Couples Therapy Rebuilds the Marriage After Your Affair — Here's the Part Still Worth Working Through for Yourself

You're in couples therapy with the hope and goal of rebuilding your relationship after you've had an affair. You and your partner are committed to the process and understand that no matter the outcome, you both have given your best effort to reconcile.

Couples therapy is integral to healing your relationship from infidelity. Couples therapy sessions entail having difficult and painful conversations with a trained professional who can guide and support you to eventually progress to a new chapter in your relationship. The work in couples therapy is real, raw, and invaluable for reconciliation.

But somewhere in that process, you may have noticed you need more than the focus on rebuilding your relationship together. You have your individual history, with anxieties and painful experiences that intersect with your relationship, but they are about you, and you may be questioning whether couples therapy alone is enough for YOU to heal. Not just the aspects that relate to your relationship.

Couples Therapy is a Piece of the Puzzle

Couples therapy is oriented toward the relationship — the dynamics within the relationship, the recurring negative patterns impeding the health of the relationship, figuring out the path back to trust. Couples therapy is a vital piece to restoring damage to a relationship, and as its own specialty, couples therapists are specifically trained and skilled to provide this service.

But the affair didn't only come from what was happening between you and your partner. It also came from something in you — from parts of you formed long before this relationship existed, in your own history, within your own family, and your own early relationships. There are exceptions, but couples work doesn't usually go this deep with each client individually. That doesn't mean anything is missing from your couples therapy — looking at each person within the couple is simply examining the relationship from a different vantage point.

This would be from the perspective of individual therapy.

Individual Therapy as an Adjunct to Couples Therapy

When we work together alongside your couples therapy, we look in depth at you. Individual therapy after an affair is a place where you can examine yourself, as an individual within, and independent of, the relationship. With respect to your relationship and affair, we look at how these, and other, factors led to your situation: not just on what you understand intellectually, but physically and emotionally.

Your space is one where feelings of shame and connected experiences can be expressed, as well as those feelings, thoughts and concerns you're not yet ready to speak about in couples therapy. We look to process those experiences and the resulting messages that became the negative beliefs you see yourself and the world through.

Using neuroexperiential approaches like Brainspotting and parts work, we look at how your brain and body have held the emotional weight of your history — what's actually held in the subcortical part of the brain and systemically. It is through this approach that those layers of negative beliefs masquerading as facts about who you are can peel away, revealing who you truly are. Where the roots of your feelings and experience about the affair are processed with self-compassion instead of running in the background of your life punishing you indefinitely.

Through this work you can bring clarity, perspective, awareness and self-love to your couples sessions. You can become clearer on how your history may have contributed to your vulnerability to having had an affair, as well as the dynamics that are playing out within your relationship. This can work in tandem with rebuilding your relationship.

This Work Is Yours

Couples therapy and individual therapy are complementary, and each are valuable in helping you reach your individual and relationship goals. The importance of individual therapy alongside couples therapy, particularly when you've had an affair, is that it is the piece of the process that is about you.

If this is describing where you are right now, you don't have to make sense of it alone, or solely rely on couples therapy to work through your infidelity. I offer this individual piece of the work, alongside whatever couples therapy you're already doing. I offer online therapy in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.