Cheating. Cheater. Cheated. The truth is out like an earthquake just ripped your world apart. The trust you had in your partner, yourself, and the world is shattered, and the pain feels suffocating. There’s no shortage of well-intentioned opinions about what you should do, and they all just seem to make things worse. Not to sound too cliche, but there is a roadmap for these things. While sadly, you’re not the first relationship in which this has happened, that also means that researchers and therapists have ample opportunity to study affairs– why and how they happen along with what you can do about it. 

John and Julie Gottman (the Gottman Method) as well as Sue Johnson (EFT)– titans in the couples therapy world– each have their own model to address affairs; Atonement, Attunement, and Attachment according to the Gottmans, and the Attachment Injury Repair Model (AIRM) within the EFT framework. Of course, other great models stand on the shoulders of those giants: RLT follows a path that similarly begins with accountability and leads to rebuilding connection, PACT addresses affairs through a Redemptive Reset, the authors of Getting Past the Affair (Snyder, Baucom, & Gordon) draw from CBT, and Esther Perel centers understanding parallel narratives, transparency, and accountability. You are not alone, and you are not without empirically sound resources and guidance.

Affairs and affair recovery are complex experiences at the intersection of trust, identity, communication, and so much more.  The discovery of infidelity ruptures the foundational sense of safety in a relationship, calling into question not only what happened, but what was believed, remembered, and relied upon. Both partners more often than not struggle to understand how to navigate the emotional terrain that follows; one stuck in hypervigilance, and the other stuck in avoidance or wishing they could "just get past it.” 

Simultaneously, along with the relational rupture of trust, infidelity can destabilize each partner’s sense of themself. For the injured partner, it can create profound doubt about their worth, their intuition, and the story they believed they were living. For the participating partner, the affair may be something they never imagined they’d do, or it could be an indication of an internal split with disowned parts of the self, generational patterns of infidelity, a reflection of unmet needs, an attempt to escape parts of themself or their life, or some other underlying aspect of their experience.

To be abundantly clear, none of these factors justify or excuse an affair. Rather, acknowledging and exploring the mechanics of infidelity with accountability, appropriate remorse, and understanding is part of the healing process within a relational system.

For both partners, these identity shifts, splits, and discoveries can be disorienting and, if relational healing is to happen, require careful exploration rather than oversimplification or an automatic default into perpetual negative sentiment override. Don’t get me wrong, negative sentiments make perfect sense in the context of affair disclosure or discovery; getting stuck there simply means the relationship, too, gets stuck in a wounded state. 

To heal after an affair, effective communication becomes both essential and even more outrageously difficult than it may or may not have been prior to this traumatic event. Partners may swing between silent withdrawal and interrogation, shutdown and overwhelm, or longing and anger. Without structure and nervous system regulation, conversation attempts can exacerbate the injury rather than support healing. Skillful, vulnerable (likely guided, at least in the beginning) communication is crucial for unpacking meaning, clarifying truths, and making space for the onslaught of emotions on both sides.

Esther Perel has said, “Most of us will have 4-5 different marriages in our lifetime. Hopefully most of them are to the same person.”

This work is not about erasing or ignoring what happened. It’s about telling the truth, exploring vulnerability, making sense of the rupture together, and ultimately choosing how to move forward with greater intention and clarity. For some, a new and more resilient and more intimate relationship will be created and nurtured, using salvageable parts from the wreckage integrated into the build along with new, enhancing, features. For others, a decision may be made that the relationship has been totaled, and there’s scaffolding for that process too. 

Affair recovery is a complex therapeutic process, and it’s also a structured one that can provide a compass in the chaos. Decades of research, clinical models, and experience show that when couples are guided through stabilization, understanding, accountability, and reconnection, the relationship can shift out of crisis and into meaningful repair. And, that healing takes time, understanding, care, skillful support, and a tremendous emotional investment on all sides. While there's no easy button, for couples willing to engage in the process with openness and courage, affair recovery becomes an opportunity to build something new, better, and stronger. Great ruptures met with even greater repair are foundations for the greatest resilience.

With that said, the last couple of years I have posted book recommendations in December. Here are a few recommendations specifically for this topic this year:

Getting Past the Affair: A Program to Help You Cope, Heal, and Move On--Together or Apart by Douglass K. Snyder, Kristina Coop Gordon, and Donald H. Baucom

Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship by KC Davis

Us by Terry Real

The State of Affairs by Esther Perel

Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After by Katherine Woodward Thomas