SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I read it and see it over and over. As a betrayed spouse, work on your healing, take your time to heal etc. what exactly does that mean? I’m over 2 weeks DDay and I’m reading here, journaling, praying and thinking and trying to focus on myself and of course my kids. What is real healing? And not just coping. Any insight would be appreciated.

Healing is a long process chica.

Betrayal teaches your nervous system a deep attachment wound, I saw it summarized well in this:

I am not chosen. I am not enough. I am replaceable

When you love someone and they betray you, your attachment system gets destroyed.
You blame yourself, you take responsibility of the WS choices.

But it is not the truth.

They cheated due to their weakness, a character flaw.
It is not you. You did not have a choice. You were not the cause.

And the relational shock makes you carry the blame of the cheating.

Healing means getting over it, understanding that:

- It's not your fault.
- You are worthy
- You deserve to be loved and cared as you can do

This requires steps. First you must pass the shock, anger, grief.
You must grief the present, the past and the future, because those are all gone and questioned by the betrayal.

This requires detachement, emotional regulation, focusing on your emotions and feelings repair.

Therapy helps, sharing your emotions helps a lot.

Sadly it is not a quick process, betrayal is not heartbreak, is worse, it will rewrite your system entirely, your identity gets shattered, you lose trust and hope. You have to rebuild your identity entirely.

the first step is to forgive yourself. You did not cause it, no matter what issues were there.
You need to find love for yourself and accept those emotions. Is normal what you feel, and needs to be felt, not suppressed.

Then you can detach from your WS and see them for the flawed person capable to do the most horrible choices ever, and to hurt you carelessly.

When you regain your center you will be stronger. True healing (getting over the betrayal) is likely only possible if you abandon the betrayer.
But healing is possible in any scenario, even if you decide to allow them back and R (if they work to heal their flaws) with support and therapy you will be able to heal (in this case though, the relationship will never fully heal, betrayal happened it will always taint it even if you patch it up).

That is the last step though, YOU and only you are the important piece now.
Coping will be not enough because BS have a lot of dysfunctional coping. IC and counseling can help. Write and read here can help.

Start accepting the emotions of relational shock, and understand this is not on you, even if you are the one suffering the most.

Is really fresh, it may take years to fully heal, but you can speed it up a bit with the correct approach.
Detachment from the WS is key

Backfromthestorm summed it up perfectly. It's rough, takes a very long time, and can be quite the roller-coaster.

You are in a great place for advice and support.

BFTS said it so well.

Healing is a marathon. It comes and goes like a dow jones chart. Don't deny the pain, hurt, loneliness... it's all part of healing. Also, I don't recommend doing it alone. Get professional help. DM me if you want a resource or two.

2 weeks is still like yesterday in terms of the trauma and healing goes. When I joined these forums I was 4 weeks out from discovery and was told that's still very fresh. I'm at almost ten months now and it's still very painful, but has subsided some. Healing from betrayal is not a linear process. It doesn't happen at a steady pace or in a straight line. There will be triggers and ups and downs, and that's if your WS does the work and tries to do everything right.

Has your husband cut all communications and ties with his AP? Is he showing true remorse and repentance? Like I said, 2 weeks is still very fresh and very early. It's not uncommon for a WS to drag their feet and struggle to cut it off with their AP and start showing true remorse, sometimes months, but it can happen. It took my wife a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to fully come to her senses, but she's an outlier and I still struggled pretty greatly for several months. I'm still not what anyone would consider "over it" ten months later, but I do believe healing has begun. Mostly because she's really putting in the work, but I'm discovering that's not the norm in most situations. 2 to 5 years seems to be the average time frame to recover, and reconciliation can be a lifetime work in progress.

Do you feel like you have the whole truth? Healing can't really begin until you do, or at least enough of it that you feel like you do. Quite often what we discover is just the tip of the iceberg. There will likely always be some question marks and a desire to understand why. That understanding may never come, but you can learn to accept it happened and work to understand it, but it requires the whole truth, talking about it, and genuine effort from your WS to make amends, and demonstrate they can be a safe partner again.

Betrayals like this are traumatic. PTSD symptoms are common. Individual therapy is often recommended. Trauma therapy for the BS and therapy for the WS to dig into what was broken inside of them that caused them to inflict the greatest damage one can inflict on a relationship.

So sorry you've found yourself back here. Hang in there, it does get better, but it's going to take time. Take care of yourself. Make sure you're getting enough to eat and try tomget enough sleep. It's bad enough dealing with this when your strength is up, let alone weakened by lack of sleep and nutrition.

Are you still set on D? (I sort of hope so. I guess R may still be possible, but 2 weeks is way too little time for your H to become a good candidate for R.)

IMO, healing for the BS is processing the anger, grief, fear, shame, and anything else that bothers you out of your body. Part of that is sharing, but much of it, IMO, is actually feeling the feelings, letting the feelings flow through and out of your body.

One of the key indicators of the healing process may be the ease with which one can feel the feelings - the easier, the better for healing. Feelings that are allowed to flow are gone; they don't come back. But the feelings are immense, so they have to flow a LOT to be gone. One probably will think the feelings will never end. My reco is to keep going; you will eventually get to the effective end.

One of the key indicators of being healed probably is NOT ruminating about the A. It may be that the less rumination, the more healed one is. Feelings translate to thoughts. The more feelings are processed out of one's body, the fewer thoughts will draw energy.

Alas, the above is metaphorical. It helps some, but some people need a different ay of thinking....

Healing is not:

- a return to normalcy
- getting back to where you were before
- getting to a place where everything is forgiven and forgotten
- feeling good about everything
- being okay with what happened to you
- getting "over it" (whatever the hell that even means)
- resilience
- happiness

Healing is:

- integrating and accepting (not approving, but accepting) that this happened to you and is a brutally unpleasant part of your story
- coming to terms with the painful past insofar as it doesn't cause you any further or ongoing hurt
- learning to navigate and function in the new emotional and physical landscape
- coming to terms with the new person this has beaten you into
- acquisition and usage of new internal and external skills to handle yourself and your environment
- the ability to regrow yourself
- emotional intelligence and competence (whatever those emotions happen to be)

Healing is a journey. It is re-regulating your nervous system so the reminders and memories no longer incapacitate us. It’s accepting what happened and integrating it into your narrative of your life without letting it define your narrative. It’s reorganizing the memories, accepting times we chose not to see what was in front of us or where we allowed our partners to get away with treatment that was not okay, and it is forgiving ourselves for that. It’s seeing our partners for who they REALLY are and not the fantasy we have built them up to be. It’s being able to re-open your heart and being vulnerable again, despite knowing what can happen.

It takes effort and time. Most say 1-2 years, but it is not linear and you will get a little tiny bit better every day.

Like recovering from a physical injury, you may need exercises and therapies or medication and lost of time to achieve this. You may have to repeat the same steps and pain many times as your work through the trauma. You can’t heal a broken bone faster, and same with this. And you may have a scar or limp ultimately, but you WILL recover and thrive in your next chapter.

What isn’t healing? Burying your head in the sand, sweeping things under the rug, stuffing your emotions down and not processing them, accepting less than what you want.

I came to this conclusion after several years of mulling through it:

You will never forget what your WS did to you. The memory is initially a heavy burden to bare. Reconciliation is about building your capacity to carry the burden. Finding a good IC can help you. You must gather new information, consider it, confirm it, and then become a believer in new ideas that help you. It's building your mind, heart, and gut in unison, your logic, resistance, and wisdom. It's building a new collective strength derived from inside. The goal is to reduce strain and anxiety.

Healing from emotional and psychological trauma isn't that much different than healing from a physical trauma. Your tend to the wound and in time your body does the rest.

I've had a few physical traumas in my life.

I severely damaged my left wrist one day while rollerblading. Six weeks in a cast and several weeks of physical therapy to rebuild the muscles. I have limited mobility in that wrist now, about 70% movement ranged. I can't hit a baseball or swing a golf club anymore. Surgery could repair the damage, but I declined.

I tore my rotator cuff, which required several months of physical therapy, meeting twice a week with a physical therapist and doing a series of physical exercises twice a day.

A few other broken bones, cuts and burns (restaurant work). Most of it healed well enough with care and attention.

Betrayal trauma isn't much different. You care for the wounds, therapy helps, mindfulness helps, as does talking about it with friends or family, here on SI, or journalling. It takes time and effort, focusing on the process.

Healing is a choice.

[This message edited by Unhinged at 5:56 PM, Saturday, February 14th]