How do I stop dwelling about my husband’s affair? I can’t get the thought of him with another out of my head. Any ideas?

This is so, so tough. I cannot speak from personal experience, but I can speak from experience seeing something similar happen to a sibling. She now is in a much better place. I wish she could write this answer :) We've talked about how she moved through the situation. Her first big "A-ha" realization is that the affair was not about her at all. She told me that she needed to stop blaming herself to start healing. Basically, she fully internalized the idea that the affair was a "him, not me" problem. She just kept hearing from people (like I'm telling you) that it was not her fault and that it was entirely his decision and fault. She eventually believed it. I don't know if you're struggling with this, but I know that it was important for her to realize that even if she wasn't the perfect wife, she did not deserve to be treated that way and he made the decision to cheat all on his own and he was the only one whose responsibility it was. The second thing that helped her heal was the idea that she had now had to rework all the expectations in the marriage. That sounds terrible but what I mean is that at first she kept torturing herself not to think about what happened and to make everything be like it used to be. She realized that that was an impossible standard because the old marriage basically had ended and they had to build a new, trusting relationship. Practically, this meant that my sister started talking about what happened with her spouse a lot. It meant any time she was ruminating about what happened she immediately told her spouse and then went on to talk with him about it. She insisted that he be emotionally real with her. It meant that any time she felt worried he would do it again she immediately told him and they worked out what would have to happen in order to for her to trust him in that day's situation. She didn't run him into the ground with all this processing by sometimes putting a conversation on hold for a few hours if he couldn't handle it, but she refused to process this trauma and reduce anxiety on her own. It was a lot of work on both of their parts. The key was that they talked all of the time about trust and how to build it. The key was that they both knew they would not stay without fixing the problem. Her spouse knew that, just like they had to go to work every day to earn money, he now had an extra job, which was to fix what happened. Best of luck and I'll be thinking of you.

This is a very painful situation. Excruciating. When our partner cheats our world no longer makes sense. We don't feel safe with them, can't trust anyone, and question everything. Somethings that have helped me have been trying to have compassion for myself and meditating on self love. If my husband cannot love me the way I need to be loved, I can only strive to love myself. I believe my husband turns to sexuality as a way of coping with emotional pain. So, I try to find compassion and forgiveness for him in his pain. And I try to distract myself with healthy coping mechanisms like reaching out to others so that I do not dwell on how lost and alone I feel. I am so sorry you are going through this. I pray you find comfort and peace today.