PICTURE THIS...
You’ve been waiting on this appointment for a week. You sit nervously in the waiting room with your husband. Neither of you talking to the other.
Your stomach is fluttering with equal parts anxiousness and excitement.
Anxious about meeting someone new and having to delve into the pain that has been haunting you since the affair - AND simultaneously, a new sense of excitement at finally having some guidance through this process and someone to talk to besides yourself- which only feels like mental and emotional madness.
You hear the knob unlatch as the door swings open. Your heart skips a beat, but you feel an immediate sense of calm wash over you as you are met with a warm smile.
The next hour is filled with talking. You share your story, your husband adds a few words and your counselor validates your thoughts and feelings and encourages you to both listen more intently to one another.
You walk out of the room feeling validated.
There is a sense of quiet throughout your body and your mind and you can’t remember the last time you felt this same level of peace.
And for the next couple of weeks you come to look forward to your counseling sessions and the sense of ease they bring to your heart - like someone lifting the thick fog you have been wading through since you learned of the affair.
But after a month or two...
you start to notice that the relief you felt after your initial appointments is evermore fleeting.
You find that you still have just as many days where thoughts of the affair partner make it impossible for you to sleep and sometimes think.
And there are just as many moments where you find yourself agitated as you fall deeper into a black hole – stalking the affair partner on Facebook and drafting a nasty message for her in your notes app …
And when you start to think about it, you realize that you aren’t even sure if you are making any progress, let alone what the end point even looks like.
You try to reassure yourself that it is still early and your recovery IS supposed to take 2-3 years (WTF).
Here’s the thing:
most of the couples we work with have this same belief - that it just takes time to recover from an affair and that their therapist is there to hold their hand through the process.
But what is actually true is that if you have an affair-specific strategy and plan, you should feel infinitely calmer and more in control after JUST 3 MONTHS (not 3 years)!
But what most traditional counseling is missing is affair-specific strategy!
PLEASE read VERY carefully through the next few sentences.
Your brain has been changed by the affair.
It is physiologically different than it was before the affair and this heightened state has become your new default. Your brain needs strategic structure in order to heal fully.
The tricky part is that the brain is wired to stay the same and in order to recover fully, there needs to be structure in place to help the body, mind and spirit unravel these patterns that you are feeling, for example:
Like your mind is completely out of control and weighted down with the images of your husband kissing another woman
So unsettled in your bones, every movement feels effortful, yet you can’t sleep at night
Like you just want to shut down the feelings of overwhelm, betrayal, anguish and anger for just 1 day- or even a few hours for that matter.
Affair recovery needs to be highly specific and specialized if you want to heal fully and find your way back to a calm mind, body and spirit.
This is exactly what we help couples through every day.
If you are curious to learn more, here’s what to do:
About Dr. Shawn Haywood
Dr. Shawn Haywood is the founder of Reimagine Love. She is a classically trained therapist, as well as a life and marriage coach, who loves to work with women and couples to help them heal fully after an affair. Over the past 25 years, she has helped thousands of women move from the cycle of disconnect to one of unbreakable love and connection, while healing fully after infidelity, in a fraction of the time of traditional marriage counseling.
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