SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I read it and see it over and over. As a betrayed spouse, work on your healing, take your time to heal etc. what exactly does that mean? I’m over 2 weeks DDay and I’m reading here, journaling, praying and thinking and trying to focus on myself and of course my kids. What is real healing? And not just coping. Any insight would be appreciated.

Healing is a long process chica.

Betrayal teaches your nervous system a deep attachment wound, I saw it summarized well in this:

I am not chosen. I am not enough. I am replaceable

When you love someone and they betray you, your attachment system gets destroyed.
You blame yourself, you take responsibility of the WS choices.

But it is not the truth.

They cheated due to their weakness, a character flaw.
It is not you. You did not have a choice. You were not the cause.

And the relational shock makes you carry the blame of the cheating.

Healing means getting over it, understanding that:

- It's not your fault.
- You are worthy
- You deserve to be loved and cared as you can do

This requires steps. First you must pass the shock, anger, grief.
You must grief the present, the past and the future, because those are all gone and questioned by the betrayal.

This requires detachement, emotional regulation, focusing on your emotions and feelings repair.

Therapy helps, sharing your emotions helps a lot.

Sadly it is not a quick process, betrayal is not heartbreak, is worse, it will rewrite your system entirely, your identity gets shattered, you lose trust and hope. You have to rebuild your identity entirely.

the first step is to forgive yourself. You did not cause it, no matter what issues were there.
You need to find love for yourself and accept those emotions. Is normal what you feel, and needs to be felt, not suppressed.

Then you can detach from your WS and see them for the flawed person capable to do the most horrible choices ever, and to hurt you carelessly.

When you regain your center you will be stronger. True healing (getting over the betrayal) is likely only possible if you abandon the betrayer.
But healing is possible in any scenario, even if you decide to allow them back and R (if they work to heal their flaws) with support and therapy you will be able to heal (in this case though, the relationship will never fully heal, betrayal happened it will always taint it even if you patch it up).

That is the last step though, YOU and only you are the important piece now.
Coping will be not enough because BS have a lot of dysfunctional coping. IC and counseling can help. Write and read here can help.

Start accepting the emotions of relational shock, and understand this is not on you, even if you are the one suffering the most.

Is really fresh, it may take years to fully heal, but you can speed it up a bit with the correct approach.
Detachment from the WS is key

Backfromthestorm summed it up perfectly. It's rough, takes a very long time, and can be quite the roller-coaster.

You are in a great place for advice and support.

BFTS said it so well.

Healing is a marathon. It comes and goes like a dow jones chart. Don't deny the pain, hurt, loneliness... it's all part of healing. Also, I don't recommend doing it alone. Get professional help. DM me if you want a resource or two.

2 weeks is still like yesterday in terms of the trauma and healing goes. When I joined these forums I was 4 weeks out from discovery and was told that's still very fresh. I'm at almost ten months now and it's still very painful, but has subsided some. Healing from betrayal is not a linear process. It doesn't happen at a steady pace or in a straight line. There will be triggers and ups and downs, and that's if your WS does the work and tries to do everything right.

Has your husband cut all communications and ties with his AP? Is he showing true remorse and repentance? Like I said, 2 weeks is still very fresh and very early. It's not uncommon for a WS to drag their feet and struggle to cut it off with their AP and start showing true remorse, sometimes months, but it can happen. It took my wife a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to fully come to her senses, but she's an outlier and I still struggled pretty greatly for several months. I'm still not what anyone would consider "over it" ten months later, but I do believe healing has begun. Mostly because she's really putting in the work, but I'm discovering that's not the norm in most situations. 2 to 5 years seems to be the average time frame to recover, and reconciliation can be a lifetime work in progress.

Do you feel like you have the whole truth? Healing can't really begin until you do, or at least enough of it that you feel like you do. Quite often what we discover is just the tip of the iceberg. There will likely always be some question marks and a desire to understand why. That understanding may never come, but you can learn to accept it happened and work to understand it, but it requires the whole truth, talking about it, and genuine effort from your WS to make amends, and demonstrate they can be a safe partner again.

Betrayals like this are traumatic. PTSD symptoms are common. Individual therapy is often recommended. Trauma therapy for the BS and therapy for the WS to dig into what was broken inside of them that caused them to inflict the greatest damage one can inflict on a relationship.

So sorry you've found yourself back here. Hang in there, it does get better, but it's going to take time. Take care of yourself. Make sure you're getting enough to eat and try tomget enough sleep. It's bad enough dealing with this when your strength is up, let alone weakened by lack of sleep and nutrition.

Are you still set on D? (I sort of hope so. I guess R may still be possible, but 2 weeks is way too little time for your H to become a good candidate for R.)

IMO, healing for the BS is processing the anger, grief, fear, shame, and anything else that bothers you out of your body. Part of that is sharing, but much of it, IMO, is actually feeling the feelings, letting the feelings flow through and out of your body.

One of the key indicators of the healing process may be the ease with which one can feel the feelings - the easier, the better for healing. Feelings that are allowed to flow are gone; they don't come back. But the feelings are immense, so they have to flow a LOT to be gone. One probably will think the feelings will never end. My reco is to keep going; you will eventually get to the effective end.

One of the key indicators of being healed probably is NOT ruminating about the A. It may be that the less rumination, the more healed one is. Feelings translate to thoughts. The more feelings are processed out of one's body, the fewer thoughts will draw energy.

Alas, the above is metaphorical. It helps some, but some people need a different ay of thinking....

Healing is not:

- a return to normalcy
- getting back to where you were before
- getting to a place where everything is forgiven and forgotten
- feeling good about everything
- being okay with what happened to you
- getting "over it" (whatever the hell that even means)
- resilience
- happiness

Healing is:

- integrating and accepting (not approving, but accepting) that this happened to you and is a brutally unpleasant part of your story
- coming to terms with the painful past insofar as it doesn't cause you any further or ongoing hurt
- learning to navigate and function in the new emotional and physical landscape
- coming to terms with the new person this has beaten you into
- acquisition and usage of new internal and external skills to handle yourself and your environment
- the ability to regrow yourself
- emotional intelligence and competence (whatever those emotions happen to be)

Healing is a journey. It is re-regulating your nervous system so the reminders and memories no longer incapacitate us. It’s accepting what happened and integrating it into your narrative of your life without letting it define your narrative. It’s reorganizing the memories, accepting times we chose not to see what was in front of us or where we allowed our partners to get away with treatment that was not okay, and it is forgiving ourselves for that. It’s seeing our partners for who they REALLY are and not the fantasy we have built them up to be. It’s being able to re-open your heart and being vulnerable again, despite knowing what can happen.

It takes effort and time. Most say 1-2 years, but it is not linear and you will get a little tiny bit better every day.

Like recovering from a physical injury, you may need exercises and therapies or medication and lots of time to achieve this. You may have to repeat the same steps and pain many times as your work through the trauma. You can’t heal a broken bone faster, and same with this. And you may have a scar or limp ultimately, but you WILL recover and thrive in your next chapter.

What isn’t healing? Burying your head in the sand, sweeping things under the rug, stuffing your emotions down and not processing them, accepting less than what you want.

[This message edited by BearlyBreathing at 1:48 AM, Sunday, February 15th]

I came to this conclusion after several years of mulling through it:

You will never forget what your WS did to you. The memory is initially a heavy burden to bare. Reconciliation is about building your capacity to carry the burden. Finding a good IC can help you. You must gather new information, consider it, confirm it, and then become a believer in new ideas that help you. It's building your mind, heart, and gut in unison, your logic, resistance, and wisdom. It's building a new collective strength derived from inside. The goal is to reduce strain and anxiety.

Healing from emotional and psychological trauma isn't that much different than healing from a physical trauma. Your tend to the wound and in time your body does the rest.

I've had a few physical traumas in my life.

I severely damaged my left wrist one day while rollerblading. Six weeks in a cast and several weeks of physical therapy to rebuild the muscles. I have limited mobility in that wrist now, about 70% movement ranged. I can't hit a baseball or swing a golf club anymore. Surgery could repair the damage, but I declined.

I tore my rotator cuff, which required several months of physical therapy, meeting twice a week with a physical therapist and doing a series of physical exercises twice a day.

A few other broken bones, cuts and burns (restaurant work). Most of it healed well enough with care and attention.

Betrayal trauma isn't much different. You care for the wounds, therapy helps, mindfulness helps, as does talking about it with friends or family, here on SI, or journalling. It takes time and effort, focusing on the process.

Healing is a choice.

[This message edited by Unhinged at 5:56 PM, Saturday, February 14th]

What is real healing?

For me, it is a very individual thing, but is basically the path you take and the choices you make processing the pain on your way back to as much peace and stability as is possible.

Next question I see a lot is what is processing the pain?

Infidelity IS trauma.

Your reality is not what you experienced - the safe space of a couple has been invaded by someone else.

As my MC put it (and he was a BS as well), it is the emotional equivalent of being hit by a bus. Just like the physical injuries, it takes a great deal of time to heal emotional injuries too.

So step one to me is be kind to you. Eat, sleep, stay hydrated and don’t be angry at yourself for "not getting over it."

Give yourself time.

When I was told it take 2-5 years to emotionally bounce back from this, I was horrified.

I didn’t think I could do the time, or invest enough time and energy in myself to heal.

I took walks, I focused on the things in life that made me….me. My family, music, reading….I went to comedy shows, learned how to laugh again, etc.

My healing was a full reset and focus on myself and discovering what it is I really wanted from life, not just any relationship.

The answers to your question are quite good!

I recently asked something similar. Here's that thread:

https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums/?tid=666548&HL=85259

What is healing?

Good question.

First of all, I dont think complete healing ever comes. I no longer look for absolute, but rather majorative healing. Even now, many decades later and in a second and wonderful new marriage, the ache of those horrid memories remain.

That said, upon reflection, I can say that I realized majorative healing more by the diminishing of certain realities experienced in the aftermath of my first wifes treason with my "best friend". These include, but are not limited to:

1. Disorientation. A wild, incredibly strong sense of disorientation. Like an intense emotional equivalent of an inner issue producing acute mental/emotional vertigo. When I walked out the door in the morning to go to work, it felt like walking into a hall of mirrors, like my world had been knocked off its axis.

2. Emotional numbness intermixed with incredibly strong rage. Maybe the strength of tbe rage burned out my ability to feel any emotions other than sorrow. Rage and sorrow, sorrow and rage, back and forth....for a long time. It was exhausting, which bring me to.....

3. Extreme fatigue. Like a battery that could not take a complete charge. Like walking through sand. Like a weariness that no amount of rest or sleep could diminish.

4. A long period of feeling nothing at all. No rage, no sorrow, no tears, no joy, no laughter, nothing. I was a straw man. A sleep walker. Moving through the "musts" of my life in a state of rote behavior. Pure habit.

5. Vindictiveness. When I interacted with my first wife (cut my former "friend" off completely) I was pretty cutting with my words. I was petty. Unkind to say the least. I became someone I did not recognize, at lesst toward her. At most, I tolerated her. She was not much better toward me. Belligerent. Entitled. Defensive. It was toxic.

These are a few oof the realities I experienced.

On to the healing journey...

When I could:

• Walk out the door feeling somewhat centered & grounded,

• Start feeling healthy emotions including and most importantly joy and could laugh again

• Experience more vitality and energy to face the day

• Think of my then wife with a lessening vindictive reaction (not gone, but much diminished).

• Go through entire days without feeling rage and/or sorrow

• Experience and revel in new love

I knew I was on the path of healing. That what had been blown up was being restored/rebuilt.

To me, healing is not a destination but a life long journey. It is expressed best in the perfect tense. I was healing, I am healing, I will be healing.

Just my take.

Hope it helps.

Healing for me looked like getting into individual therapy and finding a therapist I truly connected with. From there I would go once a week. Each session my therapist made it an absolute that we would focus on me. If she asked me a question and I got off track talking about my exWS she would circle it back to me by saying, "we got onto talking about exWS because I asked you ___. Let’s go back." In my sessions we built safety and I had to actively choose to allow myself to go where my therapist was guiding me.

When I would leave the sessions, I used to feel all of the trauma pain. Infidelity to me felt like it took all of my past trauma, added new trauma, and then without my consent — it blew all of that up in my face and now I had to figure out how to untangle it and try to move through it one bit at a time. My first response to those intense emotions was to self sabotage. I tried numbing out as much as I could, even developing new (destructive) strategies to try to get rid of the pain.

I remember reading something that talked about how after infidelity you will go through the stages of grief. I then remembered what people say on here — that it takes two to five years to heal. Knowing that allowed for me to let myself have the emotions without trying to rush or stuff them. Pairing the time it takes to heal with the stages of grief, I then started to name and label which stage I was feeling in that moment. I remember making an active choice to choose to allow the emotions to be felt. I was at a crossroads where I saw that I was losing myself to the self destructive coping mechanisms, and I thought to myself, "you’re becoming everything you hate. You can keep going down this path and continue to lose yourself, or you can go through the pain and come out of the other side with yourself in tact and probably stronger and wiser than before."

I made the active choice to start to feel the emotions and to not choose the self destructive behaviors anymore. I tackled each self destructive behavior one at a time, taking on the newer ones first and then eventually getting to the bigger ones. To give an idea of what this looked like, my self destructive behaviors included numbing the pain with alcohol, dating with the intention of trying to find meaningless sex for a revenge affair, I started smoking cigarettes, I started cutting, and I became extremely physically violent towards my ex WS and the stupid AP.

So I started with the dating, I realized that if I went through with a revenge affair and had meaningless sex — I would feel disgusted with myself afterwards. Do I really deserve to feel disgusted with myself on top of all of the pain I’m in? No. And so every time I got the urge to try to go through with this, I had to remind myself that I was hurting and I didn’t deserve to make that worse by adding disgust. Having those moments of pause, and acknowledging myself and my hurt and not going through with another swipe or another chat or another date, allowed for me to feel emotions that I needed to process. Eventually the urge to go through with this lessened and then disappeared and I moved on to the next self destructive behavior.

The hardest one to stop for me was alcohol. I saved that for last. I didn’t ever go cold turkey, instead what I did was I told myself I could still have a drink, but I needed to know what was coming up for me before I reached for the drink. So I would challenge myself to sit with the emotions just for a while, try to label them and understand them, feel them, and then after a bit I would grab a drink. I would try to sit with the emotions longer, and longer and longer before I would reach for the wine. Eventually after about two years or so — I stopped reaching for the wine.

Healing took a lot of removal of the maladaptive coping strategies so that I could actually feel the emotions and once felt, go through labeling, seeing if anything else from my past was coming up in addition to the present, processing it by letting the memories play, letting the emotion be felt, and trying to show myself compassion in those moments, journaling, or trying to show up for myself by being the parent I needed but never had for those times that the childhood traumas would play out. I would discuss these each with my therapist weekly and she would show me different things I could do, and help me label them when I got stuck, and help me access areas that I felt but would automatically shift away from.

Healing felt like layers to an onion. We would tackle the outer layers and then keep going to the deeper layers. Each time I would feel better and stronger and more ready to tackle the next thing. I’m still in therapy now, 8 years later. I don’t feel the pain of infidelity anymore. I recovered from it fully I would say about two and a half to three years after? I stay in therapy because I love it. I had so so so many traumas in my past and I feel like therapy has helped me rebuild my sense of self and helped me learn boundaries, and helped me to not carry the heavy weights of the traumas i experienced.

Something my therapist told me early on was that as I focused on myself, all of my relationships would change and look closer to what I wanted them to be. I thought that was crazy! How is it that changing me changes every relationship I have? But, it’s so true. My friendships are deeper, more authentic, my family relationships have the necessary boundaries in place, my work life has changed for the better because I was able to push myself to do the uncomfortable things, my love life is better because I no longer look for the old definitions of love that I had prior to healing. I’m still growing of course, but I’ve come a long way and I’m so much happier than I was before infidelity. I feel like my life view changed and expanded. And I have a joy now that I never could access even before infidelity. As hard as it was to have this happen and to have the traumas blow up in my face the way that they did — I don’t know that I would have ever stopped carrying them otherwise. I used this as a starting point to face each thing and now I’m so much better.

I know this was lengthy. If you’ve come this far, thank you for reading. I wanted to be as descriptive as possible to really answer this question. I hope this helped.