- When your lover leaves you, it doesn’t feel good. You are more than likely experiencing one of 6 stages of recovery and growth.
Surviving Infidelity: Cheating Husband Leaves
Nothing sucks more than being dumped by the husband who cheated on you!
If you’ve been dumped by the cheating husband that was in your life, you’re probably going through a cycle of emotions. One minute you’re happy that it’s over with, but then suddenly you just want to rush to your bed and forget about anything or anyone while you grieve. You don’t want to answer the phone because it seems like nobody understands you or wants to listen. Your best friends are sick of hashing out the details over pints of Haagen-Dazs, and your parents just tell you it was “for the best.”
While these things may be true, at this moment, you need a little more than words telling you to “drop” the subject. When troubled relationships end, it’s normal to feel like you’re learning to navigate on foreign terrain, confused and ambivalent about day to day things. But this is normal. Like many others who have been dumped, you’re moving within a cyclical pattern that follows the termination of a relationship, such as the one outlined in When Your Lover Leaves You: Six Stages to Recovery & Growth. According to the book, those 6 stages are:
Shock: Disbelief and numbness, marked by difficulty with eating, sleeping and general functioning.
Hope: Active attempts, negotiations, and manipulations designed to try and win the lover back.
Anger: Outward expressions of animosity directed toward the lover.
Despair: Inward direction of emotions, including depression and self-doubt.
Indifference: No significant emotional response to lover.
Growth: Feelings expressed in a positive way and transferred to a new relationship.
You may skip some of these stages, or you might visit them in a different order than presented. You might also spend more time in one stage than another, but what’s important is that you understand that there is no right or wrong way to experience these stages. They are simply a reference to your personal cycle of pain. Your personality, experience and personal frame of mind will determine how you experience grief. If you find that you are easily angered and aggressive, you might first jump into a prolonged stage of anger, before you become indifferent and then move on. If you really loved the person and hoped that things would have worked out, you may have discovered that you’re in shock and hope longer than you are in anger. You might skip anger and indifference and spend a bit of time in a state of despair before you discover that it’s time to move on.
The length of time you spend in a relationship can also affect how long it may take you to recover. Usually, the longer the relationship lasted, the longer the recovery cycle. Of course, the nature of this all is subjective and varies from person to person. However, at the end of the day, we do urge to you remember that if your relationship ended because of infidelity, or problems that arose due to that fact that your husband was caught cheating, then in due time you’ll understand that maybe things did end for the best. Until then, accept all of your emotional responses, and know each stage is a reasonable result of what happened to you; it’s all a part of your healing and they all serve a purpose. “By passing through the stages, you can make the transition from pain to potential.”
