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Our infidelity therapists at AZRI can help individuals or couples with the emotional and communicational needs after cheating and infidelity.
It is painful for both partners in very different ways and is, therefore, extremely difficult for partners to navigate and heal from without professional help. At AZRI we offer emotionally focused infidelity counseling to help couples recover from infidelity. The reality is that most couples stay together after infidelity, but most couples do not get help and their relationship remains damaged from the hurt of the affairs.
Partners who have been unfaithful, but still love the partner they betrayed, can be filled with tremendous shame for hurting the person they love the most. They struggle with seeing how their partner could ever forgive them, trust them, or love them again.
Unfortunately, their wrestle with shame often causes them to become defensive and withdraw from their partner when their partner needs their reassurance the most.
EFT helps both partners heal by helping the partner who has been unfaithful become an active agent of healing their partner’s pain. The source of the injury becomes the solution to healing the injury.
The process to recovery after an affair can be a lengthy process. At the Arizona Relationship Institute our intimacy counselors understand how difficult working through an affair can be on both partners. Using emotionally focused therapy we will work with each partner to open the doors of communication, honesty, and personal responsibility.
After learning of an affair, the partner that has been betrayed may feel shocked and be dealing with a significant amount of emotional trauma. They may feel a roller coaster of emotions ranging from anger, confusion, vengeance, and loss and grief. During this phase both partners may struggle with clarity and be suffering from physical effects of the affair like loss of appetite, chest pains, and loss of weight.
During this phase we begin to examine the issues that led to the affair. It is important that both partners begin to understand why the affair happened.
During this phase we work with you to begin rebuilding and repairing your relationship by working on the issues that led to the affair. There will be emotional highs and lows during this process. However, couples that persevere will build a new relationship where each partner’s attachment needs are met and real healing can take place.
From an attachment perspective every behavior and emotional response is understood as an attempt to get attachment needs for love and security met. Even when partners’ actions are destructive to their relationships and don’t seem to correspond with a desire to connect, looking for the attachment intention underlying the destructive behavior provides a clearer picture as to the ontological etiology of those actions.
When we understand the irrational and detrimental behavioral and emotional responses as an activation of the amygdala and limbic system to protect against pain and isolation, that which makes no sense at all actually does make sense. The tragedy is that operating on fear, shame, hurt and sadness with a desperation to avoid the pain of isolation, often leads to greater suffering than that which was initially feared.
It is from this perspective that we invite couples and therapists to examine the attachment intentions underlying affairs. Doing so provides an opportunity to identify the processes that culminated in reaching outside the primary relationship to meet attachment needs.
1.) Re-engage a partner
2.) Protect the existing connection with the partner
3.) Protect against feared potential abandonment
4.) Defend against the pain of potential rejection and negative view of self
5.) Exit from pain being experienced as a result of perceived abandonment or rejection from the partner
6.) Numb painful primary emotions unrelated to the primary relationship partner
7.) Emotionally or physically exit the relationship after losing all hope of creating the desired connection with the primary partner, and
8.) Prevent becoming dependent or vulnerable with the primary partner
1.) The Angry Protest Affair
2.) The Come and Get Me Affair
3.) The Burned Out Affair
4.) The Hedge Fund Affair
5.) The Fantasy Escape Affair
6.) The Power Player Affair
These types of affairs differ in terms of the attachment strategies and the partners’ patterns of interaction prior to the affair. Understanding these differences can help the couple and the therapist to have a more accurate map of where the couple has been, but also of where they want to go and how they can effectively get there.
We intentionally did not create a type of affair to address whether or not the affair was emotional, sexual or both. Nor did we create a type of affair that addresses sexual compulsivity, trauma or domestic violence. The reality is that the degree of emotionality, sexuality, sexual compulsivity or abuse are all dimensions of each type of affair, rather than being types in and of themselves. It is important to assess for and address these dimensions. We recommend assessing and treating these dimensions within the framework of understanding the attachment intention and the corresponding behavioral and emotional responses of the particular type of affair.
In our work with our clients, we have found that this framework provides a more effective way of identifying and treating the multi-dimensional aspects of partners individual and relational patterns of emotional processing and action tendencies. It provides a more detailed map with an understanding of how all the parts of the puzzle interact and have culminated into the couples’ present day relationship patterns. It provides a map of where each partner has been, where they have been together, where they are now and how to help them get where they would like to go from here.
The constructs of these different types of affairs can assist couples and their therapists with developing a cohesive narrative about how the unfaithful partner became vulnerable to and eventually succumbed to having an affair. Both partners need to have a shared understanding of this in order for the betrayed partner to take the risk of developing trust in the unfaithful partner.
Without understanding how the affair happened, it is difficult for the betrayed partner to develop trust in the unfaithful partner’s ability to promise that it will never happen again. It can also be difficult for the unfaithful partner to feel confident promising that it won’t happen again if the unfaithful partner doesn’t understand how or why the affair happened. Without understanding the hows and whys of the affair, partners are likely to adopt the most common narratives our culture offers about how and why people cheat. These popular narratives are likely to perpetuate the partners’ distorted views of themselves, one another, and relationships that contributed to their relationship being vulnerable to infidelity.
Some relationships can not survive an affair. Other couples are able to repair their relationships with couples counseling for infidelity or on their own. When one partner cheats on the other, it may leave the partner that has been cheated on feeling confused, betrayed, emotionally crushed, and alone.
Sunday – CLOSED
Monday – 9:00AM – 8:00PM
Tuesday – 9:00AM – 8:00PM
Wednesday – 10:00AM – 8:00PM
Thursday – 9:00AM – 8:00PM
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Saturday – 8:00AM – 5:00PM
