Emergency Advice for Cheaters Who Just Got Caught

As a Marriage and Family Therapist and relationship crisis manager, I’ve dealt with hundreds of couples in the throes of infidelity, maybe more. What I’ve learned is that without knowledgeable and experienced guidance, most duos manage to make a more painful and bigger mess of their lives than was necessary. Of course, this lessens the likelihood of the usual desired outcome ­ — complete recovery and a stronger and better marriage than existed before. Instead, they bumble their way to relationship breakdown, and too often, divorce.

Counseling with friends and family almost never helps. It’s a matter of the biased and clueless coaching the biased and clueless, and it ruins relationships moving forward — how can I break bread and ha-ha again with a mother-in-law who has been telling her daughter, and my wife, that she should cut her losses and dump me? If I had my way, families and friends wouldn’t be told about the matter until long after the situation has been managed and settled down, or never.

The first thing to understand is that when a human is in a life crisis, they are activated in the same way as any mammal who is sensing a threat to its life. Sure, you and your spouse aren’t being faced down by rabid dogs, but your brain thinks you are. It ascertains that the threat is serious, and sends you both into fight, flight or freeze. Most injured spouses go into fight mode, and it lasts much longer than average, so get ready. The cheaters can do all three, or only one or two, it just depends. What you need to know about this is that when couples are activated, they can’t make intelligent decisions, so no major decisions should be made at this time. What you need is to manage the crisis and not do more damage, and that’s where I come in.

Note for serial cheaters: Some men and women live by a creed that says there is no harm in cheating, only in the carelessness of getting caught, and perhaps they feel entitled to do whatever they want whenever they want. If this is you, chances are you have a personality that is not conducive to marriage and committed relationships. I strongly urge people like this to either devote themselves to going into recovery much like an alcoholic would through the 12-step treatment program Sex and Love Sex Addicts Anonymous, or return to being single and stop making people miserable. Only learning to feel badly about hurting others and immersive, intense, life-changing and decisive action will end this type of behavior. Trying to behave won’t cut it.

For all of the others who have strayed, the following information is for you:

1. Don’t do this alone — get marriage crisis help. The first thing you must do when you reveal your affair, or your spouse has discovered it: Seek professional help for your marriage with a Marriage and Family Therapist. Think: If you were vomiting blood would you manage it yourself? This is the relational equivalent. Don’t mess around, find someone who knows what they’re doing with marriage crisis, and take their wise advice. Can you afford it? Instead ask, can you afford divorce?

2. Get help for you. In addition to individual and couple’s therapy, you need to look far and wide for ways to become a better person moving forward. Yes, get therapy, but also look for support groups, seminars and workshops dedicated to being emotionally healthy and living a life of integrity. Some I recommend are the Omega Institute, The Work by Byron Katie, Onsite, Tony Robbins’s Date with Destiny, Landmark Forum.

3. Get rid of the other person. I have no tolerance of people who cheat with married men and women, and if you came to see me to talk about your situation I would point out all of the negative character traits that these types of people have — like being predatory, lying, lack of integrity. They make terrible future life partners because they’re shameless and have no problem taking what they want when they want. People that marry affair partners will find that neither partner will ever trust the other — want to know why? Because you already know that when the relationship’s stock drops, and it will, the other person will cheat. Cheaters often say to this, “Well you could say that about me.” Yes, but you are going to do all you can to be a better person and end outcomes like this, right?

4. Understand post-affair dynamics. Your spouse will be obsessing about your affair for months to come, maybe longer. This is what they do when activated. This is normal for a relationship crisis. He or she will ask thousands of questions and want every last detail, and you will not like it, but you must engage with them to an extent, for the foreseeable future. Here’s how to do it right: Answer basics like, where you met, how many times you met, where you rendezvoused, whether there was an emotional connection, why you did it, etc., but absolutely do not answer questions about sexual details such as what you did and how, did you like it. Do not engage in comparisons like, “Who is physically superior?” “Who is better in bed?” Comparisons and details like that create indelible images in your spouse’s head they will never forget and may never let you forget.

5. Express clearly and sincerely that what you have done is a big damn deal. You need to be mortified with yourself, show remorse and express this clearly to your spouse. To heal, your spouse will need to see that you “get” that this breach of trust is gigantic and has caused them great pain. You must be humble, accept responsibility, and do not blame your spouse for what you have done. Sure, their actions may have played a role in your straying, but there is no excuse for cheating, so don’t even go there. You will have to give them a nutshell answer for now about why you did it, and eventually you must be able to offer more insight into what led you to make such a wrong decision, but not when your spouse is activated. Minimizing the enormousness of what you have done, or saying things like, “I apologized so let’s move on,” will leave your spouse chronically thirsty and stall forward progress. You did the crime, now take ownership of it like any person of integrity would do. If you find that you are on your attitude high horse and can’t get over finger pointing, deflecting, and lying, then you might look into whether you may be a narcissist.

6. If your friends and/or family know and aren’t encouraging you to work things out or aren’t staying neutral, they aren’t friends of the marriage and should be disregarded. If your spouse is less than great or hopelessly dysfunctional you don’t need other people to reiterate this point, do you? Avoid negative influences, especially if the marriage has legs and can likely be worked out. You must work this out on your own with professional help. Only you and your partner know the complete story and if it’s worth working through.

7. Pondering what it would be like to be single. When marriage gets tough lots of people think about what it would be like to be single. I spent many years single in my adult life, and I work with single people daily. My report is, it’s tough out there, and there are not a lot of functional people to find romance with. Your spouse has faults, but so will any new partner. Know that once people have had children with others it complicates relationships enormously and increases the chance of a second divorce by 25 percent. Being on your own has its benefits, but humans are wired to be in relationship with another. That is where we thrive. If you can fix what you have, and most especially if you have children together, do all you can to work it out.

8. If I leave might I regret it? A landmark study of people who divorced their partners, 10 years later looking back at how everything has played out, found that 90 percent wished they had worked harder to save the marriage they were in.

One more thing: What do you do if your dysfunctional spouse won’t seek help to attain change and growth? We all have three choices at any given time:

1. Accept the status quo.

2. Change ourself, and request that our partners change, or

3. Eliminate the relationship.

Personally, I’d never consider №1 if it meant continued unhappiness. Either your relationship will grow and evolve from this crisis or it will get worse than it ever was. Then you’ll know exactly what to do.

Visit Doctor Becky’s website at www.doctorbecky.com. Email becky@doctorbecky.com.