Infidelity and Betrayal
Whether you're the one who was betrayed or the one who broke trust, infidelity tends to detonate something bigger than the relationship itself. It can unsettle your sense of the past, making you question memories that once felt solid. It can unsettle your sense of the future, and it very often unsettles your sense of yourself, whether that's "how did I not see this" or "how did I let this happen."
For the person who was betrayed, the aftermath is rarely just about the specific event. It's about the loss of a certain kind of safety, the sense that you can trust your own perception of what's real in a relationship. For the person who stepped outside the relationship, there's often a more complicated mix: guilt, but also something the affair was meeting that had gone unspoken for a long time, whether that's disconnection, unmet needs, or something closer to home that had nothing to do with the relationship at all.
In therapy, whichever side of it you're on, we work at your pace, and without rushing toward either forgiveness or an ending, since both of those can become a way of skipping past what actually needs to be understood first. What was the betrayal actually about? What does trust need to be rebuilt on, if it's rebuilt at all? What did it reveal about the relationship, and about you, that had perhaps been true for a while before it became undeniable?
This work isn't about arriving at a predetermined outcome. It's about being able to make a clear-eyed decision about what comes next, rather than one made from shock, guilt, or fear.