NOT "Just Friends": Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity

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One of the world's leading experts on infidelity provides a step-by-step guide through the process of marital infidelity-from suspicion and revelation to healing, and provides profound, practical guidance to prevent cheating and, if it happens, recover and heal from it. Until and unless you find out what you need to know, the affair will remain an open wound in your relationship. When the affair is discovered, the involved partner is torn between two competing allegiances, and the betrayed partner develops the alarming mental and physical symptoms of obsession and flashbacks. After you learn that you’ve been betrayed, you think in terms of the time before and the time after. By this I mean, it definitely played a role in weakening our marriage further, though I ABSOLUTELY do not take responsibility for the choice he made to enter in a sexual and emotional affair (the book really helped me to understand this concept).

If both decide to stay and work on the relationship, first on the agenda has to be how to reestablish safety and foster goodwill. For some people, commitment comes with a mindfulness of the need for exclusivity, about which they have no second thoughts. But most people need help learning how to change the bitterness of betrayal into fertile ground for growth. The significant news about these new affairs -- and what is different from the affairs of previous generations -- is that they originate as peer relationships. We even talked about having a sexual affair, but both agreed it had the potential of ruining our friendship, so we drew the line there.It's hard to believe that a marriage can be better after an affair, but it's true -- if you learn how to handle the nightmarish days after discovery, the traumatic reactions of the betrayed spouse, the revelation of details when the story is told, and the period of construction when the marriage is rebuilt, brick by brick.

Many of my clients have told me that understanding where the symbolic walls and windows are in their relationship has helped them enormously in explaining the dynamics of their relationship and in articulating their feelings of alienation and jealousy. Although I read the book with much personal pain and had to put it down for days, I was compelled to pick it back up repeatedly because I saw myself on many of the pages. When you take care of your body, you have the added benefit of taking care of your mind and your emotions, because mind and body are really different aspects of the same organic system. Most people mistakenly think it is possible to prevent affairs by being loving and dedicated to one’s partner.I very much appreciate having a colleague who has worked to develop a specialty in treating relationship problems and believe her expertise in this area greatly benefits her clients. I've altered all descriptive details in the case examples to protect the couples and maintain their confidentiality, but the actual interpersonal and individual issues are based on factual accounts.

This concern quickly became irrelevant because the feedback I have received from clients about working with Dr.I also recount stories of couples that demonstrate how troublesome triangles develop out of friendship. The various chapters in this section present information like how the affair is revealed, dealing with the immediate aftermath, and normal ambivalence.

Then I learned that an acquaintance, an elderly man who had an exceptionally loving marriage, had been having sexual flings for many decades without his wife's ever knowing. The new infidelity is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realizing that they've crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love. My own marriage ended after 35 years because my husband never admitted his many infidelities and would not talk to me about the one that I finally discovered. They need constructive ways to confront and understand what has happened to them and how, on a practical level, to repair the ruptures that are breaking their hearts and ruining their relationship. People who have just found out about a partner's affair may react as if they have been viciously attacked.For twenty-five years I have maintained an affectionate and stimulating professional partnership with Dr.