In the mid-90’s psychologist Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D., along with husband Michael Spring, wrote what may be the best book for couples, gay and straight, trying to recover from one partner’s affair. After the Affair: Healing the Painand Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful now has a revised edition, with a new section regarding cyber-affairs.
A review of After the Affair by Samantha Smithstein, another psychologist, names the three stages of recovery outlined in this book:
- Reacting to the Affair
- Deciding Whether or Recommit or Quit
- Rebuilding Your Relationship
What about the issue of whether or not to confess an affair to begin with? From an interview with Spring in the New York Times:
Some experts say you absolutely must reveal it in order to rebuild your relationship. When you reveal your affair, it deconstructs your relationship and allows for a new level of honesty.
Other experts say you absolutely must not reveal it. When you do, you destroy the spirit of the hurt partner. They never recover. Keep it to yourself.
I have found that people go on to build better bonds, better marriages, after telling and after not telling. What is essential is to understand the meaning of the affair, why they had the affair and to address those issues.
One of the dangers of not telling is that people give up the lover, return to the marriage, but they never face the problem and so they live in a prison. They come back to something stale or damaged and they never work to reinvent their relationship. That’s not good for anyone.
Let’s say confession has occurred, recovery has begun, but forgiveness is a sticking point. If so, she has another excellent resource, How Can I Forgive You?: The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To (2004). Like After the Affair, this book presents original ideas that came from her many years of clinical experience.
Not for issues of infidelity only, this book advises that you may or may not decide forgiveness is the choice for you.
As stated in the book description, Spring “…proposes a radical, life-affirming alternative that lets us overcome the corrosive effects of hate and get on with our lives—without forgiving. She also offers a powerful and unconventional model for genuine forgiveness—one that asks as much of the offender as it does of us.”
Selected Quotes from After the Affair
Love is not static. We grow dissatisfied and move apart; affection returns and we pull together again. Some people, ignorant of the process, pull away when the good times end and assume the bad times will last forever. These people flee, mope, or drift into affairs. Others see the ups and downs as part of a dynamic process, which, when anticipated and understood, can enrich and revitalize their relationship, even give it an added punch.
What I need you to tell me is, ‘I’m not sure, but I turn down temptations every day. I eat salads when I crave hot fudge sundaes, I force myself to go to the health club when I’m feeling dead tired, I discipline myself in a hundred ways to keep myself healthy, and I can do the same for us.’ If you’re so unsure about controlling your impulses, why should I believe you won’t cheat on me again?
This doesn’t mean that you have to feel certain about your future together, only that you must behave as if you feel certain, while you work on changing the ways you perceive and treat each other. Put your negative feelings aside, commit to each other, demonstrate your commitment by engaging in the trust- and intimacy-building strategies, and then, and only then, see whether you feel more loving, and more loved. If you wait to feel more positive before you act more positively, your relationship won’t last the course.