Let me just take a breath with you for a second here, because you’re asking about something that is genuinely one of the hardest things I work with. And I want to be honest with you about what this process actually looks like, because I think people come in with very different expectations than reality.
Here’s the thing. When a couple walks into my office after an affair has been discovered, there are actually two massive pieces of work that we have to do simultaneously. And the tricky part? They almost fight against each other.
The first piece is what I call the reparative emotional experience. That’s the moment, and I want to be clear, it’s not a moment you get to in week two, it takes a long time to get there, where the person who was betrayed gets to feel, in a real, living, breathing way, not theoretically, that their partner actually gets the depth of what they did. Not “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, can we move on?” Real getting it.
The betrayer has to be able to sit in the terror of what a disappointment they are to the person they love, and not run from it. When the betrayed partner sees that, when they see their partner dying inside because of how much they care about the hurt they caused, something shifts. That’s the experience we’re trying to create.
The second piece is understanding the emotional system the two of you were in before the affair happened. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth I have to hold: for an affair to happen, there was almost always some kind of vacuum in the emotional bond between the two people. That doesn’t excuse anything. Not for one second. But we have to understand it if we’re going to actually heal.
Now here’s where it gets delicate. How in the world do I look at someone who just found out their partner was sleeping with someone else for six months, possibly in their own home, and say, “By the way, we also need to study what emotional system you were both in that could have created the conditions for this”? It’s almost insane to ask that of someone in the acute pain of betrayal.
So the first thing I do is I say this out loud to the person who was betrayed: nobody in the universe has any right to expect you to be available to repair this. You have every right to be hurt. You have every right to never trust again. And you absolutely do not have to show up for any of this work.
The fact that they showed up to therapy at all? That’s one of the most generous things I’ve ever seen a human being do.
Now, one thing people really underestimate is that an affair is not one betrayal. It’s usually six or seven betrayals living inside one umbrella. There’s the lying. The gaslighting. The shame. The public humiliation. The reality distortion, where suddenly that night you thought he was at his brother’s house, he wasn’t. Your entire past gets rewritten. There may be a sexual betrayal. An emotional betrayal. The question “am I enough for you?” just got answered with the loudest possible no.
We have to identify and validate every single one of those separately. You can’t just treat it as one big thing and move through it. And for the betrayer to hear all of those broken down, it often does something important. It helps them stop rushing toward “when are you going to forgive me?” and start settling into the reality that we have a genuine process ahead of us.
Because that rushing is the biggest hurdle I see in betrayers. They’re often in their own suffering too. They feel terrible about themselves. They feel like they’re permanently bad, that they’ll never be trusted again. And all of that energy goes into trying to get back to good as fast as possible. What they don’t understand is that the rushing is actually blocking the healing.
What actually rebuilds trust, and I always say this, is time, multiplied by consistency of behavior, multiplied by transparency. And it almost always takes significantly longer than the betrayer thinks it should. Significantly longer.
Here’s something else I want to say, because I think it matters. Healing from this is not about forgetting. It’s not about “okay, we dealt with the affair, now we move on and never speak of it again.” The couples who actually come through this process and find something real on the other side, they get to a place where they can say, “those vulnerable, hurt parts of us are always welcome. We set a table for four now, not two.” Those little wounded kids inside both of them, the one who was betrayed and the one who did the betraying, they become honored guests in the relationship. Not shameful secrets.
And finally, I want to be straight with you: no couples therapy is better than bad couples therapy. This work requires someone who can hold the whole system, see both people, validate both people, and navigate this without losing either one of them. The work is hard. It is genuinely hard. But I have seen couples come through betrayal and find something they never had before, a relationship that’s actually real. Not performed. Real.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: What to Expect in Your First Couples Therapy Session
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