Recovering From Infidelity
As your trauma is uniquely yours, the events you have experienced play upon your psyche in a specific way; your wounds are unique and your path back to yourself will be unique. There are some guideposts, though. Directing your own healing path with the support of a group for partners like yourself, such as POSA Meetings, friends you can share safely with, POSA coaching, therapy, etc. can give you the confidence you may be lacking in taking care of yourself in the world.
Both innocence and trust can be reclaimed and become even more powerful energies in our lives. Innocence does not mean ignorance. Until we are put to the test, our innocence is really more ignorance than innocence. We can no longer “not know” about the perpetration of abuse by a Betraying Partner who is engaging in deceptive, sexually compulsive behavior.
We do know. We have been put to the test. Our innocence has become separate from our ignorance. We move to a more crisp, full-bodied innocence because it is a knowing innocence. No longer is it undifferentiated and unconscious.
It is a process, and sometimes it takes longer than we want it to. Perhaps we would give anything to go back to the day before we met our Betraying Partner and choose to have been elsewhere in a vain attempt to reclaim our innocence and ability to trust. It does not work that way, alas. Our trust will now be guided by our developing and intuitive discernment. No longer will our trust be handed out like a party favor to all comers. No longer is our trust cheapened by believing words without actions. We remain open and yet, exercise a nascent discernment that's been waiting for our entire lives to be heard, to be honored by us. Slowly, we learn to honor our discernment and to come to a trusting that will not disappoint us over and over again because we are engaged with discerning curiosity all along.
Here are some guideposts that most partners find essential to their healing. They are not listed in order of priority because we trust that you will be drawn to what you feel most comfortable undertaking. A large part of healing for partners is starting a journey of trusting themselves and their choices again. We know how damaged our ability to trust our choices has become as we may still be beating ourselves up for not knowing sooner what our mates were doing, wondering where our otherwise trusty intuition was during the entire time our mates were betraying us, or any number of reasons we may now be wary of trusting ourselves.
We encourage you to be ever so gentle with yourself as you play with starting to trust your choices again. In our e-book Recovering from Infidelity, the tools, techniques and suggestions we offer all lead to tender self-care, reducing your risk for negative outcomes as you try on "self-trust" once again. Learn what helped us through our own dark night of the soul after Discovery, from putting together your healing team, to detachment techniques that worked for us, to the importance of addressing touch-hunger, to learning how to validate your righteous anger, to learning how to "juice up" with positive friendships and strong women who will stand with you, and many other healing suggestions we ourselves use and benefit from. To learn more, click here....