One of the buzzwords in the recovery community is ‘empowerment‘. Today’s email focuses on empowerment in your recovery from the affair.
When the affair happens, it sends shock waves through your life and emotions. That shock wave disrupts and destroys many things. Your confidence is shattered, your self-image is damaged and your thinking is impaired. You may even find it hard to make simple choices.
These kind of reactions are common on discovering an affair. One of the things you don’t feel is ’empowered’. The affair instead leaves you feeling powerless.
This is one reason why self-care is so critical in the days after discovering an affair. Even when you don’t feel like showering, eating or getting exercise, they are still needed.
There are also other ways of taking care of yourself. This includes prayer, meditation, going for walks and playing with your pets or children.
Pushing yourself past the “I don’t feel like it” attitude requires effort. Just getting up in the morning requires effort some days. What’s important is that you do it. In extreme cases, you may even have to remind yourself to just breathe.
Good self-care habits like those above, when continued consistently, start empowering you. What once required effort slowly transforms into actions that you look forward to.
There’s no magic ‘ZAP!’ that will suddenly change you. Caring for yourself requires you stretch beyond your comfort zone.
The good self-care habits start empowering you. Those very actions that required effort when kept up become the things that start empowering you.
This is why in my program for affair recovery, I emphasize the importance of self-care early on in recovery. Letting yourself go to pot is de-motivating to yourself and your spouse.
When you let yourself go to pot, what is there to motivate them to want to be with you? When you don’t care about yourself, it makes it challenging to expect your spouse to care about you.
Creating an atmosphere of self-respect starts with you.
When you care for and respect yourself, it naturally flows that you can demand respect from the cheater with an air of authority behind your demands.
If you aren’t sure where to start with your self-care and recovery, consider the video on “Getting Past the Affair Crisis“. It gives you direction and a road map for those initial times when you feel overwhelmed and lost in terms of what to do.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
