Couples Counseling For Affair Recovery
You’re probably feeling hopeless and wondering if your relationship can be saved. Before this all happened you used to say that an affair was the boundary, that there's no going back after an affair. It’s hard to imagine how the two of you will get through this, how you will ever be able to trust again.
I imagine your heart feels heavy right now. You’re confused, sad, angry, so many emotions all at once. There are moments of self blame where you question all the ways you’ve caused damage in the relationship. There are moments of a deep desire to connect and be intimate with your partner. It’s all so confusing and the idea of getting beyond the affair feels incredibly overwhelming. You need comfort and feel very confused and conflicted.
I know that you feel alone right now. I know that it feels really scary to reach out to your partner for support, it feels scary to reach out to family and friends. You’re fearing the judgement of others and have no one to talk to. It feels heavy but all you can think of is what will other people say if they find out about the affair and that you chose to stay?
There is hope for your relationship after an affair.
Couples & Marriage Counseling can help you and your partner to re-establish trust, talk through the affair, understand how the two of you got to this place in your relationship, heal from and move beyond the affair.
Using Gottman Couples Therapy I’ve helped couples work through the pain of an affair.
Our first session together I will meet with you and your partner, together. The three of us will talk about the details of your relationship, going back to the start of when the two of you first met. I’ll get a sense of your story and an idea of what led you into my office.
Session two, I meet with just one and we switch for session three with me meeting alone with the other partner. These individual sessions are a chance for me to go a little deeper with you, to understand your stuck points and how you want to grow through our work together.
Session four we come back together and go through the Gottman Sound Relationship House. The Sound Relationship House is Gottman’s framework for building a healthy and lasting relationship. We will look at each level, identify your strengths and areas that need a little more attention. We will be doing all of this while also starting to move into stage one of affair recovery, atone.
In the atone stage of affair recovery we work on expressing pain, learning how to respond to that pain and helping to put the two of you on the path of starting to make it right. Your partner can’t undo what he/she has done but I promise you, there is a lot they can do to make it less painful and to start working on making it right. The atone stage is often the most difficult and longest stage of recovery. The stage is about listening, ownership, and acknowledgment. It doesn’t look like buying roses every day until your partner forgives you - it’s a long phase but there’s a peace that can be obtained in this part of the process that sets the building blocks for repairing the relationship.
Stage two, attune is when we start to take a look at the relationship and get clear on the parts that weren’t working pre-affair. During this stage we keep in focus that the partner who had the affair made a choice and they continue to take responsibility for that choice but we open up the discussion to look more at the systems and patterns in the relationship that were causing the two of you pain. Once we get clear on the partners and behaviors that weren’t working in the relationship we can start working on helping the two of you develop skills to work through these issues. Some things we might work on in this stage of recovery are: conflict resolution and communication skills, friendship, shared meaning and goals, and values.
The final stage of recovery is the attachment stage. During this stage we work on helping the two of you to re-establish intimacy, both physical and emotional. We explore blocks to intimacy and the two of you will learn how to have an intimate conversation.
It’s not an easy choice to stay in a relationship after an affair but it is possible to heal, grow and reconnect after an affair.
Begin Couples Counseling for Affair Recovery in the Bay Area, California (Online).
You don’t have to live with this pain and you don’t have to leave your relationship. It is possible to heal from an affair and to grow stronger as a couple through this. Couples counseling can help you and your relationship.
Affair recovery isn’t the only service we offer at Gwendolyn Nelson-Terry, LMFT. I am able to treat most couples concerns such as relationship unhappiness, conflict, co-parenting, and more. I also meet with individuals and can support you through a variety of relationship and non-relationship concerns such as anxiety, self esteem, and moving beyond a break up.
Don’t go it alone, work with a trained and experienced couples therapist who can help you and your partner to heal from an affair. Call today for a free 15 minute phone consultation (619)383-1900.