Look, I want to gently challenge the framing of your question, because I think it’s actually pointing you in the wrong direction. And I say that with a lot of care, because I know you’re probably in a lot of pain right now.
“Communication” is not really what broke. What broke was safety. What broke was the answer to the two most fundamental questions your nervous system has been asking since you were born: “Are you there for me?” and “Am I enough for you?” An affair is, in attachment terms, the loudest possible “no” to both of those questions simultaneously. So if we go in trying to fix communication, we’re working on the wrong thing entirely.
Here is what I actually see when couples come to me after a betrayal.
First, I want you to know that what you’re dealing with is not one betrayal. It’s probably six or seven. There’s the affair itself. There’s the lying. There’s the gaslighting, the reality that got pulled out from under your feet. There’s the shame. There’s the intimacy with someone else. There’s whatever the affair said about whether you were enough. Each one of those is its own wound, and each one needs its own moment of being seen and honored. People rush past this. They want to collapse it all into “the cheating” and move on. That shortcut doesn’t work.
Second, and this is the hard truth for the person who did the betraying: you cannot rush this. I know you want to get back to good. I know you’re doing the therapy and going to the gym and handing over your phone and saying sorry until you’re exhausted. But your partner’s nervous system is dealing with a trauma response. It is going to take longer than you think it should. Significantly longer. And the moment you start pushing for forgiveness, you’ve just answered the question “are you there for me?” with another quiet no.
Here is what actually heals this, and it’s not a communication script. It’s an experience. The person who did the betraying needs to actually feel, in their body, the full weight of what they did. Not perform remorse. Feel the terror of, “I may have destroyed the person I love most, and they would be completely justified in never trusting me again.” When the betrayed partner sees that, when they watch their partner genuinely sitting in that pain and not running from it, something starts to open. Because now the question “do you actually care about me?” starts getting a different answer.
And for the person who was betrayed: you don’t have to be available for any of this. You didn’t ask to be here. The fact that you showed up at all, to therapy, to a conversation, to even reading something like this, is an act of extraordinary generosity. Nobody gets to demand your healing on a timeline.
What rebuilds trust is actually a formula I’ve seen work. Time, multiplied by consistency of behavior, multiplied by transparency. All three together. And the time piece is always longer than the betrayer wants it to be.
The goal, if you do this work, is not to get back to who you were before. It’s to build something new, where both of you know the most scared, most hurt parts of each other, and you choose to love those parts on purpose. Every day. That’s what I’d call the real proof of work of love. Not the grand gesture. The showing up, again and again, into the discomfort, until the other person’s nervous system can finally rest.
That’s what heals this. Not better communication. Genuine presence with each other’s pain.
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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.
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