How to Overcome Trauma and Self-Criticism After an Affair

In a recent Facebook Live episode, I explained why "What's wrong with me?" is the wrong question and pointed out the folly of blaming yourself for problems with self-acceptance.

Many self-acceptance issues go back to the scars left behind from traumas earlier in your life. You get so accustomed to blaming yourself, it keeps you stuck in a loop of self-criticism. Not only that, the constant blaming keeps your nervous system activated so much you can't turn it off. That's just one of trauma's lasting effects.

When an affair happens and you have a history of trauma, you're at risk of blaming yourself. When you look for what's wrong with you, your focus is on yourself.

When the focus is on yourself, it's only going to be a matter of time before you find something wrong with yourself. Since you're looking for blame toward yourself, that's where you'll find a plausible answer.

The key to breaking this cycle is to recognize that it's not about what's wrong with you, but rather, what happened. You can start shifting the focus away from yourself. This will help reduce your feelings of guilt and shame. Instead, you can begin to understand and process the traumatic events that have led to your current struggles with self-acceptance.

By acknowledging and accepting that these traumas have had a significant impact on your life, you can begin to let go of the need to blame yourself. The answer of blaming yourself may be plausible, but the problem isn't something wrong with you. The problem lies in what happened to you and how you dealt with it.

With trauma episodes, it's easier to blame yourself than honestly look at the situation and what happened. You do and say things that make sense to you, but others are bewildered at what you did.

It makes sense to you since you're the one who endured the trauma. You did what you knew to do. That doesn't make you a bad person. The scars of trauma impact how you feel, think, and behave. The affair represents another relationship that broke and an attachment that ruptured.

Now is a time for finally dealing with those trauma reactions rather than running from them or hiding them from others. In the video, "Overcoming Affair Trauma", I present ways of moving past the trauma.

You don't have to stay emotionally stuck or shut down. You can instead start putting those things behind you.