Tuesday, April 12, 2011

After The Affair - Can You Forgive Your Spouse?



Your spouse had an affair alright. You have come to know of it and confronted your spouse. Your spouse sincerely regrets their action, not because they are caught but because they have been feeling guilty about it and intending to come out of it. Can you forgive your spouse, forget the affair and carry on with your life comfortably? Perhaps, too many questions have been packed together to be answered with a single answer. The answers can be mixed. You may say yes to forgiving. But forgetting may not be easy. Carrying on with your life comfortably will depend on several factors you may not be able to think of now.

To ensure that you are able to have a healthy relationship after you forgive your spouse and decide to put the affair into the past, you have to work on the following areas:

1) Have a frank talk about how the affair has hurt you: There is no escape from the fact that you have been hurt by the affair. Your spouse will know this. But, it is still necessary for you to convey your feelings to your spouse. Your spouse may feel uncomfortable hearing it but they have to go through this now so that the feelings are driven out from your mind. If you don't do this, your feelings will lie buried in your mind and may surface sometime in the future causing serious strains in the relationship. If, during this process of your conveying your feelings of hurt, your spouse becomes defensive and starts blaming you, it will be equally good since they will also be cleansing their minds of any resentment about or grudge against you.

2) Build confidence in your spouse: You may be magnanimous enough to forgive your spouse. But your spouse may not be able to overcome their feelings of guilt. They may also have a fear that you will not trust them as you did earlier. When your spouse lives with a disturbed mind, your relationship cannot be happy. So you have to build confidence in your spouse. This can be done only over a period of time and this has to be done by way of both your words and actions.

3) Build a protective fence around your relationship: You cannot allow your relationship to be exposed to the possibilities of a strain. You have to make the relationship strong and well protected so that no other person or event will be able to trespass into your relationship.



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