Couples Therapy
for Infidelity and Affair Repair

The pain is visceral, an agonizing ache in your chest that feels like it will never go away. You want to lash out at your partner, to make them feel that same kind of pain. The loneliness is all-consuming. You feel isolated, and you wonder if anyone could truly understand the depth of your hurt and betrayal.

The person you trusted most, the one you shared your life with, has betrayed you in the most intimate way. You feel foolish for not seeing the signs earlier. You’re questioning every moment of your relationship, wondering if any of it was real. You want to move forward, but you don’t even know where to start.

Emotional affairs and sexual infidelity draw relationship weaknesses out of the darkness and into the light. You can’t pretend everything is OK when infidelity happens.

Infidelity marks a turning point in every relationship it touches. The most important decision you face isn’t whether you stay or go, it’s what you do with what you have learned.

If you have been affected by infidelity, relationship therapy can help. I offer infidelity counseling in my office in Roseville, CA, and online infidelity coaching worldwide. Your first session is free, click below to get started. You can also scroll down for a free mini-course on how to build back after infidelity.

Restoring Trust

a mini-course
for couples recovering from infidelity

Part 1: Rebuilding Trust after Infidelity

When you discover your partner’s infidelity, you lose trust in your partner, and also in yourself. You thought you had a good idea of how trustworthy your partner is, and now you have learned that you were not as good at reading the situation as you thought you were.

Infidelity presents an opportunity to learn more about yourself and your partner. You won’t be able to trust your partner more unless you improve your ability to correctly assess how trustworthy they are.

Exercise: write down three times you saw one of your parents act in a dishonest or deceptive way. Was that kind of behavior normalized in your family? Did either of your parents ever recruit you to help them deceive the other, or to deceive someone else? As you get more clear on what you witnessed as a child, your ability to detect dishonesty as an adult will improve.

Part 2: Earning your Own Self-Respect

If you have cheated on your partner: it will be a while before your partner approves of you or trusts you again. This gives you an opportunity to start earning your own self-respect, and to start leaning more on your own approval than on your partner’s approval.

Exercise:

  1. Where do you feel your partner’s disapproval in your body?

  2. What kind of a person do you want to become?

  3. What is the next step on that journey?

  4. What will you do today that will get you closer to becoming the person you want to be?

  5. Without relying on your partner’s approval, how will you measure your progress toward your goal?

Part 3: Observe, don’t Control

Observe, don’t control: you may find yourself tempted to try to control and monitor your partner’s behavior in the wake of an affair. It’s actually best to take the opposite approach, and set your partner free to do what they want to do, so that you can gather more information on what kind of a person they want to be.

Exercise:

  1. How have you tried to monitor your partner’s behavior in the past?

  2. How would you take care of yourself if you discovered ongoing infidelity?

  3. Is there any evidence that you won’t be OK if your partner doesn’t remain true to you?

Part 4: Jealousy and Infidelity

Your brain is wired to survive childhood, not to thrive in adult relationships. Infidelity triggers a survival-level fear because the parts of your brain that manage adult relationships were designed more for managing child/parent relationships. If one of your caregiver had left you when you were very young, that would be a survival-level problem, and your brain continues to perceive it that way in adult relationships.

Exercise:

  1. How will you take care of yourself if your partner cheats on you again?

  2. What happens in your body when you think about your partner’s unfaithfulness?

  3. Do you feel less safe than you really are?

  4. Do you feel confident in your ability to take care of yourself if your partner remains unfaithful?