You never thought you would have to find out that your partner has been unfaithful. The shock, numbness, anger, and confusion are all hitting at the full force of a cartoon anvil, but the full impact is unlikely to have sunk in completely. As reality begins to sink in, the path forward for you and your unfaithful partner couldn’t be more unclear. In this article, I will lay out 5 tasks to complete if you find out your partner cheated.
Task #1 Wait to Make Any Major Decisions
It is important not to make a knee-jerk decision about major aspects of the life you may have built with an unfaithful partner. I understand how tempting it is to slap a big GTFO on the day and be done with it because it feels powerful to take back control when you have been wronged. Make no mistake, the complexity of the situation does not excuse the unfaithful partner’s actions, but it does give pause to consider the domino impact of the next crucial decision that is made in response to infidelity.
Things to Consider
There are a few questions that should be considered before making the next big move. This is not an exhaustive list.
- Do you have children together? If so, consider waiting for the dust to settle a bit before telling them.
- Do you live together? Consider separate rooms if the shared space is big enough to accommodate it. This should be entirely at the hurt partner’s discretion. If the hurt partner does not want to stomach sharing space with their unfaithful partner in the wake of discovering an affair, the unfaithful partner should make every effort to find another place to stay temporarily.
- Do you have shared accounts? It may be tempting to cancel joint accounts right away, but in the long term, you are better off waiting until more permanent decisions have been made about the future of the relationship.
Task #2- Research and Find an Experienced Counselor
Whether or not you choose to stay with your partner after they confess an infidelity (or worse you catch and confront them), you are going to need a lot of support going forward. Family and friends are an important part of this support, and professional support is equally as valuable. Even if you ultimately decide not to stay in the relationship, individual counseling can be potentially life-saving in managing the intense feelings that come in waves post discovery-day.
Therapy Can Heal the Relationship
If you and your partner ultimately decide to save your relationship, I highly recommend you both seek out individual counselors for yourselves as well as a couple’s counselor with experience working with infidelity/betrayal trauma. The individual counseling is beneficial to both parties because it can flesh out issues that might not get the focused attention in couple’s counseling that may be necessary to make changes in the relationship. Couple’s counseling is crucial for successful recovery after an affair is exposed so that trust can be rebuilt in a safe, contained space with a trained professional to referee the two of you if necessary.
Task #3- Choose Who You Talk to About the Affair Carefully
A good way to choose the shortlist of people who you lean on for support in the early days of affair recovery is to consider who among your support network can be trusted to keep what you share secret. The last thing you need is for a friend or relative to betray your trust after this fresh betrayal, and who you share this information with should be on your terms. Also worth considering is how well your chosen support is able to sit with your grief and hold space for it rather than trying to solve it or cheer you up.
Support from your friends and family throughout this difficult time is invaluable. With that said, keep in mind that friends and family members that you share this news with may not react in the way you expect or hope based on their own values. Another issue to consider after completing the first task is that family and friends may be much slower than you to forgive your partner after you have reconciled. This is important to keep in mind when deciding what information to share with family and friends and how it is shared.
You can’t unring a bell, so be careful with whom you decide needs to know which details and who doesn’t.
Task #4 Don’t Blast the News on Social Media
This task follows similar logic to the first task. The initial 3-6 months post D-day will feel intense and unstable. Inviting Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Tik Tok, etc will make this period of time more intense and confusing because of the increased focus that will be on the infidelity from anyone able to see and weigh in.
It is natural to look for comfort wherever it can be found in the wake of infidelity because the usual source of comfort in your partner is likely unavailable at the moment. Even so, the internet immortalizes these temporary feelings of intense grief and despair, which will subside with enough time. In the same vein, features on Facebook can inadvertently cause these posts to haunt you in the years coming if you don’t take steps to block those reminders. Regardless of the future of your relationship, both of you will want to move on from this pain, and you will not appreciate a blunt reminder of it years later.
Task #5- Avoid Drug and Alcohol Use
Escape will be a constant temptation going forward whether or not you choose to stay together or split for good. Dulling your senses to escape excruciating emotional pain is an understandable position to have. My advice is to fill your day up with productive things to do with a healthy mix of tasks that bring you joy and tasks that improve your environment or responsibilities like paying a bill or doing a load of laundry (still important).
There are plenty of healthy and productive things you can do to prioritize your mental and physical health during this difficult time. Some may have already been mentioned, and some of those may bear repeating. Find a short list of examples below:
- Hygiene. Make sure you take regular showers and maintain other important hygiene habits like brushing teeth.
- Eat throughout the day. Your appetite may change, but try to keep as close to the normal food intake as possible. Prioritizing physical health will directly impact your ability to prioritize your mental health.
- Make lunch and dinner dates with friends and family you haven’t seen in a while. Spending time with these people in your life provides distance from your thoughts about the affair.
- Be kind to yourself. Diminished self-confidence and self-worth are common and expected after an affair.
Above all, remember that you are loved and worthy of love. Nothing you did in the course of your relationship makes you responsible for your partner’s decision to cheat. Be gentle and patient with yourself. If you are looking for reading material on this subject, I highly recommend checking out How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Infidelity.
If you found this article helpful, feel free to reach out at bracechris3@gmail.com or call/text 702-530-1318 to book an appointment today.
