My 5-Step Approach to Forgiving Your Spouse

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

Let me outline the steps for you; then, before we start on this journey together, I want to say a few brief words about the path that lies ahead of you.

Step 1 – Why Can’t I Just Get over It?: Overcoming Feelings That Seem Like They Won’t Go Away

If you are going to get to a place where you forgive your partner, you will have to do some work. We have already established that. The reason is that you are still holding on to feelings that you need to deal with in some way. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t feel like you needed to forgive.

So the first step on the path of acceptance is to understand why your feelings linger and learn what you can do about them.

Step 2 – Help Your Partner Understand You: Five Steps to Communicating Your Pain

As you will learn in Step 1, one of the main reasons you are holding on to your emotions is because you don’t feel your spouse truly understands the pain he or she has put you in. Some or most of the problems you face right now probably revolve around this issue.

To help you overcome this problem and take another step down the path of accepting your spouse and the violation of your trust, this step includes a 5-step program that will help you communicate your pain in a way that your partner can truly understand.

Step 3 – When Images Haunt You: Free Yourself from the Plague of Images

One of the things that makes it difficult to move toward forgiveness is the haunting nature of images – real or imagined – of the offense that play over and over again in your mind. When you are plagued by images of your spouse’s offense, you get stuck in a cycle of seemingly endless pain.

Just when it starts to subside, you have an image of the offense – BANG – all your emotions flood back to the surface and you are pulled down into that awful whirlpool again.

This step gives you a powerful technique for reducing the power these terrible images have over you so you can let them go more readily.

Step 4 – I Can’t Stop Thinking About It: How to Put an End to Obsessive Thoughts

Another problem that brings all of your emotions back to the surface is when you simply can’t stop thinking about the offense. Even if you do not have images of your partner betraying you, you may have recurring and unwanted thoughts about what he or she did, and you can’t get this terrible thing out of your mind.

This step is built to help you let go of these obsessive thoughts so you can be free to move yet another step down the path of acceptance.

Step 5 – Will It Happen Again?: How to Forgive in an Uncertain World

Once you have worked through the first four steps in the program successfully, you will come to a place where your emotions begin to subside, you will feel that your partner understands what he or she did to you, you will be free of the thoughts and images that plague you, and you will be on the verge of authentic forgiveness.

At this stage, a deep worry could hold you back. It is one that many people face once they have walked down the path and are just about ready to flip that switch on and watch the light of forgiveness shine in their relationship.

You might be worried that what happened before will happen again.

What if you let go of your pain and the same thing happens all over again? You were already made to look like a fool once. Can you possibly handle that happening again? How can you walk the path of acceptance and allow yourself to forgive if you can’t be absolutely sure your partner won’t betray you again.

In this step, I will give you some strategies for rebuilding confidence in your partner and helping you address your fears of the transgression happening again so the process of forgiveness can proceed.

Each of these steps builds on top of the others to take you down the path of acceptance. Every time you work through one of the steps, another piece in the puzzle will be in place and you will move closer and closer toward forgiveness.

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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