Reconciliation advice to the betrayed wife

If you’re trying to rebuild your relationship after an affair, you’ll want to avoid making these 11 mistakes reconciling couples often make.

 

1. Trying to speed up the healing process

Don’t try to put your reconciliation on a timetable. The healing process can’t be rushed. It’s important for your husband to realize that the two of you will heal at different rates. It will take you much longer to recover from the emotional trauma of his extramarital affair. As much as your husband would like to speed up the process, and it has to be done at your own pace. This will vary slightly with each individual, but marriage and family counsellors say that the healing process can take at up to 2 years.

2. Not being totally committed.

Successfully rebuilding a marriage in the aftermath of an affair requires total commitment from both parties involved. If one spouse is working hard to save the marriage, but the other spouse is just going through the motions, or has secretly made up his or her mind to leave, it’s impossible for a reconciliation to take place. Saving a marriage is hard work, and both of you must be totally committed to the task. If you work at it, you can build a marriage even stronger than you had before. But you need to be sure that reconciling is what you really want to do.

3. Failure to understand and empathize with what the other spouse is feeling.

A cheating husband may not understand the full extent of how his infidelity has traumatized his betrayed wife. The wife may be totally unaware that her cheating husband is struggling with deep-seated feelings of shame, guilt, and embarrassment now that his affair has been exposed. Both of you need to empathize with each other’s feelings, and understand how those feelings affect the healing process.

[box type=”info”] It’s time consuming and counterproductive for you to concern yourself with punishing your cheating husband, seeking revenge, or trying to pay him back for having an affair. Your interests would be best served if you focus your energy and efforts on what the two of you can do to get your derailed marriage back on track.[/box]

4. Being unduly concerned with the opinion of family friends.

Family and friends who know about the affair will want to offer helpful advice on what you should do. They will have differing opinions about how you should treat your cheating husband, and whether or not your marriage can, or should be saved. Most of them will tell you that you should to leave. Trying to recover from infidelity is difficult enough without having to concern yourself with the opinions of people who are on the outside looking in. Unless they are qualified professionals, ignore their advice, and do what you think is best for you.

5. Not constructively addressing your two biggest fears.

The two biggest fears you’ll experience after taking your cheating husband back are 1) fear that he’s still cheating behind your back, and 2) the fear that he’ll cheat on you again. You will no longer trust your own judgment, when it comes to signs of infidelity because like most betrayed wives, you were probably the last to know. To keep from driving yourself and your husband crazy with constant suspicion, the best way to deal with your hyper vigilance is to educate yourself about infidelity, and invest in a good infidelity reference book.

6. Harbouring resentment because his life must now be an open book.

Your cheating husband may resent the fact that in order to regain your trust, he must share all passwords with you, stay in constant touch with frequent phone calls when he’s not with you, clear his itinerary with you, inform you of his whereabouts at all times. These things are a necessary part of rebuilding broken trust, and your husband must continue to do them until you feel you can trust him again. If he’s serious about wanting to save your marriage, he’ll willingly comply by making his life an open book.

7. Failing to put some type of checks and balances in place.

You need to have a way to reassure yourself that your husband is being totally honest with you, and is not still carrying on the affair or communicating with the “Other Woman” behind your back. You should have a method in place that allows you to check up on your husband and his activities – either with or without his knowledge. For your own peace of mind, you need to be able to confirm for yourself the identity of anyone he’s calling, texting, e-mailing, or associating with. Fortunately, there are discreet and affordable online services that can help.

8. Ignoring your flashbacks and your need for reassurance.

Certain things will trigger flashbacks and cause you to re-live the pain of discovering your husband’s affair. Deep down inside, women always blame themselves, even though when a man cheats it’s not the woman’s fault. Your husband will need to be especially  understanding whenever these flashbacks occur, and go out of his way to reassure you of his love.

9. Not giving the cheater positive reinforcement

It’s important to give your husband positive feedback and encouragement on his efforts to make amends to you. Otherwise he could start to feel that all his efforts are in vain. If he feels like he’s spinning his wheels, or trying to reach an unobtainable goal, he may just give up and leave, or re-initiate his affair.

10. Having unrealistic expectations.

During the aftermath of an affair, a marriage is in a very fragile state. Your emotions will be too. Your husband may become impatient. Your emotions will fluctuate wildly from week to week, day to day, or from one hour to the next. It’s unrealistic to expect the marriage to stabilize itself by a certain date. Most marriage and family counselors agree that it takes at least 18 m to 2 years for a couple to fully recover from the effects of an affair. Don’t set yourselves up for disappointment by expecting your marriage to return to normal by a certain date.

11. Giving up too soon.

The worse thing you can do is abandon your marriage prematurely, without allowing sufficient time for the healing process to take place.Variables like the type or circumstances of the affair, the length of the marriage, and other factors can further increase the length of time it takes to heal. If you really want to save your marriage, both of you need to hang in there long enough to see positive results.