Top tools to help with healing after an affair
Talking about the affair can lead to stupid advice from well-meaning friends and family.
You don’t need advice that is harmful, you need tools to cope and get through the pain so that you can make an informed decision that you will respect over time.
You need to stabilize the pain before making decisions. Let’s look at the best of the best for helping you heal and stabilize and recover. I have included those below.
“Why should I care?”
Well, your life could be different if you heal. Learn how by reading more about the techniques and go towards mastery.
You can feel better faster
Many couples find that the relationship was in severe distress. That does not justify an affair.
It does make you question the relationship and if you choose to stay together, you are going to need to change some things about it. You might even design a relationship from scratch to make sure it works for you.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Heal the affair before you take these parts on. They will wait.
If you can heal thoroughly and quickly, you would prefer that. There are tried and true tools you can use.
Use them, then decide if you are ready to try the relationship again.
Not a reader and want some tools to let go of limiting beliefs and to anchor some feelings? Listen to this audio to learn how.
https://archive.org/details/pre-game-3-anchoring-feelings-and-let-go-of-limiting-beliefs
Tools:
Prolonged exposure is a tool wherein we ask people to feel their emotions until the emotions evaporate. Ask me about these. (Overview: 3x a week for 45 minutes per time, feel the emotions until the emotions are no more. Your brain grows bored with the repeated exposure and you learn that you need not cope, just experience feelings. The feelings are not deadly or catastrophic, just uncomfortable, and inconvenient. You can do it.)
Distress tolerance- lean into doing difficult things. Get used to doing hard things. Watch what happens when you consistently do difficult things. Your confidence soars and you have the courage to face new challenges. The new challenges feel exciting, and your self-esteem grows. Oh, and if you are healing, you know there is distress and discomfort that you must go through to get the good stuff.
Hypnosis- great tool for dealing with situations like this.
Neuro linguistic programming- Ask me about the video editing concept, as it relates to images in your head about the affair.
The video in your head about what happened can be edited or altered. Great for images that you would like to scrub from your brain. Great for trauma, such as the trauma of an affair. You are the director and producer of the video in your head and can change many aspects of it to lessen the impact. As you edit parts of the video, your brain will have a harder time ruminating or obsessing because your brain will not find it as easily. It makes you suffer less.
Exposure and response prevention- There are techniques and ideas from OCD that could be helpful to you. People who manage ocd know how to deal with obsession and the affair can feel like an obsession.
Get used to feeling the feelings and not acting out simply because you have an emotion. Let’s say you want to go through their phone because you have a feeling. You would bring on the feeling (yes, on purpose- “exposure”) and then deliberately deal with it and not go through their phone.
Don’t do the compulsive behavior even when the feelings get intense and watch how liberating that is. It breaks the automatic nature of it. You have choices instead of compulsions, by the end. A lot of your thinking might look like OCD in the initial stages, so we will teach concepts from the world of OCD to help you. I am not diagnosing you with OCD.
DBT- is a field that catalogs coping skills. If you truly need skills for coping, search the internet or AI for “DBT coping skills.” Teach yourself the skills and maybe join a group to practice those skills. The more skills you have to regulate emotions, the more in control you will feel.
CBT- is a field that helps you dispute and challenge the thoughts in your head. Often those thoughts are not accurate, and they can even be harmful. People who go through CBT training are often shocked how often they used to believe thoughts that are not accurate or helpful.
Is there evidence that your belief is accurate? Is there any other explanation than the one you are hanging onto? Questions like that help you be more mentally flexible and suffer less. Is it possible that I am misinterpreting what just happened?
Habit replacement therapy- when you have a habit like obsession, we can replace it with something else. Ask me for more information. What could you do that would compete with your obsessing? Fill your time with positive, growth oriented behavior and watch how hard it is to obsess. Challenge your thoughts, change your behavior and give yourself grace.
Behavioral training includes a whistle, clicker, small rewards, codewords, touch, chime, touching the pad that makes a word- like dog training, but for people.
When you see your partner put down the phone when you walk in a room, that elicits a feeling. When you hear the ding for the notification or feel the vibration from a text, you might immediately associate those with the affair. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we are strongly influenced in this manner.
Just as you can be negatively affected by these stimuli, you have the opportunity to be positively affected.
That is where the audio comes in- we are consciously and with full awareness looking at how to program our minds and intentionally creating an anchor for feelings that benefit you.
You have choices
You always have choices in how you respond and behave. Learn the above if you need help with changing behavior. Set up a system designed for you, specifically, and learn to reinforce yourself.
Consider going for counseling, too. Many therapists have training in the above tools, so there is help out there for you.
Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future. Let’s have good conversations about this so that we heal rather than hurt.
Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”
Talking about the affair can lead to stupid advice from well-meaning friends and family.
You don’t need advice that is harmful, you need tools to cope and get through the pain so that you can make an informed decision that you will respect over time.
You need to stabilize the pain before making decisions. Let’s look at the best of the best for helping you heal and stabilize and recover. I have included those below.
“Why should I care?”
Well, your life could be different if you heal. Learn how by reading more about the techniques and go towards mastery.
You can feel better faster
Many couples find that the relationship was in severe distress. That does not justify an affair.
It does make you question the relationship and if you choose to stay together, you are going to need to change some things about it. You might even design a relationship from scratch to make sure it works for you.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Heal the affair before you take these parts on. They will wait.
If you can heal thoroughly and quickly, you would prefer that. There are tried and true tools you can use.
Use them, then decide if you are ready to try the relationship again.
Not a reader and want some tools to let go of limiting beliefs and to anchor some feelings? Listen to this audio to learn how.
https://archive.org/details/pre-game-3-anchoring-feelings-and-let-go-of-limiting-beliefs
Tools:
Prolonged exposure is a tool wherein we ask people to feel their emotions until the emotions evaporate. Ask me about these. (Overview: 3x a week for 45 minutes per time, feel the emotions until the emotions are no more. Your brain grows bored with the repeated exposure and you learn that you need not cope, just experience feelings. The feelings are not deadly or catastrophic, just uncomfortable, and inconvenient. You can do it.)
Distress tolerance- lean into doing difficult things. Get used to doing hard things. Watch what happens when you consistently do difficult things. Your confidence soars and you have the courage to face new challenges. The new challenges feel exciting, and your self-esteem grows. Oh, and if you are healing, you know there is distress and discomfort that you must go through to get the good stuff.
Hypnosis- great tool for dealing with situations like this.
Neuro linguistic programming- Ask me about the video editing concept, as it relates to images in your head about the affair.
The video in your head about what happened can be edited or altered. Great for images that you would like to scrub from your brain. Great for trauma, such as the trauma of an affair. You are the director and producer of the video in your head and can change many aspects of it to lessen the impact. As you edit parts of the video, your brain will have a harder time ruminating or obsessing because your brain will not find it as easily. It makes you suffer less.
Exposure and response prevention- There are techniques and ideas from OCD that could be helpful to you. People who manage ocd know how to deal with obsession and the affair can feel like an obsession.
Get used to feeling the feelings and not acting out simply because you have an emotion. Let’s say you want to go through their phone because you have a feeling. You would bring on the feeling (yes, on purpose- “exposure”) and then deliberately deal with it and not go through their phone.
Don’t do the compulsive behavior even when the feelings get intense and watch how liberating that is. It breaks the automatic nature of it. You have choices instead of compulsions, by the end. A lot of your thinking might look like OCD in the initial stages, so we will teach concepts from the world of OCD to help you. I am not diagnosing you with OCD.
DBT- is a field that catalogs coping skills. If you truly need skills for coping, search the internet or AI for “DBT coping skills.” Teach yourself the skills and maybe join a group to practice those skills. The more skills you have to regulate emotions, the more in control you will feel.
CBT- is a field that helps you dispute and challenge the thoughts in your head. Often those thoughts are not accurate, and they can even be harmful. People who go through CBT training are often shocked how often they used to believe thoughts that are not accurate or helpful.
Is there evidence that your belief is accurate? Is there any other explanation than the one you are hanging onto? Questions like that help you be more mentally flexible and suffer less. Is it possible that I am misinterpreting what just happened?
Habit replacement therapy- when you have a habit like obsession, we can replace it with something else. Ask me for more information. What could you do that would compete with your obsessing? Fill your time with positive, growth oriented behavior and watch how hard it is to obsess. Challenge your thoughts, change your behavior and give yourself grace.
Behavioral training includes a whistle, clicker, small rewards, codewords, touch, chime, touching the pad that makes a word- like dog training, but for people.
When you see your partner put down the phone when you walk in a room, that elicits a feeling. When you hear the ding for the notification or feel the vibration from a text, you might immediately associate those with the affair. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we are strongly influenced in this manner.
Just as you can be negatively affected by these stimuli, you have the opportunity to be positively affected.
That is where the audio comes in- we are consciously and with full awareness looking at how to program our minds and intentionally creating an anchor for feelings that benefit you.
You have choices
You always have choices in how you respond and behave. Learn the above if you need help with changing behavior. Set up a system designed for you, specifically, and learn to reinforce yourself.
Consider going for counseling, too. Many therapists have training in the above tools, so there is help out there for you.
Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to spending more time together in the future. Let’s have good conversations about this so that we heal rather than hurt.
Thank you for subscribing,
Don Boice, LCSWR
“The go- to guy for conflict”
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