You realize the significance of holding the secret from your partner. The ache of the deceit surprises you. You want forgiveness and honesty. But is it worth hurting your partner?
There is a wide-range of advice from relationship professionals available to you. Indeed, should you desire to conceal an affair for the life of your relationship, you will find support for this. Other professionals advise you to come clean. As you have discovered, there’s an inescapable niggling asterisk darkening each tender moment or intimate exchange. It’s time to fess up, but how to do it?
You want to reduce the stress and pain your partner will feel when you admit to infidelity. Staying true to this lofty goal will help you through the tougher parts of disclosing.
In advance of disclosing, get some support. Part Two in this series identifies the many resources you may need to tap to ready yourself. You may already anticipate that the fallout from an affair whether disclosed, suspected, or detected, may take awhile. Part Three of this series offers tips you may use to avoid prolonging recovery.
Unfortunately, many partners who have been involved in an affair attempt to reduce the suffering of the betrayed partner by avoiding discussing it. This is not the way to do it. It will only increase the detrimental effects your partner will inevitably experience.
In fact, the more open and honest you can be the easier will be the healing process. Attempting to minimize or obfuscate will increase their distrust for you and work against reconciliation. No matter how bad it all is/was, they will want and need the full truth to move past the injury.
Accepting that transparency to all aspects of the affair and the timeline surrounding the affair will assist you in completely answering the numerous questions to come. Acknowledge that your partner will often want to know many details which may seem trivial or unimportant to you. A therapist who specializes in Affair Recovery will often build a timeline as this tool has been reported to be very helpful to the betrayed partner as it helps to keep their questions and answers straight when their world is understandably spinning.
Oftentimes, when a betrayed partner is able to match a suspicion to a date and activity they begin to relax into the belief that they can begin to trust themselves again. This is a very important step in Affair Recovery. More on this later.
Also it is extremely important to keep in mind that any attempts to hold back or reveal only a bit at a time also increase the injury. Let the therapist be the one who encourages the betrayed partner to back away from wanting to know details that would concretize a visual of the intimate details of sex acts. Your job is to reveal and not conceal–anything.
Ideally, you have broken off the affair completely before you disclose. If not, seeking out a Gottman Method or Emotionally-Focused Couples therapist is where you want to start. These therapists are especially trained to understand the complex reasons, and the cascade of behavior choices that lead to engaging in an affair (whether emotional or physical). Your therapist can help you to better understand the process leading to affairs. Your better understanding will assist you during the confrontation phase of Affair recovery.
Importantly, make sure that you specify that the services you are looking for are specifically for you. Gottman Method Couples therapists (GMCT) are not encouraged to do Couples work when one partner is still involved with their affair partner. So, if this is you, please specify at the beginning of treatment that you are looking to resolve your indecision, or decision for that matter. Many GMCT will gladly see clients on an individual basis when they have not already been engaged to treat the couple.
If you are not into therapy, Shirley Glass, a well-respected author on the subject of affairs, offers an enlightening perspective on the step-wise path to initiating an affair. Again, clarifying how affairs happen will provide you with the most helpful descriptions and explanations to reorient to during the post-disclosure discussions.
Importantly, your understanding of what led you to progress through each step toward the affair should not be used to distance yourself from taking responsibility. However, it will provide some insulation to any attacks on your character that are likely following disclosure. Understanding will aid forgiveness, recovery, and the process of re-building. And, it will certainly protect your relationship from unnecessary further injury and additional infidelities.
Now that you have taken time to acquire some additional understanding and support, read on to learn how to best prepare for disclosure.