One of the biggest gut punches I ever faced concerned betrayal by a family member. The betrayal left me feeling I’d been gut punched to the point of the air being knocked out of me.
Instead of gasping for air, I was gasping for some sense of reality. I wanted to know if this just really happened. It was hard for me to believe someone I was related to could do what they did.
In my mind family is where I was supposed to feel safe and supported. Now, I found myself experiencing anxiety and uncertainty.
It was several weeks before the reality of what happened finally set in. Although part of me wanted to think “this is just a bad dream“, I realized it wasn’t. It really was happening.
Over the next few weeks, the realization that it was happening to me, and that action was needed now finally set in. It was as if I was in slow motion. Mentally I knew action was needed, but emotionally, I felt paralyzed to a large degree.
In your situation, the betrayal may feel more like a bomb exploded or someone knifed you in the back. I’ve heard each of those metaphors in expressing the initial experience of betrayal.
Each conveys what kind of betrayal it was and the pain associated with it. The ‘knife in the back’ metaphor is common when you’re betrayed by someone who was supposed to ‘have your back’.
Although the initial experience varies from person to person, the recovery from the betrayal requires the same journey through denial, anger and finally recovery. You can’t cheat the stages of grief about a cheating spouse.
The intensity of your reaction may differ from what others experienced, so comparing your betrayal with that of others doesn’t work so well. Those experiences are not easily compared like you compare other experiences.
Recovery took a while. There were days I made forward progress, while other days, I went backwards. It took a few back and forth episodes during recovery for me to start feeling like myself again.
It took even longer before I felt that my brain was back to normal. It took even longer before I felt safe again.
In a similar way, your journey through affair recovery will include days of forward progress and days of falling apart. That’s part of the recovery process. It takes a while before your feel that the old you is back again and your brain quits running like a race horse.
In time, you’ll quit looking over your shoulder and imagining the worst case scenarios happening to you.
If you’re expecting to be yourself within a week or two, you’re in for some disappointment. The affair changed you, and being yourself again takes longer than you initially think.
What you can do to help yourself through recovery is purchase your copy of the Affair Recovery Workshop. Instead of stumbling through recovery to where you are running in circles and getting further behind rather than ahead, you can know what to do.
You don’t have to do it alone and on your own. Instead, you can know what to do, when to do it along with HOW to do it. What’s more, you can do it at your own pace of healing rather than adding to your anxiety by being forced to deal with issues before you’re ready to.
You can know what changes to make, where to make them, ways of bringing up sensitive topics along with making whatever adjustments are needed in improving your marriage.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
