Dealing with Your Emotions Over a Cheating Spouse

Dealing with your emotions shortly after you have discovered your spouse’s affair can and does usually overshadow everything else in your life.

According to marriage and family counsellor Dr. Frank Ginzberg, rather than focusing your energy outward in the early stages of healing from an affair, the best thing you can do is turn inward.

This means not hiding from your feelings and pretending they don’t exist. You actually need to move into your emotions, feel them for what they are, and learn new ways to process these painful parts of your life.

The first step to coping with your emotions is to find out what you are feeling. If you feel like you are caught in a flood of emotions that you sometimes have a hard time controlling, much less distinguishing what exactly you are feeling then you need to figure out what your feelings are before you can start to cope with them.

Dr. Ginzburg has distinguished 8 Heart Wrenching Emotions that most people face when they learn about an affair. We’ve listed a few of them below:

Betrayal

This emotion is so universal to injured people in affairs, that it almost seems like it isn’t worth mentioning. There is little question that you feel betrayed by your partner. You may even feel as though you will never be able to trust them again. But it is useful to consciously recognize your feelings of betrayal. Don’t run away from them or pretend they don’t exist. If you feel betrayed, feel it. There is no reasons to try and bury that feeling hoping it will go away. In fact, the only way you can learn to process it is to accept that the feeling is there in the first place.

Guilt

Many people feel guilty when they find out their partner has had an affair. They think there are things they might have done better in the relationship, and that if they had only done this their partner would never have gone outside the relationship. Bearing the burden of the affair is not your responsibility. It rests firmly on the cheater’s shoulders.

There are surely things you could have done better. We are all human and there is always room for improvement. But nothing you could have done makes it okay for your partner to have cheated on you. Think of it this way.

Imagine someone gave you some sacred, valued possession and asked you to hold on to it for them for a week. In that time you learn they have done something that offends you deeply. Do you have then have the right to trash their sacred possession because of something they did that hurt you?

The answer is clearly no. And the same is true of the cheater. You gave them something sacred your trust. Nothing you could have done gives them the right to betray that sacred trust.

Disappointment

When you have invested a great deal in another person and have spent years building a life with them, you have every right to feel disappointed when they act in a way that undoes much the work you have put into your relationship. Take a moment now and see if you feel disappointed.

Be completely honest with yourself. Is this an emotion you are struggling with?

To find out more about dealing with these emotions that happen because of an extramarital affair, cheating or infidelity, we invite you to sign up for a free email course by marriage and family counsellor Dr. Frank Gunzburg PhD who has specialized in helping couples heal their relationship from an affair since 1978.