Recovering from an Affair

Nov 18

By Jay Slupesky

: New York City

Approximately 30% of the couples who begin marital therapy do so as a result of an extramarital affair. Usually when a couple comes to see me for the first time the affair has been revealed within the past week or two. Obviously at that point the wounds are still very fresh.

These days spouses often discover their partner is having an affair by finding emails, cell phone calls, or text messages to or from the third party. It can be hard to cover your tracks these days. (Of course, some people want their affair to be discovered. But that’s a whole other article.)

Inevitably the question in therapy becomes: how will the wife get over what has been done to her? (For this article I’ll assume the husband had the affair since that is more common). As I’ve written about before, it’s not unusual for the man not to want to talk about it. He has apologized and now he thinks his wife should “get over it.” Of course, he typically feels guilty and embarrassed about what he did, so it’s not easy to talk about it. I normalize this.

Usually the wife wants to know why he did it, how could he think it was OK to do it, and details about where, when, and how often. It’s common for the wife to ask these questions over and over again during the months that she is recovering. One of my jobs is to convince the husband that this is normal and that it’s in his best interest to patiently answer the questions as many times as necessary.

The recovery process is long and difficult but it can be worth effort. My goal as counselor is for the couple to end up with a relationship that is stronger than it had ever been before.

Tags: Infidelity

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Infidelity.

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