Experiencing infidelity can significantly wound and forever change a relationship. Cheating can have traumatic impacts on the couple due to the betrayal and broken trust within a vulnerable relationship. Whether emotional or sexual, affairs can shake the foundation of an intimate relationship.
For the betrayed partner, the experience can set in motion a trauma response. The person’s sense of safety and predictability is ruptured, and they find themselves filled with anxiety and self-doubt about their experience in the relationship overall. They may question whether the cheating is a reflection on their worth as a partner. Understandably, they also may feel grief, confusion, and anger.
The partner who cheated often is left feeling ashamed and afraid that they have ruined the relationship beyond repair. They may not understand their own actions and the path that led them to cheating.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to what a couple should do if infidelity has entered the relationship. Some couples choose to stay, work on the relationship, and move forward. Others choose to separate, unable to reconcile the betrayal and broken trust.
Without a doubt, being betrayed through a cheating incident can make a person overthink everything and result in mental health conditions like anxiety. These thought patterns take a toll on their mental health and peace over time. So today, we’re going to share a guide on how to stop overthinking after being cheated on.
How To Stop Overthinking After Being Cheated On
After finding out that you’ve been cheated on, it’s completely normal for your mind to spiral. In reality, your mind is trying to scan for further threats and keep you from getting hurt again.
However, constant rumination can leave you exhausted and block you from healing. Here are some coping skills to help stop overthinking and work toward resolution.
Validate Your Emotions
Allow yourself to feel the entire range of emotions that arise. You may feel hurt, alone, depressed, afraid, or even ashamed. While you may be inclined to numb out some of these painful feelings (e.g., through distractions, substances, or compulsive habits), this will only leave the emotions trapped in your body. Then, the emotions will trigger overthinking patterns.
Feel your emotions without judgement. Validate yourself for everything you notice. This could sound like: “It makes sense that I’m sad and angry right now. Anyone in my position would be. These feelings are painful but I know they will not last forever.”
You could also speak to a trusted friend to share your feelings and seek their supportive validation.
Collect Your Thoughts
Notice the thoughts that run through your mind when you are overthinking. Are these thoughts based on your current situation, or are they based on another past trauma? Are they helpful in keeping you safe?
Observe if any of your thoughts are negatively oriented toward yourself. Replace self blame and negative statements about your self worth with empowerment like, “This was not my fault” or “I am strong and can heal.”
Writing these thoughts down is an especially helpful exercise to move thoughts out of your mind and onto paper to assess for their helpfulness.
Express Your Anger
If you feel angry toward your partner, know that this anger is justified, valid, and important. This anger needs to be expressed, honored, and acknowledged by your partner in order to stop taking over your own body.
If you are hoping to work on fixing the relationship, write down all of the thoughts you have when you are angry. Write down and express how this betrayal has impacted you. If you feel your partner understands the severity of this event on you, your mind is less likely to flood with anxious thoughts.
Communicate Your Fears
Similar to the concept of sharing your anger, you should also share and honor your own fears. After being cheated on, staying and working on the relationship can be a vulnerable position for many.
If you plan to work on the relationship, help your partner understand and take these fears seriously. Even if you are not, you may have fears about getting back into a close relationship at all, after being hurt. Make sure to communicate these fears with a trusted love one. Sharing will help process and let go of this fear so that you don’t walk away from this relationship filled with negative thoughts that make you never want to love again.
Go All In On Self Care
When you go through hurt, betrayal, trauma, or grief, your body is flooded with hormones and chemicals in response to the stress. Take time to take care of you when you are processing a traumatic event like cheating.
You may decide to spend more money on yourself than you normally would. Get a massage. Take a hot yoga class. Go to dinner with friends. Take a warm bath. Wear comfortable clothing. Take care of yourself in ways that make you feel warm to re-establish safety in your body and keep negative thoughts from taking over.
Ground Your Body
Again, the body holds the stress response after a significant betrayal. While trauma responses function to keep you safe, you no longer need them once you have all of the information you need.
Learning to ground your body by practicing mindfulness and emotional grounding techniques will help you stay settled when you become overwhelmed with emotion. Grounding will keep you in the present moment and connected to your body. In this headspace, you can observe your thoughts without becoming attached to them.
Lean On Social Supports
When you’ve been cheated on, it’s common to overthink about your own worth and why someone would cheat on you. Talk to friends that you trust who can help you make sense of these thoughts.
Importantly, make sure to surround yourself with people who know your worth and can be honest with you. Social supports like friends and family who know you well can help to challenge negative self talk.
Individual Therapy
An individual therapist is a wonderful option if you do not want to entangle mutual friends or family members into your personal grieving process for privacy reasons.
A dating and relationship therapist can help you on your healing journey and help you move forward. Emotionally focused therapy, EMDR, and internal family systems are all wonderful models to support you in your grieving and healing process.
Plus, models like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy can help you to become very mindful about your thoughts and feelings, and learn to detach from the ones that are not helpful.
Couples Counseling
If you’re willing to work with your partner on the relationship, a mental health professional couples therapist can help you to navigate the aftermaths of a betrayal. A neutral third party therapist can offer a structured yet compassionate place to:
- Address pain
- Work on rebuilding trust
- Gain clarity on if the relationship will move forward
How Does Couple Therapy Help Relationships?
Therapy can be a crucial space for navigating the complex and deeply painful impacts of infidelity. Therapy can offer an experience to process the pain, rebuild trust, and ultimately decide the future of the relationship.
Whether a couple decides to part ways or work toward forgiveness, the path forward begins with addressing the hurt and finding clarity in the next steps. All of these goals will help heal and stop overthinking after being cheated on.
Process And Communicate Pain
Infidelity often leads to painful emotions for both partners. There is often a complex mix of anger, shame, hurt, and fear for both individuals. Additionally, there is a connection between male depression and emotional affairs.
A couples therapist will create a non-judgmental, safe environment for each person to express their feelings.
As the betrayed partner is able to reclaim their own emotions and experience, and be heard by their partner, their anxious thoughts will likely decrease.
Address Individual Needs
Events like cheating can reveal unhealed wounds in the person who cheated that led to this action. Plus, they create attachment injuries in the partner who was betrayed.
As such, each partner has their own healing to do for their personal growth, in conjunction with the work they are doing relationally. Couples therapy helps to build the self awareness and emotional regulation skills to complete this work.
Uncover Patterns
In addition to sharing and processing pain, a couples therapist can help you review the dynamics in your relationship that led to the cheating.
This exploration does not excuse the infidelity. Rather, it can help a couple understand the weak points in their relationship that left them vulnerable for this type of trauma.
With this information about their patterns and dynamic, couples can feel more confident that they understand the areas they need to work on to keep their bond strong.
Accountability for Actions
As you unpack the factors in the relationship that led to the infidelity, partners have a chance to hold accountability for their actions.
In particular, the cheating partner has a chance to make sense of why they cheated, to accept responsibility for their betrayal, and to ask for the forgiveness of their partner.
Rebuild Trust
Trust can take years to build, and only a moment to shatter. Reestablishing this trust takes time and intentional effort.
Through therapy, couples are guided to:
- Communicate transparently
- Set boundaries that protect the relationship
- Understand and hold accountability for their actions
All of these activities can help to create understanding, restore safety, rebuild trust, and resolve trust issues over time.
Decide How To Move Forward
Attending couples therapy does not mean you have to stay in the relationship. Sometimes, the information uncovered during therapy brings to light issues that couples are not willing to reconcile over.
A therapist can help clarify your goals and feel confident that the decision is thoughtful and intentional, whether you decide to stay together or split. The process will help you with the question: can a marriage survive infidelity?
Set Boundaries
Setting boundaries is a critical part of the healing process after infidelity. Clear boundaries will help both partners establish safety, rebuild trust, and create a foundation for moving forward.
Therapy can help couples identify and agree on boundaries in a clear and direct way. These boundaries serve to protect the relationship from further vulnerability that could lead to cheating and prevent re-traumatization.
Build Secure Bond
Therapy after an affair will include bonding events that are designed to rebuild trust and safety. These exercises are meant to set the couple up with stronger and more secure footing as they move into the post-affair phase of their relationship.
Sharing vulnerabilities, changing unhealthy patterns, and sharing a vision for the future instill hope and secure the bond between partners. This secure bond is a preventative factor for further instances of broken trust and betrayal.
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