Learning to Accept the Past

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

At this point, you might have some sense that you really want to move on with your life. It may be that you have not fully resolved all of your emotions surrounding the affair. Nonetheless, you might feel that the greater part of your pain is healed and that you want to forge ahead in your relationship.

If this is the place you are in, that is a very positive thing. You are now ready to take the final steps to heal your relationship so that you can move forward into a brighter future with your partner.

These final steps aren’t quite as simple as they are cracked up to be. In part, this is due to the fact that our culture invests a great deal in the idea of “forgiveness.” You might be under the mistaken notion that to move on with your relationship you must forgive your partner. This might be complicated by the fact that the idea of forgiveness has certain connotations that you might not be willing or able to meet right now. Nonetheless, you crave a way to practically move forward with your relationship.

The alternative to forgiveness that I offer in this chapter is acceptance. There is a way for you to accept the past and move on with your life without the requirement of forgiveness. In order to help you understand this more clearly, let’s start by defining what I mean by acceptance. Then we’ll take a look at the difference between acceptance and forgiveness.

In life, there are things that cannot be undone. The past cannot realistically be changed. You might change your relationship to parts of your past, but what happened, happened. There is no ignoring or changing that simple fact.

We often spend a great deal of time dreaming of alternatives, wishing that we could undo some adverse event. We come up with a million ways we might have done things differently. We say, “If only I had …”

It is likely that the cheating partner in your relationship has spent a great deal of time doing this. Saying or thinking something like, “If only I hadn’t done it. If only I could have seen the hurt I was causing,” is quite common. But what’s done is done. No amount of imagining or regret will change the past.

The affair cannot be undone. You can’t blink your eyes or wiggle your nose and make it never have happened. It did happen, and its effects are real. You know this only too well.

However, at this point you have done a lot of work on the effects the affair had on you and your relationship. You have, in some ways, started to alter your relationship to the event. Change also happens. You can change your present and your future, even if you can’t alter your past.

It is in this spirit that I speak of acceptance and accepting the affair. There is a point at which you will come to a place where you are ready to accept that the affair happened, that there is nothing you can do to change that fact, and that there are things you can do to change your future and keep another affair from ever happening again. You have been working on those things over the course of this book.

In our culture, we tend to use the idea of acceptance in a very negative way. We use the phrase, “just accept it” as a way of saying, “Just lay down and give up.” And while the way in which I am talking about acceptance has something to do with laying down the affair, it isn’t about giving up on your needs or your relationship at all.

Accepting does not mean that you agree with the affair in any way. It does not mean that you just lie down and let your partner walk all over you. It does not mean that you give up and let your needs go unmet.

Rather, accepting that the affair happened is about making a positive move toward a fruitful future. It is about letting go of the affair so that you can move forward. Instead of getting buried by dwelling on the past, you have the power and the choice to make a step and move forward. You can accept the past as a means of learning how to make a better future with your partner.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.

For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/

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