Building trust with more Responsible Surfing after affair on the internet
Monday, January 28th, 2008It will always be a difficult job for couples to rebuilt relationships after affair. The trust is gone and it will take a lot of time to gain that trust again. If the affair happens during a special kind of situation like e.g business trip of one partner, the anxiety of the other during business trips will be terrible. Many will agree not to go on those or stop being in those situations the affair started or took place. Affairs on the internet have become a huge problem and theinternet is the new dangers zone for affairs. It can be hard to stop using the internet at home after a cyber affair. Like the anxiety is tremendous during the partners business trips, the anxiety will also be bad during surfing of the partners who had affair on the internet. The problem is it is most of the time not so easy to stop using a computer or the internet. As a therapist working with couples after an affair I often felt a badly needed a helpful tool to manage the internet use and reduce the anxiety around computer usage at home. Since launching Responsible Surfing it has become a valuable to for people to use during the phase of developing trust again. Let me give some points on what has been successful in reducing the anxiety after a affair on the internet, reducing the risk of relapse and building trust. 1. Taking a computer break: It is not necessary but can be good starting point for one or two weeks to stop using the computer at home 2. Make a contract on what is allowed and what is not, See examples of contracts on http://www.responsiblesurfing.com/internet_Contracts/ 3. Blocking dating sites. Responsible Surfing offers a blocking list of pages that you can build yourself. Take time to set up list of dating sites to be blocked (admin list) for the spouse that had the affair and choose yourself if you want to block other sites as well. 4. Monitoring word: Set up a list of words to monitor. You can choose words like “sex”, or other flirting relating words. SO every time those words are written the other spouse will get an email or SMS alert that this word has been typed. You can also block the user for typing those words 5. Block chat programs Sometimes it can be important to block all chat programs or special chat programs that was used in the affair 6. Monitor chat: If you do not want to block chat you can monitor all keywords written so you can see how you spouse is chatting to and what is said. 7. If you want to see better how the computer is used you can take screenshot on time interval or just of the special sites you want to watch closely or when the word of the list mentioned above is used 8. Weekly meeting: It is good practice the set up a weekly meeting to discuss how you are doing and look at the report on computer use. Just look at the necessary things and try always do this together. You can say you should not use software to monitor your spouse internet use. But after an affair the trust has been broken and it is not so easy just to start trusting. At the same time I would not recommend anyone to spy on their spouse. Using Responsible Surfing helps couples overcome anxiety of another affair on the computer and at the same time build the trust again slowly. Use the tool but do not overuse it or misuse it. Bjorn Hardarson Clinical Psychologist www.responsiblesurfing.com
