Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

Sometimes, I hear from women who are many months (or even years) post-affair. They’ve had ample time to process and then heal, but many have not. They find themselves still overwhelmingly angry, and they aren’t sure why. It can be very frustrating to carry around negative feelings when you should be moving on by now.

Someone might say, “It’s been eight months since my husband’s affair. And I’m just as angry today as I was the first day that I found out. I don’t understand this. I’m not an angry person. And my husband has done everything I’ve asked. I believe that he has regret, and I want to believe that he will not cheat again. Still, I find myself unexpectedly lashing out at him. Sometimes, my anger seems to come out of nowhere, and it shocks us both. Worse, when it comes, it just has to run its course. I can’t seem to control it. I will usually take a walk or exercise until I calm down. But I am tired of being angry all of the time. I want to let it go, and I don’t understand why I can’t. I can’t pinpoint what I’m so angry about because my husband has made every attempt to fix things. How can I get to the bottom of what is causing my anger so that I can address it?”

Please don’t beat yourself up about this. It’s normal to feel anger for quite a while. But that doesn’t mean that you have to suffer endlessly. In the meantime, here are some exercises that can be beneficial for uncovering surprising causes for your anger.

The Purpose of These Exercises: The exercises I’m going to list below are free association. Please hear me out. Free association can be helpful because it allows you to turn off your rational mind. If you look at the wife’s statement above, you’ll see that she repeatedly looks for rational reasons why she shouldn’t be angry – her husband is remorseful and has done everything she’s asked. Yet, anger is not a rational emotion. So, sometimes we have to turn off logic to understand it. These exercises are meant to do just that.

Clustering: I will tell you from the beginning that you might feel as if you are in grade school while doing this exercise. Do it anyway. I know that this exercise seems ridiculously simple, but it often yields profound results. Start with a blank sheet of paper. In the center, write the word “anger” and circle it. Then write down the first word that comes to your mind when you think of “anger.” Place that new word underneath “anger,” circle it, and draw a line connecting the two words. Let’s pretend the second word is “rage.” Now, write the next word that comes to mind after “rage.” That word might be “lies.” Connect rage and lies with a line. After “lies,” you might get “secrets.” Then you might get “sex.”

Keep doing this until you literally can’t write any more words because you cannot think of anything else. At this point, you will have a long list of words. Get out another sheet of paper and make a list of all the words inside of the clusters. So, in the above example, you’d have a list that says, anger, rage, lies, secrets, sex, etc.

Look at the list and circle the words which elicit the strongest reaction. If all of them affect you, circle them all. After this exercise, you should have a pretty good idea about the sources of your anger.

Now, get out a third sheet of paper and cluster the phrase “let go.” Circle it. Use the same steps as above. “Let go” might lead to “release,” which might lead to “forgiveness,” which might lead to “trust,” which might lead to “intimacy,” and then to “talking,” and so forth. Obviously, the words that come to your mind may be very different than the examples I’ve given. This exercise is unique to each person.

Once you are done clustering, make a list of the words you’ve used, as you did with “anger.” Circle the words which give you the most relief from your anger when you look at them. Use this list as a road map for activities that might allow you to release your anger. For example, if you’ve circled “trust” and “talking,” then perhaps you might start having vulnerable conversations with your spouse to help you restore the trust.

Being Made Whole: From my own experience, I believe that some anger stems from the shadow belief that we have not yet been made whole again. We often don’t understand this, especially when our husband has done everything that we have asked. Still, we can’t openly trust anymore. We walk around with dread and doubts. The pain of the affair has left scars. Make no mistake, our life has changed. We can’t unsee what we have seen. And we resent these drastic changes.

So one way to counter this resentment is to make your life rival what it looked like pre-affair. No, you can’t turn back time. You can’t pretend the affair didn’t happen. But you can rebuild your marriage if that is what you want. You can restore your self-confidence. You can re-forge the vulnerability and intimacy so that eventually, you don’t feel as if you have lost something that you can never get back. That is where my anger stemmed from – the loss of the life I had pre-affair. So I had to forge a comparable life post-affair. (You can read about how I did that at http://surviving-the-affair.com)

There are no short cuts to this process. It takes time, patience, determination, and effort. However, putting in the effort is better than continuing to be resentful. Managing constant anger is exhausting. Try clustering. You may be surprised to find a contributing factor that you never suspected. Once you do, relentlessly address it.

Repeat the clustering exercise every couple of weeks. You should have fewer words each time. This allows you to track your progress, determine which issues you still need to tackle, and alerts you when any new sources of anger crop up. Keep doing this, and one day you may feel much less angry.

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