How We Rebuild Relationships After The Affair
How We Rebuild Relationships After The Affair
These days, we see lots of couples coming to our therapists in the midst of a crisis, after infidelity has been discovered. But working through an affair is really difficult and takes a lot of work, but I’ve seen hundreds of couples successfully work through it. It takes a lot of vulnerability and effort and willingness to learn how all of this happened, and how to make sure that it never happens again.
So there’s a specific way that Gottman therapists have to work with affairs. People can recover from affairs. At the Gottman Institute, they’ve studied couples for decades and their research-based approach to rebuilding trust after an affair or a betrayal is called the Trust Revival Method. It has three defined stages of treatment: 1) Atonement, 2) Attunement, and 3) Attachment. The effectiveness of this model is currently being studied in a randomized clinical trial and is the first research of its kind. All of our couples therapists at Couples Counseling ATL have intensive training in this model and loads of experience helping couples recover from affairs.
I want to tell you a little bit about this model of treating affairs. The first recommendation I’d make is to read “Not Just Friends” by the late Dr. Shirley Glass. Even though she’s an amazing therapist and researcher, I promise the book is interesting and an easy read. So what she did for a long time was that she treated only couples who came to her seeking help after an affair. She found out that the person who has been cheated on often almost always suffers from symptoms of PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, often severe PTSD. They have heightened hypervigilance, often going back and forth from emotional numbness and feeling nothing, to emotional explosions where they feel overwhelming and intense emotions, flashbacks… like pictures of the partner in their mind and what they imagine their partner did with their affair partner, and despite not wanting to think about this they can’t stop…it usually becomes obsessive and torturous, it intrudes in their mind when they’re awake and interferes with life and work, and even when they’re sleeping in the form of nightmares, they have trouble sleeping, depression, and many more symptoms. They also become very hypervigilant, constantly looking for signs of their partner cheating on them again with the same affair partner or a new affair partner. They might feel obsessed with checking their partner’s phone, social media, emails, or any other sign of continued betrayal. So we Gottman Couples Therapists often help couples by first explaining and normalizing that all of these symptoms of PTSD are totally appropriate and understandable symptoms of such a betrayal.
So first, the person who’s been betrayed–this is in the “atonement” phase of treatment, needs to be able to express his or her feelings, about the affair, without using the “4 horsemen”. If you have listened to my previous videos, you’ll remember that those are the most toxic ways to communicate, including criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Clearly, this is hard for most people when you feel like your heart’s been ripped out of your chest. Most people want to punish their partner and rip them a new one, understandably, but the therapist has to help the person who’s been betrayed to express their rage, anger, hurt, disappointment, grief, and all the other many feelings in a vulnerable and honest way that doesn’t do any more damage to the relationship, and that the person who had the affair can hear so that they can actually understand the gravity of the impact of what they’ve done, and step into the shoes of their partner who they betrayed. The 4 horsemen get in the way of their hearing. So starting with statements like this would be helpful:
“I feel devastated”
“I feel destroyed”
“I feel so upset I can barely get through the day”
“I feel furious”
“I feel terrified you’ll do this again”
These are all part of an honest sharing of feelings without criticism and an important first step. You just can’t say “You piece of blank. You’re scum. You deserve to go to hell I wish you would rot there.” because that’s clearly critical and contemptuous and despite the fact that it might feel good to unload, it is not going to help with understanding and healing and makes it much less likely that your relationship would survive the affair.
As your Gottman therapist, we help you speak your feelings and your partner to actually hang in and hear those feelings without defensiveness. Also, the person who’s been betrayed needs to ask questions about the affair to the person who had the affair and has those questions answered as honestly and with as much transparency as possible. It’s the only way to rebuild the new marriage or relationship that they’ll be creating in the aftermath of this affair. This is an important point to know, too. The old relationship or marriage is over. The affair has destroyed any semblance of trust, and if this couple stays together, they’ll be co-creating a new relationship from the ground up. So with the old relationship shattered, and the person who’s been betrayed has been left triggered all the time with PTSD, and especially if they have any past in their family of origin of being betrayed or hurt, that all resurfaces and comes up, too.
So the partner gets to ask any question they want to ask about the affair, but our therapists will caution you to not ask questions spefically about the type of sex they had because that will likely worsen the PTSD flashbacks and once you’ve learned something graphic, your mind will often tattoo it into your memory and torture you with it. But all the other questions are helpful for their healing, such as:
When did you meet (the affair partner)?
Where did you meet up?
How did you meet?
How did you give yourself permission?
Did you feel guilty?
What about previous opportunities? Have you had any, did you think of any?
Why did it last if you knew it was wrong?
Did you think about me at all?
What did you say about us?
Did you talk about a future together?
What did you see in the affair partner?
How were you different in the affair?
Did you have unprotected sex?
Going through all the questions may take a long time. I had one couple that spent 8 months on just the questions. They came in with a whole journal full of questions. The person who had the affair of course felt like they were on the hot seat, but they were committed to repairing the damage they’d done, and it paid off in the end with the restoration of the relationship and showing their partner that they won’t leave any stone unturned if it means rebuilding their trust in their relationship.
The betrayer needs to be able to express how sorry they are in a genuine way, over and over, with regret and remorse for the damage they’ve caused. But in this initial atonement phase, we’re not analyzing the marriage yet. We have to fully finish this stage before we begin looking at the marriage and analyzing it. So it questions questions questions answers answers answers and lots of atonement after regretting after atonement after regret. One “I’m sorry” is not going to do it, despite how many couples I’ve seen who would love to just pretend like this isn’t a big deal. Those marriages don’t work when someone has the attitude of “God I said I’m sorry, Get over it”.
So, after the atonement phase has been fully fleshed out and completed, then we can move to the next phase. We begin the attunement phase, which is all about how to listen to one another, finding out what’s gone wrong in the relationship with one another, conflict management. Almost 100% of the time, couples that have affairs don’t do conflict management well. They do it terribly and most often are habitual avoiders of conflict. They don’t talk about their resentments and frustrations at all, and neither person talks about their own needs and preferences. They’re often scared of bringing up their needs or expect to be let down, so our therapists help them to learn how to do this and to really learn how to attune to the other person as a good and caring listener. They learn to identify their partner’s needs and become more responsive to those needs. This second phase of attunement may be a long process just like the first.
Attachment is the last phase, and in this phase of couples therapy, we’re building what’s called “rituals of connection” which are the small everyday ways couples connect with each other. We’re also starting to deal with sex, including what sex they both might like to have, although the betrayed partner might not be open to that yet, because it’s often the last part of the relationship to be repaired because the betrayed person may understandably feel the most vulnerable here and it takes a lot of trusts and a better foundation in the relationship to feel safe enough to be willing to move forward there. The one exception to this is if the betrayed person is feeling unsafe with the partner, and not feeling genuine remorse or commitment from their partner, and they may be scared to lose them and are offering sex as a way to keep them, but this is false security and if the betrayer hasn’t fully atoned or learned how to create a healthy relationship with both feet fully in, closing the door on other partners, then this won’t work, and their sense of security from having sex with their partner is unfortunately just a false sense of security. As Gottman therapists, we try to help couples to avoid this trap.
Finally, the attachment phase also has to include talking about what’s going to happen if another boundary violation occurs like an affair, including the consequences for any future transgression, which needs to be spelled out in a crystal clear way. Usually, the betrayed person says they will leave if this happens again.
And once you know all that is required to fully recover trust and rebuild a relationship after an affair, and what is required to keep a relationship healthy and thriving, and how to avoid the typical steps that lead to betrayal, most people who know better do better and don’t have affairs again.
