How To Heal The Emotional Wound Left By Infidelity?
If you have suffered infidelity , you will feel deep pain like you have rarely felt. It is a mixture of rage, a feeling of injustice, disbelief and madness.
You will experience flashbacks (images of your partner committing infidelity) as in any traumatic experience and a sense of loss of your partner as in grief. That is to say: a mixture of trauma and grief.
One of the main effects of infidelity is hypervigilance, because this experience damages your attachment system. Infidelity damages the connection we have with our partner and, although in these circumstances we would like to end the relationship so as not to suffer, many times we cannot do so.
The reason is that human beings create steel cables that unite us with others, and when we feel attacked and betrayed, we feel two opposing forces working at the same time On the one hand, we feel the need to move away, and on the other, we cannot break that steel cord. The solution: hypervigilance.
And if you have suffered infidelity you will be hypervigilant with your partner. You will want to know where she is, what she does, what she feels, what she thinks and who she is communicating with on her cell phone at all times. Your partner, usually, feeling overwhelmed and stressed by surveillance, will hide information to escape the pressure. The result: more distrust And you will think that you are not going to regain trust in your partner.
Thus, betrayal causes us to feel distrust and distrust protects the person from being hurt so deeply again.
Another sensation you will feel is anger. Any serious psychological trauma caused by a family member or partner produces anger, hypervigilance and distrust. Anger has to do with the feeling of injustice
To do?
In order for you to heal this wound, you need heal the emotional wound that your partner caused you Healing this wound depends on defusing injustice, mistrust, and hypervigilance.
1. Deactivating hypervigilance
The most important thing is that your partner tells you and informs you about what happened. However, if he tells you little, your desire to know more and your distrust will increase. If he tells you a lot, the flashbacks (with images of excess information) and anger will increase.
Therefore, you must negotiate with yourself and your partner what is strictly necessary to know to move forward Additionally, your partner should tell you if the person they cheated on tries to contact you. Once you have the past and present information, the hypervigilance will fade away because it will no longer be of any use.
2. Deactivation of rage
To deactivate anger, you must get something in return that compensates us for the injustice received For example, if your partner is not usually communicative, let him open up to you and let you know what he thinks and expresses himself. This way you will feel that your partner is different and not the same. And if your partner is another, you will run fewer risks than if it is the same (this reasoning is emotional reasoning and is not only rational).
This is the emotion that covers the core emotion of the trauma of infidelity: sadness. Since this is a defense that protects your most vulnerable “I”, it is the one that will take the longest to deactivate.
At first, trust will be restored on a rational level, but it will take time to reach the emotional level This requires time and that in that time you have had the necessary information so that hypervigilance remains deactivated and, above all, that you feel that your partner has changed by giving you something with which you can gain from such a painful situation.
If these conditions are maintained, your wound and pain will heal and you will be able to say that you learned and got something out of one of the most painful experiences you have ever felt.
