After infidelity, most couples struggle with rebuilding trust, earning forgiveness, and moving toward a shared vision of a new monogamy and a new future. As a therapist, it’s easy to feel ineffective in the treatment of affairs. There is an old model of infidelity treatment that focuses on a perpetrator and a victim. Common dilemmas in affair recovery often surface around this “threesome” and only make the secret keeping, both in the therapy as well as in the primary relationship, worse. The real healing comes when couples and the therapist learn to be transparent, to confront the differences between privacy and secrecy and when the causes of the affair are explored in a nonpathological way. Forgiveness can be a stuck place as well. And is many times the cause of divorce or separation. “I cant forgive you,” or “Why cant you forgive me?” is a stuck place for many couples who have cheated. Yet forgiveness is a power struggle. Some days there is true forgiveness and understanding and other days, when there is no balance in the relationship, the one who has been cheated on may take back their forgiveness to even the score. Forgiveness is not the goal of the therapy. Empathy is the focus of long term healing. Imago relationship therapy works well in this model, with its structure and understanding of validation and empathy for each partner.
Join me in a new webinar on May 14, May 21, and May 28, 2014 to learn how to help couples work through these major stumbling blocks using Imago therapy techniques of dialogue, validation and empathy. Imago therapy is uniquely therapeutic when it comes to working with affairs and will help any therapist deal directly with couples in the dialogical process necessary for post affair healing.
To register online please click here. To register as a Graduate Student, please email Preston.Walters@ImagoRelationships.org.
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