Let me just sit with you for a second here, because what you’re carrying right now is heavy. Whether you’re the one who had the affair or the one who was betrayed, shame is in the room. And I want to talk about both of those, because they’re different animals.
If you’re the one who was betrayed, here’s what I want you to know first. An affair is not one betrayal. It’s usually six or seven individual betrayals nested inside the big umbrella. There’s the physical act, yes. But there’s also the lying, the hiding, the moments your partner looked you in the eye and you trusted them, the times you maybe sensed something and they told you that you were wrong.
Each one of those is its own wound. Each one deserves its own attention and its own repair. If you’re trying to process this like it’s one thing, one event, one conversation, that’s why it keeps feeling impossible. It’s not one thing.
The shame that hits you as the betrayed partner is sneaky. It whispers things like “I should have known” or “I must not have been enough” or “Everyone else can see what I couldn’t.” That shame makes you feel small and stupid and somehow complicit in your own betrayal. None of that is true, but shame doesn’t care about truth. It cares about making you disappear.
And if you’re the one who had the affair, the shame you’re feeling right now is real. I’m not going to minimize that. But here’s what I’ve learned in sixteen years of sitting with couples in this exact fire: shame that isn’t metabolized becomes a wall. It stops you from being present for your partner’s pain. You get so consumed with how terrible you feel about yourself that you actually become less available to them, not more.
That’s a brutal irony, because your partner needs you to be able to hold their pain right now. They need you to stop drowning in your own shame long enough to see what you’ve done to them. Shame makes you want to defend, explain, minimize, or collapse. None of those moves help.
Here’s the clinical truth. The only way through this is what I call empathy squared. That means both people are hurting. Both people’s pain is valid, accepted, empathized with, and felt deeply. Not one person’s pain is the real pain and the other person’s is just a consequence. Both.
That genuinely feels unfair after infidelity because it can feel like saying “your pain counts too” somehow diminishes the betrayal. It doesn’t. It’s actually the only path that works.
Shame wants you to hide. Recovery demands you stay visible, even when being seen feels unbearable. The shame will tell you that you’re too broken to fix this. That’s the lie shame always tells. You’re not too broken. You’re just human, and humans can learn to do better.
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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: How Shame Destroys Relationships
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