During recovery from the affair, there will likely be a time when you experience ambivalence. There will be times when you have mixed (if not contradictory) feelings about your spouse.
You go from loving them to hating them and back again. It becomes a cycle that spins you through extreme moods. This experience is confusing enough without beating yourself up for it.
The tendency to question whether you’re a bad person based on what you’re feeling goes back to confusing thoughts and emotions. Even though you are an adult and have an understanding of what thoughts and emotions are, there may still be some confusion. When you are going through such times, it is natural that some blurring of the two happens.
You are leaving one intense relationship and re-integrating into another. Making a transition like that is confusing. Your heart and head need time in adjusting to such changes.
The blurring is natural phenomena. Your heart and mind are struggling to make sense of what is going on, and trying to coordinate with each other. They’re on two separate wavelengths and not working together.
The more you talk about your emotions and what you are experiencing, the more your mind starts making sense and sorting through what your heart is feeling.
Let me make this point even clearer. Talking helps speed up healing. Refusing to talk slows down the healing. That is as simple as it gets. If you do not want to talk, you are choosing to continue hurting for a longer period of time.
This is why I emphasize the importance of communication as part of recovery in the Affair Recovery Workshop. Communication is not just about letting other people know what your feeling. It’s also how your head and heart start working together.
Communication is more that just talking. Mastering the basics of communication makes a big difference in recovery, and is critical in moving past ambivalence.
The confusion about thoughts and emotions is also due to applying the rules of one to the other. Thoughts can be good or bad.
There is definitely a moral component to them. You do make conscious choices about which thoughts to dwell on. The outcome of thoughts can also be right or wrong.
Emotions, on the other hand, operate according to different rules. Emotions do not have the moral component to them.
You can choose to express or not express them, or explore what is triggering the emotions. Emotions amount to a measure of the emotional temperature of what you are experiencing. When you apply moral evaluations to emotions, it will mess you up.
Emotions can give you clues about what you are reacting to or working through. Keep in mind that the affair is something that should not have happened. It was an act that violates the emotional, relational, and spiritual bonding between you and your spouse.
When the bonding is violated and shattered, it changes things. Even when you recover, it will change how you react, think, and feel.
The affair has changed you and your marriage. Adjusting to those changes takes time. The disruption of bonds is an unnatural experience, even though it happens with increasing frequency in 21st century society.
If you are still struggling with ambivalence after your affair, the video, “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery” guides you through that tough time from D-Day through you and your spouse working together.
Best Regards,
Jeff
2 Responses
My struggle as the betrayed spouse whose husband is ambivalent about staying in the marriage is, although I have asked questions and got trickled information, I’m in a position where he says he’s not ready to work on the marriage. So I’m stuck not being able to heal from the affair and not knowing if I will be married another week, month or year. It’s hard to move forward when you’re locked in stagnation.
Roxi,
Thank you for writing. Being stuck in such an ambivalent situation amounts to an emotional purgatory. Not knowing where you stand is a horrid, insecure place to be made worse by the trickle of information. When the cheater chooses ambivalence, it often limits your options.
Some people will not make choices until the level of discomfort in their lives reaches a critical point. What is bad about those situations is that it effects everyone else around them as well. Much like substances change under pressure, people do too.
Since he will not answer the key questions, you may have to make choices about being married as well. Your situation leaves me wondering if he is unable or unwilling to make choices. Some cheaters intentionally keep things in limbo so that they can have their cake and eat it to. The tension at home gives them a built in excuse to find relief outside of marriage. I know it is a horrid way to do things, yet cheaters and their lovers do not play fair.
Regardless of what he chooses to do, you will need healing from the betrayal. That may mean that you will need to take care of yourself and your family until he finally makes his choices.
Your note makes it clear that more posts are needed on the issue of ambivalence and ways of dealing with it.
Thank you for sharing.