You've worked through the initial explosion. Perhaps you've written your letter of acknowledgement and remorse, or heard your partner read their letter to you. You two have discovered that you want to be together and that you want to work on healing problems and being better friends and lovers--you want to have a shared life together. You're beginning to feel more hopeful and less angry if you've been betrayed, and less guilty and ashamed if you cheated.

There's a sense of distance from the ex-lover, a sense of separation for both partners. He or she has been given unambiguous messages of good-bye.

What happens in therapy at this point is endearing and validating to the therapist. I love it when other couple issues start coming into therapy; issues about kids, money, friends, social events, about household activities. As we deal with these we keep referencing and enhancing the marital friendship, love affair, and capacities to repair.

All this being said, the affair/betrayal never disappears completely, and can suddenly intrude into almost any moment. It's confusing to the cheater--who is long past his or her entanglement with the secret lover--when the past trauma is triggered by apparently random events. I might ask the couple about socializing with their friends, and suddenly the betrayed partner tenses with anger and says, "Well, we're going to go to Jim and Audrey's house. Did they know that you were cheating?"

Bam! The question needs to be answered honestly, and if Jim and Audrey knew about the affair and kept it secret, there is more betrayal, loss, humiliation, and challenged relationships for the cheated-on partner. This distress then needs to be acknowledged, validated, and transformed into healing. In therapy, we now we go back to supporting, loving, resolving until we're at the other side of the current intrusion--hopefully with the couple a bit more resilient and connected. If couples allow themselves to receive influence in therapy, they can get back to love and compassionate understanding progressively more easily. Sometimes it's a long and laborious process, but it takes as long as it takes.

On the other hand, improving a marriage means having more fun with each other. You're nourishing a friendship, love affair and mature capacities to heal injuries. This requires shared pleasures of different sorts. You need to go out, be affectionate, laugh together, and parent together more cooperatively. You need to be social together, and have fun family events. In doing all this it really helps to cultivate care about the other person's opinions about you, and offer them personal positives as much as possible. A simple example is, "Do you like me in this shirt?" "You look great in that shirt!"

Problems involve patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating

All the normal activities of a couple become highlighted in therapy and they all are vehicles to deeper self-awareness about self and other. The patterns that weren't working very well before become even more highlighted by increasing awareness. And those hurtful patterns need to improve!

Let's go back to the sexual destiny, sexual growth attitudes. We want to have a sense of growth in all the relevant areas of our lives--a growth mindset. Carol Dweck did the research on growth and fixed mindsets. A growth mindset is believing and practicing effort and progress to keep growing as a person and partner. A fixed mindset is needing to do well right now, making mistakes is shameful, and outcomes are more important that processes. In marriages, shared effort-and-progress growth mindsets are central features of learning how to cherish each other and be grateful for what we have.

Of course, conflict will always come up and growth mindsets believe that with effort and progress orientations we can get better at resolving conflicts and repairing injuries forever.

Important bottom line:

Conflicts always involve distressed states of consciousness, often defensive states with distorted perspectives, amplified or numbed emotions, and destructive impulses. Necessary skills in distressed states are self-soothing skills. The first step of almost every self-soothing skill is slow relaxed inhale, followed by slow relaxed exhale from your lower belly, always focusing on relaxing your body. Often the hardest practice to learn in self-soothing is simply recognizing that you're too jacked up to function well and need to take a deep breath and calm down. Try it right now, slow deep breath through your nostrils, slow exhale through your mouth, relaxing your whole body. Do this until you feel mellow, wise, and dialed-in. Check out The Attuned Family on your reading list to learn this and many more self-soothing practices.

The magic formula for defensive states

When a defensive state comes over you, sometimes all you can consider doing is lash out, be lashed out at, freeze the other out or let the other freeze you out. Here's some steps that can help if you find yourself in a defensive state:

• Soothe yourself into social engagement and then ask your partner about his or her experience until they feel understood and respected. You need to hear from them, "Yes, I feel you understand and respect my position." You don't have to agree, just understand and respect.
• When they feel understood, you ask them, "I'd like you to understand and respect my position," and then help them focus on understanding and respecting your position.
• Ask, "How can we make a little bit of progress with whatever this is?" Each person needs to offer some effort. Like, "I'll be a little kinder to our son when he's defiant." "I will make a point to try to call when I'm late for work." Slight improvements generate hope. Hope feeds initiative to love better.
• Finally, after you make a little bit of progress, you need to create warm contact. Smile at each other. Have make-up sex. Thank the other for making progress on the issue.

Warm contact is necessary


If you haven't created a warm contact, you haven't finished the repair. The sequence is:

• Express the distress.
• Practice shared understanding without defending.
• Move a little forward--real progress.
• Feel shared warmth now.

We don't feel like practicing this in fights because when we're threatened--when our nervous systems read "Threat!"--they create defensive states in 40 to 80 milliseconds. If I feel threatened or triggered or charged, my nervous system goes into a defensive state to protect me. Defensive states usually involve amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives (negative stories about you victimizing me), destructive impulses to fight or flee, and diminished capacities for empathy and self-reflection.

In defensive states, many of us are aware something bad is happening, but we're stuck in the state. Often, we struggle to control distressed impulses even as we indulge them. They come out spontaneously when we're threatened, but we can regulate them. When we notice a defensive state coming out, we can say, "All right! If I'm having that amplified or numbed emotion, I can do relaxation programs--deep inhale, slow exhale, soft belly, tense muscle groups for five to ten seconds and then release them."

As I self-soothe, my arousal level goes towards social engagement levels. Or if I'm so shut down I can't think, I can breathe deeply, consider my body, look at my partner with love until I feel like I can think clearly again--my arousal levels regulate up towards social engagement. I now have more capacity to create real social engagement. I can challenge distorted perspectives with compassionate understanding. I can say "No." to the destructive impulse and look for action that's healthy. I can reach for empathy for what you're going through, even though I don't feel like paying positive attention to you when I'm lost in a defensive state. I can reach for self reflection. "Yeah, I'm in a defensive state. I want to do something destructive rather resolve into love." As you practice this, it makes it easier to help your partner feel understood, easier to help them understand you, and easier to commit to taking a little bit of a step forward so that you're making progress.

Always reach for warmth

As you self-soothe and repair, you always reach for warmth. Whether it's a hug or a kiss, there needs to be a sense of shared warmth at the end or the repair is not finished. All couples need to get better and better at repairing. If you don't, if you stay in those defensive states, you start doing destructive things. You say nasty things, you use contemptuous tones, you stonewall. You might start lying by commission or omission, making extreme statements, or normalizing chronic lies. All these defensive reactions create more injuries, and many of those injuries need to be repaired later. We want to create as few injuries as possible and we want to get better and better at healing injuries--both current ones and past ones.

Such repairs are super important and super difficult. And so we learn how to bring these things up, deal with them with each other. And if we can't deal effectively with each other, then we get the therapist to help. And that's generally a good idea. Let's try to talk about it until we feel better and can repair, we can't do it now. Let's do it again. If we can't do it a second time, let's bring it up in therapy session and let the therapist help us. And always keep remembering that what we're moving forward to is that state where we're cherishing each other and feeling grateful for what we have. We want more and more of that! Cherishing each other and grateful for what we have means shared fun. When recovering from affairs, it means honoring your sex life, getting it so that it's better than it was before. More communication and more fun and so on. And in every important area of your life, understanding that we are always managing processes that we want to help get better over time.

Growth mindsets are better for everything, better for kids, better for couples, better for businesses. Where effort and progress is what we focus on. We don't focus on solving everything 100% (hardly anything gets solved 100%). Progress orientations keep couples moving forward.

If you're doing this class with your partner and you're in the middle stages of therapy, which you might be, receive influence from your therapist to learn and practice growth mindsets.

Look for my part of problems and my responsibilities to improve

I suggest you answer the following questions in your journal:

• Is there a way of understanding my partner that I'm resistant to because I'm angry or I feel entitled, because he or she hurt me?
• Do I have bad habits from the past, lying by omission or commission that slip out?
• Am I willing to confess my mistakes and try to learn how to be more transparent and honest?
• Am I willing to ask my partner for help and receive positive influence?

Discuss what you've written with your partner. Congratulate each other for these efforts, even if you have to take unresolved conflicts to your therapist.

Use therapy to keep on track

Remember, if an argument gets more intense, don't escalate the conflict! First try to repair. If repair isn't working, let's talk about it in therapy. What often happens in therapy is gradual progress as you work through more and more regular issues, as well as gradual progress managing the intrusion of the trauma/affair issues. As couples get better at this, they often go to having therapy sessions every second or third week. When you feel like you're solid in that you're moving forward as a successful couple into the future, schedule the appointment with the therapist two or three months down the line. Research shows that when couples do this, the benefits of therapy tend to last longer.