{"id":677,"date":"2017-09-07T13:44:53","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T20:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.PsychologyLounge.com\/?p=677"},"modified":"2017-09-07T14:20:47","modified_gmt":"2017-09-07T21:20:47","slug":"6-types-marital-affairs-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.PsychologyLounge.com\/6-types-marital-affairs-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Types of Marital Affairs and How to Heal From Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
Affairs in marriage and relationships are very common. Data suggests<\/a> that between 30% to 60% of married individuals will engage in infidelity at some point during their marriage. Other studies suggest that roughly 3 to 4% of currently married people have a sex partner on the side in any given year, and that about 15% to 18% of married couples have had an affair. So we can conclude that somewhere between two in 10 and six in 10 married people will have an affair at some point. It\u2019s hard to get accurate data since obviously people have shame and embarrassment about having affairs and may not always give accurate data even to anonymous researchers. My sense is that if you include emotional infidelity, meaning flirting and getting close to another person of the other sex, at least half of all married people have had an affair.<\/p>\n I frequently see couples in my practice where an affair has recently been disclosed or discovered. This creates a crisis in most marriages. Affairs obviously create enormous amounts of emotional pain. There is the actual affair and its impact on the marriage, but there is also the betrayal of trust, which may have even a more lasting impact.<\/p>\n Before I can help a couple who is dealing with a recently discovered affair, it\u2019s important to understand what type of affair has occurred. The different types of affairs have different implications for the future of the couple\u2019s marriage, as well as for treatment. Let me discuss each. These six affair types are listed in order of prognosis, from worst to best.<\/p>\n Treatment of affairs<\/strong><\/p>\n Before one can offer treatment to a couple in which there has been an affair it\u2019s important to diagnose what type of affair you are dealing with. In terms of prognosis, the most positive prognosis is with marriage stabilizing affairs or with friendship affairs. In both of these cases if the therapist can help the couple to either to improve their sex life or become better friends, there is a good likelihood that their marriage can endure and even become better.<\/p>\n The worst prognosis is with affairs designed to break up a marriage and with sociopathic affairs. In the first case, the person has already made up their mind to leave the marriage and the only thing a therapist can do is to help the couple gracefully negotiate their mutual exits. A common therapist mistake is to assume that there is actually desire to fix and rebuild the marriage. In sociopathic affairs you are dealing with an underlying personality disorder, and as such, it is virtually impossible to resolve. The only possible resolution is for the betrayed partner to come to sort some sort of peace with their partner\u2019s sexual behavior. Sometimes establishing ground rules like only in faraway towns can help. But the prognosis is not good.<\/p>\n In impulse control affairs particularly those associated with substance abuse, treating the underlying substance abuse is the best way to lower the probability of future affairs. But the treatment of substance abuse has its own difficulties, and relapse is common.<\/p>\n What about true love types of affairs? These can go either way. Sometimes the best approach is not couples therapy, but rather to counsel the betrayed partner alone. This counseling usually has the goal of having them encourage their spouse to fully pursue the other relationship and to move in with the affair partner. Often these true love affairs only can maintain themselves in a rarefied and separate universe where there are no responsibilities and no stresses. By encouraging the spouse to create a real-life relationship with their affair partner which includes school pickups, sharing expenses, cleaning the bathrooms, it sometimes takes most of the magic away. Then the spouse may seek to return and couples therapy can then begin to address what the issues were that led to the spouse straying in the first place.<\/p>\n A key perspective on treating affairs is how do you address the betrayal of trust? Trust is asymmetrical. All it takes is one betrayal to completely destroy trust, but rebuilding trust requires many pieces of evidence of non-betrayal and non-lying.<\/p>\n What I often suggest in order to rebuild trust is that the affair perpetrator adopts a position of radical transparency with all aspects of their life. This means turning over passwords for email accounts, phones, iPads, and all other electronic devices. It means allowing your partner to access your airline online accounts so that they can track your travel, and it even means installing GPS tracking software on your phone so that your spouse knows where you are at all times. The idea of this radical transparency is to gradually rebuild trust by displaying that you have nothing to hide, and that you are doing nothing that would trigger distrust in your partner.<\/p>\n Many people resist this radical transparency idea, often saying that their partner should just trust them. But why should they trust when that trust has been betrayed? Without this intervention, it takes a very long time before trust is rebuilt, and I often wonder if those who resist it want to maintain their ability to hide things from their spouse.<\/p>\n It is important to establish ground rules for the other partner. If they use the data to relentlessly question even the most innocuous events, then this will generate more friction and more conflict in the couple.<\/p>\n Beyond the rebuilding of trust, the treatment of affairs primarily focuses on improving the underlying quality of the relationship. Most affairs occur because people feel disconnected emotionally from their partner\u2019s, and they can\u2019t talk about it. Sometimes affairs occur because couples are sexually disconnected as well.<\/p>\n So couples therapy for affairs often looks a lot like couples therapy in general. Teach the couple to communicate emotionally. Teach them how to be more nurturing and loving towards each other. Work on teaching them communication skills to resolve conflicts. Help them to discuss and improve their sex life. I have written about this topic here <\/a>and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Affairs have meaning and have impact. My very first family therapy trainer, Sheldon Starr, said, \u201cAn affair is like tossing a hand grenade into the middle of the marriage. It always creates change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.\u201d<\/p>\n In counseling couples where there has been an affair my goal is to help them to survive and even grow through this painful experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Affairs in marriage and relationships are very common. Data suggests that between 30% to 60% of married individuals will engage in infidelity at some point during their marriage. Other studies suggest that roughly 3 to 4% of currently married people … Continue reading \n