Infidelity is one of the common problems for people seeking professional help. It is an extremely painful and traumatic event for a partner to experience and a major occasion for divorce. For couples who don’t divorce, infidelity is a main cause for long-lasting pain, disappointment and mistrust in relationship.
Most affair relationship is a fantasy relationship that is unlikely to work out in reality. Only 2.5% of pursued affair relationships make it to lasting marriages.
The damage of infidelity to relationship can be terminal because trust is broken. But the crisis can serve as a “Danger-Opportunity” for couples to find out what is missing or not working in the relationship and strengthen the partnership in the long run through couple counselling.
A video clip on “Can You Repair A Relationship After An Affair?” by Dr Sue Johnson
Why People Cheat
People have affairs for many reasons. For example, pain of a failed marriage, boredom with a routine and passionless marriage, a desire for adventure, feeling unloved and constantly criticized at home. Knowing what caused the affair is helpful because it sheds light on the needs and wants of the partner who had the affair and the shortcomings of the relationship. It also enables the couple to confront the issues honestly and overcome the inadequacies of the relationship eventually.
Sometimes, people have affairs to force a change in the relationship. For example, people who want to improve the relationship because they are deeply unhappy but do not know how to communicate their distress; or people who want to leave the relationship but feel guilty to initiate.
Relationship therapist Esther Perel examines why people cheat, and unpacks why affairs are so traumatic: because they threaten our emotional security. In infidelity, she sees something unexpected — an expression of longing and loss.
A video clip on “Rethinking Infidelity” by Esther Perel
Decision Making
The decision of whether to stay or leave is a big decision in your life. Basically, you have three options:
- Leave: you see this breach of trust and fidelity has injured the relationship fatally and there is no way you can continue with your partner.
- Stay as it is: you choose to tolerate the affair and stay in the relationship for whatever reasons.
- Work on the relationship: you insist that your partner must end the affair and seeking professional help together to rebuild trust, grow and build a solid relationship.
Guidelines for Decision Making
- Make your OWN decision
- Do not rush the decision
- Get professional help to have clarity of the issues
- Do not make this decision solely on emotional factors, nor solely on practical factors
For some people, the impulse to leave after the discovery is high for one or both partners, to avoid dealing with the storm of emotions caused by infidelity. Because the final decision about your relationship is so important, it is essential for your own sake, as well as for your partner and family, that your decision come from real self-understanding, rather than from impulse.
To part is a solution but may not be the answer for most relationship problems. Because if you don’t know the reasons or meaning behind the infidelity, you may end up with a similar problem in your future relationship.
Before you make your final decision, it is worth to seek professional help to see whether your relationship can be saved and to have more clarity and understanding of the issues. The new clarity and understanding enable both partners to see things from different perspectives and create opportunity for change.
Discover Meaning of Affair
Couples who want to rebuild their relationship after an affair must discover meaning of the affair, or it will remain a profoundly threatening event. The article Shattered Vows: Getting Beyond Betrayal written by Dr.Shirley Glass, the world’s leading expert in infidelity, challenges everything you know about infidelity and help answered many questions couples wanted to know about infidelity and why it’s so deeply wounding and traumatic to the hurt partner.
Understand Effects of Infidelity Trauma
Dr Shirley Glass discovered that the hurt partner usually suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) once the affair has been disclosed. The hurt partner may experience hyper-vigilance, intrusive images of the affair, nightmares, emotional numbing alternating with emotional explosions, disturbed sleep, etc. Both the hurt partner and the involved partner need understanding of this PTSD reaction as a normal response to an abnormal situation. Both partners need therapeutic support because the involved partner may be experiencing grief and ambivalent feelings as well as shame and guilt.
The trauma of infidelity is a continuing cycle that can haunt the hurt partner forever.
Healing Journey
The healing journey will be painful and probably very long. It needs commitment and hard work from both partners to rebuild trust and intimacy in the relationship. The couple needs to develop honest and open communication in the relationship as a foundation for rebuilding.
Many relationships survive infidelity through hard work and end up stronger than before. However, many couples are unable to handle the painful experience and distress when working through the affair, it is thus advisable to seek professional help to assist you in keeping the healing process fair and balanced.
Guiding Principles
Some helpful guiding principles for the healing journey:
- Affairs are about insecure attachment and disconnection with oneself. It is not about bad people doing bad things.
- An affair can be a wake-up call, an opportunity for learning and growth, rather than a tragic ending.
- A person who cheats may have been conditioned in childhood to be achievement-oriented who denies the need for closeness, and avoids feeling anxious or vulnerable.
- The idea that infidelity is about a mismatch, is oversimplified. Those who end their relationships on that basis often go off to create the same dissatisfying patterns in their future relationships.
- The degree of disruption in the revelation of an affair can be linked to two factors:
- The duration and intensity of the affair(s).
- The foundational degree of trust and level of functioning in the relationship.
Understand Hurt Partner’s Experience
It is crucial for the involved partner to understand at least 3 things about the hurt partner’s experience and how couple counselling can help to speed up the healing journey for the hurt partner:
- Shattering of reality
- Violation of the specialness of the relationship
- Broken trust
1. Shattering of Reality
For the hurt partner, there is a profound sense of shock, at having been deceived, left out, taken advantage of, and manipulated. It is like a tsunami suddenly come and sweep you away. The hurt partner is forced abruptly to live in a new reality that is not anticipated, cannot imagine and understand. Everything now comes into question. It is natural for the hurt partner to ask similar questions again and again because he/she cannot understand and make sense of what had happened.
The involved partner normally experiences significant guilt and shame, and usually has difficulty tolerating the hurt partner’s emotional turmoil and questioning, and wanted the hurt partner to get over this as soon as possible. But the hurt partner’s hurt, anger and resentment need to be constructively expressed and openly acknowledged by the involved partner.
Couple counselling can help to provide a safe space for the hurt partner to ask questions in a non-accusatory way and adjust to the new reality, to normalize experience of both partners and facilitate communication between them.
2. Violation of the Specialness of the Relationship
The experience of betrayal includes the violation of the sense of specialness in the relationship. Intimacies that were thought to be shared only in the relationship have been shared elsewhere. This includes sexual and emotional betrayal. Often the emotional betrayal can be more painful than the sexual. This violation can lead the hurt partner to question whether he/she is just a replaceable good. The failure of the involved partner to reassure the hurt partner repeatedly and being remorseful for his/her actions, will prolong the healing process.
Couple counselling can play a significant role in helping both partners through the isolation of anger, hurt, guilt and shame into a more productive and compassionate communication.
3. Broken Trust
The most significant impact of affair to a hurt partner is broken trust because trust is the glue that holds a relationship together. Love alone is not enough and commitment is all about trust. Broken trust is one of the most difficult dynamics to restore in relationships. Without trust, intimacy suffers. When emotional intimacy dried up, so does sexual intimacy. Defensive walls go up. Communication breaks down. Distance replace closeness. Resentment festers. Hostility kills kindness and caring. The atmosphere turns toxic. And relationships slowly disintegrate and die.
The process of rebuilding trust requires effort, time, motivation and total commitment from both partners. But it is not time that heals the wound, it is how you spend that time. The presence of a counsellor as a neutral third party is crucial to create a safe space:
- For the hurt partner to question the involved partner in a non-accusatory way to rebuild trust, to mourn losses and explore new way of relating.
- For the involved party to be honest, transparent and attentive to the hurt partner’s questioning and needs to feel safe again.
Counselling Approach & Fee
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