Handling Your Emotions When the Infidelity Is Revealed

When your marriage encounters infidelity, emotional stress causes you to react irrationally and leaves you psychologically lost as to how to handle the situation. These are normal reactions to this personal crisis in your life. There are only a few events in a normal life that equal this intensity of being emotional. Infidelity leaves you in a condition, and frame of mind, that is equivalent to a death of a loved one. Shocked and wondering what to do now.

Once you get past the initial distress of finding out about the unfaithfulness in your relationship, you need to be able to emotionally and mentally regain your composer to survive this calamity.

Initially, you must learn to remove yourself from the passion of the event. You do this by gathering your reason and rationally approaching the problem. You must recognize that your spouse’s indiscretion is not your fault.

Don’t focus on what caused them to stray, or what you may have done differently to have prevented the affair. What has happened is done. You don’t do yourself any good in wasting your energy on what ifs. Instead, center your attention on what to do now.

If you haven’t figured out whether to try to work things out with your partner or to call it quits and separate from your spouse, you can’t move forward.

You need to open up a dialog with your other half to explore what is ultimately best for you.

What you need to satisfy for yourself that it’s worth working out a solution together is determining how your partner is feeling about their behavior. If they can’t admit they were wrong, or they are still justifying their actions, that isn’t a good sign for your relationship.

On the other hand, if you believe they are truly sorry for what they have done and they recognize the pain they have caused you, reconciliation is a good possibility.

However, you need to be looking more at their actions than what their saying. Not only should they be saying the right things, they should be doing the right things. For example, if your spouse says they are truly sorry for hurting you, but they haven’t severed their relations with their love interest, they aren’t truly repentant and your relationship is on shaky ground at best.

If you conclude that it’s in your best interest to separate, take action to do so. However, don’t use this as tool to force your partner to work on staying together. People generally want something they can’t have. If you use separation as a tactic to reunite, you may find yourself in the same predicament in the future, because you only received cooperation now from your other half for the wrong reasons.

If you believe that your partner is truly sorry for their actions and you trust that they’re willing to leave their past mistakes behind, and move in a positive direction in working on your marriage, then you should seriously consider giving them another chance.


Todd Hill and Phyllis Stein-Hill are marriage counselors extraordinaire. For more great information on emotional infidelity, visit their website http://www.MarriageAndInfidelitySecrets.com and subscribe to their FREE email mini course "TEN KEY SECRETS OF INFIDELITY AND YOUR MARRIAGE". Also, get Todd and Phyllis’s latest eBook "Surviving an Unfaithful Spouse" for even more valuable information.