Rebuilding Your Self-Esteem after an Affair
By Dr. Frank Gunzburg, PhD

One of the most devastating aspects of an affair is the effect it has on your self-esteem. When you find out that your spouse has broken your marital vow and cheated on you, the effects this can have to your sense of self-worth are tremendous.

It can make you feel as though you are the most worthless person on the face of the planet. You must be, right? After all, your spouse would never have thrown away your relationship if you weren't such a terrible person. Isn't that true?

Let me give you a very short answer to that question: No it's not.

No person is perfect. No relationship is perfect. You aren't perfect either. But that doesn't mean you're a terrible person, and it doesn't mean that the affair is somehow your fault.

Every relationship has bad times. Every married couple has arguments. When you got married you made a vow. You vowed that no matter how bad things got, whether you started arguing every day or didn't have sex for months, that you had a lot of options. You have the option to move out of the house, to go to your sister's, your mother's, or your best friend's home. You have the option to talk to a clergyman, a therapist, or call a hotline. You have the option to yell back, complain, or act passive-aggressive. You have the option to buy a self-help book and see if you can work out your problems that way. You even have the option to get a divorce.

Out of the multitude of options you have, there is one that you gave up when you got married. You gave up the option to have an affair. By having an affair, your spouse has showed that he or she has a character problem. This broken promise is a reflection of a "hole" in your spouse's character.

There may be any number of reasons this weakness of character exists. Perhaps your spouse has a difficult time keeping promises. Perhaps he or she can't accept the reality that people and relationships aren't perfect. Or perhaps he or she has an unresolved childhood issue regarding trust or integrity. Whatever the reason, it is this "leak" in your spouse's character that caused the affair. Not you.

So the first thing you need to realize is this one simple truth: The affair was not your fault.

If your marriage wasn't doing so well before the affair, you probably contributed to the problems in your marriage. It may be that you, or both of you, dropped the passion in your relationship. Perhaps you got to a point where all you ever thought about was taking care of the kids and going to work, or, perhaps the two of you were yelling at each other a lot or not having sex for months on end. Even if you both agree that your marriage was doing well before the affair (this happens too), you are both going to have to work on your relationship to make it better than ever so you can protect it from future problems.

So it's true, you are responsible for the future of your marriage. Even so, there is one thing you should be clear on. The affair wasn't your fault. The choice to cheat resides with one person and one person alone--the cheater. It is the cheater's fault that the affair occurred, not yours.

Now that I have made that clear, I want to address a typical scenario that occurs in many affairs which deepens the sense of worthlessness the injured person carries. Keep in mind, this doesn't happen with every affair, and I won't be able to cover every different situation in this letter. However, the following scenario happens so commonly it's definitely worth addressing here.

The injured person is demonized while the paramour is given a halo to wear. I want to look at how this happens, explore the effects this has on the injured person's self-esteem, and help you understand how you can reverse these effects.

Demonizing the Injured spouse: A Cheater's Way to Excuse an Affair

One way the cheater demonizes the injured spouse is by developing a litany of complaints against him or her. The list could be in his own mind, told to other people, or used as ammunition against the injured spouse, herself.

Basically the process here is simple. The cheater starts thinking of the injured person in a black-or-white way. Rather than accepting the reality that everyone is made up of a multitude of good and bad pieces, the cheating spouse starts to notice only the bad pieces of the person he or she is married to.

In essence, the cheater focuses on everything his spouse isn't. Ignoring the good sides of his spouse, a cheater makes it seem as though his spouse is "all bad." Once this happens, it makes it that much easier for someone to come in and hook up with the cheater. If the cheater is talking with a married person, all the cheater has to do is demonize his or her spouse to the potential paramour, and they immediately have a strong common bond.

At the same time, the cheater usually looks at the paramour in this same black-or-white way. As you might be able to guess, in situations like this, it's very easy for the paramour to become the "haloed" spouse in the mind of the cheater. Let's look at an example of how this happens.

Let's say that Carol has some problems in her relationship that she's really frustrated with. Namely, she has become disgusted that her husband is "never thoughtful." She tells herself things like, "He never has time to spend with me," "He never talks to me," and, "He never expresses an interest in the kids."

This is the only thing Carol can focus on in her relationship.Every thought she has of her husband is dominated by this sense that he is less than thoughtful. One day, she's talking with her friend, George, who's having problems with his wife. He makes similar complaints about his wife, and now Carol and George have something in common.

Suddenly George starts being super-thoughtful to Carol. He calls her at the office to see how she's doing, he sends her flowers to let her know he's thinking of her, he even stops by at lunch to pick her up from work every once in a while.

Eventually, they have an affair. All Carol can see is that her husband has been completely thoughtless, and George is a super thoughtful guy. Her husband is the demon, and George is wearing a halo. When Carol's husband finds out about the affair, his self-esteem is destroyed. Not only did his wife cheat on him, but he's being forced to compete with someone who seems like the perfect man. How could he possibly match up?

You may find yourself in a similar situation right now. Perhaps you feel you are being forced to compete with a fantasy personality: Someone who doesn't have to share finances, responsibilities, children, in-laws, laundry, carpools, and house chores; and who therefore has the time to just focus on your spouse in a "wonderful" way. As a result you just don't feel like you're good enough to match up. Hence your sense of self-worth is damaged that much further.

If this is the case for you, let me remind you of something: No one wears a halo. No one is a perfect person. The fantasy that your spouse has built up around his or her paramour is just that—a fantasy. Let's look a little further at Carol's situation above to clarify this truth.

In the example with Carol, she doesn't even know George. She might feel as if she knows him better than she has ever known anyone in her life. However, she's never had to live with him. He might be a complete mess in other parts of his personality. Maybe he has an explosive temper that won't show up early in the affair. Maybe he's demeaning and unreasonable. In fact he may be anything at all. Carol doesn't really know.

What she does know is that he's thoughtful to her, and that's the one thing she's been missing in her husband. So she puts a halo on George and assumes that this thoughtfulness is a reflection of every part of his personality.

She starts thinking of him as a wonderful man. She imagines him to be kind, thoughtful, gentle, attentive, and so on. But of course he may not be all those things. He may not be any of them if she were the one living with him. She's living a fantasy.

What's more, she's never had to handle real life with George. She's never had to handle bills, children, or in-laws. She's never had to go with him to social engagements. She's never had to deal with all of the things that go along with making a marriage work. Which only makes it that much easier for her to make George into her dream man. She's having a relationship with a fantasy. In reality she has no idea who George is. In truth he almost certainly doesn't wear the halo she has put on him in real life. No one does.

This whole process is sometimes taken a step further by the cheater. The cheating spouse may rewrite history to match the demonized image she now has of her spouse. This process is so subtle that the cheating spouse won't even know she's doing it and will believe with strong conviction that her memories are the correct ones. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.

For example, Carol might focus exclusively on the times her husband wasn't thoughtful and "forget" the times that he was. She blots out parts of her recollection of the past, hence changing her perception of their history together.

Another example is a cheating spouse who says something like, "I never loved you. Even on the day of our marriage I remember telling myself this was what I had to do out of a sense of duty. I was afraid you would fall apart if I left."

When you hear things like this, you can be almost certain your spouse is rewriting the past. Statements like these are unlikely to be true memories.

The problem is that the injured spouse often buys into this demonized vision of herself. She starts to accept the cheater's rewritten version of history. As a consequence, she suffers a terrible blow to her sense of self worth.

In some cases, the cheater never even says these things to the injured spouse. The injured person just takes on this terrible mantle on her own, assuming that she must be a horrible person for her spouse to have cheated in the first place.

The irony is that it has nothing to do with the injured person whatsoever! You're competing with a fantasy. And no one can compete with a fantasy. None of us is perfect. We're all real people with real flaws.

What you need to do is keep in mind that the cheater is demonizing you. Your spouse is living in a fantasy world and may very well be rewriting history to match that fantasy.

Don't take on the burden of an affair that isn't your fault. Instead, I recommend you remind yourself of these three truths when you are struggling with feelings of worthlessness after you learn about an affair:

1. Your spouse cheated based on a character flaw. It is the cheater's responsibility that the affair happened.

2. Your spouse may be rewriting history based on his or her need to justify his or her position regarding you and your marriage.

3. Your spouse has an investment in putting a halo around his or her paramour while demonizing you.

If you keep these three things in mind, it will help you realize that the affair isn't about you, that it isn't your fault it happened, that you aren't a horrible person, and that you don't have to suffer with feelings of worthlessness after an affair.