Relationship Counselling After An Affair | Therapy Online or Face-to-face

When the relationship you thought you had turns out to be something else

Whether you found out yesterday or six months ago, the discovery of an affair does something particular to a person. It isn’t just the betrayal itself – it’s the rewriting of everything that came before it. Moments you thought were real, reassurances you believed, a version of your life that now feels like it was built on something hollow.

If you would like to speak to a therapist about your emotions around the discovery or aftermath of an Affair and feeling betrayed, you can explore the therapists below.

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The discovery of the affair and the aftermath often sheds light on the weakest areas of the relationship and can call into question everything we thought we knew about our relationship with our partner and our own ability to judge people accurately.

The reasons people have affairs and betray the trust of their partners are complex and differ with every individual case. Much depends on personal circumstances, individual needs and the state of the relationship. Frequently, an affair happens because there was an underlying problem in the relationship that couldn’t be discussed.

Whether you seek therapy as a couple or as an individual, relationship counselling after an affair seeks to work through feelings that have arisen by the discovery of the betrayal.

“I keep replaying everything, looking for the signs I missed.”

You’ve gone back through old messages, old arguments, old silences. You’re trying to find the moment it started, as if locating it will make it make sense.

The mind does this after a betrayal because it is trying to restore order to something that has been shattered. If you can find the moment it began, you can tell yourself you should have known — and that at least feels like control. But hypervigilance and obsessive replaying rarely give you the peace they promise. They keep you inside the storm rather than helping you find your way out of it.

What you might be thinking:

“I thought I knew this person. How did I get it so wrong?”

“Was any of it real, or was I just being taken for a fool?”

“I keep checking their phone, their location, their emails — and I hate that I’ve become this person.”

“Even when they’re kind to me now, I don’t trust it. I’m waiting for the next thing.”

“I can’t stop thinking about who the other person was and what they had that I didn’t.”

Therapy after an affair doesn’t ask you to stop thinking about it before you’re ready. It gives you a space to bring all of that — the replaying, the obsessing, the questions you can’t stop asking — and look at what’s underneath it. What you’re really grieving, and what you actually need to move forward.

“I don’t know whether to stay or go — and I’m exhausted by not knowing.”

You’ve had the conversation a hundred times in your head. Some days you’re certain it’s over. Other days, you look at them and remember why you’re still here.

This is one of the most common and least talked-about experiences after an affair — the paralysis of not knowing what you want. People expect you to either forgive and move on, or leave. The space in between, where you’re still living together and still raw and still undecided, can feel completely unsustainable.

What you might be thinking:

“Everyone keeps asking me what I’m going to do and I genuinely don’t know.”

“I want to ‘want to’ stay, but I’m not sure I can get past it.”

“We have children, a life, a mortgage — it’s not as simple as just leaving.”

“Some days I feel like I’ve forgiven them. Then something small happens, and I’m back to square one.”

“What if I leave and regret it? What if I stay and it happens again?”

Couples therapy after an affair doesn’t require you to have already decided. It offers a space where both of you can be honest about where you actually are — not where you’re supposed to be — and figure out together whether what’s between you is worth rebuilding, and whether rebuilding is even possible.

“I was the one who had the affair. I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.”

You didn’t plan for it to happen the way it did. That doesn’t make it right, and you know that. But the shame of it is making it hard to think clearly about anything.

The partner who was unfaithful is often the forgotten person in conversations about affair recovery — assumed to have less right to pain, less need for support. But shame is not a productive place to do this work from, and the question of why it happened matters, both for your own understanding and for the possibility of rebuilding anything with your partner.

What you might be thinking:

“I know I hurt them. I don’t know how to live with what I’ve done.”

“I keep asking myself why I did it — I wasn’t unhappy, or at least I didn’t think I was.”

“What does this say about me as a person? As a parent?”

“I want to make it right but I don’t know how to even start.”

“Every time they get upset, I feel I have to absorb it because I caused it — but I’m drowning.”

Individual therapy for the partner who had the affair isn’t about avoiding responsibility — it’s the opposite. It’s about understanding your own motivations clearly enough to take responsibility in a way that’s honest rather than just self-punishing. That understanding is also what makes genuine repair possible, if repair is what both of you want.

“We want to try and rebuild, but I don’t know if trust can actually come back.”

You’ve decided to try. You’re both still here. But the gap between deciding to stay and actually feeling safe again is enormous, and nobody tells you how long it takes.

Trust doesn’t return on a schedule and it can’t be willed back into existence. What couples therapy does is create the conditions in which it becomes possible — slowly, honestly, through difficult conversations that are held in a space where the heat can be managed and the feelings underneath the arguments can finally be heard.

What you might be thinking:

“We’ve talked about it endlessly but we always end up going round in circles.”

“They say they’re sorry but I don’t know if sorry is enough.”

“The intimacy feels impossible right now. I don’t know how to get back there.”

“I want to trust them again. I just don’t know how.”

“Sometimes I think we’re making progress and then I have a bad day, and it feels hopeless.”

Rebuilding after an affair is not a straight line, and a good therapist won’t pretend otherwise. But it is possible, and many couples find that the work they do in the aftermath of a betrayal takes them somewhere more honest and more sustainable than where they were before.

“The affair ended years ago. So why am I still not over it?”

You thought time would do more than it has. You stayed, you tried, you thought you’d moved on. But it’s still there — a shadow that falls across ordinary moments.

Some betrayals don’t resolve on the timeline people expect. The initial crisis passes, life resumes, and there’s a pressure — often unspoken — to be over it by now. But unprocessed pain doesn’t disappear; it goes underground and surfaces in other ways. In withdrawal, in flashes of anger, in a low-level distance that neither of you can quite name.

If the affair was years ago and you’re still carrying it, that isn’t weakness or stubbornness. It’s a sign that something about it hasn’t been fully processed — and that’s exactly what therapy is for.

For the person whose relationship has already ended

You don’t need to still be in the relationship to benefit from therapy after an affair. Many people come to City Therapy Rooms as individuals, working through a betrayal from a relationship that has already ended — processing the grief, the anger, the damage to their confidence in their own judgement, and what it means for their capacity to trust someone again in the future.

If you would like to speak to a therapist about your emotions around the discovery or aftermath of an Affair and feeling betrayed, you can explore the therapists below.

Each therapist profile explains:

how they will work with you
the way therapy for affairs can help
their availability for sessions

You are welcome to contact several therapists before deciding who you would like to work with.

Helpful resources on affairs and betrayal

Here is Esther Perel giving her TED talk about ‘Rethinking Affairs’, a fascinating and insightful talk.

Relate — the UK’s largest relationship support charity, with guidance on affair recovery for individuals and couples. Relate.org.uk

The Gottman Institute — research-based resources on trust, betrayal and relationship repair. Gottman.com

Questions People Ask Before Getting in Touch

I’m not sure therapy can help — we’ve talked about it until we’re both exhausted and nothing changes.

Talking between the two of you and talking in therapy are fundamentally different things. In therapy there is a third presence in the room — someone who can notice when conversations are going in circles, step in before they escalate, and help you get beneath the argument to what’s actually being said. Most couples find that the conversations they have in a therapy room go somewhere that the ones at home never do.

I’m the one who was betrayed. Shouldn’t they be doing the work, not me?

It’s a fair question. But healing from a betrayal isn’t something that happens to you — it’s something you have to actively move through. Therapy for the betrayed partner isn’t about letting the other person off the hook. It’s about giving you somewhere to process the shock, the grief, and the anger in a way that helps you rather than keeps you stuck in it.

I had the affair. I feel too ashamed to sit in a therapy room and talk about it.

Shame is one of the least useful places to do this work from, and it’s one of the things a good therapist will help you move through rather than dwell in. The goal isn’t to make you feel worse about what happened — it’s to help you understand it clearly enough to take genuine responsibility and figure out what comes next.

We’ve decided to separate. Is there any point in couples therapy now?

Yes. Therapy after the decision to separate can help you end things with less damage — particularly where children, shared finances, or long shared histories are involved. It can also help you understand what happened so you carry less of it into what comes next.

I’m worried couples therapy will just give them a platform to make me feel responsible for their affair.

A good therapist holds the space for both people — they don’t take sides and they don’t allow one person to be scapegoated. If you’ve felt that the affair is somehow being explained away by problems in the relationship, that’s worth naming directly at the start of any first session. The affair is the responsibility of the person who had it, full stop. Therapy explores context; it doesn’t distribute blame.

My partner wants to come to therapy but I’m not ready. What do I do?

You don’t have to be ready at the same time. Individual therapy for you, now, can help you work out what you actually want and what you actually feel — separate from the pressure of your partner’s timeline. That clarity is useful whether you eventually come together for couples work or not.

Will the therapist tell us whether to stay together or separate?

No. That decision belongs to you, and a good therapist will never push you towards a particular outcome. What therapy does is help you make that decision from a clearer, more honest place — rather than from the middle of a crisis where everything feels impossible.