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Dealing with Triggers As A Couple - Especially During the Holidays

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Dealing with Triggers As A Couple - Especially During the Holidays

“Pre-assurance” — offering reassurance before your partner is triggered, is a proactive way to help them feel emotionally safe. It communicates awareness, care, and emotional leadership, especially after betrayal. It's one of the most compassionate things an unfaithful partner can do to rebuild trust.

You can remember it like this:

“I see you. I’m here. You matter.”

Any version of that,  in word, tone, action, or affection,  offers safety before the fear can set in.

Use Gentle Physical Affection (If Welcome)

Sometimes just holding their hand, offering a hug, or sitting near them without pressure says:

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Physical presence, when safe and consensual, is a direct way to soothe nervous system reactivity — especially in the early hours.

Here are practical examples of how to offer pre-assurance across different common triggering situations…

How to Rebuild Trust After an Affair: The First 3 Steps That Actually Work

How to Rebuild Trust After an Affair: The First 3 Steps That Actually Work

Discovering an affair can leave a marriage shaken and uncertain. Trust feels broken, emotions are heavy, and the future may seem unclear. Yet many couples who once felt this same pain have rebuilt something stronger. Healing after infidelity begins with a clear plan that focuses on emotional safety, honest communication and guided support. These first steps make recovery possible.

How to Stop All Feelings and Fall Out of Love with an Affair Partner

You didn’t mean for this to happen. No one does. It starts subtly—like all catastrophes do. A text that makes you smile longer than it should. A conversation that feels easier than the ones you’re used to. Then comes the rush. The kind that makes everything else feel black-and-white while this—this connection—feels full color.

Now you’re in it. Not just an affair. A feeling. A flood of something that looks a lot like love, sounds like love, but behaves like something far less noble. You’re not just betraying vows. You’re betraying logic. Because it feels real. Too real to walk away from. And yet, deep down, you know you if you pursue this affair further it’ll destroy your family.

The trouble is, our culture is fluent in falling in love—but illiterate in letting go. No one hands you a guidebook when you’re trying to climb out of an emotional trapdoor with your dignity intact. You’re not just ending a relationship. You’re ending a story you believed in, an identity you borrowed, a feeling that got under your skin.

This isn’t heartbreak. It’s limerence—emotional obsession that feels like the love of legend.

Dr. Debora Phillips and Robert Judd knew this terrain when they wrote How to Fall Out of Love. Not for the casually heartbroken, but for the emotionally hijacked. The spouses who want to come home but can’t stop reaching for a shadow. The ones who know the affair must end but don’t know how to feel that ending.

If that’s you, here’s your roadmap—not for guilt, but for freedom. You don’t have to hope the obsession fades on its own. You can shut it down. One intentional step at a time.

Should I Leave My Spouse for My Affair Partner? What the Research (and Real Life) Say Happens Next

In the late 1980s, Dr. Jan Halper ran a study that asked 4,100 successful men—executives, entrepreneurs, professionals—the kind of question you can’t answer without shifting in your seat: “Did you leave your wife for the other woman?” Only 3 percent said yes. Not exactly a groundswell of romantic rebellion.

But here’s where it gets stickier. Of that small, defiant sliver—those who left the boardroom and the bedroom behind for a shot at forbidden love— another study from Frank Pittman shows 75 percent of their new marriages ended in divorce. Surprisingly another researcher discovered most of them didn’t even make it past year two.

It’s not just a fluke. It’s a pattern. And as someone who’s spent years sitting across from couples trying to stitch their lives back together after infidelity, I can tell you: the data is just the beginning. What it doesn’t explain is why. Why do these relationships, born in heat and secrecy, so often crash and burn once the dust settles?

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The 6 Stages of Limerence: How Obsession Disguises Itself as Love—and Destroys Relationships

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Most people in limerence can recall the exact moment it hit. A smile across the room. A laugh that lingered too long. A text that shouldn’t have felt like anything but somehow felt like everything.

That’s Stage One.

We like to believe affairs are plotted, deliberate things. But limerence doesn’t ask for planning. It sneaks in through the cracks. Through mild discontent. A low-grade loneliness. A sense that something—anything—needs to change. Then someone new offers attention, and the world tilts. Not because that person is extraordinary. But because the feeling is.

Why Affair Partners Won’t Let Go After the Affair Ends: The Love Trap You NEED to Know!

If your spouse has ended the affair but the other person keeps circling back, it may be because the affair partner is stuck in emotional withdrawal. The affair partner doesn’t just miss your spouse—they feel like they need them. This behavior isn’t about love. It’s about addiction. The affair gave them a high. A sense of being wanted, chosen, important. And now that it’s over, they’re searching for their next “fix”—which, to them, means getting your spouse back and they’ll stop at nothing until they do.

That’s why they keep texting. That’s why they linger. It’s not about your marriage. It’s about their own internal crash.

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