Affairs are sad and horrible, and make you lose trust. A lot of trust. Especially when you find out about the infidelity by seeing a text or a picture. And that’s how it’s discovered most of the time. If your partner still denies it, the feeling becomes worse still.

The good news is that infidelity is something that can be helped around 80% of the time when both partners want to work on the betrayal in therapy and the affair has been ended. The other good news, and this might sound ridiculously pollyannaish if you just found out about your partner’s infidelity, is that there may be a silver lining in there somewhere.

The affair often wakes up couples where connection and intimacy has gone dormant. Or there has been a longstanding negative pattern of communication that has gotten in the way of connection. The affair wakes you up to really seeing and wanting to change that.

By taking a good look at your relationship and what may not have been going well for quite some time. Suddenly, you both want to work on it, you are having heartfelt, difficult, tearful, but strangely intimate conversations. And even weirder, you feel closer to your partner than you have in years.

Couples therapy is perfect for working on healing the injury by having many deep, vulnerable, conversations where the injuring partner listens, just listens, and helps the injured partner hold the pain. It brings the couple together in the shared goal of healing and helping with the pain that has been caused.

A bit after there has been some amount of healing from the acute and present pain, or intermingled with that healing work, the couple must also confront what has been going wrong for years that led to the affair. The goal, using Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy, is to discover what the ‘negative cycle’ of the couples is, and how it has caused disconnection between both partners. How it’s caused loneliness and pain for the couple. And how the couple has struggled to connect either emotionally or intimately or both.

The hard work of healing from the injury together while looking deep into what has been causing disconnection can cause a newfound connection that is as surprising as it is hopeful. The couple begins to learn new ways of communicating so that previous disconnection is not happening nearly as much anymore. It’s also essential to continue to have those healing conversations where the partner who was injured by the affair gets to ask questions, process their feelings, express how hard it is to trust again, etc. The other partner must learn to listen, and most of all, to feel empathy and understanding for how hurt the other is. This is key for real healing.

We always tell couples recovering from infidelity: “It’s not enough to talk about it just once, to listen once, or even just to listen, you must do it with your heart, not your head. And you must to do it over and over again.”
It’s often very very important for the injured partner to be able to share repeatedly how bad they feel, how hurt, how scared, and how tortured by repetitive thoughts and worries about what could happen next. This vulnerable sharing needs to be received with grace by the injuring partner, with empathy and with heart. This is the path towards healing.

The silver lining of the affair can be that you get to revamp your entire relationship and find each-other again. You get to discover how you got disconnected and maybe even find a new closeness that is more fulfilling than you imagined was possible.