4 Steps to Emotional Affair Recovery

When you think about a spouse being unfaithful, physical adultery probably comes to mind. Sometimes we forget how common – and devastating – emotional infidelity is.

How do we even define an emotional affair? Where is the line crossed? And when there has been an inappropriate emotional relationship with another person, what does the recovery process look like for the marriage?

Are you the person who is engaged in a close relationship with someone outside your marriage? Have you been rationalizing the connection under the guise of an innocent friendship, but deep inside you know it’s more?

Or, are you the spouse whose partner seems to be more interested in someone other than you? Do you wonder how to confront the problem and whether recovery is even possible?

4 Steps to Emotional Affair Recovery

Once you seek counseling for this issue, these are the steps you’ll need to work through with your counselor for your marriage to move towards recovery.

Step 1: Acknowledge the emotional affair.

How does an emotional affair begin? It’s not usually an overnight betrayal; instead, it’s a series of small decisions to spend a little extra time talking to this other person. To cultivate a sense of friendship and closeness. To focus more on that other person than your spouse, as you enjoy the feelings of attraction and camaraderie. And all the while, you’re gradually becoming more distant from your spouse.

You fixate on this other person and look forward to being with them again. You might not even fully admit to yourself how much you enjoy their company. Or you rationalize it, thinking, “I’m not going to do anything about this. I’m better than that. I’ll enjoy the friendship and the feeling of being understood, admired and appreciated for a change. I won’t cross any lines.”

So months pass with this state of things, and gradually you turn more of your attention to this “friendship.” You’d rather celebrate with this person than with your spouse. When you’re having a bad day, you’d rather talk to them about it.

Over time, you start to feel like this person truly “gets” you more than your spouse does, and that they are the only one who can love you and care for you the right way. You don’t even hesitate to seek their support first.

The anniversary of your wedding rolls around, and you have agreed to go out with your spouse to celebrate, but it’s difficult to commit because it takes up the time you would usually spend with this other person. While you’re out together, your spouse talks about memories from your years together, but you realize how few memories you’ve created this past year, because of your preoccupation with someone else.

This jars you into realizing that you’ve directed your time, energy, and emotions not to your spouse, but to someone else. After you get home, you reach out to that person and let them know that you need to end the friendship because it’s not healthy for you or your marriage.

As you’re thinking about the time spent with your spouse tonight, you find yourself asking how this happened. When did you cross the line from innocent conversations to an emotional bond? No matter how it happened, you’ve realized that it’s overstepped a boundary and you need to stay away from it for good.

But how do you move on now? Should you talk to your spouse about it, and if so, how? The book Anatomy of an Affair (Carder, 2008) discusses some of the most common indicators that a friendship has crossed the line into an emotional affair:

• “You share marital and relationship difficulties with this friend believing that they are a mentor to you and they also share their difficulties with you believing the same thing.
• You find yourself looking forward to being with your friend more than you look forward to being with your spouse.
• You start comparing your spouse to your friend wishing that they were more like them.
• You find yourself providing special gifts for your friend as you remember some of their favorite things.
• You start to spend more alone time with this person.
• You are uncomfortable with sharing your texts or computer history involving this person with your spouse because of how much you two are in contact with one another.
• You are noticing conflicts between you and your spouse when you mention your friend’s name.
• You are not honest about the amount of time you spend with your friend.
• Your texts and social media interactions start to become more flirtatious.”

Step 2: Find a neutral third party to talk to about it.

Once you’ve acknowledged the fact that this relationship has become an emotional affair, you’re probably wondering what to do now. We highly recommend that you include another person in what’s been going on by talking to them about it.

This conversation will look different depending on your unique situation. Maybe you’re comfortable immediately talking to your spouse about the emotional affair, but on the other hand, you might want some support before you do that.

If you’re meeting with a counselor or you’ve met with one in the past, maybe you can reach out to them for help. You can also talk to your pastor or another spiritual mentor who can provide support as you prepare to speak with your spouse.

It’s not going to easy to have any of these conversations. You’ll probably feel guilty and ashamed. You might also be feeling confused about how things got to this point. You know there’s been an emotional affair going on, but the reasons it happened may not be apparent.

If your marriage has been close and secure enough in the past, maybe you desire to repair the damage and confess your sin to your spouse, but it’s scary to think of what the outcome might be. How will your spouse respond? Will they welcome you back to the marriage, or will they push you away?

In spite of this fear, confession is worth it. Bringing sin from the darkness into the light removes its power over you. Whether it seems like it in the beginning or not, talking to someone is the first step towards freedom from this hidden sin, and towards healing in your life and marriage.

How should you share such a sensitive topic with a counselor, pastor, or friend? If you’re still feeling confused about how and why the emotional affair happened, you could start with a simple script such as, “I’ve found myself in a situation that has gone too far emotionally.”

You can also use a script like this when you first confess to your spouse. If you’re speaking with a counselor first, you can share that statement with them and process the issue for a little while before you talk to your spouse.

If you’ve decided to reach out to your pastor or mentor first, you can ask for prayer and talk about some of the spiritual issues involved. No matter what, the primary goal is to share what’s been going on. Eventually, you’ll be able to work through more in-depth conversations about how the emotional affair happened, how healing can take place, and what to do to prevent any form of adultery from happening in the future.

Step 3: Schedule a counseling session.

If you haven’t talked to a counselor yet, this is a perfect next step. There’s value in both individual and couples counseling, and of course, your ability to get couples counseling depends on your spouse’s willingness to go.

In individual counseling, you can work through the issues underlying the emotional affair that caused you to seek fulfillment outside of your marriage. You can discuss what you believe about marriage and what you desire for you and your spouse going forward.

In individual counseling, it will be essential to talk about what you felt you were gaining from being involved with someone other than your spouse. When you’re able to identify those feelings and motives, it will help you avoid emotional and physical affairs in the future. Past hurts may be one factor that made you more vulnerable to temptation in this area. Individual counseling can help you process and manage any pain underneath the surface.

If you are the betrayed spouse, individual counseling can significantly benefit you as well. You can talk through the distance that developed in your marriage. Maybe you wonder why your spouse chose to engage in an emotional affair. You can work through any self-blame, anger at your spouse, anger at the other person, and your desires for your marriage and the healing process.

If you have been blaming yourself for your spouse’s straying, individual counseling can help you realize that his or her decisions are not your responsibility. If you are grieving over the rejection and betrayal, your counselor can walk with you through the grieving process. Counseling can help you come to a healthy place where you’re able to listen to your spouse’s perspective, and the two of you can begin to mend your relationship.

Marriage counseling is a must after an emotional affair. If you go straight to marriage counseling without individual counseling, you can still work through all of the topics above, but with the benefit of having a moderator to ensure the discussions happen in a safe emotional space. You can process your emotions constructively so you can heal from the past and move towards a healthy future.

Part of the healing process will be to learn how can could better meet each other’s needs. There will be a lot to overcome considering the shame, hurt, guilt, and betrayal of an emotional affair. The goal of marriage counseling is for you to be able to communicate all of this and for your marriage to reach a healthy place in the aftermath of this dark time.

In Christian marriage counseling, your therapist will also talk about the role of faith in your marriage, and how your faith can play a vital role in emotional affair recovery.

The emotional challenges of affair recovery are complex and nuanced. Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, is a therapeutic technique in which couples learn to identify how emotions are involved in the way they react to one another. EFT can be very helpful in affair recovery counseling.

Whether you choose individual counseling, marriage counseling, or both, focus on healing as individuals and as a couple. If you don’t work through these issues now, it’s hard, and there will probably be issues that surface later on. If you do the work in counseling now, you will gain a greater understanding of your own needs, your spouse’s needs, and how you can best communicate those to one another.

Step 4: Forgiveness.

Now that we’ve arrived at the last step, you can see that forgiveness is a process. It’s not something you can instantly demand of your spouse when they discover you’ve had an emotional affair. (But it is something you can immediately seek from God.) And over time, the hope is that your spouse will forgive you and be willing to move forward in your marriage.

What does forgiveness look like in this situation, either as the betrayed spouse or as the involved spouse? You’ll need specific markers for what to work on in this step.

Maybe you tend to be verbal, and you can specifically ask your spouse for forgiveness after a full explanation of the emotional affair, along with a promise to never repeat it. Maybe a simple apology along with an immediate change of behavior will be a powerful way to communicate your genuine remorse for what you’ve done.

If you were the involved spouse, asking for forgiveness might seem overwhelming. How do you get started? If you are the betrayed spouse, you’ll want to feel safe again before you think that you can fully reconcile. For you to feel safe, your spouse will need to rebuild your trust before full restoration can take place.

It’s essential to have an open conversation about what requires an apology. Keeping secrets and hiding the relationship? Allowing it to happen in the first place? Emotionally withdrawing and creating distance in the marriage? How will things be different in the future?

This need for discussion doesn’t mean that immediate forgiveness is out of the question! But if your spouse is willing to forgive you early on in the recovery process, that doesn’t circumvent the other conversations that need to happen for healing and preventing future affairs.

No matter what forgiveness looks like in your situation, it’s essential to communicate your feelings openly. Your honesty will make the recovery process genuine. When you work through it together, you’ll find it very rewarding.

For many couples, a clear action plan can help in the aftermath of an affair. For them, a full apology might involve explaining what led to the relationship (without blaming their spouse), sharing how they plan to be honest and close with their spouse in the future, talking about how they will handle their own and their spouse’s emotional needs, and discussing specific accountability measures regarding texting, social media, etc.

Each couple is unique in the recovery process, so being honest about what will help you is critical.

Going through this process on your own or as a couple can be tricky since it is fraught with emotions such as sadness, betrayal, shame, etc. Don’t hesitate to reach out to a counselor today so you can begin your journey of healing.