Affair Recovery
Has An Affair Left You Feeling Lonely, Devalued, or Stuck?
When there’s been an affair in your relationship, it can be confusing, gut-wrenching, and anxiety provoking. After discovering your partner has been having an affair, it can feel like a sharp combination of betrayal, loss, anger, and depleting sadness. If you had the affair and are trying to recover the relationship, you may be frustrated that the apologies you’re giving just don’t seem to be enough, that you’re reliving the same arguments over and over again. Your complaints about the relationship get met with resistance because you were the one who had the affair.
Amidst all this pain and anxiety, don’t you wish you had someone who could help you understand why the affair happened and how you can re-establish trust again?
Affairs Happen. Quite Often.
According to the National Association of Marriage And Family Therapists, physical infidelity occurs in 11-15% of married women and 22- 25% of married men. When the definition widens to include emotional affairs and behaviors that trigger betrayal, that number grows to 70%. Despite these numbers, it is also not unusual for injured partners to want to repair the relationship.
How An Affair Can Feel For You
If you’re the one affected by the affair, it’s as if a bomb has exploded. After this bomb, the world no longer works the way you thought it did. The bomb was a surprise. You feel alone because the connection you thought you shared with your partner feels severed. And because you were surprised, there is no narrative of why the affair happened and the same affair may lurk around the next corner. Everything that led up to the affair is a mystery, so everything afterward is uncertain.
This metaphor is useful because it gives each person a model of what happened. For the affair-involved partner, it gives a window into their partner’s experience and a reason for their responses. For the uninvolved partner, it helps them understand their experience and lets them know they’re not crazy. For both people, it gives hints on what each need to do to help their relationship in the future.
How Do I Move Forward?
When there’s been an affair, whether it’s a physical or emotional affair, your relationship may need “First Aid,” or Affair Recovery before starting couples counseling.
What are the goals of Affair Recovery?
Create Immediate Safety: Help the injured partner talk about what they need to stop feeling threatened by the betrayal. Has the affair stopped? Does the injured partner need the injuring partner to cease all contact with their affair partner? Is there access to certain communications conduits (phone, email, text, etc.) that the injured partner needs.
Responsible Inquiry: Here at Heartfelt Counseling, I help the injured partner ask what happened responsibly. What does this mean? Sometimes when people feel hurt, they can ask for details that will only hurt more. I help the injured partner ask questions about the affair that will help them make better sense of the world. In this part of the process, I help the “affair involved” partner grapple with their shame and mixed emotions to give the most accurate and complete answer while being compassionate.
Once there is a basis of safety and facts, both parties can start working on their relationship, including discussing the dynamics that created the vulnerability in their relationship. This does not mean that the conversation may not come back to these issues of facts at some point in the future. This is not a simple linear path - injured partners may realize at some point in the future that they have unanswered questions, and I will help couples revisit these questions when they come up.
Affair Recovery Can Help You, Your Partner, and Your Relationship
For Your Relationship
It may surprise you to hear that my couples almost always report a greater sense of trust when both are willing to have these types of discussions in a way that feels safe. So often when people are fighting, the experience is one of invalidation or feeling like you’re crazy. Both really speak to a feeling of alone-ness, a feeling that changes when both people are willing to walk into a difficult conversation. It can be one of the first points of collaboration for a couple in a long time, which feels like a big change from fighting.
For The “Affair-Uninvolved” Partner
If your partner had an affair, there can be a lot of disorientation, anger, rage, sadness, and hurt. The surprise betrayal tells the Uninvolved Partner that the future is filled with uncertainty. There can be a sea of emotion because the affair was covered up by lies -- an additional betrayal.
Here are ways Affair Recovery can help you if your partner had an affair:
Help organize the distress. When people first come to counseling, often times they can be swimming in a soup of emotions. Helping you and your partner talk about what emotions are coming up and why, helps create clarity about your pain. It changes ambiguous pain into a pain that comes from a specific place. This is often helpful.
Create a narrative to reduce hypervigilance and anxiety. Creating a narrative helps you understand how your relationship dynamics created a vulnerability in your relationship. This is NOT to excuse the affair. However, understanding the vulnerability changes the betrayal from one happening at random to one happening because of your shared dynamic. This shift helps reduce the fear of the future, because now you can look for a specific dynamic in the future instead of being hypervigilant and interpreting everything as a threat.
Help your partner see your pain. Often times, your partner has so much guilt and shame about the incident that seeing your pain can feel too much to bear. They might try to minimize, escape, or ask you to “get over it.” Therapy can help you talk about more vulnerable emotions under the anger, so the pain you feel can be seen by your partner. This reduces the intensity of the fighting because you can feel heard.
For The “Affair Involved” Partner
If you were involved in the affair, there can be a lot going on. You could be feeling some shame about what’s happened, you could be feeling like there’s been no escape from what you’ve done, no matter how much you’ve apologized. You may feel a bit mixed in your desire to be in relationship.
There are several ways Affair Recovery at Heartfelt Counseling can help you if you had an affair.
Help your apologies land. It takes an amazing amount of vulnerability and emotional energy to apologize for wrongs in your relationship. Wouldn’t it be great to expend all that energy and get it to matter?
Help with the “moving on.” Sometimes the pattern of fighting after an affair can feel a little like Groundhog Day. So many times couples come to me with this need for the other partner to “move on” from where they’re stuck. I help couples get unstuck by helping people move much more slowly, so more vulnerable emotions like hurt and sadness can reveal themselves instead of just anger.
Support with the guilt and shame. There’s probably a certain amount of guilt and shame that you’re feeling for your role in the affair. I will help support you through that, and name that feeling to your partner. Guess what? It’s actually restorative for your partner to see you struggle with that.
Help you “responsibly disclose” details up front. The research shows that if you disclose to your partner the injurious, helpful details all at once, it almost doubles your chances of recovering the relationship. I will work with your partner who is not involved in the affair to ask only the questions that are helpful to them.
A Metaphor For Affair Recovery
Imagine that you and your spouse are together in a house that represents your relationship. Things aren’t quite working well in the house. The pipes leak, the furnace breaks regularly, and it’s not well insulated. All of a sudden, one of you decides to burn the house down (have the affair).
If you both come in and start Affair Recovery, we can start by establishing safety for the uninvolved partner. Think of it as allowing both of you to walk into the house to survey the damage.
Now both of your are inside and looking at the damage,seeing what you might have to repair. You’re ripping burned siding off to survey structural elements, you’re telling your partner what you see, and they’re telling you what they see. This is what Responsible Inquiry will feel like. Walking around and talking about what’s broken may feel like a refreshing change when both of you were at each other’s throats not too long ago.
Affair Recovery: An Essential Step to Wellness For Couples Experiencing Affairs.
Both of you have to feel confident that you’re living on the same planet before marriage or couples counseling can begin. Affair Recovery can help land you both on the same planet and prepare you to talk about ways your relationship didn’t work. This allows both of you to feel secure enough to do the emotional repair work required in couples counseling. It puts this first-aid on so you can do more complex work with greater confidence. While in this process, partners often comment on how their regained trust already starts feeling like some amount of repair.
Frequently Asked Questions
I had an affair and I’ve been trying to apologize unsuccessfully. Will therapy be like beating me up verbally for so I can somehow make up for it?
Thankfully, no. If you’ve been spending all that effort and vulnerability to apologize, I would love for the apology to stick for you! This counseling process helps with apologies because it makes those apologies specific to the hurts that your spouse/partner are feeling. It also helps make the apologies clean of any resentful messages from you. It’s entirely normal that resentment starts accumulating after these things don’t stick. I will help you make your sincere efforts more effective.
What if I’m not sure I want to continue my relationship?
For couples who are on the brink, I offer a separate process from affair recovery or marriage counseling called discernment. Affair recovery and marriage/couples counseling assume both people want the relationship to work and are focused on relationship repair. Discernment helps couples where there is some indecision. It helps create clarity about which of three ways they want to proceed in the relationship:
Keep things the same.
Amicably separate.
Commit the next 6 months to repair the relationship.
Couples report that the intentionality of the process helps give them a sense of confidence in what they chose. Couples that choose to separate report less conflict because it was clear from the outset what and why each chose that path. Couples that work on their relationship have a stronger base because they remember during difficult times that they consciously chose their path. Even couples who choose to remain the same have an advantage because it was a conscious decision, and that there is reduced blame of the other person.
What if I’m ready, but my spouse is not?
For Individuals who want the best possible in their relationship and put in their all without without having a partner who is bought-in, I offer relationship therapy for individuals. Depending on your situation, I can help identify the triggers that get you stuck and work on them through talk therapy, guided meditation, or EMDR, a Department of Defense approved treatment for PTSD.
I typically talk to people on the phone to see if this is the right fit for you. I would welcome a call with you and your spouse/partner or separately if your partner/spouse has not entirely bought into the idea of couples counseling. I’ll also point your partner to my website so they can read more about me and feel a greater sense of comfort with either talking to me or making the decision not to. I’m emphatic that if the match is not right for one person, it’s not right for both people.
If this process sounds good to you and you’re in the Edina, MN area, please don’t hesitate to contact me. You can give me a call at 612.230.7171. You can fill out the contact form to email me - I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You can also make a phone appointment by clicking on the button for a free consultation.
Take good care.
Affair Recovery This Week
Recently, I was asked about Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, who, as it turns out, is fathering a child with his affair partner. The question posed to me was simple but complex: “Is there a chance that Dave Grohl could actually repair his relationship with his wife after the affair?”
As someone who works with couples navigating the fallout of infidelity, my immediate response was a cautious, “Maybe.”. . . it requires a focused and intentional approach. Affairs are like emotional earthquakes in relationships—leaving devastation in their wake—and while some couples can rebuild, it’s never a simple path.