Having An Emotional Affair ?

The Emotional Affair

An emotional affair can be devastating for a couple. The same feelings can get triggered as an actual sexual affair. For the same reasons. 

When you are the one having emotional affair – Emotional affairs can cause a lot of damage to your relationship. Maybe you think it’s not so bad since you were just having conversations with other women or men. What’s the big deal if it’s not a physical or sexual affair. However, lying and hiding things, being dishonest and sharing intimate thoughts and feelings with someone else is betrayal.  Infidelity usually starts with flirting and can always lead to more involvement. Especially when both people are on the same page. You’re definitely playing with fire.

Letting go of the attention is hard sometimes – It may be hard to stop the affair since you are enjoying the attention and the way it makes you feel. It might be especially hard thing to give up if you’ve been feeling distant or having other issues affecting your marriage. This also goes for couples that are not married.

The Emotional Affair 

When your partner had or is having an emotional affair  – Maybe you felt there’s something wrong for a long time. You noticed different behavior. Maybe it was with a coworker or an online affair. Something was off. You may even have confronted your partner about your suspicions only to have him or her deny anything is going on. But your gut continued to tell you something was mot right.

So what should you do?

If possible, sitting down with an experienced therapist can help you sort through these issues. Sometimes one person will not cooperate and go to counseling, but don’t let that stop you from getting help if you need it. Even by yourself.

If you just found out about the emotional affair by finding something like an inappropriate text or if your partner finally confessed, it’s time to think about the next step. Of course it’s completely devastating to find this out and/or finally have it validated. And in a way it also feels good that you weren’t crazy after all if you suspected.

Step-by-step healing.

First of all, the emotional affair must stop immediately if you are going to start working on building trust back again. For the person having the affair, this might be challenging if you will feel pain giving up something that made you feel good. If you don’t want to lose your marriage or relationship over it, it’s important to think about how much more pain you’ll be in if you don’t stop.

Why did I do it? This is a question many people ask when they have done something like an emotional affair and even infidelity that involves a sexual component. Many trustworthy, good people end up in this place. It’s something that they would never ever have thought they would do and always judge other people. Now you know it can happen to good people and good relationships. 

Important to understand why this happened and what you can do to heal your relationship. Sometimes the person who had the emotional affair can benefit from his or her own individual counseling to understand what happened and/or to get help letting go.

If you need help with an emotional affair as a couple or individual, please get in touch with us.