My plan to guide marital recovery after an affair is summarized in four very important rules.
The Rule of Protection: Avoid being the cause of your spouse's unhappiness.
The Rule of Care: Meet your spouse's most important emotional needs.
The Rule of Time: Take time to give your spouse undivided attention.
The Rule of Honesty: Be totally open and honest with your spouse.
Taken together these four rules create an integrated lifestyle that guarantees mutual love, and they prevent either spouse from having another affair.
Each rule is equally important, but in my plan for recovery, I help couples learn them one at a time. First, I teach the Rule of Protection because that rule prevents them from withdrawing love units from each other's Love Bank. I focus on this rule first because I want to help couples plug up the holes in their banks before they begin filling them up again. After all, why deposit love units unless you know how to avoid withdrawing them? How To Rebuild Trust After Infidelity
My ultimate goal for Jon and Sue was the restoration of their love for each other. To achieve that goal, they had to redeposit all of the love units that had been withdrawn over the past two years. But before I would focus their attention on depositing those love units, I had to be sure they knew how to avoid withdrawing them.
Knowing that his wife was having an affair was the most painful experience of Jon's life, and when it was over, he had very little compassion for Sue. He wanted to have an affair himself, so she would know how it felt. He wanted to lecture her on how thoughtless she had been. He wanted to remind her of the pain he had endured. He wanted to punish her just to even the score.
Fortunately I was able to convince Jon that those instinctive responses would eventually drive Sue away from him again and make the chances of their marital recovery very unlikely. If he really wanted to save his marriage, he had to protect Sue from his negative emotional reactions - at all costs.
Even though Sue was the one who had the affair, she was also angry and resentful toward Jon. She did not welcome him home with guilt and remorse for what she had put him through. She felt that the whole ordeal was all his fault. If Jon had been looking for an apology, he came to the wrong place. Sue never did apologize.
But Sue was not only unrepentant, she was tempted to take out her anger on Jon. She had lost the one she had regarded as her soul mate for life and she somehow blamed Jon for it. Unless she were able to protect Jon from her feelings of anger, their marital recovery would end almost as quickly as it had begun.
Jon's and Sue's emotional instincts were telling them to freely express their anger and disrespect to each other. Their instincts were also encouraging them to make their decisions without considering each other's feelings. They were both hurt deeply by the events of the past two years and were very tempted to do whatever they could to make themselves feel better, even if it was at the other's expense. How To Rebuild Trust After Infidelity
If Jon and Sue were to follow the advice of their instincts, there would be no hope for marital recovery because they would be continually hurting each other. Love units would be withdrawn faster than they could ever be deposited. That's why Sue and Jon had to make a special effort to stop doing anything to hurt each other. If they didn't, whatever they would try to do to make the other happy would be wasted effort.
The first rule to guide marital recovery after an affair is the Rule of Protection: Avoid being the cause of your spouse's unhappiness. It helped remind Jon and Sue that whenever they did anything to make each other unhappy, they were withdrawing love units, making it more difficult for them to restore their love for each other.
The Rule of Protection highlights a very important problem that all marriages face. Instincts often encourage spouses to hurt each other, and that, in turn, destroys their love and marital happiness.
I will begin with the more obvious ways that Jon and Sue were tempted to withdraw love units by deliberately hurting each other. Then I will describe less obvious but equally destructive ways that couples ruin their love for each other.
Love Busters: The Most Obvious Ways to Destroy Love
I began the course with a description of the three most common Love Busters - angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, and selfish demands. I helped Sue understand that these are Love Busters because each of them withdraws love units from her account and destroys Jon's feeling of love for her. Even though she would feel like using these Love Busters to hurt Jon, especially in the beginning of their recovery, she should do everything in her power to avoid them.
Jon also needed to be reminded to avoid Love Busters. I knew that when he and Sue got back together, there would be many occasions when he would be tempted to use them. Next post, I'll explain the 3 common love busters in details. Before that you can check out How To Rebuild Trust After Infidelity.
