Tammy Nelson, Ph.D

When you discover that your partner cheated on you, it feels like your world is ending. You feel anger and deep betrayal and question their love for you. You rewrite the whole history of your relationship. Everything the two of you built together comes into question. Because of the affair, you wonder who they really are and if they were ever honest with you. It will trigger your worst coping mechanisms, and you might find yourself overtly controlling, jealous, irritated, angry, or shut down, withdrawn, and self loathing. Our initial anger is a natural response. Our anger part is trying to protect us from the deep hurt and insecurity we are feeling underneath. We shame and blame our partner for what he did to us, and soon enter into very unhealthy and negative dynamics with ourselves and our partner.Â
If you open up to family and friends about the affair, you’ll hear lots of advice, some sympathy, and if you’re lucky, words of love. It can be hard to know who to listen to; you question yourself and your own judgement. You doubt your intuition, forget how to trust yourself, and may even devalue your worth as a person. You often feel very alone in this and desperately want to be acknowledged and understood.Â

During the process of recovering from an affair, most people feel alone. Both the cheating partner and the partner who has been betrayed. Much of our identity and how we grow to know who we are in our community and with our friends comes from our relationships with others. We pick a partner because we have a vision of the life we want to create with this person. We build a world with our life partners. We build an identity around and within this life. Our families, our friendships, and our social interactions define who we are and our relationship – and with betrayal, we can lose all sense of where we fit in the world.
But this shift in our identity is not always tragic. Sometimes it is a wake-up call from our higher selves. A call to grow into the person we want to be. Whether we stepped out of our monogamy agreement or we were the one betrayed by a cheating partner, our world has changed, and the shakeup has a fallout. This fallout is at first a crisis that feels untenable. Over time, and with good therapy, this turning point in our lives can give us new clarity into who we are as a person and where we want to make changes.
For over 30 years I have been working with people who have had affairs and been cheated on. People survive it, move through it, and with the right support, can even thrive from the experience! The latter has been my personal experience with betrayal in my own relationships. Our capacity to pivot is our greatest resilience.

As someone who has been cheated on, but also someone who cheated, I know the pain of both. In therapy today with my clients, I can relate to the absolute devastation that comes from such dramatic change, and I also know the freedom and clarity that comes afterward, the relief of honesty, real and true disclosure, and the transparency that is possible in a life lived with integrity and passion.
Couples who have worked through infidelity and tried to recover can have a difficult time moving forward. They can get stuck in the betrayal trauma of an affair. Betrayal trauma is when feelings and the story of the wound leave ongoing symptoms of trauma in one or both partners. These symptoms can include intrusive thoughts, bad dreams, somatic rigidity, pleasure denial, rejection of intimacy, guardedness, isolation for protection, and other fight, flight, freeze and fawn or faint behaviours.Â
How to Recover and Stay Together in 3 Stages: Crisis, Integration and Vision
The unique dynamics of a post infidelity relationship may show symptoms that persist unless and until the couple can work through the three stages of recovery – the crisis, the integration and the vision stages. Until then, the trauma tends to keep the relationship stuck in its betrayal narrative, leaving the couple bound in their struggle to find trust and to move on to a better future.

In the crisis phase, or the acute phase, the discovery or disclosure of an affair means that sudden or acute emotions can flare up and activate feelings that may persist into extended or enduring emotions, or can give us information about past traumas and partner selection. We can focus in this phase on settling each partner’s nervous system and taking a systemic approach to assessment and evaluating risk to the family and to the couple.
The integration phase of treatment is the deepest phase of therapy, where the narrative of infidelity is explored and understood. With each new insight there can be a shift and new wiring happens as the story shifts from what happened to why it happened. The goal is not forgiveness here, but rather empathy.

Affairs are pathologized and we tend to, even in therapeutic research, look toward the treatment of the ‘victim’ instead of looking at who the person becomes when they are with the other. Yet much can be learned if we instead see the addition of the ‘third’ in a relationship as a tool for expansion and learning. Most people don’t look for someone else, they look to be someone else. We become a different part of ourselves when we are with someone else, and this person becomes a mirror of a part of ourselves that can teach us much about who we are.
Therapy can help increase this insight and integrate this information into the primary identity and the primary relationship. This can be a step in the integration stage of healing that can move the relationship(s) forward instead of getting stuck in the victim/perpetrator/rescuer triangulation.
In the third phase of recovery, the vision phase, the couple has decided they will stay together and honour their new relationship agreement. In this phase of recovery the creation of a new vision of their relationship includes openly communicating about what their future should include at this phase of their lives. This work includes creating a new monogamy agreement.

If the couple is going to stay together, they are going to have a new monogamy, a new relationship, together. They can’t ever go back to the way it was. They have to create a new paradigm for monogamy, making everything they long for a ‘talk about-able’ thing. Making an explicit monogamy agreement is like renewing vows only without following a standard predetermined text.Â
We are changing as a culture, in our attitudes around monogamy, commitment, attachment and trauma. Monogamy is no longer defined by morality but by transparency. Honesty is the new generation of couples’ way of staying true to their promises around relationships, and they seem more able to ride the changes that happen developmentally as they grow and as their relationship grows.

An affair can be a catalyst for change. It can warn couples that their current relationship is unstable and it can create the chaos that is necessary for shifts in awareness. But ultimately, recovering from infidelity, and choosing to stay together, means the couple needs to look at new ways of maintaining connection.
Disclaimer: This article is adapted from Betrayal Trauma: Helping Couples Rebuild Connection, Tammy Nelson, 3 November, 2022.
Tammy Nelson, Ph.D., is an internationally acclaimed psychotherapist, Board Certified Sexologist, Certified Sex Therapist, and Certified Imago Relationship Therapist. She has been a therapist for almost 30 years and is the executive director of the Integrative Sex Therapy Institute.
Dr. Tammy can be followed on her blog, www.drtammynelson.com/blog.