has cost financially, what is has cost health-wise, what it has cost emotion-wise. That’s always going to need to be emphasized over the benefit.
3. You need to develop a zero tolerance policy of affairs in the home. What I mean there, if you’re serious about affairs, your spouse just got out of one, then when you go home don’t sit down and watch movies that glorify having affairs.
What’s that going to do? That’s going to get you right back into the situation again. Maybe not immediately, but it is going to bring back the romanticizing of things and the excitement of that, and get you back into that whole lifestyle. And that’s not what you’re wanting.
You’re wanting to stop the nightmare. You’re wanting to stop that merry-go-round.
To drive home the point let me go ahead and put it this way. I know when I have worked with alcoholics, one of the challenges that they have to address is to learn not to love the alcohol.
Likewise, when you’re dealing with a porn addict, they’ve got to get to the point where they don’t like the porn, where they hate the porn.
Many times addicts and alcoholics, they don’t like the effects, but they still love the rush of those activities. A similar thing with cheaters.
You’re going to have to get them to the point where they quit enjoying the rush, enjoying the benefits, and quit having that ongoing romance with the fantasies that went down in their head with the affair. That’s got to come to an end.
It’s going to be essential, if you really want to bring things to a close and tie a pink ribbon around things and bring it to an end, you’ve got to end the mental affair as well. Stopping with just ending the physical affair, that’s going to leave the job half-done and you’re going to have to find yourself coming back out and redoing it.
No one enjoys having to go through the hell that you’ve been through a second time around. So let’s get the job done right the first time and end the mental affair.
These things that I gave you, these are things that you can start right away. Just go ahead, even before we finish the call, and come up with a game plan on how you can start putting these things in place to start turning your marriage around after the affair.
If you’re the cheater and struggling with ending the affair, the video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery” provides you with more details on ending the affair along with other needed changes.
Best Regards,
Jeff
