The upside to an affair
Affairs. Your world is turned upside down. You don’t know what to believe. Don’t know what is real, what isn’t. You thought your partner was one person, turns out they were someone else.
Affairs are a relational trauma. The narrative of the relationship you knew to be true, you can no longer trust. It shatters one’s reality – that's what makes it a trauma, an affair threatens your psychological/emotional existence. It's one of the most painful experiences a relationship can endure, but for some, it can be one of the most revitalising.
Many affairs happen when a relationship endures problems that are unable to be resolved between the couple. As a result, one partner ventures beyond the relationship to find a solution to that problem. Its a resolution to a seemingly unsolvable problem.
When an affair is unveiled, couples are faced with the choice on where they want to take their relationship. Many separate – the pain is too much, irreversible. Some endure and tolerate, but are never quite the same. For others, they manage to transform their wounds to wisdom.
When an affair happens, the outsider has a window into the relationship. And so too does the couple, if they are willing and able to view the relationship from that angle.
What did the affair mean?
What was learnt about yourself?
And what was learnt about our relationship?
What was it about our relationship that lead to the affair?
The couple relationship can grow stronger than before, if they are able to move beyond the hurt and view the relationship from a different lens.
The first step is healing. It takes one to stray, but two are responsible for the creation and continuity of a relationship.
A key ingredient in healing is remorse by the straying partner. Remorse means to take responsibility and acknowledge the wrong doing and the hurt. To show the hurt partner “I care, you matter, I see the pain, this relationship is important”
Where couples get stuck is in the details. It becomes an interrogation, did you have sex? When? Where? How?
The wanderer wants to sweep the affair under the carpet, whilst the hurt partner wants it out in the open.
Questions are important to have, but some answers are better not to know. Once you know the answer, you must live with the consequence of knowing. It’s a question of how much knowledge will protect and heal versus how much it will traumatise.
What we know about infidelity is that the symptoms experienced by the hurt partner often resemble post traumatic stress disorder. Intrusive thoughts and images, nightmares, sudden swings in emotion, emotionally numb or explosive, hypervigilance (anxiety, constantly looking for potential danger/threat – looking through your phone, questioning your whereabouts), rumination/constantly thinking about the affair.
The hurt partner doesn’t want to have the symptoms, These symptoms are out of their control. but it’s part of the condition left behind when an affair if unveiled.
Affair symptoms, as with ptsd, are made worse by enhancing images. Questions and talk of sex is not necessarily helpful in the healing journey. And most affairs arent about the sex anyway.
An affair is not necessarily the end. Many couples come out the other side stronger than before – you can learn meaningful lessons that guide the relationship into the future.
I’m not telling you to go have an affair in order to fix your relationship. What I’m saying is there is growth in trauma. There is hope that a stronger more resilient relationship can emerge from the hurt.
