Dealing with anger after an affair
You’re angry right now, extremely ANGRY!
It’s understandable. When the person you love and trust most in the world betrays you, lies to you, and cheats on you, the natural response is to really feel angry. You have every right to your own angry emotions.
Perhaps you find yourself blowing up at your spouse almost every time you see them. You just can’t help it. The rage you are feeling about being betrayed is simply too much and you explode in a fit of harmful words as well as behavior.
You could possibly start unloading on your spouse when they do just one minor thing which offends you. Also, the questionable behavior sends you straight into motion–berating your spouse, not just for the current offensive behavior, but for a never-ending string of additional misbehaviors that may or may not be related.
Or possibly your style is to hide your anger. It seethes under the surface. You may actually do this so well that you have convinced yourself you’ve overcome your anger. Although secretly you know it’s still there, bubbling beneath the surface waiting to explode just like a ticking time bomb.
These are typically some of the natural reactions to feeling betrayed by your spouse.
If your spouse cheated on you, it’s a natural desire for many people to verbally blow up, particularly in the very early stages immediately after you find out about the affair.
This anger can be helpful to the injured person, however there comes a time when revealing your angry feelings reaches a point of diminishing results. It starts creating more troubles than it solves.
Generally people know whether they have hit this point. They want to let go of their anger, however they don’t know how. They desperately look for a way to avoid the nightmare of rage that never seems to end.
You may possibly not even know the full extent of why you are really angry. There are some fundamental aspects that maintain the cycle of anger that you may not be aware of. This lack of awareness may perpetuate the problem
3 Reasons You Are Still Angry
These problems come up over and over again. They are easy to understand, plus they reflect important aspects of the healing process.
They are:
1. You want to show your spouse how hurtful their behavior has been so you can get the special treatment you want from them to make you believe that you can move on from the transgression.
2. You need your spouse to know exactly how hurtful the behavior has been and continues to be, so they will faithfully search their particular behavior for knowledge of how this took place, accept complete responsibility for it as well as the subsequent pain it caused, and be legitimately remorseful about it.
3. You want to have some assurance that this will not ever happen again. This can be a big one and it comes up repeatedly. You could possibly feel you have been made to appear foolish, and you simply never desire to feel this way again.
With the reasoning of points one and two, you feel that increasing the pain and anger will effect a change in your spouse.
In the event you decide you are going to remain and work out the relationship with your spouse, eventually you will need to manage your angry thoughts before they become angry feelings: You start to treat your spouse as your friend and not as your enemy.
Anger doesn’t serve you. It’s not a shield. It’s a weapon– the weapon you use against an enemy, but in today’s world, you are destroying yourself by using it.
You have to express your hurt, or, rather, the ideas that are driving your anger.
You need to communicate your own pain to your spouse if you are intending to move past this terrible trap and continue in the future to acceptance and finally forgiveness.
Dr. Frank Gunzburg can help you learn how let go of your anger after an affair. He can help you to move toward forgiveness in a practical, real-world, step-by-step way. For more detailed information on Dr. Gunzburg’s teachings, click here.


