On Healing After an Affair

Many people believe that affairs are too damaging and painful to heal.  Lacking a clear path forward (and the right guide), couples often surrender to the pain and decide to separate. Others choose to stay in the relationship but grow distant, avoid the past, and hope time will somehow blur the memories. Unfortunately, neither path leads to healing.

 

Is healing from this really possible? 

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Fortunately, effective affair recovery options exist.  Even if you have tried to recover but not healed, it is almost always possible to heal and move forward.

 

I am not saying this process is simple or easy. Affair recovery therapy is challenging work. Both partners often have deep wounds.  The emotions are powerful, as is the desire to avoid feeling them.  Doubts about the relationship and its future are almost ubiquitous. And yet...

 

I am resolute in my belief that recovery is possible for the majority of couples after an affair. Why? Because I have been witness to the remarkable human capacity for healing and growth after trauma. Couples can -- and do -- come back from even the most painful of experiences.  With each passing hour of our work, healing reliably happens.  But how? ​​​​

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The process of healing. 

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This initial hours and days of work are often challenging. Yet even at this early stage the work begins to feel different than the arguments and fights at home. Perhaps ironically, the pace of things slows down. The structure I introduce begins to change the intensity. Simply showing up to sessions together reintroduces the idea of a partnership. Kindness to each other -- sporadic and tentative though it may be -- provides a kernel of hope.

 

With time, the pace of healing increases. Painful (and once resolutely avoided) admissions about the affair spark anger and tears, but simultaneously (if gradually) build trust. Anger and rage slowly give way to the softer emotions of sadness, loneliness, and longing. Rigidity and defensiveness slowly turn into a cry for help and the kind of safety only one's partner can adequately provide. 

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Gradually, the reasons for the affair emerge. Anger and confusion give way to an increasingly coherent understanding not just of the affair, but of everything happening that created the landscape in which the affair happened. When we can make sense of something, we can begin to feel confident we will not endure it again.  Trust, kindness, and love begin to reemerge in the relationship. Boundaries get stronger and the couple begins to work as a team again. 

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Forgiveness and empathy return, and the couple begins working on older problems that may have weakened the relationship in the first place. 

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Better than we ever were. 

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Later, after many hours of effort, the real fruit of this labor begins to emerge. Couples begin to realize that my belief that they can become better than they ever were is not cliché, but entirely true. By not only healing the affair but also the many antecedents to it, couples rise above what they were before the affair happened. 

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The time required for all of this varies. But the couples who commit to the hard work of recovery will almost certainly heal, emerging better than they ever were.

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Despite all of its many challenges I love this work and cannot imagine doing anything else. It is deeply rewarding to witness the rebirth of a relationship once believed hopeless, and then watch the couple outgrow what they were. As the only other witness to this process I am indeed fortunate!

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Dr. Chris