Infidelity Pain: Controlling Your Feelings Amidst an Affair Crisis

It’s never easy to control your feelings of infidelity pain when you discover that your partner is, or was, involved in an extramarital affair. Most of the time, you feel out of control and all over the place, and you never really know what you’re going to feel the next minute. This is one of the techniques that could help you in controlling your feelings.

First, get a timer of some kind, a notebook and a pen, and whenever you start having intense feelings or thoughts about your situation, find a quiet place where you can be alone. Next, set the timer for two minutes. In those two minutes, write down everything you are feeling and thinking. Don’t leave anything out. Let it all come out of you. When you feel pain or any kind of emotion, write it down – how painful it is, where it hurts and what triggers the pain. Don’t worry about the things you write. Just write all of it down. It is up to you what you do with what you wrote. You can shred it, burn it or throw it away. You decide.

When the two minutes are done, set aside the pen and notebook and say to yourself, “Alright, its time to set aside any feelings and thoughts for now, and focus on other responsibilities. There will be time for you later.” Whenever you start feeling this way again, repeat the whole process.

Although this technique may not be for you, or if you see that it isn’t something you see yourself doing or you aren’t comfortable doing it, you don’t have to worry. It is perfectly okay and is nothing to fret about. There are plenty of other techniques that you find from different books or other relationship blogs that you can try. Just because this particular exercise doesn’t work well for you like it does for others, it doesn’t mean that every exercise won’t work. Be patient in trying to look for a technique that works, or better yet, you can develop one yourself.

 

Healing From Infidelity: How to Deal With Someone Going Through an Affair Crisis

What can you do to help someone who is the middle of an affair crisis? The following are a few things that are from people who have gone through this experience, and may help you help someone going through an affair crisis:

1. I’d really like to be able to talk about what I’m feeling openly and without censor. I’d like to be able to say how overwhelming my pain or my guilt is, to talk about what I’m going through, because I don’t want to keep things bottled up inside me.

2. I want to be left alone to go through what’s happened and process things by myself. I don’t want people pestering me about what I should do or how I should handle things. I want to be able to make decisions by myself without feeling that I have to do oblige what other people think I should do.

3. If you’re going to ask me how I am, I want to be able to answer it truthfully. I don’t want to be asked that in passing, when I can’t say how I really am doing. I want to be able to have time to mull it over so I can say how I really am.

4. I want to be understood. I want people to accept that I’m unsure of what to do and what I want to do, of how I feel and what I want to happen. I want you to be able to just be there for me even if I don’t make any sense.

5. And most importantly, I want to know that I am okay. I want to be accepted and validated by the people around me.

More Comments on Healing from Infidelity

Here are some more comments by readers who found Break Free From the Affair to help them on their healing journey:

>>>>It made me feel less alone and less ashamed that I had somehow failed to meet my husband’s needs. He told me I “drove” him to it but I now also know that I didn’t and it was not my fault that he chose to go outside of our marriage to resolve whatever issues that bothered him. I also now know that his excuse was an afterthought to justify his action.

>>>>It let me know that I am alone and that I should not blame myself. That there are definite patterns and profiles to affairs and that the route I was taking was one of the least success when wanting to repair a relationship. It gave me advice and confidence in following thhrough with the suggestions.

>>>>I decided to start talking to him again. I had reached a point where I was so afraid to say the “wrong” thing that I had distanced to a dangerous point. He had visited an attorney, to get “some information”, so he could “move forward”. I was afraid to DO anything, but I had reached the point where I was more afraid NOT to. Your materials, coupled with my faith in God, have helped calm my fears. I do not believe that the “issues” lie primarily with me (I am not without issues, but I was actively improving myself PRIOR to the affair onset, and was in a fantastic place at the time it began. I was actually working to heal the issues of concern between us), but this gave me the courage to resume showing myself to him, revealing to him who I am and where I stand. I had ceased to do so also because I felt that he (my husband, who was historically such a private person) had become an informational pipeline to his “emotional affair” counterpart, and I did not want MY heart & soul revealed to HER, particularly if we do not reconcile. However, I have decided that I must be fearless…I believe in my faith, my vows, my marriage…I have to do this.

>>>>Situation is not quite like any of below. H has indicated that he wants divorce but despite months of saying that, has not yet moved forward (who knows, this could be it). Is in relationship that is now going on 9 months of living together. I am not going to resist if he files. Helped me calm down and recognize that I cannot get caught up in this drama. Helped with some actual verbiage in conversations w/H. I have, however, resisted discussing the situation w/him. Gave some hope (though that hope is waning).

>>>>Because of your advice to “charge neutral”, I was able to control my emotion when I was talking to my husband this afternoon. He told me things that answered some of my questions though I still have some doubts.