Emotional Acceptance: The Most Important Aspect of Healing from His Affair
Throughout the discovery of your lover’s affair, you may fight to resist the truth. You may refuse to believe they cheated on you, deceived you and lied to you. “How could this happen?! No, it didn’t happen… not to me, I’m too good for this!” you may think.
Emotional acceptance is an important part of recovering from an affair, or any other traumatizing situation in life. When you have emotional acceptance, you give yourself the ability to stop fighting and resisting what’s happened on an emotional level. You become less emotionally reactive and accept what’s happened without the overt, painful dramatics. Emotional acceptance aligns you with reality, allowing you to see your husband’s cheating for what it is and helping you decide what to do next.
Emotional Acceptance Is Not Passivity or Tolerance of Infidelity
A striking example of example of emotional acceptance is dealing with the death of a loved one. When someone you love dies- a dear friend or beloved pet- it’s hard to accept what happened initially. You don’t want to hear that everything will be okay and you don’t want to believe this person is dead and never coming back. You’re consumed with grief and have little-to-no control over your emotional reaction when the news first hits. The pain lives within you for a long time, but decreases its affects on your daily living over time. Eventually, while you still love and miss the person, you’re now able to fully accept and embrace their passing. At this point, you’ve stopped resisting what’s happened and emotionally accepted it.
When it comes to emotionally accepting an affair, the process will be very similar. You will have to ride it out and accept that your husband did cheat on you. You will have to accept that things in your marriage were not going as expected. You will have to accept that your cheating husband did lie to you about his sexual or emotional affair, and that he did so willingly for a period of time, in an effort to conceal his extramarital trysts.
Clearly speaking, emotional acceptance does not mean what he’s done is okay. Emotional acceptance simply allows you to find peace within the storm. Emotional acceptance is not tolerance; his cheating on you doesn’t have to be right as long as you accept it happened. When you emotionally accept a situation, you’re not rewarding poor behavior and it doesn’t stop you from making his life difficult. You don’t minimize what was done when you accept his cheating; in fact, you must see it for what it is in its full glory. And emotionally accepting your husband’s cheating does not denote passivity and mean you do nothing, but allows you to move forward with confidence in yourself to make the most of this situation.
This information was adapted from Paul Coleman’s You, Him and the Other Woman: Break the Love Triangle and Reclaim Your Marriage, Your Love, and Your Life
