Affair Recovery
Whether you're a hurt partner finding your footing, or an affair-involved partner ready to take an honest look at what happened, Garden Space has support for you.
My approach to affair recovery
My work is warm, respectful, collaborative, and compassionately candid.
Trained in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), I work from a three-phase integrated framework that also draws on Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), The Gottman Method, the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), and Interpersonal Neurobiology.
*Please note: The three stages described below reflect a broad arc of recovery, not a linear sequence. Most people navigate these stages in a nonlinear way, often finding themselves in more than one stage at once, cycling back through earlier territory or jumping forward as healing continues. Wherever you are is a legitimate place to be.
PHASE 1
Stabilizing. This phase names the trauma and focuses on establishing containment, safety, and communication structures that reduce reactive cycles, support collaboration, and create conditions for deeper relational work. Without this foundation, subsequent phases cannot hold.
PHASE 2
Understanding.
Here we develop an honest, transparent, shared picture of what happened and why. We explore both individual and relational vulnerabilities with accountability and care. The clarity built here is necessary for making well-considered decisions related to commitment, connection, and intimacy going forward.
PHASE 3
Rebuilding. In this phase, the understanding you have developed will support you in making a decision about how to move forward, as individuals or as a couple. For those that re-dedicate themselves to one another, we apply actionable strategies to continue fortifying trust, cultivating intimacy, and maintaining relational security over time.
Formats for couples and individuals
Standard 50 minute sessions, weekly or biweekly, couples or individuals.
While appropriate for both couples and individuals who appreciate a steady, contained pace, this format is often recommended for individuals who want to process the experience regardless of relationship repair or dissolution.
Extended 90 minute sessions, weekly or biweekly, couples or individuals.
This format fits when the standard format feels too compressed to settle in, or when sessions feel like they end just as something important starts to surface. This format is often recommended for couples, especially in the early phases of affair recovery work.
A note on individual, couples, and group therapy
I work systemically, which means that even when I have an individual in my office, my clinical radar still considers how they shape and are shaped by their relationships. With that said, individual, couples, and group therapy can complement one another, but they serve different purposes. Attempting to serve as support for both an individual and the couple creates an ethical conflict that can undermine trust and blur perceptions of bias and allegiance. I want you to have a couples therapist who is equally dedicated to both of you and your relationship goals, and I want you to have an individual therapist who exclusively centers your individual experience. As such, I have policies in place that outline how I manage these dynamics: If I see you as a couple, I will refer you to other providers for individual therapy and group therapy. Individual and group services are adjunctive to one another, but I will refer you to other providers for couples therapy.
Couples Work
The relationship, itself, is the client here, and the high level goal is to cultivate something more authentic, resilient, trusting, and secure than what existed before. The invitation in couples work is to collaboratively assess the wreckage, keep what's salvageable, leave what's not, and build something new. This work relational and, as such, both partners will have a role to play, including both paradigm and behavioral shifts in service to creating the new relational dynamic.
Individual Support for the Hurt Partner.
This is your therapeutic space to process the betrayal, manage overwhelming emotions, rebuild your sense of self, and orient to what you need and want. This option may be the best fit for you as a supplement to couples work, or if you need to clarify your own experience and needs before you're comfortable engaging in joint work. Individual work also has its own value, regardless of your partner's engagement or relational outcomes.
Individual & Group Support for the Affair-Involved Partner
Therapy for you as the involved partner is a compassionately candid space to gain insight into yourself and your behavior, clarify and center your values, develop an understanding of accountability to yourself and others, and integrate the split parts of yourself into a cohesive identity. Whether this is preparation for the joint work, a complement to it, or simply a path toward personal growth, individual work has its own value regardless of your partner's engagement or relational outcomes.
Join us, and give yourself the restorative experience of relational healing, connection, and intimacy.
A few things to remember:
Affair recovery work invites insight, clarity, and connection, but as with all therapy, the process is rarely linear, results may vary, and no specific outcome can be guaranteed. Ongoing reflection, practice, or follow-up care is often part of the process.
This work is not appropriate for crisis situations, abusive dynamics, acute symptoms of severe mental illness, or active substance addiction. If you are experiencing thoughts of harm to yourself or others, immediate support through local emergency services, a crisis line, or trusted loved ones is recommended.
For partners that ultimately decide uncoupling is the best way forward, intensive work still supports supports a healthy, respectful process.