Can Relationships Work After Cheating?
Yes. Affair recovery focuses on rebuilding trust. It’s important that the person who cheated be willing to be honest about what happened, be transparent with passwords and locations, and be willing to answer questions and help their partner deal with triggers that occur along the way. It can take a long time to recover and be complicated.
Some of the factors that influence affair recovery include:
Transparency
The person who cheated may also have trouble being honest about what happened. They may feel fear, guilt, and shame. They may fear upsetting their partner even more, or feel punished by having to be so transparent. Providing transparency in communications or relationships with others, and providing constant updates on their whereabouts leave many people feeling trapped or controlled. If they were already feeling trapped or controlled before the affair, this complicates matters.
Duration
For affairs that last a long time, a second relationship is formed. That relationship must be grieved and ended. This can be very complicated and often involves a series of lies and betrayals before it is resolved. The longer the length of time someone spends in an affair is an indicator of the complexity involved in exiting.
Intensity
If we are dealing with a one-night stand, or other short-term betrayal, recovery can occur more quickly. If the relationship investment is emotional, psychological, and physical, affair recovery takes longer.
Underlying factors that led to betrayal
Affairs are symptoms of larger issues either within a person or between people. Usually both. If you’re not getting your needs met and unable to be genuine about that or are being genuine but going unheard, relationships become vulnerable to affairs.
Relationships are also vulnerable to affairs when there are a lot of stressor stacked upon one another: death/loss, job loss or transition, illness, stressors created during the pandemic, relocation, etc. When multiple-stressors accumulate, relationships become vulnerable and sometimes people slip into coping in unproductive ways.
Unmet needs
The degree of unmet needs in a relationship influences feelings of resentment and withdrawal. The more you experience either, the harder it is to switch the emotional system back on and re-engage. It’s possible, it just takes a lot of time and work by both partners.
Additionally, one person usually feels blind sighted by the disclosure of those unmet needs. Either they were not being expressed or they were, but one person couldn’t hear the other. This is tricky because each person feels violated and the partner who experiences the betrayal can start to feel blamed if we focus too much on their role in unmet needs in the early stages of affair recovery.
Resilience
Some people are very willing to forgive. Others disintegrate into anger, rage, and despair when betrayed. It ranges. Resilience is key in affair recovery. People often surprise themselves by how willing they are to work things out after their darkest fears are realized.
Emotional Reactivity
Some people focus on understanding, restorative justice, forgiveness, and healing. Others focus on how “evil” the betrayer has been and struggle to see them as humans who make mistakes.
Intent
Lots of people with otherwise intact integrity have affairs. So do manipulators. When empathic people have affairs, they feel very guilty, remorseful, and want to make things better. They often are riddled with shame and anxiety. They feel torn about what they want, what to do, and awful about the impact on their partners. Sometimes it’s very hard to face that shame which can complicate recovery but is a normal part of working through the pain.
Manipulators intentions are different. Manipulators seek power over others by doing what works for them, often without regard for their partner or the affair partner. They rank low on empathy and remorse. Often, they double down on their justifications for the affair or are repeat offenders. These relationships are very complicated and take a long time to recover. They are only recoverable if the manipulation stops, and the betrayer shows radical ownership for their behavior. Trust must be rebuilt and takes a long time.
An affair is a sideways solution to a bigger problem or set of problems.
It’s an attempt to assuage pain without making a concrete decision. Often this indecisiveness is rooted in fear. Those fears need to be faced to recover and decide about the viability of the relationship.
Affairs are common and you can recover from them.
It takes work. As in most things in life, the longer it takes to get into a problem, the longer it takes to get out of it. Affair recovery is a delicate process. It involves an adequate amount of empathy, compassion, safety, and honesty by both partners and the therapist.
Many people wait years before getting help. Others seek help right after discovering an affair. Wherever you are in your struggle, therapy for affair recovery can help. There are some “Do’s and Don’ts” in recovery that are important to know and work through successfully.
As a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, I’ve worked with affairs my entire career. They are painful and require special knowledge of affairs for recovery to be helpful. If you’re hurting, facing betrayal, have committed one, or need help recovering from the long-term impact, let’s talk.
