How do you go on after an affair. Does it get any easier to work thru something so painful. I love my husband and we are going to work thru it,but I honestly don't think I will ever trust him again.

Thanks

This is the hardest thing you may ever do (I sure hope i never have to do anything more painful than this!), but even rebuilding trust is possible. It takes time.

The best resources I have found to help with recovery are in the link in my signature line. I will add another post about rebuilding trust when I switch computers later.

myheart -

Welcome to marriagebuilders. It is a great place to be under the circumstances. Please give us more information, how long the affair went, how you found out, whether your husband has no contact with the other woman, how long you have been married, what your marriage was like before this happened.

You won't believe it now, but your marriage can be better than it was before. Many, many people here have better marriages after the affair.

You are right, it will take a long time to trust your husband again. He has to earn that trust. That takes time. So fasten your seatbelt and join us for the ride of your life. Keep reading and posting here and we will help you.

An excerpt from a previous post that I hope you will find helpful: </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">…I knew that people who get divorced once are likely to get divorced again, and usually for the same reasons, and I did not want to find myself in the same place some years down the road. But, I was not sure I could overcome the pain, I had no idea how to re-establish trust, I frankly didn’t know if I could forgive her, and I had no desire at all to go back to the way things were, because frankly they were pretty miserable (even pre-A) for me

So, the first thing I did was go to God and repent of a couple of habitual “minor” (in my eyes) sins, so there would be nothing between God and I that would get in the way of our communication. I spent many hours in prayer asking God to show me my sin. I think at some level I thought the A was my fault. While I no longer think that, that time of humbling myself before God was really crucial to our recovery. Because, I HAD sinned, and had gotten so distant from God that I was unaware of many of my sins, so He did show me. As I agonized over what my wife did to me, it became clear that I had done almost identical things to God. That helped keep me from self-righteousness and arrogance which are poison to any recovery. Also, if I expected Him to forgive me, I had to forgive her. That got me a long way down the forgiveness road, but forgiveness and reconciliation are two separate things. The pain and trust issues remained barriers to reconciliation. It turns out the pain fades with time, if the actions that produced it are not repeated. That leaves trust, and trusting that the actions will not be repeated, as the sole barrier to reconciliation.

As far as I can discern there is really only one approach to re-establishing trust, and a couple of well-established ways to get there. In both cases, the bottom line is: believe their actions, not their words, at least until you have seen a consistent pattern of their words and actions being aligned for a period of many months. That necessarily means you have to be more involved in their lives so that you have the ability to verify that their actions and words are cohesive.

The path to get there, according to Willard Harley, is to have no secrets from each other, and to use the Policy of Joint Agreement (POJA) in all your decisions. Once you see your spouse consistently use the POJA, and the two of you have learned to understand each other and communicate with each other well enough to implement it, you will trust them when they are out of sight, too. Perhaps ironically, one thing that will convince you of your spouse's honesty is if they tell you things they know will hurt, instead of lying or keeping silent to "protect" you. So this process will likely not be painless, especially since, if you are like most couples, it will require learning a new way to communicate. Change is hard.

A second path, promoted by Carder in “Torn Asunder” (and the younger Harleys, too, I think), is for the WS to really dig in to the "WHY?" of the affair, and in gaining that self-understanding, communicate to you both why it happened, and how they will change their behavior in ways that you can verify and that will prevent them from having another.

Of course, these two paths are not mutually exclusive. I view them as complementary, and think “Surviving an Affair”, by Harley is extremely helpful in figuring out important parts of the why, at least as far as the answer involves unmet Emotional Needs, and it almost always does, especially for a woman who has an affair.

The fallacy is the belief that unmet EN’s “cause” affairs. If that was the case, I would have had the affair, not my wife, because my EN’s were less well met in our marriage than hers.

Unmet EN's do not cause affairs, they cause lousy marriages. If you read Harley thoroughly and carefully, he does not say unmet EN's cause affairs, either, though it is a so common a misconception among his readers that I would say he should do some re-writing of his material. Reading SAA, it can be easy to conclude that unmet needs are the reason for affairs. Not so. Affairs are entirely the responsibility of those involved, and the reasons vary.

Our MC worked w/ Bill Harley for 8 years, and according to him, in about 80% of MEN'S affairs unmet EN's had very little to do with it. Yes, there were usually unmet EN's in their marriages, because no marriage is perfect. But, having the wife find out about and meet his most important EN's did not stop the affairs from re-kindling or stop the husband from having another. Harley is aware of this, which is why his plan for recovery is a lot more complicated than: 1.) Take the EN questionnaire. 2.) Meet your spouse’s EN's. Our MC said that in his opinion, for that 80%, if the wife had been meeting the husband's top 5 EN's PERFECTLY, the husband still would have had the affair. If you want to learn more, read "The State of Affairs", by Todd Mulliken particularly the chapter on "The Double Life Man". Though the percentage of women who have this type of affair is small, it is not zero. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

<small>[ September 08, 2004, 08:23 PM: Message edited by: johnh39 ]</small>

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by believer:
<strong> myheart -

Welcome to marriagebuilders. It is a great place to be under the circumstances. Please give us more information, how long the affair went, how you found out, whether your husband has no contact with the other woman, how long you have been married, what your marriage was like before this happened.
You won't believe it now, but your marriage can be better than it was before. Many, many people here have better marriages after the affair.

You are right, it will take a long time to trust your husband again. He has to earn that trust. That takes time. So fasten your seatbelt and join us for the ride of your life. Keep reading and posting here and we will help you. </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I found out about my husband being unfaithful on our 8th anniversary. We were visiting our inlaws and he dissappeared. The next morning he showed up and that's when everything started sinking in.

Not only was I angry, but hurt as well. I'm thinking what in the world did I do to deserve this. I never blamed myself for his lack of morals, but it still hurt.

The following morning after the kids left for school (daughter 15 -son 11) I started packing my clothes. I wanted out. I was tired of it all, me being alone at night for the last eight years due to him working midnights has gotten old. He's a supv for Chrysler so he has always worked long hours 7 days a week which has finally taken it's toll.

It's as if we had become to settled with each other. I ended up traveling by myself or with the kids but hardly together as a couple. I found myself becoming envious of my cousins with their spouses because no matter what function they were there while husband was working. (Money isn't everything)

Well after husband saw me packing he panicked. He confessed everything about how he slept with this woman about 4 years ago and then had oral sex with her on our anniversary. This was the first time I ever slapped my husband. I literally tried to slap his eyeballs out. I was soo angry and felt betrayed.

He says they only slept together once and had oral sex 4 times. Do I believe him not really, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over him either. I love him ,but I don't love him like I use to.

He begged and pleaded with me to give us another chance. He told me how sorry he was for hurting me this way. He told me that he finally turned his life around when he went to church on Sunday and felt that the preacher was talking to him.

I know God can change anything and anyone. I know his power is awesome and I believe in him. I had to pray and ask him for guidance to show me what my path should be and to help me make the right decision.

Two weeks has passed and I do see a big change. I still fell anger sometimes, but I refuse to dwell on it because I don't want to destroy myself.
I don't blame myself nor do I hate myself because of what he did. If anything I know I deserve better and so do my our son and daughter.

Only time will tell but I'm definitely not crying over him anymore. God is my strength and thru him I know I'm going to make with or without husband.

myheart -

Well your marriage sounds very promising to me. Is there any way that your husband can change his hours at work? Being away from each other so much is deadly to a marriage.

Also print out the emotional needs questionnaire here and see if you can both start meeting each other's top needs.

Would your husband consider posting here?

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by believer:
<strong> myheart -

Well your marriage sounds very promising to me. Is there any way that your husband can change his hours at work? Being away from each other so much is deadly to a marriage.

Also print out the emotional needs questionnaire here and see if you can both start meeting each other's top needs.

Would your husband consider posting here? </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">He says his hours definitely
need to change. He wants me to not give up on us so and put the 8 years behind us and start anew.

As far as posting I seriously doubt it, but anything is possible.

<small>[ September 09, 2004, 08:26 AM: Message edited by: myheartwillsurvive36 ]</small>

You can put it all behind you and start over and have a better marriage. But first there is a lot of work for you to do together. Is he willing to discuss why this happened?

You may also want to post this on general questions. There is much more traffic there and you will get more responses.