SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi all, I haven't posted in a few weeks due to the emotional depressed gut wrenching state I've been in. I just started IC and have my 2nd appointment today. I like the therapist, she is very direct but caring, at least that is what I got from my first appointment. She recommended the book "After the Affair" by Janis Spring, for myself to read and she also said it was good for my partner to read too. But as I started reading it, I really was triggered by the fact that the author uses the word "Lover" to the WP, but in this book the author states

1."I don't make blanket judgements about whether the affairs are, in themselves good or bad."

2."I don't separate the two of you into victim and victimizer, betrayed and betrayer" each of you must accept appropriate share of responsibility for what went wrong. instead of assign blame i encourage each of you to confront those parts of yourself that led to the affair and to change in ways that build trust and intimacy."
" I refer to the affair person with whom your partner had the affair as "lover" and for the hurt partner "affair person".

TRIGGERED JUST reading the INTRODUCTION. has anyone else who wants to work on their relationship read this book and found it helpful???

A friend of mine who knew nothing of affairs gave me this book after D-Day.

I think I made it through a few pages and threw it in the trash.

IMO it partially blames the BS. Nope.

Haven't read it. Now, after reading what you just posted, I don't intend to read it either. She sounds just like another Adultery Apologist, Ester Perel. I have watched a couple of her YouTube videos, and she made me want to gag.

I think the experts are here.

I'd ask the therapist if this concept of "shared responsibility" is also her philosophy.

If so, then you can save your time and get a new therapist, asap.

I had a (horrible) marriage counselor suggest this book. While there may be some good in the book, it throws a lot of blame at the betrayed spouse and is very hurtful, not helpful.

Based on your therapists book recommendation, I’d never step foot in that office again.

That is awful!

I think it’s good to not get indoctrinated by any one school of thought. Even SI can, at times and to some degree, resemble a cult-like rally as members begin to parrot the tenets and buzzwords of this site and feedback off each other, BUT there’s a lot of gold here and it’s largely a great resource.

It seems that the "formal infidelity training" some therapists get is in the form of post grad CE workshops. When you try and research what infidelity training is included in a clinical psychologist’s curriculum, it’s vague and inconsistent, BUT there’s still a lot of gold there. Some therapists can be God sends. Some can really do damage.

Even the infamous Ether P has some gold in her teachings.

An old SI mantra that is pure gold is:

"Take what you need, what resonates with you and your situation, and leave the rest."

"After the Affair" definitely gets it wrong as it relates to blameshifting. No two ways about it. It doesn't make the rest of the book useless.

Janis Spring's other book "How Can I Forgive You?" is much better, and I found it useful in R.

EDIT TO ADD: No given book on affairs is "the Bible" (which I had my own laughable encounter with my fWW on, what with the actual Bible forbidding infidelity and recommending death as the punishment). I think "Not Just Friends" by Shirley Glass is the best that I've read and is frequently recommended here.

What you will find, is that if you choose to reconcile, you are going to have to have some flexibility in your thinking and judgment. I mean, you could NOT have that flexibility, but you will just be torturing yourself by staying with someone you believe to be a bad person and an unsafe partner. I've also called this the "loss of something integrity adjacent". If cheating is a straight up deal breaker for you, you don't have to figure out acceptance, forgiveness, or how to rebuild trust with someone that has betrayed you. You still have to find ways to heal from the trauma, but there are some more straightforward paths to that healing if you maintain the view that cheaters are fundamentally bad people. These paths are inaccessible to people that also want to R.

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 9:10 PM, Monday, November 28th]