The Affair Wasn't About the Affair Partner. Here's What It Was Actually About.
Your affair may have felt like it happened unexpectedly. I mean, you weren't actually looking for an affair when it happened. Now that it's ended, you're trying to sort out what you're feeling and why it happened in the first place.
It's tempting to explain what happened by pointing to the person — what they offered, how they made you feel. But staying there keeps you from the more important question: what already existed in you, long before this person entered the picture, that made you vulnerable to exactly that kind of connection?
When I work with women who've had affairs and want to understand why, get to the other side of the aftermath, or work through feelings of guilt or longing, the process involves examining not just the primary relationship and the relationship with the affair partner, but also your most significant childhood relationships — typically with each parent, their relationship with each other, and your relationship with and amongst siblings or other family members with an influential presence in your life.
Traditional talk therapy can help explore and put some of the pieces together. But we also look at your life's experiences using neuroexperiential approaches such as Brainspotting and parts work that allow us to understand how your brain and body have accrued the emotional effects of your history and translated that information to how you view yourself and how you experience your world.
This means you begin to see the effects of the events and relationships from your early life on your perspectives and choices in adulthood — in friendships, in intimate partnerships, in how you navigate dynamics with co-workers or superiors. And how those effects both protected you when you were younger, but no longer serve you now. What we usually find is that it makes sense, within the full scope of your history, that you would behave in certain ways, or have difficulty with intimate partners, or not speak up for yourself — or yes, even have an affair.
And when those parts of you that still hold pain — and work overtime to protect you from past threats that no longer apply to your life as an adult — are ready to recognize and accept you as the adult you are now, your perspective starts to shift. Sometimes it feels obvious, sometimes subtle, and many times you don't realize the Brainspotting and parts work helped get you there. What happens is that the negative self-judgments that once felt like facts start to no longer feel valid. The "self-sabotaging" patterns that kept you from the life you want start to dismantle to where you feel able to change the trajectory rather than their running on autopilot. The complexities of the feelings connected to the affair — self-judgment, shame, longing and guilt — are held and worked through with self-compassion. You begin to value yourself, set limits, and show up in your relationships and life from a place that is more authentically yours rather than from what your history has layered over the core of who you are.
This work doesn't happen overnight. But it is deep and meaningful change. And it is the difference between managing and genuinely understanding the breadth of the situation in a way that supports your next steps.
We do not look at your affair as a character flaw or that you're a "bad person" for having had an affair. We look to understand and bring healing to your unmet needs, childhood pain, shame, preverbal confusion, and intergenerational trauma that contributed to your having an affair. Looking at the complete picture of your lived experience — logistically, emotionally, psychologically, physically, and neuropsychologically — makes it possible to foster meaningful growth beyond managing what the affair left behind.
If any of this is describing your experience, you don't have to make sense of it alone. I work with women navigating exactly this — the complicated, multilayered aftermath of infidelity, and what was underneath it. I offer online therapy in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. If you're wondering whether working together might be the right fit, reach out for a complimentary consultation.
