Stefan came to see me for therapy. And he wanted answers. After his wife discovered his secret life (infidelity, hidden use of pornography) over a year ago, their marriage had been turned upside-down. He feared losing his family. He emphatically proclaimed his love for his wife. “But she keeps telling me: ’If you truly loved me you wouldn’t have cheated…’ I understand her point, but it’s just not true. I never stopped loving her. I’m as baffled as she is… And I really hate myself for what I did to her.”
Like many of the clients who come to see me for infidelity counseling, Stefan loved the partner he betrayed. Like those many, Stefan had no grand design to leave his partner and start a new life with someone else. He wanted to keep his family intact, and while there may have been marital/relationship problems, he never questioned his love for his wife. He also knew, at some deep level, that what he was doing was wrong and that it violated the trust his partner had in him. And despite this, there were psychological forces that drove Stefan and the many like him into secrecy, forces that blinded them to the devastation that awaited.
Today’s article is a companion piece to a previous one, Infidelity Couples Counseling. We’ll examine the issues that the unfaithful partner must work on in order to heal themselves as well as their marriage/relationship.
Throughout affair recovery, the wayward partner has the two-pronged task of becoming a support for the partner/spouse they’ve betrayed while also working to understand the reasons that led them to live a secretive life. Both of these are priorities to explore in infidelity therapy.
In my work with the wayward partner, I often highlight how they have the complicated task of becoming a healing agent for the person they have traumatized; complicated by the fact that as the one who caused the betrayal, they have turned themselves into a person who is a threat, someone who has caused considerable psychological damage. It is a slow and steady process for the unfaithful partner to transform themselves into the one who facilitates healing.
There are numerous barriers that can arise along the way. We’ll look at the core competencies the unfaithful partner has to work to achieve throughout the infidelity recovery process.
I) Working to become a healing agent
Learning about the various ways in which the betrayal has impacted your partner can take time and it’s important to go beyond simply seeing them as “upset.” There are often complex and significant changes that occur for the betrayed partner. This understanding is needed for true empathy to emerge and for it to be maintained throughout the recovery. Someone who only sees their partner as “really angry all the time” may be missing the humiliation and deep sense of loss that fuel this anger — humiliation and grief that need witnessing by the unfaithful partner.
Or the betrayed partner might be struggling with the moral implications of what has occurred, a violation of their deepest principles that are the bedrock of who they are and how they view the world. Without seeing and exploring this moral injury, the betrayed partner can appear “stuck” rather than struggling in a particular way. Individual infidelity therapy (as well as couples therapy) can work on addressing these important issues.
Taking unequivocal ownership of the betrayal is critical for affair recovery. The focus on the self-capacities required for accountability, remorse and empathy is the starting point.
1) Radical accountability
Radical accountability isn’t easy. The unfaithful partner may use verbiage that softens the reality of the betrayed partner. Abstract language, euphemisms, and evasiveness used to obscure the truth will leave the injured partner alone in their reality. Anger is often triggered when the wayward partner misses the mark in how they talk about the betrayal. “I made mistakes that really hurt you…” does not capture how abused and violated the betrayed partner may feel.
Explanations about why the secretive behaviors occurred can also be used to hide behind. Of course genuine understanding is important, but the wayward partner should not bring up reasons for the affair during a conversation focusing on the betrayed partner’s emotional devastation. For instance, during heated moments when his wife was expressing anger, Stefan would often respond with, “I was in the throes of my sex addiction…I didn’t want to be doing those things!” In these moments, he couldn’t tolerate the intensity of his partner’s suffering, so he psychologically distanced himself by highlighting his addiction rather than staying with her pain (and it’s essential for the unfaithful partner to remember that rage and anger are expressions of pain).
So someone can say, “Yes, I cheated. I take full responsibility,” while still organizing the infidelity recovery around self-protection. In their infidelity therapy, the wayward partner must work to develop the inner resources so they can tolerate hearing the impact of their actions without quickly jumping into explanations.
For instance:
Rather than: “I made some bad choices, OK?”, consider how it would feel for each of you if you said something like: “I looked you in the eyes and blatantly deceived you…that was abusive.”
Instead of only waiting until your partner initiates difficult conversations, can you become the one to begin them?
Can you tolerate your partner’s suffering without making them responsible for alleviating your shame?
Are you able to remain accountable six or twelve months later, when you’re feeling exhausted by talking about the betrayal?
This is radical accountability. Demonstrated, sustained accountability is essential.
2) Honesty and transparency
Safety and trust are shattered by infidelity trauma. Secrecy, lies and deception give infidelity the space to occur, sometimes for prolonged periods of time. What was hidden was traumatic for the betrayed partner; what was hidden threatened their safety; and what was hidden may ultimately end their marriage/relationship.
Honesty and transparency are the opposites of deception and secrecy. And they are required for safety to be reestablished. The relational playing field is now dramatically different than it once was. Asymmetry replaces mutuality. Complete transparency has replaced boundaries and personal space. What was once, “I’ll be doing my own thing” gives way to the betrayed partner having full access to the unfaithful partner’s devices, social media, whereabouts, etc. This level of transparency is required for the betrayed partner to feel less anxious in general and less fearful that deception is still occurring. The wayward partner’s words and guarantees are not enough at this point, and it may take considerable time for trust to be rebuilt and for their words to truly matter.
All too often a pattern occurs where the unfaithful partner is fully onboard with this arrangement (even if they don’t like it, they see why it’s necessary) but then over time they begin to bristle, some start to feel controlled, others may feel that after a certain passage of time they’ve proven their trustworthiness, while others start to push back because they feel it’s important to reclaim some level of “dignity.” This is where the importance of empathy comes in.
I often remind the unfaithful partner that their spouse/partner doesn’t enjoy this level of vigilance — in fact, they often hate it and hate themselves for “being so insecure.” Considering the extensive psychological and emotional damage that betrayal trauma causes, this level of sacrifice for the emotional well-being of the betrayed partner is often what is needed. The wayward partner must hold on to how shattered the betrayed partner is, and allowing this level of transparency helps to stitch together some of these torn pieces.
3) The role of remorse
Remorse is more than feeling badly about what you’ve done or repeatedly saying, “I’m sorry.” In an earlier article, I described the importance of developing an apologizing attitude — an ongoing mindset that allows the unfaithful partner to remain emotionally connected to the harm they have caused. This includes taking ownership of the betrayal without excuses or blame, developing a deeper understanding of how the betrayal has impacted your partner, and being willing to remain present with their pain even when doing so evokes difficult feelings in you. Remorse, in this sense, isn’t a single emotional experience or apology. It is something that needs to be carried forward throughout the recovery process.
This can become particularly challenging when shame, defensiveness or recovery fatigue start to take hold. The unfaithful partner may desperately want their partner to feel better, but that wish can slowly turn into pressure for them to be better — to ask fewer questions, show less anger or finally begin trusting again.
Genuine remorse focuses on something different. It requires a willingness to meet the betrayed partner where they are rather than where you want them to be. When remorse is rooted in empathy rather than the need to escape one’s own shame or discomfort, it allows the unfaithful partner to keep witnessing the injury they caused without making their partner responsible for relieving them of that burden. Part of the therapy work is to cultivate an apologizing attitude while exploring the hurdles that get in the way of this.
4) Developing empathy
Empathy is another capacity that can be strengthened throughout infidelity counseling. We sometimes think of empathy as something you either have or you don’t, but research suggests that empathic abilities can be developed through learning, practice and feedback. In one meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled studies, Teding van Berkhout and Malouff (2016) found that empathy training produced meaningful improvements in participants’ ability to understand and respond to the emotional experiences of others. While this research was not specifically conducted with couples recovering from infidelity, the larger point is an important one for infidelity recovery: struggling to respond empathically to the betrayed partner does not necessarily mean you are incapable of empathy. It may mean that empathy is a capacity that needs to be deliberately worked on, especially when your partner’s pain evokes shame, defensiveness or the wish to escape from what you have done.
For the unfaithful partner, developing empathy means learning to step outside of your own struggles long enough to become genuinely curious about what is going on for your partner. Exercising curiosity starts with self-reflective questions; for example:
What was it like for my partner to discover that so much of what they believed was happening wasn’t true?
What happens inside of them when I leave for work now or during other separations?
What has my deception done to my partner’s ability to trust me and trust their own perceptions?
Why might it be so difficult for my spouse/partner to let go of their anger (or any other intense emotion they might be struggling with)?
In infidelity therapy, I often have the unfaithful partner reflect on such questions through journaling. This helps to strengthen the muscle of empathy.
Researchers use the term empathic accuracy to describe our ability to accurately attune to and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings. Not surprisingly, greater empathic accuracy helps us respond to another’s emotions more effectively.
There is another piece of the empathy research particularly relevant to infidelity recovery: your partner needs to experience you as trying to understand them. Research with couples has found that one’s perception of the other person’s empathic effort contributes to relationship satisfaction apart from empathic accuracy itself. You may understand perfectly well why your partner is devastated, but if shame causes you to withdraw, defensiveness leads you to explain yourself, or frustration communicates that they should be further along in their healing, very little of that understanding gets expressed.
Developing empathy therefore involves repeatedly practicing the ability to stay emotionally present with your partner’s pain, to ask (rather than assume) what they are experiencing, and to allow yourself to be corrected when you get it wrong. Demonstrative efforts can make an important difference. I often hear the betrayed partner report that they feel less alone with their suffering when it’s obvious the wayward partner is making efforts to reach them. These moments become part of the slow transition from being experienced primarily as the person who caused the wounds to becoming someone who can help with healing.
The therapeutic question I often explore with clients is what interferes with empathy when empathy is most needed? Often the answer is shame, defensiveness, fear of condemnation, helplessness, exhaustion or difficulty tolerating another person’s distress. These are central issues commonly worked on in infidelity therapy.
5) Working with shame and moral injury
Most of the unfaithful men and women who come to me for infidelity counseling aren’t simply distressed because they’ve gotten caught. Frequently, they are reeling from the devastation they’ve caused their loved ones, while also overwhelmed by the realization that they have betrayed themselves. They can no longer hide behind curtains of self-deception, compartmentalization and justification. They now have a front row seat to the consequences of their actions.
This is where shame and moral injury enter the therapy picture. Moral injury can occur when we act in ways that violate our own deeply held beliefs and values, when our behavior comes into direct conflict with our sense of who we believe ourselves to be. The psychological collision between the person I believed myself to be and the person I now know I am capable of being can be profoundly disorienting.
This inner conflict can quickly sweep one into the depths of shame, where all they think about themselves is some version of “there is something fundamentally wrong with me.” In the face of overwhelming shame, the unfaithful partner may withdraw, become defensive or angry, minimize what occurred, collapse into self-condemnation, or desperately seek reassurance that they aren’t “a terrible person.” Part of the work of infidelity counseling is to help the unfaithful partner regulate their intense feelings and explore the dynamics that led to their moral injury — this important task centers around the question of how and why the infidelity occurred.
II) Understanding how and why the betrayal occurred
Infidelity recovery would not be complete if the unfaithful partner didn’t explore the dynamics that led to the betrayal. When working to find possible reasons that lead to infidelity, we are exploring particular vulnerabilities that may have been at play rather then seeking the answer to why someone cheats (or acts out in secrecy in some way). One should not quickly settle on “this is the reason I cheated” in an attempt to bring about closure to the difficult and uncomfortable self-examination required in this type of therapy work. Premature attempts at closure are also offered up to give the betrayed partner something more tangible to hold onto, with the hope that it will quiet their pain. The wayward partner must be acutely aware of their reasons for settling on a particular explanation for what drove their clandestine behaviors.
Infidelity counseling should examine family-of-origin dynamics, including parental and intergenerational infidelity, attachment trauma and abuse, the role of secrecy and shame within the family, unresolved intergenerational trauma, and patterns of emotional avoidance and poor communication, to name a few. The goal isn’t to search the past for something that excuses the betrayal. Rather, understanding these early experiences can help clarify how certain ways of relating to oneself and others developed long before the infidelity occurred.
It’s also important to explore the ways in which the unfaithful partner learned early on to protect themselves psychologically and emotionally. In abusive, neglectful or chaotic families, hiding one’s true feelings, keeping secrets, emotionally shutting down or becoming highly self-reliant or avoidant of closeness may have once served an important protective function. When painful realities cannot safely be spoken about or even fully acknowledged, children may learn to keep different parts of their emotional lives sequestered. Over time, this can contribute to patterns of self-estrangement and compartmentalization, a capacity to disconnect from certain feelings, needs or realities in order to keep functioning. It’s important to note that these are not conscious choices, but rather survival strategies that became deeply ingrained and automated.
These early adaptations do not cause someone to be unfaithful, nor do they diminish personal responsibility for their choices. But they can help us understand how an adult might become skilled at fleeing from themselves and their loved ones by moving between different emotional worlds without allowing those worlds to fully meet. Unfortunately, without the resolution of these earlier traumatic experiences and an understanding of how the psychological defenses created to cope with these experiences have shaped one’s relationship to self and others, the long arm of childhood abuse will continue to negatively shape one’s choices and life.
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Let’s return where we started, with Stefan.
For Stefan, therapy eventually brought him back to an abuse history that had been kept secret throughout much of his life. He had learned early on to carry painful experiences alone, minimizing his own struggles while outwardly going about his life as if everything was okay. This split-screen of two very different realities is common for many childhood trauma survivors; a deep loneliness and self-estrangement while they present to the world a put-together image. They often respond to genuine inquiries about how they’re doing by people close to them with, “I’m good”; “Fine”; “I’m okay.” This isn’t necessarily deception, it’s self-estrangement deeply rooted in childhood and adolescence coping.
As we explored Stefan’s infidelity and hidden pornography use, we began to understand some of his behavior as a self-destructive reenactment of an earlier pattern of abuse: once again, something powerful and emotionally charged was occurring in secret, cut off from the people closest to him and from parts of himself. This understanding didn’t explain away his choices, but it helped us begin to make sense of why secrecy had become such a powerful and alluring way of organizing parts of his internal world.
As a child, he had been trapped within the secrecy surrounding his abuse, he carried experiences that were painful, shame-filled and largely disconnected from the rest of his life. Decades later, he had created another secret world, only now he was the one constructing and maintaining the secrecy — he went from a passive victim to the one in control of orchestrating what happens in secrecy, albeit with devastating consequences for himself and the people he loved. It was a reenactment of an old way of living with experiences that felt too difficult to bring into the light. To begin to untangle the underlying dynamics that pulled him to the underworld, Stefan needed to look at the pain and rage buried within him, emotions that would have overwhelmed him as a child, feelings that would have made the abuse worse if he had expressed them then.
Compartmentalization and self-estrangement were central to how Stefan was able to manage what had happened to him growing up. They helped him survive. But in his adult life they also helped maintain a harmful, fragmented existence. What was once an ally for his survival became a self-destructive force. He could love his wife and value his family while entering another psychological world where the potential consequences of what he was doing receded from view. Compartmentalization allowed these conflicting realities to remain separated; self-estrangement left him disconnected from the feelings, needs and unresolved wounds that were helping to drive his behavior.
An important part of Stefan’s infidelity therapy involved bringing these divided parts of his experience into greater contact, not only so he could understand why he had built a secretive life, but so that he could become less divided from himself and less reliant on hiding to manage what he had never learned to face directly.
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Not all survivors of childhood abuse betray their partners, and not all infidelity is rooted in an abuse history. But in the treatment of the unfaithful partner, exploring attachment patterns and well-worn ways of regulating emotions and protecting oneself can often shed light on underlying issues that have made it difficult to bring one’s fuller self into an intimate relationship.
The infidelity recovery process is challenging for many different reasons. Above we examined what I’ve called the core competencies the unfaithful partner must work to develop: accountability, honesty/transparency, remorse, empathy, the rebuilding of trust, tolerance for shame and becoming more psychologically aware of the patterns that drove them into secrecy. The work ultimately moves in two directions at once: becoming a healing agent for the person you betrayed when also becoming less divided and hidden from yourself. For someone like Stefan, who began therapy baffled by how he could deeply love his wife while also betraying her, the goal isn’t to arrive at one simple explanation for what happened. It is to understand himself more fully, to take responsibility for what he discovers, and to use that understanding to become a safer and more emotionally present partner.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with three decades of experience working with individuals and couples. His work is informed by psychodynamic and attachment theory, trauma theory, and parts-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Dr. Nicastro is licensed in Connecticut and Texas and provides teletherapy to clients in participating PSYPACT states.
Interested in working with Dr. Nicastro?
To inquire about therapy or schedule an initial consultation, email Rich@RichardNicastro.com
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Article References
Cohen, S., Schulz, M. S., Weiss, E., & Waldinger, R. J. (2012). Eye of the beholder: The individual and dyadic contributions of empathic accuracy and perceived empathic effort to relationship satisfaction. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(2), 236–245.
Gottman, J. M., & Gottman, J. S. (2015). 10 principles for doing effective couples therapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Teding van Berkhout, E., & Malouff, J. M. (2016). The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 32–41.
