In the course of affair recovery, there will be times when the cheater breaches the trust. They don’t go full blown back into the affair, they just manage to blowing it when it comes to trust.
It may be a phone call or visiting a website they promised not to, or some other infraction. When these breaches occur, “How will you handle them?”
I mention this because those breaches will come. There will be mistakes, there will be slip ups. There’s a big difference between mistakes and returning back to a full-blown affair.
When the slips happen, it helps remembering that they aren’t a failure. You’ll need to treat slips as slips instead of treating them as failures.
The breaches need attention, yet they don’t require the attention of returning to the affair.
During affair recovery, you have to consider the direction you and the cheater are headed. There may be some wrong turns and mistakes, yet as long as the two of you are headed in the right direction, eventually you’ll reach your destination.
Reaching that long term goal is more important than getting each step along the way perfect.
The simplest it gets is that “slips are slips and relapses are relapses” Getting them confused leads to problems. It’s important you treat each of them for what they are.
You don’t put a band-aid on a wound needing stitches, and you don’t stitch a scrape. Keeping the idea of slips (breaches of trust) separate from relapses (return to the affair) will help you through the recovery.
If you need more help handling Affair Relapse issues, the video “Preventing Affair Relapse” guides you through these issues. Over reacting to those slips brings more damage than healing to the hurt people in your marriage.
Best Regards,
Jeff
