Alcohol Abuse Advice

Coping With Infidelity and Rebuilding Your Marriage After Cheating

How do you go about coping with infidelity? Where do you start to pick up the pieces? It’s so hard just to get through the day sometimes knowing that someone you loved with your whole heart and soul has betrayed you in the worst way. You feel so devastated that at times you wonder if you can ever get past this stumbling block and move forward with the difficult work of rebuilding your marriage that the affair so devastated.

How do you move forward on the long road to healing? You cope with a cheating spouse just as you cope with any other type of crisis in your life. Coping with infidelity is a little like overcoming alcoholism or any other addiction in that you have to set a course and take it day by day. You’ll have good days and bad, but if you stick to the course, it will eventually start to get a little better and easier with time.

Learn to control your thoughts

As the affair victim you should start by rebuilding what’s inside you in order to survive. That’s easier said than done, but it is your self-esteem that will make you stand up again and move forward. Right now you may be consumed with negative thoughts about yourself, your spouse and your marriage. So you have to learn to control your own thoughts and direct them positively, tell yourself something great about you everyday, remember how you thought of yourself before the affair.

You can’t go back

You may sometimes wish you had never found out about the affair because of all the pain and hurt that you now feel. You wish it had never have happened. But you can’t go back because in some way there was something wrong with the marriage before that led to the cheating. This is not to justify the cheater’s actions, nothing can justify the affair. However, the affair presents an opportunity for you and your spouse to mend what was broken and move forward with a different outlook.

The affair is water under the bridge now, and nobody can change the past. You will always cherish certain memories of your past and mostly likely you will never forget this ugly situation. The future is what should keep you going, believing that your marriage can get better than it was and better than it has been. You do need time when coping with infidelity but you and your spouse also have to do things to make changes, time is good but if you don’t do anything time heals nothing.

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