Whether it was you or your partner who strayed, infidelity can feel devastating – and this can feel even more intense if you are in recovery from drug addiction or alcohol addiction.
Addiction can increase the risk of infidelity. Studies of married men entering outpatient alcohol treatment showed a significantly higher rate of infidelity than a community sample. Risky behaviours tend to be exacerbated by active addiction – many people in addiction report associations between their sexual thoughts, feelings and behaviours and using their substance of choice.
Unfaithfulness within your relationship can feel like a reason to return to your addiction. It’s extremely important to prioritise your recovery, take a step back, and not fall into this trap.
Understanding how addiction may influence repairing your relationship
If you were the unfaithful partner, you may have been unfaithful due to impaired judgement while using. This must be acknowledged but not used as an excuse. Being honest about what happened and why is an important step for rebuilding trust.
Emotions during recovery are raw. You may be dealing with depression, anxiety, anger, loneliness, boredom and anhedonia. These heightened – and dulled – emotions represent an entirely different emotional landscape from when you were in active addiction. You may not respond to stressors in the same way as you did previously – and will find them much more challenging to deal with with one of your primary coping mechanisms no longer accessible to you.
Before engaging in the process of rebuilding your relationship, you will want to seriously ask yourself if you can handle both addressing infidelity and addiction recovery at the same time. Both are emotionally difficult, labour-intensive and require serious commitment. Working on your sobriety will leave you in a much better place to deal with painful events like relationship breakdown.
Acknowledge your emotions
It is normal to feel angry, hurt, betrayed and sad if your partner has been unfaithful to you. If you are the unfaithful partner, you will still feel many of these emotions, alongside a large amount of guilt. Along with the uncomfortable emotions you will be experiencing as part of the recovery process, this can make the period after discovering infidelity extremely challenging.
Judgement and self-blame will be natural reactions when infidelity comes to light. Taking a step back and acknowledging how you feel without immediately acting is important.
Guilt and shame are both common responses to infidelity. These emotions should be acknowledged, not suppressed, so that they can be managed effectively. An Australian study found that managing these emotions was a critical element for couples who stayed together after one of them was unfaithful.
Validating emotions—both yours and your partners’—is a crucial first step in understanding the impact of the affair and in starting down the path to healing.
Communication
Unfaithfulness indicates a sustained breakdown of communication in a relationship. One partner has been untruthful, potentially for a long time. Additionally, addiction often involves a large amount of secrecy – many people in active addiction go to great lengths to hide their addiction from their partners.
Your sobriety and the rebuilding of your relationship both depend on working to repair these broken-down channels of communication and continued effort to be honest with yourself and others. Opening up new communication channels takes work, and both partners must develop new communication skills.
Being vulnerable with your partner allows them to see the full impact that infidelity has had on you. It’s also the groundwork for communicating properly – you can’t address something your partner will not talk about.
Be realistic
Setting realistic expectations for the time it will take to do the work of relational repair is important. Rebuilding a broken relationship takes time, even more so if you are also dealing with recovery.
Dealing with the fallout of infidelity can feel humiliating, and you may want to lash out at your partner. This may feel good in the heat of the moment, but you should avoid further damaging your relationship. The work of rebuilding a relationship after infidelity can take a long time, and words said in anger at the beginning of the process can mean it will take even longer. If you need to step away and take time for yourself then do it – the road ahead is long.
Rebuilding trust
Rebuilding trust in the aftermath of infidelity is a lengthy process, and both partners have to be committed to repairing the relationship. This trust is earned over time and will not be an overnight process.
Trust is rebuilt slowly, through actions rather than words. Rebuilding trust means being accountable and doing your best to keep your promises – to yourself or your partner. This is true of both rebuilding relationships and addiction recovery.
Couples therapy
Rebuilding a relationship after infidelity is a complicated process, and addiction recovery adds an extra layer of complexity.
The dynamic of many couples where one partner struggles with addiction can be fraught with codependency. For people in addiction, getting couples therapy is extremely beneficial as it addresses the enabling behaviour that allowed the addiction to continue unobstructed for so long. Couples receiving therapy as part of the addiction recovery process report higher levels of relationship satisfaction, improvements in other areas of their relationship – and reduced substance use.
For couples dealing with addiction and infidelity, professional support from a qualified therapist is beneficial – not just for working through infidelity, but as part of the addiction recovery process.
The art of forgiveness
Forgiveness is not guaranteed and cannot be rushed. Forgiveness is also not condoning the unfaithful partner’s behaviour. Forgiveness is a gradual letting go of anger and reopening to the possibility of trusting your partner again.
Forgiveness takes time and commitment – you cannot half-heartedly forgive someone. If you do manage to get to the stage of forgiveness, it is possible that you will have a deeper, more realistic understanding of your partner and a renewed commitment to them.
Walking away
While it may be painful to leave a relationship that is no longer serving you, it’s sometimes necessary.
If you feel that your relationship with your partner can only be recovered at the expense of your sobriety, you need to prioritise yourself and your recovery. This is particularly true if your relationship was previously codependent and had a role in enabling your addiction.
FAQ’s
(Click here to see works cited)
- Hall, J.H., Fals-Stewart, W. and Fincham, F.D. (2008). Risky sexual behavior among married alcoholic men. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(2), pp.287–292. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.22.2.287.
- Bosma-Bleeker, M.H. and Blaauw, E. (2018). Substance use disorders and sexual behavior; the effects of alcohol and drugs on patients’ sexual thoughts, feelings and behavior. Addictive Behaviors, 87, pp.231–237. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.07.005.
- Abrahamson, I., Hussain, R., Khan, A. and Schofield, M.J. (2011). What Helps Couples Rebuild Their Relationship After Infidelity? Journal of Family Issues, [online] 33(11), pp.1494–1519. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513×11424257.
- Fals-Stewart, W., O’Farrell, T.J. and Birchler, G.R. (2004). Behavioral Couples Therapy for Substance Abuse: Rationale, Methods, and Findings. Science & Practice Perspectives, [online] 2(2), pp.30–41. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851021/.