Without a doubt, infidelity is one of the most perplexing challenges that many therapists face during their careers.

Frequently couples arrive in your office reeling in the aftermath of an affair. One partner may feel intensely angry and believe they were betrayed, while the other is in a hurry to get the affair behind them. How you structure the therapy and what you attend to in sessions can prove to be stressful when each partner has a different agenda.

A therapist in one of my training groups posed the question this way, “ What do you suggest when a partner who had an affair proclaims that they’ll never do it again? And the spouse wants to believe it, but they don’t. Your intuition says you aren’t sure you believe it, either. It seems way too fast. One partner wants a quick resolution and the other wants to discuss the affair a lot. Under these conditions what is the best focus for treatment?”

I frame it to myself and to my clients this way: successful resolution of an affair involves three stages:

1.  Crisis management
2.  Accountability and growth
3.  Recommitment

Many partners have a reflexive desire to avoid a comprehensive repair. They want to rush through the crisis. The most common reasons for this are:

• They may still be lying and hiding significant information and don’t want the truth to surface.
• It is difficult for them to acknowledge the positive growth attained or some unexposed positive aspects of themselves that were elicited in the new relationship.
• They are conflict avoidant and don’t want to go through the intense emotional process involved in resolving the affair.
• They are afraid the marriage will end – or are afraid of retribution.
• They don’t want to develop themselves and be accountable for the deception and especially for facing shame.

Partners like this believe they can put the affair behind them and everything will return to “normal.” However, successful resolution of an affair involves much more than crisis management. The first stage of therapy does mean managing the immediate threat. It requires slowing the process down and confronting the urge to make impulsive premature decisions. It is important to clarify whether the couple will continue to live together, whether the affair is ongoing or terminated and whether both partners want to engage in therapy.

However, the partner who says, “Everything is OK and it will never happen again,” usually wants to skip the second stage. And the second stage of therapy is where there is a lot of self-confrontation and accountability – facing shame or limitations of self. This can be excruciatingly uncomfortable.

How do you communicate to a couple in a productive, non-moralistic way the value of engaging in repair and self-confrontation? Ideally you want to make a decision with both partners about whether they are choosing to engage in a significant therapeutic process with you.

Here is one effective analogy:

When the partner who had the affair starts to downplay the affair or minimize its effect, you can use the parallel of partners in a start-up company. Partners in a company talk about their dreams, what they want to create and do, and how they want to be as a company. They invest a lot. As time passes and the company starts to struggle, if one partner discovers the other has been embezzling, that throws everything into question and turmoil. And if the person who has been embezzling takes precious time and energy and invests it into a rival start-up, that makes the pain even worse and the decisions that must be made even harder. And it takes a long time to regain trust.

Everything that happens – even things intended as support and goodwill – get put under the microscope of suspicion. What are they really trying to tell me? Can I really go on a vacation and trust you?

The disruption of an affair is the violation of dreams, goals and decisions. The interdependency, family, teamwork and partnership are all potentially lost. What was once secure or seemed to be secure is no longer secure.

The issue with an affair is not primarily sexual. One partner has made a unilateral choice to put an end to what was previously an equilateral decision and team commitment. The new decision has disrupted the attachment and the question, “Will it happen again?” is a substantial one. Or, “Will there be other unilateral decisions that affect me deeply in which I will not have a say?”

Without successful resolution of this issue, other events will be unnecessarily charged. Recently, a wife who had previously had an affair, said to her husband during a fight, “I’m not going to discuss my sister with you ever again.” He became extremely agitated, not so much because he couldn’t handle her saying “I’m not going to discuss this with you,” but because it brought into the air again how many other unilateral decisions she would make. And would they be made impulsively?

The challenge for you is to ask the couple, “How do you want to use the therapy and what are we going to do here? Is our work about re-establishing any kind of secure boundary or clear commitment with each other, and what is it going to take on each side?”

It is crucial for you to find a way to discuss this with the couple without moral indignation. The essential goal is to help both partners participate actively in Stage 2 – the portion of therapy where individual growth and personal accountability take place. This will pave the way for recommitment that is real and not a quick “flight back to normalcy.”

If you aren't familiar with our downloadable one-hour training session on working with couples about an affair, click here to learn more about managing the stress of infidelity cases. Or read Tell Me No Lies for strategies to minimize the likelihood of infidelity.

We help couples struggling with cheating partners in Menlo Park, San Francisco, San Mateo, Redwood City, San Jose, Campbell and the surrounding areas.