Nothing rocks a relationship more than one person steps outside of the relationship either through a sexual or emotional affair.  Relationships can and do recover from Infidelity. The process to repair the relationship and recover from infidelity is not easy but if both people are committed it is possible to not only recover but actually make your marriage stronger and better in the process.

Decisions to Make: Repair and Improve Relationship or End Relationship

A couple must decide whether or not they want to engage help with a professionally trained counsellor. Couples can attempt to repair and improve their relationship on their own. The benefit of seeking outside help is that a professionally trained counsellor specialized skills and training in human development, relationships, brain functioning along with various effective counselling theories to help couples identify what went wrong and more importantly how to repair and strengthen it.

Counselling can be done for the individual or for the couple.

How Counselling can Assist recovering from Affair

There are many challenges to successfully overcoming infidelity. Infidelity is sign that something in the relationship between the two people was not working and created a void for one person to step outside the relationship. Couples may benefit from the help of a professionally trained counsellor to navigate some of the immediate short term and long term difficult decisions. This can be done as a couple or individual.

• Deciding if the marriage is worth saving, especially if children are involved. This can be a difficult decision when people are emotionally and spiritually vulnerable, but the ability to have professional help to sort out these issues can shorten the time and ensure a better outcome whatever decision is decided for the relationship. 
• Counselling can help a couple decide whether or not to allow punishment into the relationship aimed at the person who committed the break in fidelity to the relationship. Some couples or individuals have a belief in punishing someone who has done wrong and often the person who was unfaithful agrees to be punished- for a period, usually a period that neither person agrees to upfront. Other couples don’t have this belief in punishment but the hurt party is overwhelmed by anger, fear and hurt and lashes out as a result of these thoughts and feelings. Working through this can be deciding factor as to whether or not the relationship can survive.
• Working through the grief and loss of what an individual or couple thought they had about their relationship and other beliefs.
• After infidelity is discovered, trust is lost and often the couple struggle with how to trust one another. A professional counsellor can help couples develop more effective ways to bring trust back into the relationship. Often couples struggle with boundaries around travel, email, phone and other issues of privacy and communication.
• Another decision the couple must decide is whether or not they can let go of the past and work towards forgiveness so that trust can built. A therapy can help a couple work through this issues as it is an important choice because without it the relationship will flounder to recover.
• Developing more effective communications and conflict resolution skills to ensure that couples can repair what wasn't working before the infidelity and make sure they have a future that is strong in communication.

 Our effective relationship counsellor will help you repair and improve your relationship. She will partner with you to help you learn more effective relationship skills, improve communication, friendship and sexual intimacy. Call us to learn more how counselling can help you deal with this either individually or as a couple.

Read our Article: Surviving an Affair