I heard about a contractor who was so angry about his wife’s infidelity that he filled her car with cement. Everyone laughs when they hear that story. But where does a couple go from there? Definitely not reconciliation, and most likely an expensive acrimonious divorce.

When I discovered my husband’s infidelity and shortly after was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, I realized that plotting vengeance would hurt me as much as my errant spouse. Instead, I wanted to spend my life energy working on the best way to move forward, so that I could thrive whether I chose to stay or go. My aim was to become a more complete, creative and joyful person, with or without a partner.

I know that’s not necessarily easy to do. Humans are emotional rather than purely rational beings. But after finding out about your partner’s infidelity, making decisions based on your emotions isn’t a wise idea. Whatever choices and actions I was considering doing after I discovered the betrayal, I tried to remember to ask myself, “Is this serving my own long-term best interests?”

After all, one minute a partner is the love of your life, and then when you find out they’ve been cheating, they become an evil demon. But it’s the same person. Someone whom in the past, you may have had a good life with. The mother or father of your kids. Rather than demonizing your partner, it’s better to remember that they were the same flawed human being all along, with good points that originally drew you to them in the first place, and bad points that may make you now want to leave.

So how do you move forward? When I found out about my husband’s infidelity, I developed a 6-part program to stop feeling like hell. It’s useful to cope with the emotional impact of almost any kind of adversity and I’ve used the program to get through both infidelity and breast cancer.

To overcome infidelity, the best revenge is to get past the need for it. That’s the mantra of my comedy self-help book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not. I realized that I needed to truly forgive my husband for his betrayal to break the emotional hold he had on me and get my freedom back. My 6-part program helped me be able to do that.

If I could wave a magic wand and make the cancer and infidelity never have happened, you might be surprised to hear me say, “No thank you.” I do not regret having gone through the experience, bleak and difficult though it was. Regret is not about the past—it is about the present. I am happy with my life as it is now. Because of what happened, I wrote a humorous self-help book about how to thrive after adultery, and soon I’m releasing another—about thriving after breast cancer and infidelity. It took time, but yes, I’ve learned to become more complete, creative and joyful. And you can too. Get my free PDF, Overcoming Infidelity: Tools to Tame the Roller Coaster of Negative Emotions which includes a wonderful exercise to learn how to become more mindful by using a piece of chocolate. You can also follow along and join me doing that Chocolate Mindfulness Exercise on Instagram video. As a committed chocoholic, it’s a practice that really resonated with me!