You never thought this would happen to you. You feel like you’re losing your mind. One day you want to feel close to your partner again and want to repair the damage. The next day, you can’t stand to look at them.
Note: Everything you are thinking and feeling is completely normal.
Infidelity causes emotional shock. It can also cause symptoms of trauma. You don’t trust your partner anymore. And you aren’t sure if you can trust yourself either.
Your mind feels like an endless reel of painful images. You can’t help thinking about what they did together. You get stuck in certain phrases. “How could this happen to me? Did they even think about me when they were together?”
You are reeling. You are raging. You are grieving.
Infidelity is far too common and far too painful.
But why does infidelity hurt so badly? And why is it so difficult to recover from?
Infidelity is so painful because it’s an emotional wound to your connection with your partner. You can’t see this wound, but you can feel it.
This wound hurts because the foundation of your relationship is an emotional connection. Beneath all of your daily interactions, you and your partner are both wanting to know the answer to this question: “Will you be there for me?”
Infidelity answers this question with a “No,” and shatters the safety and security you once felt with each other. As a result, your self-esteem plummets and you can find yourself questioning your sense of reality.
At Lasting, the leading relationship counseling company, a team of therapists created an app-based program for individuals hurt by infidelity. In the program, app users can select the thoughts and feelings they have about their partner’s infidelity.
To date, there are currently more than 600 responses, all with a similar theme.
Here are the most common thoughts and feelings, according to Lasting’s Infidelity survey:
For their thoughts about the infidelity, 20% of the users expressed shock, selecting “I can’t believe my partner did this.” This top response was closely followed by, “I never thought this would happen to me” and “I don’t want this marriage to end.”
Regarding emotions, the majority of users selected “Sad,” “Betrayed,” “Disconnected,” and “Devastated” to describe their feelings about the situation.
These responses reiterate the great effect the pain of infidelity can have on your emotional state and the connection with your partner.
The good news is that healing is possible whether you choose to stay with your partner or not. It just takes hard work.
What if we choose to stay together?
Couples that choose to stay together often decide to emotionally divorce from their old marriage and to start a new one together. They work together to rebuild trust and safety in their relationship. Over time, the partner who was unfaithful proves that they are once again there for their partner.
Couples that decide to end their marriage because of infidelity traverse the healing process alone. They process through the pain and make sense of what happened. As difficult as it is, they learn from the pain.
Both roads to healing begin with connecting with your own pain. You have to look at the wound before it can begin to heal. The first step in this process is naming your experience for yourself. The act of labeling your emotions helps your body to physiologically calm down and helps your brain move in the direction of healing. See this article on Surviving Infidelity for more on this topic.
This road to healing is daunting without help, but help is available. Check out Lasting, a relationship counseling app ,for how to move forward after infidelity.