Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Unfortunately, many wives who are trying to move on after the affair are very frustrated with the pace of their progress. Many of them worry that recovery is taking far longer than they anticipated. They sometimes think that this means that their marriage is now doomed to fail or that they can’t ever heal. Many of them don’t want to give up on their marriage, but they wonder if they even have a choice. How do you hang in there when you doubt that you are making any progress at all?

I know this topic well. My recovery took far longer than I anticipated or hoped. I have to admit that I kept going because of my children. I was only thinking of them. If they had not been part of the equation and I had been only thinking of myself, I may have struggled greatly. However, there were times where I just had to shore up my resolve and keep moving. I made the mistake of telling some acquaintances about the affair. Some of them relentlessly questioned me about why I stayed when things didn’t appear to be changing. I stayed because I didn’t want to uproot my life. I stayed because I’d invested years in my marriage. Below, I’ll go over how and why I did it.

Accept That Progress May Be Gradual Or Hard To Gauge: By nature, human beings are quite impatient. We want everything to feel normal immediately. I learned this lesson very recently when I sustained a mild brain injury that affected my concentration and my eyesight. Doctor’s instructions were to rest and to limit electronics. This was torture. Intellectually, I knew that accepting a gradual recovery helped my long-term outcome. But the days where I felt completely nonproductive were excruciatingly long.

The same can be true during affair recovery. One morning you may feel pretty hopeful. But by mid-day, you may find yourself angry or unsure for no particular reason. Or you may find yourself lashing out at your husband or other loved ones for minor infractions. Your husband may have answered all of your questions. Yet, you keep backtracking and asking again. Your husband may insist that he is committed to you, and yet you are sure that he will cheat again. He will demonstrate a desire to be intimate. But you will still question his attraction to you.

I know that these contradictions can be frustrating. But I believe that they are normal. It is rare that someone doesn’t experience at least some of them.

Find Other Ways To Make Progress: With my brain injury, I found that I did better when I looked for small signs of progress. For example, being able to read a novel was going to be out of the question for some time. I had to take that off the table. So I asked myself if I was able to read even a small amount of text on that particular day. I allowed myself to feel hope for even tiny improvements.

You can do the same sort of creative thinking with the affair. You may not have restored intimacy and trust yet. But can you sit in the same room together for longer periods of time before the fireworks begin? Did you ask your husband fewer questions that have already been answered today? Did you ruminate slightly less?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you ARE making progress and can give yourself credit for the same. If you felt that you answered no too much, then it may be time to try different approaches.

Have You Explored Every Avenue?: One effective way to move on is knowing that you have done every single thing that you can. If you still feel stuck, ask yourself if you’ve used every resource available. Counseling is great and often a short cut to healing, but I know that some people resist it. If you are in that category, you can still educate yourself about recovery via self-help.

Yes, you can only control yourself, but that still leaves you with much power. Because changing some things within yourself can yield huge results. This was the last place I addressed, but it should have been the first. When I was lamenting my lack of progress, I looked around and realized that most of our issues had already been addressed endlessly. But the one thing that hadn’t been addressed was me. In the end, my struggling self-esteem was holding back progress. It was difficult for me to believe that my husband was committed and invested because I didn’t see myself as worthy. I worried that I was old and ugly. I fretted that I was uninteresting. It was not until I addressed my self-worth that many of our recurring issues improved because I could finally believe in our marriage and in our progress. Finally, I felt like an equal part of the process.

Commit To A Set Period Of Time: I think one thing that helped in my own marriage was I committed to a set period of time as long as my husband did as I asked. In other words, I told him that I wouldn’t go anywhere as long as he agreed to rehabilitation. As a result, he did come right home after work. He did stop traveling for his job. And he did commit to rebuilding our marriage. Then he took the action to make this happen. So long as he did these things, I had no choice but to be patient and wait for the results to happen. They eventually did, but certainly not as soon as I’d hoped.

Sometimes, hanging in there is nothing more than a leap of faith. I made the leap because I wanted to keep my family intact. There were days when I questioned the logic of this and worried we’d never get there. But we did. The time-frame was longer but the results were sweeter.

If you are determined that this marriage is still what you want, it can be worth it to hang in there. Ask yourself if you are seeing small improvements. If not, change things until you are. Know that this is a gradual process and celebrate any small victories along the way. Don’t put pressure on yourself. Accept that gradual improvement is more likely to be a lasting improvement. The changes we made in our marriage still endure today. Sure, things went very slowly, but that might be while we’re still going strong. You can read that story of healing here: http://surviving-the-affair.com

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