Are there times you want to take your life back? The whole idea of reclaiming the life you once had is appealing.
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.
You can take steps that reclaim your marriage.
It’s one where you and your spouse have made the difficult decisions to repair the damage while keeping what was good. You’ve opted for a future together that is new and improved instead of going separate ways. A reclaimed marriage may mean giving up some aspects of your life you’re accustomed to
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 you and your spouse will need to change how you think and how you look at the affair and the hurts each of you has related to it.
It’s hard listening about the hurts without blaming and deflecting. This is the hard part of the rebuilding of your marriage. One of the principles of communication is 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 patterns 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.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
