I spend at least 50% of my time in my office helping couples heal from infidelity.
Infidelity is not a good thing; it is a very painful thing. It is a hurtful thing and the betrayed person is a victim of a deception that shakes his or her world. Cancer is not a good thing it is a painful thing. However, there have been people who have been diagnosed with cancer who look more deeply into their lives or they learn how to be what I call “healthily dependent.” They open up sometimes for the first time in their lives as they deal with their mortality, fear of death and their own type of feeling betrayed (by their body, by God, etc.)
After an affair, some couples and I will say even say- a majority of the couples I see, open up to each other like they have not in years. This crisis of infidelity wakes the partners up to what has been going on in their relationship or inside themselves. It makes them look at what are the messages from their inner world that is being conveyed by this crisis. What have they not paying attention to in themselves and each other? I love the following statement made by Esther Perel, a well-known therapist and education on the subject of infidelity:
“In marriage, sometimes you start out face to face, and then after a while you start to live side by side. It takes one crisis, and it puts people back face to face.”
This is accurate for a large percentage of couples. In the “honeymoon” stage of relationship, couples tend to be very positively intense with each other.
They not only look at each other; they are curious about each other; they want to feel close to each other and create that positive intensity. After a while, many couples lose their intensity; they do not do the things that create that closeness, that positive intensity. They fall into routines, they avoid dealing with painful subjects and emotions and they stop uplifting each other. Their focus is on work, children and everything else except the need to CREATE that positive intensity. In the beginning of the relationship, that positive intensity came effortlessly.
What the crisis of infidelity teaches us is that is necessarily to become curious about each other again; to get to know each other again and to stay connecting through both pain and pleasure. And of course, after the discovery of infidelity, there is plenty of pain to go around for both partners. This is when the fear of losing each other becomes the catalyst for great personal growth.
This is when I see couples developing the emotional muscle to stay connected with their eyes, hearts and bodies to each other even when the words of the other trigger them.
Instead of fight or flight reactivity, this time they stay connected. I get the privilege of working with these couples that no doubt are in pain but also they are open to growing and evolving their relationship. They somehow know that f they do not grow their relationship if they do not develop the emotional muscle to create that connection through thick and thin, that the relationship will perish. I have the privilege of being a catalyst in their healing; being sensitive to the pain of the betrayed (as well as the one who betrayed) and at the same time helping them become the kind of partners that can create something deeper and more loving than they had before.
For some, infidelity is the end of the relationship. That is understandable. For others, infidelity moves the couple to a new chapter in their relationship and that is also understandable. For this second group, they learn how to embrace each other more fully and deeply. I would love to assist you in this process.
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