The first therapy session—what kind of affair is this, and what does each partner want?

Couples usually come in to the first session anxious and distressed. As they take their seats, there's often a palpable aura of tension often that expands into the room.

If you're the person that has cheated, you probably feel a combination of fear, shame and irrational resentment at being caught. Cheaters often initially cling to the rationalizations for having the affair, and sometimes nurse a sense of self-righteous betrayal because your partner has gone into your private areas to find you out.

If you're the person that's been betrayed, you'll often feel a sense of depression and outrage. There's a chaos about your life being turned upside down that's profoundly disturbing. Now what? I can’t stand my partner and I don’t want to lose my partner.

To the therapist, the number one question after, “Is everybody physically safe?” is to ask each partner, "What do you want?" Do you want to separate? If so, there are a number of issues to explore and decisions to make. “Do you want to work on this marriage, work through this disaster, and hopefully into a marriage that's worthwhile on the other side?” If so, there are a number of issues to explore and decisions to make.

A certain percentage of affairs are exit affairs—affairs generated because the cheater has consciously or unconsciously wanted to leave and couldn't figure out how. Maybe he or she is frightened of blowing up the marriage, feels social pressure to stay married, or is worried about the impact on children, but really doesn’t want to be married to their spouse. So, the cheater unconsciously creates an affair as a bridge out of the marriage.

Quite a number of affairs are "I would like to be loved better" affairs. The strayer has felt a sense of disconnection or alienation and misses the friend and lover of the romance and early stages of marriage. Rather than challenging their partner to address the issues, the partner instead looks outside the marriage for intimacy with another person.

70% of affairs are opportunity affairs. Remember, we’re genetically wired to cheat if we get a chance. An opportunity shows up and someone goes for it. In therapy, these opportunity affair people often feel a sense of "Oh, no! This is way too big a deal over something that was just a circumstance." This is especially true if it was a single episode.

Sometimes there are affairs because people have lingering resentments. Remember, nurturing resentment is one of the beginning stages of working your way through the glacial progression into betrayal.

Suffice to say, there are different kinds of affairs, and countless reasons people cheat. The bottom line? When the affair is discovered, the couple often ends up in therapy.

As I just mentioned, when you come in after you or your partner has cheated, one of my first questions is, “What do you want?” If one person wants to leave, then we talk about leaving. It only takes one partner committed to leaving to break up a marriage, and I don’t advocate one way or the other. It takes two people deciding to heal to give reconciliation a chance. What I tell people is that, if you want to end a marriage that has a history, has investment psychologically and financially, and often involves children, it needs to feel right over a variety of states of consciousness. It can't just feel right when you're super pissed off at your partner or super ashamed. It needs to feel right later on when you're not super pissed off. It needs to feel right when you're feeling calmer and more understanding. It needs to feel right across a variety of states of consciousness to be the right decision to separate. Figuring this out often that takes time.

So, the first session we explore, “Do you want to separate, or do you want to reconcile?” “Do you want to work your way through it, or to you want to divorce? Most of the time, when people come to my office as a couple, they want to work through it. They want to get to the other side and somehow trust and love again. They'll say some version of, “I want my marriage to be healed."

Stages of recovery

In the first session I explain to them that there are stages that people tend to go through when they're recovering from an affair. I'll tell them there's this huge big mess that you're in, this big explosion in your life, and we're going to spend the next months working through the smoking fire and damage and distress until we get to the point where we're beginning to deal with the issues that we would have dealt with if the person who cheated would have gone to their partner and said, "You know, I'm thinking of cheating, we should get into therapy."

And then I'll tell them that there are three stages of recovery from affairs as reported by Shirley Glass in her book "Just Friends"--atone, attune and attach.

Atone, attune, and attach

Atone is the cheater taking responsibility and facing the damage.
Attune is deepening understanding of each other and choosing positive connection over distressed disconnection.
Attach is co-constructing a friendship, love affair, and capacities to repair injuries that support a growing and satisfying marriage.

These don't necessarily happen in order. There are emphases on one process or another at different points in the therapy. Initially, we have to deal with the whole disaster itself. We have to deal with the fact that if you're the person who cheated, you made your partner disappear. He or she disappeared while you got involved with this other person and had this relationship. Now, not only is your spouse dealing fantasies of you having sex with this other person, and choosing the lover over you and your family, they’re dealing with the fact that you had to lie repeatedly to him or her. They have to deal with the fact that to engage in this relationship, you had to make them disappear, and, if you have kids, you had to make the kids disappear. You can’t enjoy a secret affair overcome with what it might do to your spouse and children. You have to dissociate from those potential consequences to indulge the instincts to cheat. Understandably, cheated-on partners are super pissed off about that having been done to them.

Atoning is taking responsibility for the damage you’ve done

If you're the person who cheated, part of atonement is realizing that you didn't just betray your partner. You betrayed your children. You betrayed your friends, extended family, and everybody else that potentially is going to be distressed by you cheating. You need to feel bad about this—guilty and ashamed. Not so bad that you go out and be self-destructive (which is passive aggressive—your anger at others expressed indirectly through hurting yourself), but bad enough to realize this affair was a huge mistake, and that you are really sorry. You need to understand the suffering of your partner and help them feel understood by you.

Atonement is a two-way street

If you're the person that was cheated on, you are going to be furious and distressed and upset and filled with devastating images. But you're going to need to know about what happened. You're going to need to ask questions. You have work to do to save your marriage, even though you aren’t the one who strayed. Part of that work is asking questions to help both of you metabolize what just happened.

Asking questions can be tricky

When you ask your unfaithful partner questions, you need to be ready to listen to the answers and recognize that some questions are better not asked (it's usually not a good idea to ask about specific sexual practices, beyond safe sex questions). You're going to want to know when did it happen? How often did it happen? How did it feel? Did you think about me while it was going on? Where did you go? How did you deal with the fact that you were going to a place that was an "us" place and you made it a "you and your lover" place? And on and on like that.

Do you really love me?

Also, you're going to have a sense of, “Does my unfaithful partner really love me, and do they really want me? Does he/she still care about me? Does he/she still want me as a partner and as a lover? And always, there is an interface with your own fear and anger. “Do I want him? Do I want her? Can I get through this?” These questions inevitably arise in therapy, and each one needs to be dealt with, often many times.

Sex with your spouse after an affair?

Right after a spouse has discovered their partner has cheated, he or she can want to have sex just to feel that sense of normalcy and reassuring connection. On the other hand, when some partners discover sexual betrayal, they become disgusted with their partner sexually. They might try to begin to be sexual, think about the affair, and become turned off and repelled. The love affair of the marriage, the sexual relationship which is one of the three marital pillars (friendship, love affair, and repair of injuries) has been profoundly injured.

Unpacking what happened

In the first session, I describe much of this material. The first stage, the atone stage, begins with unpacking what happened, how it happened, and the person who was betrayed needs to ask the questions that he or she needs to ask.

One woman I worked with brought in a long sheet of questions, and her partner found it horribly painful to answer them. He kept asking, "Why should I do this? This doesn't seem to help. She just gets pissed off." Of course, she did when he answered the questions. But also she was saying, "I need to have a sense that we have a shared life again, and you had a separate life. Somehow I need to make sense of your separate life. I need to understand it and so I need to ask these questions." When people get activated like this—as they always do during the process--I encourage them to first calm themselves down, self-soothe, and then engage.

A great technique for lowering distressed arousal is:

• Slow deep inhale into your abdomen.
• Slow exhale as you relax your body.
• Repeat until you feel your arousal level adjusted so you can listen and talk cooperatively.

The person who was betrayed needs to engage in discourse and ask questions that are not designed to punish. The questions need to be designed to explore and resolve. Your therapist will help you with this, and it’s a great idea to make this as easy as possible for your therapist! When I’m working with a couple, the cheated-on partner can get angry and start moving into a punitive role--going into the litany of the horrible offenses. "You made me disappear!” “You had sex with her in our bed!” “How could you do this to our children?!" When this happens, I’ll often interrupt say, "Remember what we're doing here. You need to ask the questions that get you where you want to go, and then move you two forward.”

Atonement letters

Often in the initial stages of the therapy, I’ll ask the person who cheated to write a letter expressing empathy for what happened to their partner. I encourage them to express remorse and how they intend to move forward into the future.

Back to self-soothing

This is how we address the explosion. We dive into it and look at it. Along the way, I need to keep teaching people how to self-soothe. As I mentioned earlier, a good way of self-soothing is just feeling your body, relaxing, and breathing. Let's all do it now. Feel your body. Feel it get heavier in the seat or the chair. If you're standing, just feel your body get relaxed and heavy. Feel your breath go in and out of your abdomen. As the breath goes in, you say “Soft” to yourself. As the breath goes out, you say “Belly,” “Soft belly” to relax your belly, to relax yourself, to self-soothe.

As you do this, your arousal level goes down. Your pulse goes down, and your body relaxes. If you feel particularly tense, you can tense your body up for five or ten seconds. Then relax everything and feel heavy. Feel the heaviness of your body and feel your body get warm. What this does is lower your arousal level so that you can be socially engaged. Socially engaged is really a big deal. If we're so upset that we can't listen or speak productively, all we can do is lash out and nothing good happens.

When you're talking about the affair, you need to monitor your arousal level whether you're the person who cheated or the person  who was cheated on. As you do that, you need to be able to notice when you're getting too jacked up or shut down, and calm yourself. The therapist will help you with this.

During this initial stage, therapy is like riding a rollercoaster. It gets better, it gets worse, it gets crazy, you feel clear. You just stay on that rollercoaster together and move forward so you have a shared understanding. Gradually, you begin to get a sense that the other person wants to reconcile, wants to get through this.

Have fun and connection whenever you can

One thing that I tell couples is to the extent that they can have any kind of normal connection, have it. Just because you're dealing with a betrayal or distress doesn't mean you can't laugh about things. If couples want to make love, go ahead, make love. It actually makes it easier in therapy if you start having sex with each other, but don't do it if either one of you feels wrong about it.

Unambiguous “No!” to the secret lover, and accept your loss of privacy

The person who had the affair has to give an unambiguous message to the secret lover, “No more contact!” From now on, any contact from the lover has to be shown to the husband or wife who was cheated on, and any response needs to be shown to the husband or wife who was cheated on. Also, if you're the cheater, be prepared to lose your privacy for an extended period of time. If your partner wants to look at your phone, let them look at your phone. If your partner wants to look at your email, them look at your email. The only way through this to rebuild trust is to create transparency where you're doing your best to tell the truth, and your partner can access any of your platforms and can ask you any question and you'll give an answer, unless the answer somehow causes great distress to another person. That's why the tricky questions about the lover and so on should be brought up in therapy.

Include your partner in this class

If you're in the process of doing this class, it's a good idea to have you partner look at this video, have your therapist look at this video, and ask yourself, “What stage of this process am I in, and am I deciding I want to be in the relationship? If I am, am I taking the steps that I need to be transparent and be in integrity? If I'm the one who cheated, have I set clear boundaries for my ex-lover? Am I willing to be available to connect in positive ways with my partner?

If I'm the person that was cheated on, “Am I clear that I want to resolve this and make better intimacy with my partner? Am I clear that I'm available when I'm not suffering to be able to have an enjoyable time with my partner? Am I willing to structure time that we can be together not talking about the affair?"

Remember, you’ve decided the marriage needs to be salvaged and your time together can't all be about trauma. That being said, there's no mistaking, an affair is traumatic. Discovering an affair is traumatic. Having your partner cheat on you is traumatic. The practice of working through trauma is generally:

• Becoming embodied, feeling your breath and sensations.
• Lowering your arousal level
• Going into the traumatic memory or fantasy, and then coming back to the present moment in a controlled way.
• Practicing this, back and forth, until you feel progressively less traumatized remembering what happened or remembering what you lost.

Grieving your lost lover

Gradually, you do work through all traumas, including affairs this way. Also, if you're the person who cheated and you happen to be in a romantic infatuation with the person that you were cheating with, you're going to be grieving for your lover. You might need individual therapy to grieve for your lover, because you can't grieve with your wife or your husband about a secret affair that just ended. When you stop a relationship in the middle of romantic infatuation, the whole unconscious body rebels against it. We want the beloved. We rebel against losing the beloved. We get angry at our partner for loss of our lover. If you are grieving your lost lover, you often have to work through the grief. It's a good idea to be in individual therapy during this time.

Individual therapy helps couples’ therapy

For the person who has been cheated on, it's often useful to have an individual advocate of your own where you can go and talk about how outraged you are, as well as your ambivalence about being married to a person who’s betrayed you. Sometimes, I will serve both those purposes for one member of the couple. I'll do the couple's work and I'll do individual sessions with one of the individuals. Sometimes I'll just do the couple's work and they'll do individual sessions with other people. Very infrequently, I'll be the person doing the individual work and somebody else will be doing the couple's work.

Journal exercises:

If you had an affair, and if you're starting therapy, I would like you to listen to this and I would like you to get your notebook out answer the following questions:

• What stage are we on?
• Are we on the atone stage?
• Are we in the attune stage?
• Are we getting back to being connected?
• What's hard for me and easy for me in terms of participating in this process?
• Am I willing to talk to my partner about what's going on with me and am I willing to listen to him or her about what's going on with them?
• What do I have to do to wake up and get stronger and wiser to be able to have a better marriage?
• Whether I was cheated on or whether I was the person who cheated, I'm going to need to have to grow in certain areas to have a better marriage. What are those areas?

Begin to look at those things and write them down, and I encourage you to ask your partner to write them down, and then share your answers with each other. If there is a difficulty or if an argument emerges, don't accelerate it. Bring it up in your next therapy session. This is how you deal with a secret affair in the initial stages of therapy.