Affair Recovery

Today, we at AffairRecovery.com are excited to share with you an interview with the esteemed Dr. Robert Weiss PhD, LCSW. Dr. Weiss is the Chief Clinical Officer of Seeking Integrity LLC, offering clinical programs that provide online education and residential treatment for sex, porn, and substance/sex-addicted men and their families. A psychotherapist and addiction specialist, he has created six intimacy and addiction treatment programs in the US, Southeast Asia and for the US military. Dr. Weiss is...

Have you ever reached a point in your own recovery, or in your relationship, where you thought to yourself: is this really as good as it's going to get? Maybe you've found yourself reasonably happy, but just not fulfilled with the repair work you've done? Like many, you may have also felt like you or your relationship were making great strides, showing ongoing momentum and promise, and now you feel stuck...

If you have been impacted by infidelity, whether it happened recently or even years ago, your emotions can be all over the place. When you decide to commit to heal yourself, no matter what your spouse decides to do, there are some things you'll need to change in order to get to a healthier place mentally. Some betrayed partners feel the overwhelming need to control everything about the unfaithful, including their schedules, email or social media activity...

For that matter, what is "healed" anyway? What does it mean? What does it actually look like? I will explore this further in a future blog, as this question has perplexed and frustrated me since I learned of my husband's infidelity. More to come on that.

In the meantime, the process of healing is hard to measure. You can't take out a yardstick or step on the scale to track the progress. It's subtle and murky. Healing is slow and...

Preface: In Hope for Healing lesson 5, as a participant, I was asked to examine the difference between a prideful spirit and a broken spirit. At first, I thought maybe I had come up with the "wrong" answer because the other women in my group saw brokenness as a bad thing and a place to be ashamed of. I see brokenness as a catalyst for total transformation. Looking back on my journey through failure, disaster, and gut-wrenching pain, I came up with this definition of brokenness....

When you decide to face your addiction and commit to recovery, it is vital that you surround yourself with others who are in a similar position. As Mickey likes to say, "there are no lone rangers in recovery." Even if this is foreign or uncomfortable for you, being humble and asking for support from other people on the same path is going to help you stay accountable and healthy in your relationships...

Previously, Samuel interviewed Michael Webb to discuss a scenario between an unfaithful male and a betrayed female, and how developmental trauma affects both inner and outward conversations with our spouse. Today, Samuel follows up with Michael with the roles reversed: an unfaithful female with a betrayed male partner. Without an understanding of our wounded inner selves, we end up transmitting our pain, instead of transforming...

For couples who are attempting to heal after an affair, it's a common struggle that one partner feels the need to manage the other's recovery or repair work. Maybe this sounds familiar: "Are you reading? Did you go to therapy? Did you see that article I sent you? Did you talk to your accountability partner today? Did you watch that new video?" While a normal temptation, the result is typically immense frustration...

Rejection is an awful thing to deal with, whether it be from adolescence, high school, or years later from our significant other or spouse. Enter infidelity or addiction, and the rejection monster seemingly sprouts seven other heads. If we are going to move beyond the initial devastation of infidelity, it’s vital that we understand our need for a game plan to process through the painful litany of emotions and...

You may be familiar with the life analogy of the contrast between the way cows and buffaloes face an impending storm. As a storm approaches, cows sense it coming and move in the opposite direction, away from the storm. Unfortunately for the cows, they aren't very fast and as a result of this decision, they actually remain in the storm longer as they run alongside it, prolonging the unpleasantness.

It seems like it would be a no-brainer, that after disclosure, the unfaithful spouse would display significant empathy and compassion for the betrayed spouse in their pain. While understandable and reasonable, it's simply not always the case. But why is that? After a spouse has been unfaithful, betrayed their partner, and broken their heart, why would they further traumatize the betrayed partner, with blaming,...

It's quite easy for couples to address life, marriage, and even recovery after infidelity or addiction with a transactional approach - "let's just fix this and move on.” Yet, this transactional approach to repair work never leads to a transformative experience, typically resulting in a 'go along to get along' mentality. When couples hit this point, restoration is extremely difficult, and true healing...

Rick Reynolds, the founder and lead therapist at AffairRecovery.com, oftentimes says we learn far more from failure than we can ever learn in success. It's a principle that can be applied in everyday life, and specifically, in recovery from infidelity or addiction. How we handle failure can determine our next phase of life, and our next phase in maturity. After an affair, the last thing we need to do is cause more...

Today you'll hear five key factors that can either stall your recovery or actually speed it up. That's right; you did read that correctly: your healing can be accelerated if you utilize these five key principles and tools. Alternatively, if you choose to ignore these tools, your own repair work will most likely be stalled out. Surviving infidelity is not impossible, but it does require proven strategy from those who have...