Recovering from an Affair: Rebuilding Trust
Romers Therapy I July 2024
Life’s challenges can be overwhelming; everyone deserves a space to feel heard and supported. At Roamers Therapy, we provide trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, LGBTQIA+ affirming, and evidence-based environments to help you heal, grow, and navigate your mental well-being journey. As your psychotherapist, we are here to guide you every step of the way.
The definition of an affair is breaking an agreement between partners or doing something to hurt a relationship. The discovery that a partner has crossed the line can feel earth-shattering, whether physical or emotional. This traumatic rupture in trust is emotionally devastating and has destructive consequences on a relationship. Affairs causes ripples of insecurities, conflict, and distrust, but mending the relationship is possible if both partners are willing to commit the time and energy needed to recover. To get through an affair and rebuild the trust between partners, Dr. John Gottman researched for years to understand affair dynamics and how couples can repair damage to a relationship’s foundation-like affair. Consequently, the Gottman Method provides a roadmap for couples who would like to recover from an affair and rebuild trust between partners. In this therapy sketch, we will briefly mention how to recover from the affair.
What is Trust?
Before explaining the affair and how to recover from it as a couple, we should address the concept of trust. According to John Gottman, we have an evaluation process to decide whether someone is trustworthy. This evaluation process has five steps, including honesty, transparency, accountability, ethics, and alliance. Let’s assume that you are evaluating a person’s trustworthiness. Here are the explanations of these five steps:
- Honesty: To the best of your knowledge, this step refers to deciding on whether this person is not deceitful or a liar.
- Transparency: As the name suggests, this step refers to deciding whether a person is open about their life without hiding anything.
- Accountability: This step refers to deciding whether a person will follow through on their commitments without being unclear about it.
- Ethics: This step refers to deciding whether someone is acting justly and fairly to others and having a moral compass that suits you well.
- Alliance: This step refers to deciding whether a person is on the same team as you. You should feel like this person genuinely supports you and takes care of your best interests without forming alliances against.
Detecting who is trustworthy is an important skill in every part of life and also in relationships. An affair can profoundly disrupt a relationship’s foundation, undermining the betrayed partner’s sense of trustworthiness. But what exactly is trust, and why is it so crucial that it forms the foundation of a strong relationship? Let’s discover that by viewing John Gottman’s Sound Relationship House model briefly.
John Gottman hypothesized a model to explain what makes relationships work well. According to research findings, he found that building love maps, sharing fondness and admiration, turning towards each other, having a positive perspective, managing conflicts, making each other’s dreams come true, and creating a shared meaning are the key components of a successful relationship. Gottman named his work Sound Relationship House. After the criticism he received and observing couples, he noticed that something fundamental was missing. After continuous research, he detected that the missing component of the Sound House Relationship was trust. Trust is a sense of assurance between partners that builds a sense of security, safety, and openness. It enables all components of Sound Relationship House to blossom. From the Sound Relationship House research, we know that solid relationships are built on three dimensions: trust vs. distrust, loyalty vs betrayal, and optimal balance of power. From this perspective, an affair or betrayal harms the relationship’s foundation and solidness.
What is an Affair?
Every relationship contains implicit or explicit agreements within its dynamic. These agreements function to protect trust, intimacy, and closeness between partners. An affair is a violation of these agreements and endangers the trust and exclusiveness of the relationship. According to Gottman, an affair can be defined as a physical or emotional act of damaging the romantic relationship that causes a significant breach of trust. It generally involves a third party that is outside of the relationship dynamic. Also, it contains a term called “Intentional Secrecy,” which means a degree of secrecy and deception to cover actions caused by affairs. Altogether, the betrayed partner might feel denial, anger, sadness, loss, and hurt. Strong negative emotions and thoughts can lead to communication breakdowns, conflicts that deeply hurt both parties and solid emotional distances. We can divide an affair into three aspects:
- Emotional: This type of affair implies forming a romantic connection with someone other than one’s partner. In this situation, one can share intimate thoughts, emotions, or experiences with a third party outside the relationship. This kind of intimate behavior is generally reserved for one’s partner, and sharing this information with another person and forming a connection in this aspect might hurt the other partner. This might indicate that one of the partners is investing in another person emotionally, which can break the relationship deeply.
- Physical: This type of affair implies becoming physically intimate with someone other than the partner in the romantic relationship. This causes significant trust and security issues for the other partner and causes profound damage to the relationship’s foundation.
- Combined: This type of affair implies having both emotional connection and physical intimacy with a third party outside of the relationship. Since it has more aspects within the dynamic, addressing combined affairs is challenging and harder to repair.
How to Recover from an Affair?
An act of affair causes intense relational trauma that damages the foundation of the relationship. It destabilizes relationships by breaking the trust between partners. To recover from it, both partners must be open to rebuilding a stable foundation. Trust is critical for a stable foundation because it promotes safety by reinforcing partners’ commitment to one another. The Gottman Method suggests rebuilding trust after an affair, which is called the Trust Revival Method. This evidence-based approach involves three stages, which include atonement, attunement, and attachment. This offers a structured way for renewed hope, trust, commitment, and intimacy.
Stage 1: Atonement
The first stage of Gottman’s Trust Revival Technique, Atonement, focuses on hearing the betrayed partner’s pain. In this phase, the Betrayer must accept full responsibility for the harm caused to their partner and offer space to listen non-defensively to how their partner feels. For the hurt partner, the inability to believe their partner understands their side makes it impossible to heal. The unfaithful partner must be willing to be transparent and honest in order to start to rebuild trust and boost the stability of the relationship. This can be emotionally challenging for both partners, but the couple cannot recover without complete transparency, and the hurt partner’s pain feels heard. Offering forgiveness is connected to a feeling of safety and understanding in the relationship. Once couples reach this level, they are ready to progress to the next stage.
Stage 2: Attunement
The next stage of the trust revival method focuses on the attunement process. Attunement is defined as the ability to emotionally connect on a deeper level and understand your partner’s inner world. This focuses on learning how to better meet one another’s needs through asking open-ended, communicating without defensiveness, contemplation, and criticism, and becoming better in touch with our partner’s emotions. By co-creating a new dynamic in the relationship through honest disclosure, trust and a more profound connection start to blossom. The attunement process includes the following actions:
A – Awareness of your partner’s feelings.
T – Turning toward the partner and allowing them into your world.
T – Tolerance to hearing different perspectives.
U – Understanding your partner’s perspective
N – Non-defensive responses
E – Empathy
By learning how to better attune with your partner, couples learn how to understand each other better.
Stage 3: Attachment
The final stage focuses on rebuilding a willingness to reconnect emotionally and sexually further. In the attachment phase, couples work to reconnect physically with a renewed sense of feeling understood. Couples can use attunement skills to ensure intimate desires are seen and heard. In this stage, partners are focused on developing new bonds, norms, and dynamics in their relationship. The goal is to understand one another’s triggers to be successful.
Maintaining Trust
After going through a deep relationship trauma like an affair, it is normal for the betrayed partner to think, “Would I ever get betrayed again?.” Although it is impossible to predict the future, some indicators from Gottman’s research might provide insight into the partner’s commitment to the relationship. Let’s assume that you are observing your partner about their commitment; here are the clues that you should consider:
- If you feel like your partner does not experience genuine remorse for the affair, such as avoiding apologies, or you notice some disagreements about perspective to the affair,
- If you feel like your partner’s actions are not changed, and it is not transparent, such as involving intentional secrecy, e.g., hiding things or lying,
- If you feel like your partner is avoiding addressing issues, such as not being open to talking about the issues you have been through,
- If you feel like you and your partner are not employing healthy communication, use unhealthy communication, such as defensiveness or stonewalling, in this topic,
- If you feel like both of you have a hard time rebuilding intimacy, such as spending quality time together and being affectionate to each other,
Observing these clues might break the trust and might rekindle the issues both of you have been through. Communicating with your partner about it using healthy communication styles, seeking clarity about the situation that worries you, setting boundaries if necessary, and reflecting on your needs might be helpful. However, In terms of taking care of your and your partner’s emotional well being, getting support from a mental health professional might be beneficial to navigate the rebuilding trust process.
We would like to say that recovering from any form of affair can be challenging but not impossible. Yet, it is essential to accept that rebuilding trust can be extremely difficult for both partners. So before beginning the process and moving forward, both partners should decide that the relationship is worth saving because resolving this process is a challenge in itself. Rebuilding trust requires tasks such as genuine apologies, honest disclosure, and a willingness to put the required time and energy into regrowing a relationship, which might imply significant emotional resources for both partners and for this reason, it may require a specialized clinician’s intervention. However, when both partners are committed to true healing, they can flourish with more profound levels of intimacy and genuine connection.
While our physical offices are located in South Loop and Lakeview neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois for in-person sessions, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more.
At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy.
Whether you’re seeking guidance on a specific issue or need help navigating difficult emotions, we’re ready to assist you every step of the way.
Contact us today to learn more about our services and schedule a session with our mental health professionals to begin your healing journey. To get started with therapy, visit our booking page.
First, decide if you’ll be paying out-of-pocket or using insurance. If you’re a self-pay client, you can book directly through the “Book Now” page or fill out the “Self-Pay/Out-of-network Inquiry Form.” If you’re using insurance, fill out the “Insurance Verification Form” to receive details about your costs and availability. Please let us know your preferred therapist. If your preferred therapist isn’t available, you can join the waitlist by emailing us. Once your appointment is confirmed, you’ll receive intake documents to complete before your first session.
This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.
While our offices are currently located at the South Loop neighborhood of Downtown Chicago, Illinois, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more. You can visit our contact page to access detailed information on our office location.