Infidelity/ Affair Counseling

Of course infidelity can leave the betrayed partner feeling devastated, isolated and overwhelmed. The betrayed partner may feel their value as a woman has gone down because their partner was unfaithful, although this statement is not often said so much as felt and or reacted to.

While the cheated on partner gets almost all the sympathy, the partner who engaged in the infidelity may quietly find it very difficult to face themselves. The shame by the unfaithful can prevent partners from openly speaking on the feelings involved, and then both partners feel isolated, despite still being together. A skilled psychotherapist is a safe, non-judgmental relationship where processing, correcting, and healing can occur. Professional help is not about blaming a partner but proving the correction of patterns, thoughts and misplaced feelings so this behavior does not occur again.

In addition to clients needing to avoid untrained non-clinicians pretending to be able to treat clinical issues such as this, clients also need avoid falling into the trap of focusing on the marriage as the cause of the infidelity. While infidelity creates a crisis in a partnership, partnership issues do not cause the infidelity.

Another matter that has be resolved is what level of information does the non-cheating partner need about the illicit behavior. I absolutely tell my clients to be truthful, but that does not mean the faithful spouse necessarily wants every detail. Openness is needed, but it should not be for the sake of the unfaithful partner trying to unload what they are carrying.

The person who was unfaithful and the person cheated on may experience the time post discovery very differently. A women who was cheated may re-process the facts many times over, and some unskilled practitioner’s may exacerbate this issue by going into the circular thought process with the client, rather than helping the client leave that circular mental space. Related issue is the unskilled practitioners using language unbecoming a clinician. With social media use being so high today, people in need of clinically skilled help have to avoid the pitfalls of getting unhelpful and grossly misapplied labels and ideas such as “narcissist” and “gaslighting”, put forward on Instagram and other platforms. It is often difficult work to help a betrayed spouse feel like herself again, it becomes impossible to help them when moronic and simplistic labels are used on someone who that client still today does, or did in fact at one time, love. It’s easy to harm a client when you have no clinical training and wade into clinical work. I have seen the real damage that the inept/untrained cause.

The person cheated on may feel that almost no time has past since the discovery of the cheating, and conversely the person who cheated may feel “it’s been awhile”. This disparity in the experience of time post discovery on the matter of the cheating needs to be addressed, or it will exacerbate conflict. A psychotherapist skilled in this issue can help this situation to not reoccur and move clients from the acute crisis, through the recovery process, and on to stability and strength.

A clinician can assist the unfaithful partner to dismantle the distorted thinking that created the outside the boundaries behavior, and that partnership then begins to heal post-affair by that unfaithful partner demonstrating both insight into how they got their thinking so distorted, and also improvements in non-sexual attitudes, moods, views, and behaviors, that helped them at that time move towards that sexual misbehavior.

For decades I have helped countless clients correct the distorted thinking that creates affairs. Although, an affair can end a relationship, with skilled help it is often the case that it can be repaired and the relationship made even stronger than before. The first step towards recovery from this is making the decision to see an experienced and trained psychotherapist. I’m a 26 years at this work expert on sexual misbehavior, and have helped countless persons for these very issues.