What does remorse look like after cheating?

If cheating spouses knew all that goes into surviving the guilt of infidelity, they would probably reconsider their straying.

Cheaters' remorse follows most infidelities. Betrayal is undeniably devastating to the unsuspecting spouse, but it also wounds and scars the one who cheats.

Infidelity means different things to different people. There’s "the obvious," of course. But there are also the various shades of gray in-between and completely transparent faithfulness.

What matters is how you and your spouse define infidelity — and it’s important that you and your spouse define it and are on the same page, in the context of your marriage.

RELATED: The Harsh Reality Of Cheating On The Person You Love

To avoid cheaters' remorse, first define infidelity for your marriage.

Whether the topic is emotional intimacy with someone outside the marriage or "doing business" at a strip club, infidelity isn’t self-defined. It’s defined within the marriage.

And if you want to avoid the painful work of surviving the guilt of infidelity, you will define it early.

After all, faithfulness is rooted in trust — and unfaithfulness is the destruction of trust.

It’s easy enough to expect that your spouse doesn’t have sex with anyone but you. But true intimacy involves trust in the tiniest nuances of a relationship.

It’s about the secrets only the two of you share. It’s about what you know, deep in your own heart, about your spouse’s heart.

What moves her, inspires her, frightens her, and wounds her? What elevates him, validates him, and deflates him?

When you violate your marriage’s definition of fidelity, you can’t undo the trespass.

The foundational trust of your relationship is damaged, if not completely shattered.

If your spouse doesn’t discover the affair and you haven’t disclosed it, the destruction of trust will begin within yourself.

By the very nature of cheating, you'll know you've crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. You'll have taken something sacred to the intimacy of your marriage and shared it with someone else.

And, even if your spouse doesn’t know right away, you will always know. You'll consciously cover your tracks while guilt and shame unconsciously deconstruct your sense of self.

You may even begin distrusting or blaming your spouse. After all, you can’t trust yourself, even though your spouse still trusts you. So maybe they can’t be trusted, either.

But that will change as soon as your infidelity is exposed.

You will instantly lose your spouse’s trust and realize the fragility of this cornerstone to your relationship. And you will see your past and future flash before your eyes as you wonder if you can ever regain what has been lost.

And this floundering without the anchor of trust and the quest to reclaim it will be the crux of surviving the guilt of infidelity.

If you knew before cheating that your most transparent, trustworthy efforts afterward would fall on a dismissive heart, would you think twice?

If you knew that the road to healing your marriage would be lonely and deeply painful, would you reconsider cheating?

These are important questions to ask when you’re feeling tempted to stray. There are just some things that can’t be undone, swept under a rug, or forgotten.

What you need to know about surviving the guilt of infidelity is rooted in the quest and commitment to regain trust.

Not the trust you gained on a positive curve during your dating years and pre-affair marriage. It's the kind of trust that has plummeted below the threshold — trust that now makes everything done on its watch seem foolish, unreal, untrue.

If you have hopes of saving your marriage, your life will have to become completely and transparently honest.

And that starts with ending the affair. Completely. No phone calls. No texts. No "being friends."

Only then can the work of rebuilding trust — within yourself and within your marriage — begin.

You will have to become more forthcoming, accountable, and rigorously honest than you have ever been. You will have to offer information you don’t think is necessary to share, let alone offer.

You will forfeit your privacy, your "adult freedoms," and your expectation of timely forgiveness. And you will most likely need the help of marriage counselors to safely guide you through the answering of painful, exposing questions.

Before you think that rigorous honesty will be a natural derivative of self-flagellating guilt, think again.

From passive truth-telling to partial disclosure, to minimizing your betrayed spouse’s responses, there are several ways to sabotage your own commitment to rigorous honesty.

But rigorous honesty is imperative, and it starts with yourself.

If you don’t do the reflective work to come to grips with why you cheated, honesty with your spouse will be impossible.

Remorse will be impossible, too, as you will lack the empathy to step into your spouse’s devastation and feel their pain.

Guilt and remorse may seem synonymous when it comes to how a cheating spouse should feel. But surviving the guilt of infidelity depends, in large part, on your capacity for and the depth and expression of remorse.

The difference may seem subtle, but to a betrayed spouse whose world has been shattered, it’s everything.

Feeling guilty keeps the focus on you. You got caught. You confessed. You went against your moral compass and feel a healthy dose of warranted shame.

You’re sorry. You want to be forgiven. And you want things back the way they were so you can stop feeling this horrible guilt.

But the twist of the knife comes when your shattered spouse is indifferent to — even angered by — your guilt.

"Oh, you feel guilty?"

Of course you feel guilty! And you should! But what your spouse wants and desperately needs is your remorse.

When you can shift your focus from how you feel to how your spouse feels, healing can begin.

Genuine sorrow for the pain you have caused will cultivate a genuine yearning and effort to assuage it, even at the expense of your own.

And that commitment to understanding and healing a pain outside your own will sustain you through the grueling work of saving your marriage.

It will also help you survive — and rise above — the guilt of infidelity.

RELATED: 5 Ways To Stop Ruminating Over The Guilt Of Cheating On Your Partner

Mary Ellen Goggin offers relationship coaching for individuals and collaborates with her partner Dr. Jerry Duberstein to offer private couples retreats. To learn more about working with Mary Ellen, schedule a half-hour complimentary consultation.

This article was originally published at The Free & Connected blog. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Rasmus Rasmussen/iStock/Getty Images

In order to survive infidelity, both partners need to work at rebuilding the relationship. The partner who cheated has to show genuine remorse. Through accepting responsibility, committing to complete honesty and being an open book, the straying partner begins to show true regret for cheating. Counseling may be necessary in order to resolve the couple's issues, and a cheating partner's willingness to attend shows remorse as well.

True remorse for infidelity requires the cheating partner to take responsibility for his actions. A partner who blames his spouse for his straying outside the marriage is not working toward saving the relationship, says clinical psychologist Frances Cohen Praver in the Psychology Today article "Fruits or Follies of Forgiveness." Perhaps the relationship had issues before the infidelity, but that is no excuse for straying. The cheating partner should accept responsibility and acknowledge that the decision to cheat was wrong.

Learning that a partner has cheated is devastating news. As the wronged partner works through processing what this means to the relationship, there may be some tough questions for the partner who cheated. In order to show regret for straying, it is important to answer every question the significant other asks with brutal honesty, advises marriage and family therapist Ondina Hatvany in the PsychCentral.com article "How to Heal From Infidelity." Even if sharing the truth is difficult, it is important that the wronged partner know there is complete honesty in dealing with this issue.

Infidelity breaks the trust in a relationship. In order to show guilt for cheating, the unfaithful partner must be willing to account for her whereabouts when her significant other is looking for her, says marriage and family therapist Sheri Meyers in her Huffington Post article "For the Betrayer: Eight Things You Must Know and Do to Rebuild Trust After an Affair." The guilty partner should share her daily calendar with her partner and make her life an open book. Doing so shows her partner she is willing to prove her trustworthiness.

Infidelity in a relationship is often an issue that requires counseling to resolve. A cheating partner who is willing to seek counseling exemplifies someone who is remorseful, advises the Mayo Clinic article "Infidelity: Mending Your Marriage After an Affair." Counseling signifies an effort to work through a problem. When both partners are willing to seek help, it shows both parties are exerting time, energy and attention toward rebuilding the relationship. Individual counseling and couples counseling are both sometimes necessary in order to work through serious issues like infidelity.