Are there times you want to take your life back? The whole idea of reclaiming the life you once had is appealing.
You can regain your mind, but you can’t go back to the marriage you had. So when you say, “Reclaiming your life”, yet you’re referring to your marriage, you’re tricking yourself.
Although this sounds appealing, it’s deceptive. The affair changed your marriage, your life and you.
There are ways of overcoming the pain, rebuilding the intimacy and restoring the connection you once had with your spouse. You can reclaim the important parts yet you can’t go back to the way things were. As much as you want to, you can’t live in the past.
Something wasn’t working in your marriage relationship. You may have thought it worked, yet the affair is evidence of dysfunction at some level.
Rather than beat yourself or your spouse up over it, what you can do is work with each other in making things better. Restoration after an affair is possible. The affair doesn’t have to end your marriage.
You can still salvage the best parts and re-invent how the two of you do things. Re-inventing requires making changes in how the two of you deal with each other, how you solve conflicts and what you expect from each other.
It means changes are needed in how you and your spouse think and how you look at the affair along with the hurts each of you have related to it.
It’s hard listening about the hurts without blaming and deflecting. It’s especially hard hearing about your spouse’s hurts without taking offense.
This is the hard part of the rebuilding of your marriage. One of the principles of communication is “we are heard to the degree that we listen”.
Let me repeat that. We are heard to the degree that we listen.”
It’s good to want to claim your marriage and to make it better than it was. What’s not good is defaulting back to unhealthy patterns that existed in your marriage prior to the affair.
Going back to unhealthy patters just because they are familiar isn’t in your best interest.
If you want the good parts of your marriage back without the dysfunctional parts, download the Affair Recovery Workshop and start getting your marriage healthy again.
The workshop guides you in making the important changes that transform marriages and relationships. It guides you in knowing what needs changing, where to start making those changes along with regaining the best parts of your relationship.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
