Recovering from an affair brings many emotions. One of these emotions is disappointment. That disappointment ranges from irritation to crushing.
Emotional Recovery -Dealing with Disappointment <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio, and I’m glad you are here with me today. Today we’re going to be dealing with the issue of emotional recovery. More specifically we’ll be dealing with disappointments.
When you’re going through a recovery from an affair there’s going to be a lot of emotions. One of the emotions that you’re going to find yourself dealing with is disappointment. Disappointment is an emotion that has a wide range. It’s wide range goes from an irritating type of disappointment to a crushing one.
It may be something that just bothers you a little, or it may be an emotion that hits you so strong that you feel you’ve been knocked over by a large truck and can’t even get out of bed.
Although the intensity of the experience related to disappointment varies, the pattern of going from one disappointment to another with the ups and downs is likely to happen. No matter what the intensity of the situation that you’re dealing with, you’re going to be finding yourself going through disappointments.
Some of you may be taking it more extremely than others, but disappointments are something you’re going to have to deal with.
That brings us to the question in consideration at this point. “How can you make this roller coaster ride of dealing with disappointments more bearable?” Good question.
In terms of solution, the solution’s going to be to reframe your mindset. Because you are going to be going through these disappointments.
- Take your affair recovery one day at a time. That’s important because this essentially sets the time frame for what you’re dealing with, and that has a lot to do with the disappointments. If you are trying to figure things out for next week, next month, what you’re going to do about the holidays, rather than take it one day at a time, you’re setting yourself up for more disappointment.
When you take it one day at a time the frame of time that is under consideration, or that you’re dealing with, is more restricted. It’s smaller. So that there will be less disappointment coming through. Take it one day at a time.
2. Let go of absolute thinking and expectations. What I mean by that, these are those statements where you may use the terms never or always, just those terms to where you start making blanket statements. All men do this, all women do that. It’s always going to be this way, it’s always going to be that way.
When you have those kind of absolute thoughts and you deal with information that way, that’s going to increase the amount of disappointment that you experience. To have less disappointment you’re going to need to let go of those types of phrases. I know that it’s almost like a bad habit when you get used to doing it.
Rather than making those global statements “This always happens”, “That always happens”, you can say “This happened today and I didn’t like it”. Or “that happened today and I didn’t like it”. Rather than “This always happens to me”. Don’t say that. That’s part of this bad habit we’re trying to break that’s making all your disappointments that much harder to deal with.
3. Practice unconditional love. And this is going to be dealing with emotional frames. The emotional frame that you put around your relationships. Because with this one, when you are able to love people and deal with people in an unconditional manner, it takes away a lot of the expectations. Because when you have the expectations, strings attached, however you want to put it, the more strings attached the more room there is for disappointment.
Does this mean that you’re going to need to love the cheater for who they are without a lot of strings attached? Yes. That may be hard for some of you to just blanketly love people without putting any kind of caveats on there.
I’m only going to love you if you do this, or I’m only going to love you if you do that. Don’t do that. You’re going to need to break out of the habit of that.
Because what’s going to happen? They’re going to disappoint you as you let them back in your life. Well, I love you but only if you choose to do good. No. That’s one of those conditions and that’s going to lead to disappointments.
Let me go through this again. Because each of these solutions presents a different frame. The taking recovery one day at a time makes adjustments to your time frame.
The letting go of absolute thinking and expectations, that deals with the frame of acceptance. The everyone wants to be accepted, and when you go into a situation with those never, always, and those generality type of terms, it messes up this whole frame of acceptance. And that’s why you’re going to need to let go of that.
Number three, you’re going to need to practice unconditional love. You may not be ready to do that with your spouse. That’s okay. You may have to start with your dog, you may have to start with your cat, you may have to start with your kids. That’s fine. What we’re talking about is getting out of the habit of putting all those caveats in there, because those typically turn into traps that, when they’re set off, end up hurting you.
The best way to deal with disappointments is to reframe your mindset. To make some changes in you. I know some of you are probably saying but it’s the cheater that needs to make all the changes.
Yes, the cheater needs to make some changes. But who’s hurting right now? You. And since you are hurting you need to make some changes to deal with your hurt.
Because you’re making changes, that does not mean that the cheater did nothing wrong, that they’re off the hook. No. It does not mean that at all. It means you’re hurting, you need to do something about it. Once you get your hurt, and get your house in order, you’re going to be in better shape to deal with some of the other ups and downs about affairs.
And I know one of the issues that you will have to deal with is disappointment. I can guarantee you that you’re going to have to be dealing with disappointment.
If you put these into place, taking recovery one day at a time, letting go of the absolute thinking and expectations, and practicing unconditional love, it’ll put you well on the way to smoothing out those wild ups and downs.
Yes, there will still be some ups and downs, and some disappointments. But it’s not going to be as extreme as it was. And that’s what we’re trying to do today, to give you some practical things that you can do right here and now to help you through the affair recovery process.
In the video ‘Getting Past the Affair Crisis”, I deal with these issues in greater detail.
Best Regards,
Jeff
