After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful |...

After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful | Janis Abrahms Spring, Michael Spring | REALLY helped me by giving me validation

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After the Affair: ...

	After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful Janis Abrahms Spring, Michael Spring Harper Paperbacks, 1997 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 81 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent, insightful work

as a psychologist, i have found this book to be a wonderful resource. i have used it with many patients who have been on the giving or receiving end of an affair and have also used it with patients who have a family history characterized by an affair. the book is great for getting both members of the couple to look at the ways in which they could do things differently in the relationship. it's unfortunate but true that an affair can often bring couples closer together. i certainly do not think that this is the way to get your partner's attention (!), but i do believe that relationships can survive an infidelity. this book provides hope and help for strengthening a marriage after an affair.

one of the best parts of the book discusses the process of learning from the affair. this chapter includes a section on how our own family of origin issues can contribute to our tendencies to push others away, withdraw from others, or otherwise sabotage a relationship. for instance, dr. spring speaks of a situation in which a person never got to be a child and sought a lover to get in touch with that impulsive, childlike side of the personality. none of the tendencies that she describes are meant as excuses for behavior, though. rather, they are meant as potential reasons and points of consideration so that the individual may work toward preventing an affair. this section alone made the book worth reading for me, and i have used it with faithful couples who appear to be attempting to sabotage their relationship in some way.

for those who say that this book blames the faithful partner, i remind you of what anais nin said: "we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." while this book provides the faithful partner with points to ponder during the process of recovery, the message is not one of blaming that spouse for driving the unfaithful spouse to an affair. in my opinion, that is simply NOT possible. i can't MAKE my spouse have an affair any more than i can MAKE him stand on his head or eat asparagus! if it's not yours, don't own it. simply read the book, do some instrospecting, and work to make your love strong enough to withstand the trials and tribulations that characterize a relationship between two people who love each other deeply.

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REALLY helped me by giving me validation

When my husband had an affair with my best friend, my therapist recommended this book to me. It was VERY, VERY helpful. It really explains all the reasons people have affairs - the circumstances that can create them, what's missing inside you and in your relationship, etc. I cannot recommend it enough. It helped validate a lot of things for me and helped me gravitate back to good self-esteem. Get a copy for your spouse, too.

This book restored my sanity and saved our relationship!

If you've been cheated on and are desperate for answers and understanding like I was, you need this book. After I found out about the affair, it was a nightmare. The anger was overwhelming to the point it consumed my every thought. We didn't know where to begin to start dealing with our own thoughts or with each other. This helped me understand more and guided us on how to talk in a constructive way so we could begin to heal. It's been five months and we're probably getting along better than ever. We chose to stay together and I'm not sure we would have succeeded without the help of this book and it's great advice.
Good luck to you!

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Sensible Encouragement For Those Hurting From Infidelity

If you've been the victim of your spouse's affair and are seriously considering sticking by him/her, you'll find this book helpful in deciding whether staying together is the right decision for you. I feel Dr. Spring focuses on helping hurt spouses decide whether to stay or go, and then further focuses on helping those who choose to stay with issues of restoring trust and rebuilding love and intimacy.

My husband cheated on me, and when I caught him, he admitted his affair. I read this book under the following presumptions: that my husband's affair is over, that my husband wishes to stay with me, and that the only hindrance to our staying together is my doubt and apprehension. If you are experiencing infidelity under similar circumstances, I feel this book will help you come to the "right" conclusion in your situation. I can only offer that suggestion as the hurt spouse, though. I don't know how helpful this book will be to unfaithful spouses. My husband will be reading it next week, so I should have him review this book when he's through.

Dr. Spring encourages unfaithful spouses to look deep within themselves for an explanation as to why they chose to cheat, and the explanations she demands must be introspective and self-centered. She frowns on the unfaithful spouse blaming others for the infidelity. She also encourages the hurt spouse to look deep within and examine whether certain kinds of conduct or interaction with the unfaithful spouse encouraged infidelity within the relationship. She doesn't ask the hurt spouse to accept blame for the affair occurring, but she does ask that the hurt spouse accept responsibility for creating an atmosphere within the marriage that may have contributed to the unfaithful spouse's desire to seek out a lover.

Some of Dr. Spring's suggestions and assumptions didn't apply to me, so I simply skipped those parts of the book. However, I voraciously read through the first half of the book and hung on every word. She focuses the first part of the book on putting into words the feelings and emotions both partners may be feeling after the affair. It was helpful to read in print the feelings I was experiencing so that I knew I wasn't the only woman in the world feeling this way. It also helped me to know how my husband might be feeling since I was too angry to ask him myself, but wanted to know how he felt about things.

The second part of the book asks you to think about your assumptions about love and marriage, and examine your own marriage in light of your assumptions (does it measure up or fail to meet your expectations?). She then guides you through some difficult questions you must ask yourself if you're struggling with the decision to stay or go. After reading this part of the book, I still felt torn in both directions, so I continued reading in the hopes that I would be able to glean more about my own decision-making process.

I'm glad I continued reading into the chapter that describes how you can begin to learn from the affair and restore trust. I found the chapter on restoring trust to be especially helpful, and it was from that chapter that I gained the greatest confidence in my decision (I've decided to stay and work on improving our marriage).

I skimmed the rest of the book on how to forgive, how to restore intimacy, and whether you ought to reveal your affair (a last-minute addition to the book for those who haven't told their spouses yet). As I said, these chapters didn't seem necessary for me to read under my specific circumstances. The sexual intimacy chapter would be helpful for those couples who haven't been intimate since the affair, as she guides you through some exercises that may help you shed inhibitions and fears. I didn't read the chapter on forgiveness in detail, figuring forgiveness will come with time, so I don't need to focus on it right now (again, restoring trust was vital to me and will be my focus for some time). I will reexamine this chapter at a later date.

If you're seeking help right now and don't know where to turn, this book is an excellent starting point. I have sought counsel with friends and family, but not professional counsel just yet. I feel more comfortable about starting professional counseling soon now that I have a grasp of the ideas and concerns we need to focus on. I didn't want to make my decision based on what my friends told me because they're biased in my favor. I also didn't want to make my decision based on my husband's hopes since he's biased in his own favor. Dr. Spring's suggestions and thought exercises helped me to decide in as unbiased a manner as possible whether staying was the right decision for me. I feel she can help you make the right decision for you if you are experiencing infidelity in a similar way to me.

Further, I checked out "Not Just Friends," but since I read this book first and with great care, I was too emotionally drained to read "Not Just Friends." Perhaps it would be helpful, but I didn't have the energy to read it through and compare the two.

My faults with the book are that you may experience a wider range of negative emotions while reading it because you read about concerns you didn't have but now think about. Actually, that'd be my only criticism.

Best of luck making your own decision.

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A comprehensive self help book!

It's really comprehensive. It helps me to put things in perspectives and provide useful information to make a choice to stay or leave.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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