Positive thinking can help you to survive infidelity

Banishing negative thoughts requires replacement with positive thoughts, which is possible with practice. Learning basic breathing exercises and focusing on the act of breathing, may seem basic, but with regular practice is effective. Negative thoughts needed to be identified, written down, and focused breathing techniques used to distract the mind. For some women this negativity is life threatening, and counseling or psychiatric help may be the only solution. Dealing with infidelity is made even more difficult by its prevalence; stories of congressmen in newspapers, chat shows, and talk shows seem full of cheating husbands and betrayed wives. Some comfort can be taken in realizing that you are not alone, but the bad thoughts can wreck your sleep and thus your health.

Positive fight back
You need a way to counteract those bad thoughts, by using the power of, positive thinking! Carefully analyze your negative triggers, really concentrate and try to understand why they trigger such terrible thoughts. The next step is to identify at least 10 things that you see in a day, which could be positive triggers. This list could include anything from cats to kids, from odd statues in the park to great songs on the radio. The main point is can these positive triggers make you smile? The technique is to smile each time you see, hear or even smell (fresh baked bread for example) a positive trigger. Dr Amanda Smith explains that, “The act of smiling itself has been shown to be good for one’s health. Simply changing your expression to a smile or mimicking another’s smile can cause involuntary biological changes just like those induced by emotions.” Select your most powerful negative thoughts, those that wake you up in the middle of the night, like whether your marriage can survive infidelity, a word imprinted on your brain, and now seen everywhere on ad hoardings, the television, heard on the radio. Isolate the fear you feel, maybe the fear of raising your children alone, and then write down what you can do about it. You are NOT helpless, your husband may have had an affair, but you are both in the marriage, and if you want to save it, that is within your power.

Think positive thoughts when dealing with infidelity
The next step is replacing negative and destructive thoughts. Having swapped the negative triggers for positive ones, challenge those negative thoughts with a lie detector test! What you are doing is disproving the sweeping generalities that are made when feeling negative and down. To take an example, “I am a total failure as a wife, that’s why he had an affair”. How true is that in the lie detector world? Did you ever cook a nice meal, iron shirts, drive to his office because he forgot something important, even though it made you late for work? The jury is back, you are NOT a TOTAL failure. If you repeat that exercise for each one of your negative thoughts, you will disprove most of them. On the off chance that there may be some truth in what you have been thinking, be very specific, sweeping generalizations are very dangerous. If a negative thought is that your marriage cannot survive infidelity because of the way you were brought up, be more precise. Your background and belief system always allows for exceptions, not to say it will be easy, but it is not impossible, life is never that rigid.

Finally, use the age old Buddhist power of the mantra, look yourself in the mirror and repeat several times, “I am a decent person in a bad situation, I will get through this”. On another note, with the swap of a vowel, and the power of positive thinking, the word that haunts you, infidelity, becomes DEFINITeLY, so each time you see or hear it, say to yourself, “I am dealing with infidelity I am definitely going to survive this!”