Blaming Your Spouse After the Affair
I get a lot of emails in which the spouse who was cheated on can not let go of the blame and the resentment toward the spouse who cheated. Often they have tried many things to get past this, but every time they look at their spouse, they just can not see anything but anger.
In contrast, I sometimes also get emails from the spouse who has cheated but who in some way is blaming their spouse for the cheating. Sometimes they will say that their spouse did not give them enough affection or attention. Sometimes they will tell me that their spouse was distant and cold. And other times, they will say that the affair is “pay back” for infidelity from a previous period of time.
Neither of these situations and this blame does anything to help propel you forward towards healing. It’s absolutely understandable to want to find and feel anger towards the source of your hurt, but at the end of the day, you need to move past these feelings so that you can heal. I will discuss this more in the following article.
Blaming The Spouse Who Cheated On You: This is absolutely understandable. This person betrayed you, hurt you, and shared things with someone else that they promised to only share with you. They made this decision without giving you a chance to state your case or to change the outcome. You went to bed one night and thought you knew what your life consisted up and woke up the next morning realizing that what you thought you knew was a lie.
So, it’s absolutely understandable that you are feeling a little lost right now. Take all of the time that you need to release these feelings. However, eventually there is going to come a time where you realize that it is painful to live in the past. You will discover that you are tired of always feelings as though you have a heavy anchor tied to your ankle tying you down. You will come to realize that you no longer want to feel the awful way that you are feeling right now.
To move forward, you are going to have to let go of the hurt, the pain, and the anger. Sure, there is more than enough blame to go around, but do you want to cling to it, hold onto it, and continue to allow it to bring you pain? Whether you decide to stay in the marriage or not, in order to move forward in a healthy way, you have to encourage the healthy feelings and discourage the unhealthy feelings. Blame leads to anger and anger, if allowed to continue on without resolution, hurts you every bit as much as it hurts them.
It’s OK to hate the cheating and to hate the act, but it’s more healthy if you can get to a point where you can separate the person from their act. The cheating can not define the person forever. It was one act in a long line of acts and you must evaluate what the totality of their acts represents to you. It’s highly likely that there are some loving and kind acts tied in with this one, so truly, in the end, you might come to a point where you realize that things are sometimes not as black and white as you originally thought and that seeing the shades of gray is more healthy for your emotional health moving forward.
This doesn’t mean that you condone or negate the behavior or will ever accept it again, but it does mean that you want to move on without allowing it to continue to hurt you in this way for the rest of your life.
Blaming Your Spouse When You Are The One Who Cheated: I am sure that you can understand why your spouse is furious right now. Just for a second, put yourself in their shoes. They trusted you, they were vulnerable with you, and you betrayed them. Now, once you’ve imagined yourself in their shoes, imagine how you would feel if they told you that it was your fault. How would you like it if they told you that they cheated because you didn’t do your job at home, that you weren’t a good enough spouse, and that you didn’t offer you what you needed?
Would this make you feel more forgiving toward them? Of course it wouldn’t. It would only make you more angry and hurt. The truth is, maybe your marriage was not perfect. Maybe your spouse was lacking. Maybe you were vulnerable. However, none of these things justify cheating. There were other options, but you did not pursue them. You chose to betray and lie instead.
You can’t change the past, but you can certainly change how you act from here on out. Take responsibility for your actions and instead of flinging the blame, work with your spouse to address and fix what is broken, should you chose to go that route. It really doesn’t matter who shoulders the most blame – what matters is where you go from here and how healthy your actions are moving forward.
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