How can our marriage recover from the pain of adultery?

It is important that you know that it is possible you can recover from adultery, that there's hope, and many couples in fact do heal from the pain and the devastation of adultery. Now, this doesn't mean that you're not going to experience grief and ongoing sadness or loss or anxiety, because in fact you will. And the reason why you will is because infidelity is traumatic. It's traumatizing. Something deeply within you and between you and your spouse has been devastated, has been shattered. The very ground beneath you has shifted. So it's important to understand that healing starts when the ground stops moving underneath and beneath your marriage. The sexual immorality, the infidelity has to end. It must end, and the pain and trauma only deepens the longer the infidelity continues. So adultery must come to an end. Now, likewise, don't do further damage. When adultery is revealed, your emotions are going to be overwhelming. Venting them on your spouse only will make things worse. There will be a time when you have to ask really hard questions and communicate what this has meant to you, what it's done to you. But in the days and weeks immediately after the devastating discovery, the more a person vents and shares their outrage, that will actually increase the pain that's in circulation in the marriage and in this crisis.

So in that time, in the immediate hours and days after this discovery, each spouse, the husband and the wife, will have a different need, a different pastoral need you could say, and they'll need to see an individual counselor, an individual pastor, to work through the immediate aftereffects and feelings and experience of adultery. Now, a colleague of mine, Bill Doherty, uses a metaphor that I think is incredibly helpful. He uses an accident or a ER metaphor, and what he says is, look it, when a person goes and drinks alcohol and drives and then gets into a wreck, and there are casualties, when those people come into the ER, the ER doctor, his or her immediate priority is not to figure out what happened and why, but simply to stabilize the people that come into the ER. There is devastation, there are wounds, there is a crisis, and the ER doctor is going to focus on stabilizing each person in that crisis.

Now, in the same way, when there's a discovery of infidelity, there will be a time to work through what happened and why. But the immediate priority is to bring stability back to a relationship that is utterly devastated. So once there's stability and you've made it through the initial shock of infidelity, this is the time now to make sense of what happened and why. This is the time to work together as a couple to ask the hard questions. And clearly not all infidelity is the same. For example, a two-year romantic relationship, that's different than a one-time, in-the-moment sexual failure. So understanding the nature of what happened and working your way through that is essential. As you make sense of the adultery together, now you have a chance to start rebuilding trust. And at the heart of rebuilding trust, really, there are two things: forgiveness and faithfulness.

For every couple, the seventh commandment must be a focus of where they're going, and a couple must move beyond the prohibition, you could say, of the seventh commandment—thou shall not commit adultery—to move beyond that prohibition to the actual heart and command that's contained in the commandment, which is thou shall be chaste, sexually pure; thou shall be faithful, truly faithful; and thou shall be fully content with God and with your spouse. And as you grow in God's intentions, you could say, for the seventh commandment, healing can start to occur. You start to focus not just on how do we not repeat this sin, this traumatic experience, but how do we grow towards true chastity, true faithfulness, and true contentment with the Lord and with one another.