How to Mend Your Marriage after Infidelity

Infidelity is one of the most challenging hurdles a relationship can face. One act of infidelity can damage a relationship, but when your relationship has suffered from repeated acts of infidelity, the breach of trust, the sense of betrayal, and the emotional fallout can feel insurmountable.

Let’s play out the history of your relationship like the game Jenga.

The Jenga Tower of Your Relationship

Imagine that half of the blocks in your Jenga game are orange and the other half are purple. It doesn’t matter which color you claim, but whichever one you pick represents who you are and what you bring into your relationship, while the other color is your partner. 

From the start, your relationship is built on trust, affection, attraction, and mutuality. The blocks are stacked solidly against one another. The tower is strong.

If you come from a history of abuse, trauma, or addiction, remove a couple of your blocks—but be strategic! You’ve developed a lot of coping mechanisms, become more resilient, and maybe seen a few therapists to deal with some of that past trauma. Stack them on top of your tower. Those moments didn’t go away when you joined this relationship, but they do bring some uncertainties, blindspots, and potential weaknesses into the relationship.

Now, remove a block for every moment you acted out during your time together. Remove a block for every secret kept. Remove a block for every selfish act. Remove a block for the times you chose to masturbate or watch porn instead of being intimate with your partner. Remove a block for every lie.

Just like your family history and background, those blocks don’t disappear once you’ve taken them out of the structure of your relationship. No, each of those blocks stacks on top of the tower of your relationship. Each of those blocks bears weight and takes energy to keep your relationship from falling apart. The more blocks get removed from the base of your relationship, the more unstable your relationship has become. 

With every next move, you and your partner collectively wonder, Is this it? Is this the one that will send our relationship down to the ground?

Often, couples come to me after their Jenga tower has collapsed. Every effort they’ve put in so far has ended in repeated behaviors, broken trust, wounded hearts, and shame. Despite their talented acrobatics, they could no longer maintain their balancing act, and the pressure of so many different hurts and lies have caused their relationship to turn into a pile of rubble.

It isn’t over for you once your Jenga tower falls. Your relationship can be rebuilt, but just like in Jenga, you have to start over, building your relationship block by block until it is restored.

Basic Building Blocks for Renovating Your Relationship

In my experience, when the Jenga tower of a relationship affected by compulsive sexual behavior falls, there are four key pillars that come down with it. They are communication, trust, respect, and intimacy.

These are vital to the health of any relationship. When they are lost, everything in the relationship suffers. Every conversation feels like the words are wrapped in barbed wire. Anxiety, dread, fear, worry, anger, guilt, and shame cloud the air between you, leaving no room for warmth, intimacy, humor, or affection. Physical touch is often limited to obligation or sexual gratification; sex itself seems mechanical, disconnected, and unsatisfying, and in many cases nonexistent.

Maybe you are standing in a pile of fallen blocks right now. Maybe communication is gone, trust evaporated, respect moved out, and intimacy is squelched. These building blocks aren’t gone. They just need to be restored.

In order to restore trust, you need honesty.

In order to restore respect, you need integrity.

In order to restore communication, you need accountability.

And in order to restore intimacy, you need fidelity.

Four Essential Tools to Rebuild Your Relationship

Hope & Freedom has developed four essential tools to help couples begin the important work of clearing the rubble and reestablishing the foundational principles that healthy relationships are made of.

These four tools are:

• Clinical Disclosure or “Formal Therapeutic Disclosure”
• Personal Recovery Plans
• The Recovery Points System
• The Marriage Contract

Clinical Disclosure

The aim of a clinical disclosure is to bring everything out into the open. The primary purpose of a disclosure is to begin the process of restoring trust. 

Formal disclosures are important for both partners: 

For the one struggling with sexual addiction, secrets have shame attached to them. But as soon as we’re able to tell the truth about our struggles and our shame, it knocks the wind out of the bogeyman. When sexual acting out is exposed to the light, it breaks the power of the addiction, and creates space for a foundation of truth to be re-established.

As the partner on the receiving end of the disclosure, this is your chance to fully know the truth. In order for trust to be restored, complete honesty is required.

Personal Recovery Plans

The purpose of a personal recovery plan is to rebuild integrity so that you can restore respect in your relationship. It has taken years for you to develop the habits and behaviors you default to on a daily basis, and so it will take commitment for you to define and pursue new habits and behaviors to supplant those old ways of being.

In my practice, I work closely with couples to develop personal recovery plans, not just for each of them as individuals but for the couple as its own unit. Hope & Freedom’s personal recovery plans are customized plans that outline daily, weekly, monthly, and annual practices to foster that person’s healing journey.

The Recovery Points System

The third tool to address accountability, reestablish communication, and rebuild your relationship is the recovery points system. 

The recovery points system assigns a number to every recovery activity that is in your personal recovery plan. Daily, each partner tracks their recovery activities and calculates how many recovery points they earned, tallying these up to find a weekly total.

When your weekly recovery night check-in comes around, the recovery points system provides you and your partner with a language to talk about whether or not you’ve met your recovery goals for the week. It helps you communicate about recovery with a little more space and distance, using numbers. This way, you can both hold each other accountable to the goals you’ve outlined for yourselves and celebrate each other’s progress.

The Marriage Contract

The fourth tool helps you restore intimacy in your relationship, through fidelity.

Faithfulness is a cornerstone of every relationship, but in this relationship, fidelity has been compromised time and time again. Both partners must be committed to remaining true to one another as you enter into more intentional work on your relationship, if you want this relationship to survive.

I work with couples to develop a marriage contract, which outlines a set of boundaries each partner agrees to follow. Once that contract is established, couples revisit their marriage contract once a month to hold each other accountable.

You Can Heal Your Relationship

Restored honesty, integrity, accountability, and fidelity lead to trust, respect, communication, and intimacy.

I know it may seem impossible to get to that place, but I believe in the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit, and I also believe that you are strong enough to do the hard work of the heart. If you are committed, you can restore your relationship.

You can get some help with all four of these pillars through Hope & Freedom’s Couples Recovery Kit, the From Survival to Freedom Guidebook, and other resources we offer.

If you are very serious about mending your relationship, I highly recommend learning more about our 3-day Therapeutic Disclosure Intensive for Couples. In this intensive session, we take on all four of these essential tools to give your relationship the greatest possible foundation on which to rebuild.

Your relationship might feel like a fallen rubble of Jenga blocks, but I promise you, it’s possible for you to reestablish the four key pillars of your relationship and stand strong, stronger than ever before.

Learn more about our 3-day intensives or explore our other resources designed to help couples make progress on their healing journey together.