Forgiveness is a powerful tool that can transform any negative situation.

The Magic Action to Help Restore Your Scarred Relationship

Throughout relationships, it is not uncommon for people to hold on to and silently grieve past hurts dealt by their loved one without extending forgiveness. Over time, resentment builds up, and, if it’s not addressed and worked through, this can lead to making either party susceptible to sexual or emotional infidelity.

Now, you may think this is a childish assumption, that many people would not make it a habit to let “the little things” get in the way of the relationship. However, the truth is that “the little things” build up hurt and resentment over time. As they get pushed back into our minds, these pains snowball into a big, nasty and even hateful situation.

Before things get too ugly and out of hand, there’s a free gift available to help you thwart the ugliness of built-up resentment known as forgiveness. Forgiveness allows you to let go of the past and work through old hurts in the marriage.

Forgiveness can be difficult, but gets easier with time.

A learned skill, your ability to practice forgiveness is influenced your history of forgiveness. Think back on your previous history with forgiveness. Have you ever been deeply pained by someone who’s refused to forgive you for something you’ve done? What about someone who you may have hurt intentionally, but later deeply regret betraying? Have you ever been asked for forgiveness by people who have hurt you? Have you ever felt the heaviness of holding grudges literally seem to lift from your shoulders before?

Ask yourself if you forgive easily. People who forgive easily allow themselves the opportunity to advance past their current frame of mind and move forward without the resentment they’ve held against others.

When it comes to asking for and giving forgiveness, it will be important that you and the other party come together in agreement to work things out. The offending party is usually the party that people think should start the conversation, but the offended can start out as well, initiating the conversation with a thorough explanation of how and why they were hurt by the others’ behavior.

Should one extend an apology and request forgiveness, then the offended party should honestly answer as to whether or not they can and will forgive them. Even if the answer at the current moment is no, they let the person know that there’s a possibility that forgiveness will come in time. They can inform the other party of the changes they’ll need to see over time in order to forgive and move from there.

Now, forgiveness does not mean letting someone “get away” with what they’ve done, nor does it mean this behavior will never happen again. To the contrary, forgiveness just means that you’ve accepted that the perceived wrongs have occurred against you.

Forgiveness also means that the offending party understands how they’ve hurt you and will not repeat the behavior again with the intentions of hurting you. As expert Dave Carder writes, “Change takes time. Most of us can tolerate hurtful behavior when we see that our [loved one] is working hard at changing the pattern. To the degree you can forgive, you can build respect, and to the degree you can respect, you can build trust.”

Your cheating husband might have been influenced by past events which spurned infidelity.

3 PERSONAL INFLUENCES THAT INCREASE POTENTIAL FOR INFIDELITY

Even with the intense familial factors which can directly influence a person’s potential to be unfaithful, there is still room for personal history and influences to make an impact.

Sexual Molestation and Abuse

Promiscuous behavior following sexual molestation and abuse usually are an attempt to work through the painful experience and shame of the events which occurred. For an abused individual, shame and sensations of pleasure regarding abusive sexual experiences create ambivalence. As a result, they may think sex is bad, and can leave them feeling emotionally unsatisfied during the act. Others can seek out a “bad” person to have sex with (in most cases, someone other than the “good spouse”) and involve themselves in affairs.

Adolescent Promiscuity

Promiscuous sexual behavior in adolescent years is heightened by the feelings of excitement and spontaneity, making those experiences idealized and wonderful. The simple and pleasant sensation seeking experiences in these years are what we most want to experience and long for once we’re older and life is more complicated than we’d like it to be.

Learning Disabilities

High-risk individuals with histories of developmental disability or other shortcomings, like ADHD, for example, have also shown heightened risk of infidelity. Nobody never seems to feel they are good enough and someone always seems to be yealling at them. Life’s difficulties seem to make them especially vulnerable, and therefore cause them to seek out nurturing experiences, even when they pretend they don’t care. They are especially vulnerable to affairs when there’s trouble at home and there are members of the opposite sex who seem to pay special attention to, listen to and support them

Babies, Funerals Cause for A Sexual Affair?

Family situations and personal challenges are unbelievably influential in whether or not someone is going to cheat, but what about personal risk? Does depression incease the possibility of your husband cheating? What if he loses his job, or someone close to him dies?

According to Christian relationship expert Dave Carders, situational factors definitely influence a person’s potential to cheat on their significant other. “Often there are situational factors that weigh heavily into the initiation of [infidelity],” he writes in his bestselling book Close Calls. “Two of these areas are high-risk times and high-risk behaviors.”

High-Risk Times

High-risk times refer to great times of stress and change in relationships. Many times, these times are life-altering and require major adjustment on one’s part in order to fully absorb the changes that are made to their routines.

Death or Loss

Death of a loved one is a common high-risk time for people. Research has indicated that spouses and couples actually experience an increase in their sex life following the death of a loved one.

Many times, both parties in the marriage or relationship will experience difficulty connecting because they’re both in mourning during this period. They may preserve their energy in order to work through the day instead of expending effort in consoling one another.

As we’ve discussed before, men have a real pattern of using sex to comfort themselves. If they’re not getting emotional support and care from their wives at home, there’s potential for them to seek outside refuge in the arms of another woman, as having sex will still release oxytocin, which comforts them and makes them feel less “alone” in times of need.

Pregnancy

There are several reasons why pregnancy carries an increased risk of infidelity in men. First and foremost, a man is adjusting to the fact that the relationship isn’t all about him anymore; he now has to share the spotlight with another person, his own child. Second, he has to spend an extra amount of time catering to the woman carrying his child for the approximately 9 weeks or so that she’s carrying the child.

To add to this, women usually go through a lot during their pregnancies. Hormones shift and change, and women can become emotionally unstable, sensitive and possess lower libidos, resulting in a lack off sexual desire. In turn, the changes which take place in the female’s body, such as weight gain, make her less visually appealing to her husband, and therefore divert his sexual desire away from her.

Once the baby comes, pressures of being a new parent add strain to the relationship. Many women experience post-partum depression, while others become completely consumed with thebaby and lose desire to connect with their partners. Resentment, stress and the need to “get away from it all” can cause an otherwise great man to cheat – all because he wants attention that he feels is no longer readily available to him.

Relationship expert and author Dave Carder discusses stressful life changes which further influence infidelity in his groundbreaking book, Close Calls: What Adulterers Want You to Know About Protecting Your Marriage. Click for unbiased reviews on Amazon.

Look At the 4 Phases of an Affair: How You Can Recognize an Affair in Progress

Dave Carder is an awesome Christian relationship author. His well-known book, Close Calls: What Adulterers Want You to Know About Protecting Your Marriage, discusses the warning signs and “close calls” that people tend to overlook when they or their spouse has an affair.

One of the topics Carder discusses in Close Calls are the relatively consistent phases of sexual affairs and infidelities. Referring to the phases as a “dangerous sequence,” he explains how things can progress from relatively harmless and innocent to horribly out of control.

According to Carder, there are four phases of close calls regarding infidelity, each one progressively more dangerous and alarming than the last.

Phase 1 is when parties experience a growing mutual attraction for one another. “Most parties don’t start out with an intention to commit adultery,” Carder explains. He states that the more individuals get to know each other, the more the attraction grows. He considers this natural, as he feels that God has instilled a sexual nature in us all. In fact, he believes denying this attraction only “intensifies” the situation, and people are led to subconsciously seek out interactions with those individuals.

Entanglement occurs in Phase 2, and involves sharing the illicit feelings with one another. Any communication with the other party becomes sexually charged and heavily anticipated, whether in person or over the phone and in emails or instant messages.

However, in some lesser aspects, entanglement may be as subtle as dropping hints regarding interest. For example, someone might tell another, “If I weren’t married/engaged/involved, I’d love an opportunity to talk to/sleep with/date/romance you.” Nevertheless, this is usually the phase at which an affair begins, and many times, the parties feel the connection was spontaneous.

Phase 3 is characterized by destabilization. If one or both parties felt their relationship went against their moral code, then there’s potential for them to attempt to stop the relationship. This on-again, off-again quality of the affair dangerously prolongs the relationship and creates unhealthy emotional attachments.

At this point, both partners may feel comfort and security by the presence of the other in their lives, even when they’re not together 24/7. They both desperately feel the need to be desired by someone else, and feel that this is something they no longer get within their primary relationships at home.

When people attempt to separate from each other post-affair and move on with their lives, they still find that they crave the others’ reassurance, and this is what draws them back. Marriages which can adopt this process – the cyclical need and pursuit of each other – can expect to see a healthy change in their relationship.

Termination and Resolution is the 4^th and final phase of an affair. Although it feels that trust and security has been built up between affair partners, maintaining the feelings of trust and safety become difficult. The artificial intimacy build by sexual relationships begins to fade and the passion wanes.

All too often, the affair partners may return to their marriage and realize that the passion they had in their affairs was exactly what was missing at home. Sometimes, they may attempt to bring that passion back to their marriages in an effort to rebuild with their partners. (Many times, experts indicate that unsually spontaneous passionate behavior like this is indeed a sign of infidelity in one’s spouse.)