How can I heal, when my spouse won't help?
Anne Bercht, the director of the Beyond Affairs Network, is co-founder, along with her husband Brian, of www.passionatelife.ca, a website dedicated to creating a healthy, passionate marriage.
Question: My spouse refuses to come to marriage counseling with me after his extramarital affair. How can I start healing when my spouse does not try to help?
Answer:
The key to healing yourself and/or a marriage after an affair is actually not what you’d think. During the first 3 months following disclosure of the affair, I just assumed my husband should be very sorry, come begging on his knees with flowers asking my forgiveness and of course (wasn’t it obvious?!) come for counseling with me.
My husband did none of the above during the early stages of our healing.
So what did I do? I began to work on me. I made a decision to get through this. I was going to recover. I was going to survive. I wanted my marriage back. I fought for the marriage, but things didn’t go according to my plans and it wasn’t until I actually let go of the marriage and it finally dawned on me that maybe things weren’t going to work out and I just may have to face my future alone, without the man I loved and as a single parent, it was when I accepted this truth that I got my marriage back, ironically.
Sometimes we try too hard. This is not attractive. Also we focus our energy on “getting our spouse to change” after all he/she was the one who had the affair, right?
As long as we focus on what our spouse needs to change (and believe me you’re not wrong – they do need to change), but we are still focusing on the wrong thing.
Can we change our spouse? No
Can we change ourselves? Yes – So this is the part we work on.
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