Dealing With Affair Images
Yesterday’s post explored why the betrayed partner is often plagued by recurrent images of their partner being with the other person, and how intrusive and destructive that can be.
Providing affair help and resources for infidelity is our focus at Infidelity Help Group. The membership here draw upon both their education about infidelity and their own personal experiences to provide affair help for those who are struggling to cope. We believe in educating people about infidelity, its patterns and its impact on all parties involved. We offer infidelity and affair help that is practical, realistic, and from a place of genuine support and caring. It’s not our job to sugar coat it, but it’s our role to challenge existing thought, debunk myths, press for authenticity, and to ask the hard questions.
We understand how destructive mind movies are. Our veteran membership has lived through them, our newer membership is working to cope with them, with the support of the community. These are techniques that some of the community here have tried and found successful in trying to cope with the images that they conjure up in their own mind movies.
Affair Help: Ways to Stop the Mind Movies
- Imagine a STOP sign and focus on that until you can divert your attention to something else.
- Set aside 15 minutes a day when that is the ONLY time you permit yourself to think about them together.
- Think instead of a calm, peaceful place, or a happy time (not one starring your spouse/partner!) and concentrate on the details of it - identify colors, count objects, name people etc.
- Put an elastic band on your wrist and whenever the thoughts intrude, snap it against your wrist a few times, HARD.
- Hold an ice cube as tightly as you can in your hand and focus on the coldness. When it starts to hurt you will be busy focusing on that instead.
These are a few tried and tested techniques from within our forum (there are others - register with us for further ideas). An article by Stephanie Anderson suggests that you use your imagination as an editing suite, manipulating a movie reel to try to control to control and alleviate the power that these intrusive and disturbing thoughts have over you.
Torturing yourself with images of the affair will suck you into a vortex of self-destructive and negative thinking. However difficult it is, find the time, the inclination, and the courage to implement a coping strategy to stop yourself from wallowing in the drama and angst of the affair.
