221: Why I Work with Affair Couples as Individuals

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgements.  When you’re ready to start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, I can help you do it.  There are two ways you can have me as you coach.  You can enroll in my self-guided course, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  To learn more about both of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I can’t wait to meet you

All right.  The title of today’s episode probably gives you a pretty good idea of what we’re going to talk about today.  I am regularly asked if I work with affair couples, and the answer is yes, I absolutely do.  But when people ask me this, they usually want to do joint sessions with their affair partner.  They want to do the traditional couple’s counseling thing and have me work with them and their affair partner at the same time.

And I don’t do that!  At least, for the most part I don’t do that.  There is ONE exception to this rule of mine, and I’ll tell you what it is later in the episode.

But what I DO do, and what I’m very happy to do, is work with you and your affair partner concurrently but separately. 

And I’m going to tell you exactly why I work with affair couples in this way, but before I get into all of that, I just want to emphasize that I am more than happy to work with you and your affair partner concurrently, so if you are both interested in working with me as individuals, all you need to do is book separate introductory coaching sessions with me - one for each of you - and that’s how we get started.  It’s as simple as that.  And you can book your introductory coaching sessions with me through my website, mariemurphyphd.com. 

OR you can each enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, and work through the material in the course together.  I do require that you enroll in the course separately, but you can share the learning journey with each other.  And you can get started engaging with the course materials right away!  So if you’re super excited to begin the process of you and your affair partner working with me in this capacity, you can take the next steps right away.  Turn off the podcast, and go my website.  Mariemurphyphd.com.  When you enroll in the course, you’ll have access to all of the course materials within minutes, and you’ll be able to access them anytime online for as long as the course exists, which will be either forever or for a very long time.

Engaging with my course while your affair partner also does the same is kind of like learning a new language together.  You each have to do it on your own – but you’re also doing it together.  If you want to learn the language, you have to put in your own work, but you get to do it WITH someone else, and sharing that kind of experience with someone you enjoy connecting with can be immensely fulfilling.

And that speaks to the main reason why I work with affair couples separately, or individually, rather than meeting with them together.

The reasons why I work with affair couples separately have nothing to do with the fact that the relationship is an affair, or started as an affair.  Or that the relationship has or has had any kind of infidelity component to it.  Rather, the main reason why I work with affair couples as individuals is because if you want to change your relationship dynamic in any way, your best bet is to start by recognizing what you have the power to control, and then actually taking responsibility for changing what you have the power to control.

And my opinion – based on my professional experiences as well as my personal experiences – is that it’s a lot more effective to learn how to do this by working one-on-one with a practitioner, rather than you and your partner working simultaneously with a practitioner.

There are a few reasons for this.  One is that when you want to learn how to do something, you may want a certain amount of individual attention – or you may NEED a certain amount of individual attention – if you want to get a particular result.  Let’s say you and your partner want to be a pickleball team.  Or you want to play doubles pickleball, or however you say it.  But neither one of you has ever played pickleball.  Maybe neither one of you has any experience hitting a ball of any kind with a paddle or a stick or any other object.  If that’s the case, you may each need to learn how to serve before you can work on your double’s game, or how you work together as a team.  You may need to get good enough at the basics on your own before there’s ANY POINT in learning how to improve how you and your partner function as a team.  And if you’re just learning how to serve, and your partner is just learning how to serve, is there any utility in on focusing on how your partner’s serve is coming along?  Arguably, there is not.  Arguably, it is a LOT MORE USEFUL for you to focus on learning how to serve yourself.  When you’re learning how to serve, your job is to make your own serve serviceable!  Your partner’s serve is their job.  Only you can work on your own serve, and only your partner can work on their serve.  Even if you want to be a team, there are some things you each have to do by yourselves.

But it goes even further beyond that when it comes to working out relationship dynamics, or relationship challenges.  Because many of us have subscribed to the idea that once we get into a relationship with someone, our partner has both the power and the responsibility to do certain things for us.  And more specifically, many of us believe that if we’re romantically involved with someone, they have the power to MAKE us feel good or bad, and they therefore have the responsibility to do the things that make us feel good, and refrain from doing the things that make us feel bad.

That idea – or some variation of it – is pretty darn prevalent, at least in some parts of the world, and sometimes this idea is so taken-for-granted that we don’t even notice that we’re operating from this premise.  Nor do we question the validity, or the utility of this premise.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you may have heard me talk about the think-feel-act cycle, or the think-feel-do cycle.  This framework of understanding was conceptualized in recent times, but its roots are old – so if what I’m about to say sounds like Buddhism, you’re right.  The think-feel-act cycle holds that humans encounter circumstances as they go about their lives.  They see things, they hear things, they experience events, they meet people, and they experience all of the things that other people do and don’t do.  But it isn’t these circumstances that CAUSE people to feel however they feel.  Rather, it’s their thoughts about their life circumstances that create their feelings.  And then, your feeling state gives you the capacity to engage in particular types of actions, or refrain from engaging in particular types of actions.  And then, whatever actions you take or don’t take create discernable outcomes, or results. 

The circumstances we encounter in our lives are neutral until we give them meaning.  That means that any given circumstance isn’t inherently meaningful, and doesn’t have any particular, fixed meaning.  We humans like to think that circumstances are inherently meaningful, but they are not.

Your partner – whether it’s your affair partner or your non-affair partner or your sexual partner of one evening – is a neutral circumstance.  Everything they do or don’t do or say or don’t say are also neutral circumstances.

If we fail to recognize that, we are totally screwed.  And by that I mean, we are doomed to experience a lot of unnecessary suffering in our relationships.

Human interpersonal relationships are pretty much bound to be painful at times.  That is definitely a thing, but I don’t think we need to necessarily consider it a terrible thing.  On the other hand, however, we do create a LOT of unnecessary suffering for ourselves by failing to recognize that our thoughts – rather than our partner’s actions – create our feelings, and believing that our partners are somehow responsible for ensuring through their actions that we feel good.

So, let’s talk about one specific example.  Let’s say your affair partner does not text you on the weekends.  And let’s say you really don’t like that.  THAT is fair enough – you are entitled to dislike any circumstance that you encounter!  But the problem is that we usually don’t say, “Oh, I don’t like it that my affair partner doesn’t text me on the weekends” and then figure out what we want to do about that.

RATHER, we often think, “Oh, it makes me feel really unloved that my affair partner doesn’t text me on the weekends.”  Or maybe, we think, “I feel really undervalued because my affair partner won’t text me on the weekends.”  And then we feel unloved, or undervalued, or whatever.

And this is where the trouble starts.  We make meaning out of our affair partner’s behavior.  Or put differently, we think thoughts about our partner’s behavior.  And if the thoughts we think make us feel feelings that we don’t like to feel, we tend to blame our affair partner and their behavior for our feelings.

And with that, we tend to think that our affair partner needs to change their behavior so that we can feel better, or feel differently.  And if we believe this, we may attempt to get our affair partner to change their behavior.  And, if this works, we may feel good, at least for a while.  Let’s say you manage to cajole your affair partner into texting you once each weekend.  Maybe that seems like a great improvement to you, so you feel good.  But then you may start to want MORE than one text per weekend, or you may want them to have a text EXCHANGE with you over the weekend, or you may think they didn’t include enough heart emojis in their last weekend text to you.  And pretty soon, you may feel disappointed in your partner’s behavior, because you consider it lacking – even though you did get them to make the initial behavior change you requested.

When we don’t recognize that it’s our thoughts about other people’s behavior, not other people’s behavior in and of itself that creates our feelings, we are perpetually at the mercy of people doing the things we want them to do in order for us to feel okay.  And that is probably not a position you want to put yourself in.

Now again, I want to stress that if your affair partner doesn’t text you on the weekends, you have every right to not like that.

But the question is, what are YOU going to do about that?  What are you going to do with your own dislike?

In general, when our partner does things we dislike, we have four options.  One is to try to get your partner to change their behavior.  And although there are times when it is fair enough for you to ask your partner to make changes, a) they aren’t always going to do what you ask of them, and b) even if they do, it’s still your thoughts that create your feelings, not their actions.  Not directly.  Yet so often, we rely exclusively on this strategy when we think that something is amiss in our relationship.  We try to get our partner to do things differently.  And that may create even more discord within the relationship!

But the good news is, we do have other options.

Option two is to just keep disliking whatever your partner does, and keep on making the whole thing a problem for you.  It is possible to dislike something and not make it into much of a problem!  But you can also dislike something and continue to stew in your juices and be actively pissed off about whatever it is you don’t like.

Option three is to shift your thinking about what it means that your affair partner doesn’t text you on the weekends.  Maybe what you’ve been thinking is that if your affair partner really loved you, they would find a way to text you on the weekends because they know it’s important to you.  It’s not totally unreasonable to think that kind of thought, but it probably makes you pretty miserable to think that kind of thought.  Maybe, upon consideration, you do believe that your affair partner really loves you.  Maybe you believe they love you, and, maybe upon further consideration, you don’t really mind that they don’t text you on the weekends, because you get so much uninterrupted time to do your own thing.  Or you find some other way to change your thinking about your affair partner not texting you on the weekends.  If you change your thoughts, your feelings WILL change, and when they do, the problem may be resolved.

On the other hand, maybe you don’t like being in an affair, and you don’t like being involved with someone who isn’t fully available to be with you.  Maybe your affair partner not texting you on the weekends is just one manifestation of a much bigger problem.  If that’s the way you see your relationship with your affair partner, you might come to the conclusion that you would prefer to end your relationship, because you don’t want to be involved with someone who doesn’t text you on the weekends.  That is one way to handle your dislike of their lack of texting.  So option four is to change your circumstance, or circumstances. 

These four options that I’ve just described constitute an approach to dealing with your relationship and with problems or challenges within your relationship that’s very different from any approach that is predicated on the idea that your partner’s actions, in and of themselves, cause your feelings.

My continuous observation is that when we take responsibility for our experience of whatever is happening in the relationship – and specifically, when we take responsibility for our thoughts and feelings about our partner’s actions, the whole relationship changes.  Our experience of the relationship changes, and then the way we engage in the relationship changes.  And when we engage in the relationship differently, the whole dynamic shifts.  Your partner starts to experience different behaviors from you!  And they may respond very positively to that!  And you may end up getting the changes you wanted in your relationship without having to ask your partner to do anything differently.  That’s been my personal experience, over and over again – and I see this happening with my clients in their relationships all the time, too.

And to the best of my knowledge, couple’s counseling fails to account for this.  To the best of my knowledge, couple’s counseling does not emphasize the fact that your experience of your relationship is happening in your own mind.  There are external things happening, of course, but it’s what you make those external circumstances mean that matters, first and foremost.  And in fact, what I’ve seen is that couple’s counseling subtly and explicitly reinforces the idea that our partner’s actions do in fact cause our feelings, and our partner IS in fact responsible for doing things that make us feel good, and not doing things that make us feel bad.  And while I’m all in favor of being considerate of other people, if we buy into the idea that our partner determines our feelings and is therefore responsible for our feelings, I think we’re all doomed to suffer tremendously.

So, I want to state my usual disclaimer here: in sharing my observations of couple’s counseling – based on my own experiences with it, as well as my clients’ stories of their experiences with it – I am not trying to suggest that I know everything about every couple’s counselor’s approach to their work.  And if you have benefitted from couple’s counseling of any kind, I love that for you.  But my observation is that couple’s counseling often fails at what it sets out to do, and I’ve just described what I believe to be a big part of the reason why.

So what I do with couples is I help them work through their thoughts and feelings about their partner WITHOUT their partner being directly involved in that process.  Because why would they need their partner to be there with them as they do that?

I want to normalize something that we don’t talk about nearly enough: there are going to be times when you are not thrilled with your partner – even if you love them dearly, and really want to continue your relationship with them!  There are going to be things your partner does – whether you’re in an affair relationship with them or not – that you really don’t like.

And my approach is to help you deal with your dislike of your partner’s humanity in such a way that you can deal with it in a manner that, first and foremost, serves you well. 

What exactly do I mean by that?  Well, a lot of things, but for the present purposes, what I mean is this.  If our partner is doing something that we don’t like, it’s possible that the best thing for us to do is to choose to leave the relationship.  And that, in my opinion, is a perfectly acceptable outcome.  Sometimes the intention – stated or otherwise – of couple’s therapy is to preserve the relationship at all costs.  Sometimes keeping a couple together is the therapist’s agenda.  And I don’t think that should be the first priority!  I think the first priority should be to ensure that each participant in the relationship wants to be in the relationship!  And couple’s counseling – again, in my experience – sometimes skips over that part.

So sometimes what I see with affair couples is that one or both members of the couple aren’t really sure if they want to be in the relationship or not.  This can be true of non-affair couples too, of course!  And it can be really hard to admit that when you’re both working together with a professional for the sake of bettering your relationship!  Maybe you sort of want to work on the relationship you have with your person, but you aren’t 100% sure that that’s what you REALLY want.  You need to work that out before you try to do anything with your partner to change the relationship!  And you may have a MUCH easier time doing that if you’re working with a professional on your own.

On the other hand, you may deeply love your partner and want to stay with them, but you may HATE some of their behavior.  And I want to normalize this, too.  It is entirely possible to love someone tremendously and also have feelings of utter contempt towards some of their actions.  Now, there are some very famous couple’s therapists who have a very different perspective on that, and if you know who I’m talking about, good for you, and if you don’t, even better for you!  I want to propose – and again, this is a statement born of experience and observation – that it is possible to deal with feelings of contempt or hatred or anger for your partner.  Or any of the other mucky emotions that we tend to pathologize.  However, it’s YOUR responsibility to deal with those emotions and the thoughts that created them.  It’s not your partner’s responsibility to change their behavior so you don’t have to feel those feelings anymore.  And it’s not going to be productive for you to unleash your contempt upon your partner because they’re doing something that you think is worthy of your rage.  That’s why emotions like anger and contempt and hatred get such a bad rap.  A lot of people do not know how to skillfully digest these emotions on their own!  So when they’re feeling these feelings, they tend to behave in ways that create a lot of undesirable outcomes. 

So, your job – everybody’s job – is to learn how to recognize your thoughts and feelings about their partner and take responsibility for digesting them.  And your partner does not need to be present for this.  They do not need to hear you talking about how much you hate the way they chew, or how angry you were that time when they dismissed your feelings when they said that they hurt your feelings.  Your partner does not need to know that you are filled with rage every time they mention their spouse.  Your partner does not need to know that you are bitterly jealous of the attention they devote to their children.  Your partner does not need to know that you are repulsed by the way you twitch when you’re about to have an orgasm.

But I’m here for all of that.  I’m here to listen to all of your rage and disgust and anger and hatred and contempt, and here to help you digest all of that stuff, so that it does NOT seep into your relationship and corrode it.

Now, are there ever times when you are going to want to talk to your partner about their behavior?  Are you ever going to want to make requests of them?  Sure!  Almost certainly!  The point of recognizing that your partner is a neutral circumstance, and that all of their actions are neutral circumstances, is not to abandon your own preferences.  Rather, it is to see your preferences for what they are: preferences that you happen to hold, or subscribe to.  Your preferences are NOT absolute standards for how everyone in the world must behave.  Or how just your partner in particular ought to behave.

When we have a better handle on what we are responsible for in our relationship, we can engage in much more productive conversations with our partner about what’s going on in our relationship.  Asking your partner to make a particular change when you know that you don’t like their actions, but you also know they are not directly causing your feelings is VERY different from asking your partner to change because you believe that their actions are making you feel terrible.  Totally different ballgame. 

Now, to that effect, I will tell you my exception to my I don’t work with affair couples together, simultaneously policy.  If you and your affair partner, or you and your person, whatever your situation looks like, have both been working with me separately for a while, we can then come together and meet as a group of three.  I’m happy to do that.  But I won’t do that unless I’m confident that both of you are reasonably good at taking responsibility for your own stuff first.

Finally, I just want say that when we’re experiencing challenges in a relationship, it can really, truly seem like our partner is the PROBLEM, or that something the two of us are doing together is the problem.  And therefore, it can really, truly seem like the way to solve the problem is to talk about it as a couple with a professional.  Or put a little differently, it can seem like our life depends upon being able to successfully drag our partner to couple’s counseling.

Working on things with your partner and a professional at the same time has its time and place.  But if you’ve been thinking that you NEED to get your partner to work with me – and you – together, I hope today’s episode has helped you think differently about that.  Start by learning how to take radical responsibility for what you have the power to control in your relationship.  And then you can worry about whatever your partner is or isn’t doing.  They’re responsible for things too, of course.  But don’t start there.  Start with yourself.

If you are ready to take the bull by the horns and start dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s get to work.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach.  You can enroll in my online course, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  Either way, we’ll find you some relief and a clear path forward.  The rest of your life, beyond the drama and the difficulty of your infidelity situation is waiting for you.

All right people, thank you so much for listening.  Bye for now.