Five Boundaries Necessary For Affair Recovery

I love this topic, you guys.

I think I like talking about it because the idea of having boundaries in my marriage is somewhat new to me in the last few years, and it’s been life-changing for our marriage. I’d always heard of it, I knew there were books on it, I just had no idea what it should look like.

Then……..my marriage fell apart.

I quickly realized how necessary these boundaries would be when it came to putting our marriage back together. My biggest struggle with it all is that I have always been confused as to when I should extend grace to my husband and when I should draw a boundary. I think I actually have this problem with most people in my life, but I see it primarily in my marriage. I guess I thought it had to be one or the other, and in the past I’ve always ended up choosing grace.

I had no idea you can actually extend both grace and boundaries AT THE SAME TIME. 

It is possible to have grace for the brokenness that you’re seeing in your spouse. When they choose to repent and enter into recovery and you decide to offer forgiveness, grace is a beautifully transformative gift in this moment. I also believe it is absolutely necessary for this process to work. It’s an incredible thing to learn to give and it’s an incredible thing for our partner to receive in the midst of such massive shame and failure. There’s not many things that can make the power of shame dissipate quite like grace is able to. Cameron often says that it was the grace he experienced from God and from those closest to him, especially from me, that changed him.

I also believe that after a betrayal, both before and after forgiveness and reconciliation occurs, it is absolutely necessary to have boundaries. I’ve had a lot of questions about this since we came out with our story and so I wanted to break it down into five primary boundaries that were very important for us to implement after we had decided we were going to pursue healing and recovery for our marriage. There are many more that I won’t be covering in this post, but these five are right up there at the top, and I believe someone needs to hear this today. Also, I will be using the word “spouse” a lot for the sake of continuity, however, everything I share here applies to either gender whether you’re married or not.

So hang on, and here we go.

1) Your partner must cut off complete communication and any kind of association with their affair partner—even if it means losing their job. 

For some, this will be very obvious and has most likely already been implemented. For others, this is a bit trickier. I’ve heard from many that even though their spouse works with their affair partner, quitting their job isn’t quite so easy. And let me be the first to say, I totally get that. My husband lost his job due to his affair, and it WASN’T EASY. We went into a lot of debt when this happened. However, if his job security was up to me would I still choose for him to lose his job?

Absolutely.

Losing nearly everything including his job was one of the best things that ever happened to Cameron and he says that himself. A lot of people in this situation don’t lose their job and their life doesn’t always change much, and I’ve observed that it makes the recovery process SO much slower and harder when that is the case. We didn’t have a choice when it came to losing his job and so many other things, but I’m thankful we didn’t. Because choosing to give all that up is sometimes way harder than just having it ripped away. Painful consequences are the best teachers. So while I know that not everyone will agree, in my opinion, if your spouse will still have to see or interact with their affair partner in the routine of daily life, then they need to quit their job or move on from wherever this shared space is.

I wouldn’t be able to tolerate for Cameron to be in the same room with his affair partner for even two seconds if it was up to me. When a spouse chooses to break their vows and their covenant and bring another person into the marriage union, it doesn’t just destroy the marriage. It harms every single member of that family on some level. You can’t tell me that anyone’s job or house or car or 401k is worth that.

One of the best quotes I ever heard shortly after everything happened was: “You can’t heal in the same place that you got sick.” This is true for dysfunctional relationships and environments.  In many cases a toxic work environment can contribute to or foster an affair in some way.

So my advice? Your partner needs to RUN from the person and the place that was so unhealthy and destructive.

2) Create safety for yourself—no matter what you have to ask for to get it. 

This can look like a lot of things, but for us, the first thing I did to make myself feel safe was to separate myself from Cameron. The misconception about marital separation is that it’s usually the first step towards divorce. I don’t think that has to be true at all. I actually think it’s often the very thing necessary to save a broken marriage. It can be the first big step towards healing, and for us that’s exactly what it was. I knew I couldn’t live with him for a while after being betrayed on such a deep level. So to feel safe, I needed him to go stay somewhere else, and he completely respected what I needed.

A couple months later when we had walked through forgiveness and reconciliation, safety meant locking down all of our electronic devices completely so I knew that at least our house would be a pure and safe place for us to grow and heal.

The Lord just happened to put the person to help us with that, right NEXT DOOR to us. Shortly after everything happened, our neighbor James who was in IT and specialized in doing things like this for schools, came over and combed through every electronic device in our home to make sure that pornography or “work-arounds” were not an accessible option for Cameron. He might as well have just gotten a flip phone because his fancy iPhone was pretty much only good for making phone calls, emails, and taking pictures at that point. I also have all of his passwords and access to everything on his phone, computers, and  email, and he’s been open-handed with my access to all of it.

Another boundary we had to make in order for me to feel safe was to set up our phones so that I can see Cameron’s location at all times. Sometimes if he’s out late with one of his buddies, he’ll ask me to name a number between 1 and 5, and once I tell him a number, he’ll send me back a picture of his friend holding up that many fingers to show it’s a real-time photo in that moment just to assure me where he is. Something else we’ve done is have Cameron FaceTime with me and show me where he is, or he’ll have his friend text me from their phone to verify that he’s being honest about where he is and what he’s doing—this does require trustworthy friends, and I trust Cameron’s friends. This level of communication is huge for my healing and my ability to trust what he’s telling me.

These are just a few ideas of what it looks like to create safety with your partner. Whatever it is that you need, you’re allowed to ask. In the wake of such a devastating betrayal, no request is too great for the sake of your healing.

3) You get to call the shots and determine the level of intimacy you want to have with your spouse.

One of our counselors gave wise advice when he said, “Only do what the most uncomfortable person is comfortable doing.” That’s exactly how we go about any kind of intimacy. And I don’t just mean with sex.

By the way–for you ladies reading this, your husband can live without sex. He really can. And he doesn’t need to go find it elsewhere to survive. It’s a myth going around that says they have to get it somewhere, and that’s just simply not true. Your husband’s sexual needs in the wake of betrayal and a sex addiction is not on you, that’s on him. And learning how to re-train his mind and body for the sake of protecting you and the marriage…..it’s actually a very beautiful thing. And necessary for true healing. Don’t feel bad if sex is not something you can offer for a very long time.

Obviously after an affair there should be physical boundaries, and it’s completely okay to express those to your partner whatever that looks like. However, there are also other levels of intimacy that may need boundaries as well.

I also asked Cameron not to say “I love you” to me in the months following the affair. It meant nothing to me. And not only did it mean nothing, it actually triggered my trauma episodes like crazy. Having him tell me he loved me after such betrayal only caused further pain. It wasn’t until we were further along in our process of building trust and reconnection that he was able to say that again.

Intimacy is sacred and you have to be careful with it, especially with your spouse during affair recovery.

4) Your spouse needs to have limited interaction with the opposite sex. 

Part of Cameron’s issues is that because of his trauma he didn’t really know how to have deep relationships with men, so he very naturally turned to women. Women are good listeners, and they are generally quicker to understand complex emotions—and quicker to affirm. And then years of pornography had a major impact on his ego, growing his pride and self-hatred at the same time, and eroding his sensitivity for boundaries in relationships. So for us, we had to have a lot of boundaries when it came to other women, including not spending any one-one-one time with them. This boundary had actually been in place our entire marriage, but the one time it wasn’t monitored was during work hours, which is unfortunately true for most people. During recovery Cameron has heightened his sensitivity and awareness, intentionally keeping his emotional distance with women in our life.

It also means that if my husband needs to text another woman for any reason, he usually loops me in as a group text. It’s such a great practice considering how private and intimate a text conversation can be.

In many affairs the offender has struggled most of their life to have meaningful relationships with their same sex, so learning how to do that is a major element in their recovery. Cutting out interaction with the opposite sex will not only ward off potential problems but will also leave voids that members of the same sex can step into on the path of recovery.

5) Your spouse has to continue to consistently pursue recovery and there needs to be obvious change.

In my recovery group I learned that the four primary signs of true recovery that we can evaluate in our spouse are: humility, openness, brokenness, and willingness. I would actually like to also add empathyto this list. These are all fruits of recovery that can’t be faked for very long. Yes many addicts or those recovering from an affair might be open and willing in the beginning. They might seem humble and distraught right away. But what about a year later when life levels out and the mundane kicks back in and marriage feels boring and difficult again? Are they still open? Are they still willing?

It was incredible to see each of these things grow and develop in Cameron week after week and month after month. And stay there. It brought so much more trust and hope to see him “sober up” and feel true empathy for what he had put me through. It’s like when all the walls finally came down and his heart and mind began to truly mature and be enlightened to the scope of what he’d done, I saw his heart completely break…….for me.

All of the work he committed to and continues to do was essential to us getting to a healthy place and restoring the marriage. If your spouse isn’t fully ready to dive in to their brokenness for the sake of their own restoration, then the marriage will not be built on a firm foundation—eventually drifting back into an unhealthy marriage dynamic.

As I wrap this up, I also want to say this: it is not up to you to enforce all of these boundaries for your spouse. All you need to do is communicate them.

Once these things are communicated, it is up to your spouse to make sure they immediately find a way to put them in place so that you feel taken care of and safe in this recovery process. These are really the first steps that they can do to slowly begin to rebuild trust.

And if they really can’t do that? Then this marriage may not work out long-term. Which is exactly why these boundaries are in place. Please hear my heart on this one:

Just because God led me to stay in my marriage doesn’t mean that you should. 

If there is repeated betrayal, a disregard for boundaries, consistent gaslighting (twisting conversations to make you feel like you’re crazy or at fault), lying, and an unwillingness to truly do what it takes to protect you and your marriage…..then I’m just not for that. And that’s not what I’m condoning here.

Our marriage isn’t thriving today just because God asked me to fight for it. A huge part of why it’s thriving is because Cameron respected and encouraged each one of these boundaries, some of which are still in place. He feels protected by them, even though some of them are still really inconvenient. I highly advise you to take the boundaries mentioned here to your counselor and have them walk you and your spouse through them so you can get on the same page about what your recovery journey needs to look like.

Getting over an addiction, mental illness, negative thought patterns, or the trauma from an affair is messy, and there will be plenty of stumbling as you navigate it all. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is to see humility, openness, brokenness, willingness, and empathy all along the way.