My Husband Had an Emotional Affair. Can I Ever Trust Him Again?
By Stephanie Newman, PhD
Trust can be broken by one partner, but it can only be rebuilt by two.
Dear Psychoanalyst,
I recently found out that a successful marriage therapist engaged in an emotional affair with my husband. She’s also married, and while my husband wasn’t her client, her messages reveal how she accessed his vulnerability, assured him that what they were doing wasn’t cheating, and offered a no-strings-attached fantasy that they planned to act on in the near future. We’ve been married for over 20 years and we have children together. He is a dismissive avoidant and I am now trying to heal from his traumatic choices and figure out if I can be with him. How can you rebuild trust when the interest and emotional connection you needed from your partner was denied for so long only to be so easily given to someone else? Their words to each other haunt me and I fear that their affair has ruined what we had. I feel like I am the only one suffering from their choices.
Thank you for your time,
B
Dear B,
Thank you for writing in and trusting me with your question. I hear the pain and loneliness your husband’s relationship with this woman have caused. What happened is not your fault: Whatever difficulties may have existed in your marriage, your husband is responsible for the choices he made.
Before I respond: Please get all the therapeutic support you can! Take care of yourself. And now that you know where I stand, let’s clarify a bit.
The immediate aftermath of extramarital discoveries and disclosures is intense, confusing, and emotionally fraught. Understanding an emotional affair can be especially tough because its boundaries are less obvious than those of a sexual affair. The person involved may insist that “nothing happened,” even while displacing the spouse and breaching their trust. And yet the distinction does not fundamentally change what repair requires: honesty, accountability, and a shared commitment to one another.
Taking a history, which I do in my office, is crucial to understanding the morass of intense and conflicting emotions. Sifting through the initial hurt and confusion helps me to intervene and opens up choices that will allow you to decide what’s best for your family. I always ask for context. My questions and clarifications here are not expressions of doubt about the events you’ve described; they are part of helping you see the whole situation and the choices available to you.
So here goes. What jumps out from your letter is that you’ve framed your husband’s emotional affair with “Successful Therapist” as though she is the major player here. Has your husband explained or said anything at all about his participation in the relationship? You describe him as “dismissive avoidant,” suggesting his involvement was purely passive. It’s understandable that with a third person intruding into your marriage you’ve been feeling betrayed, and have continued to suffer a gaping wound. But let’s take note of something else that is important: While the woman you describe is central to what went on, your husband is also an independent actor.
I wondered as I read your letter how you learned of the messages and discovered the details of the emotional affair. Did you come across the messages on your husband’s device, or did he show you? I’m also not clear as to whether he knows you are aware of the situation. The precise nature of how you got the information speaks to your feelings of trust or mistrust and offers information about your sense of your husband’s commitment.
If you came across the messages in secret by searching his computer or phone, that’s important in terms of your sense of the state of the marriage. Perhaps you have sensed for some time that something was not right. You picked up on a rift or growing distance. This matters because the affair is devastating—and I’m not excusing your husband or the woman he became involved with—but perhaps the messages and emotional affair are not the entire story. It’s crucial to get a sense of the entire 20-year marital relationship, as well as its evolution over time. I also wonder how your husband sees the marriage and his affair.
My best guess is that something wasn’t working between you and your husband, or that something was (is?) going on within him—and by that, I mean he may be struggling with an intrapsychic dilemma, with emotions and conflicts that are between he and him.
While—and I repeat—I am not justifying the extramarital relations you’ve described, I encourage you to think about how things have been in your household. By that I mean that your husband’s inner life was there long before “Successful Therapist” entered the picture. Can you think about whether there was an underlying distance or never-resolved resentment or difficulty between the two of you that was not addressed but contributed to a rift? Are you aware of any difficulties your spouse was having like a longstanding low-grade depression or other emotional struggle that he might have acted upon instead of discussing it?
Many couples cannot find ways to come together and discuss relationship ups and downs, share individual pains, or connect about hopes and dreams. It sounds as though it was hard for you and your partner to come together, leaving disputes to flare, resentments to simmer. I can’t tell from your letter whether you’ve been concerned about a lack of communication, or even if you worry about emotional distance. Did you try to address the lack of connection? Characterizing your husband as “dismissive avoidant” tells me you attempted in some way, at some point, to focus on the relationship, but your overtures were rebuffed. If so, it might be helpful for you to think about whether that’s a longstanding pattern or a distance that began to grow more recently.
By now I hope it’s clear that in seeking context here I’m attempting to ensure you find your voice. Your husband has demonstrated with his actions that he was feeling in some way dissatisfied, but if we reframe, you might ask yourself whether YOU were satisfied with the one-on-one engagements, the level of emotional closeness, between you and your husband. I’m interested in whether you felt all along that the relationship was working for you. Sexual intimacy is also an important part of a couple’s mix, also worth reflecting on. And once you have a sense of your relationship’s past levels of intimacy and communication, it will be easier to consider your relationship’s future.
It’s difficult to pore over your memories and emotional artifacts and assess the state of a 20-year marriage that has hit a tipping point. By asking you to take inventory and look back at the history of the marriage, I do not mean to suggest that you’ve done something wrong or are the one at fault for the marital rift. But I think there’s always more going on than the surface-level reveals—with any couple or individual.
So tell me this: Have you ever tried to discuss with your husband your feelings about your loneliness in the relationship? More recently, have you shared the hurt caused by his emotional affair? If you are reluctant to broach the topic of the messages, or if you have tried, only to see conversation get shut down before it even starts, that would be important to note so you can begin to change patterns that don’t benefit you. Looking at communication and assessing trust and commitment—yours and your husband’s—would be the first steps towards improving communication and strengthening your bond.
Illustration by Austin Hughes
You’ve said quite poignantly, B, that all the pain and hurt you bear is yours and yours alone. Does your husband discount your feelings or minimize the pain his extramarital relationship has caused? If you’ve tried to work on this and he refuses to talk about it, you are indeed in a lonely place. That’s serious cause for concern.
If your husband does not empathize with your pain or see a need to discuss the affair, and it’s you, and only you, who’s engaged in a process of looking inward and working on the marital relationship, this one-sidedness—whether due to a lack of commitment or emotional limitation on his part—needs to be addressed directly. When couples are working together, both members are listening deeply and hearing the other and holding onto empathy for the partner’s pain and suffering. If one person is unable or refuses to discuss, listen, and empathize, the lack of closeness drives a wedge, impeding understanding and healing.
To think about whether you can stay with your husband means shifting focus from the marriage to your internal world: your psychology, your hopes, dreams, wants and needs … to YOU, B.
Your pain is heavy and complicated. I hear self-doubt and even shame: Can you make the right choice, bear it alone, and manage all the heavy lifting for yourself, your family? “Successful Therapist” who encouraged the affair is the target of your ire. But consider this: Underneath you’re very likely angry, even furious, not just at her but at your husband. The pain of rage is hard to sit with.
My best guess is that embedded in your comment about being the only one in pain is a feeling that you are there to take care of and support others and hold the family together. For a lot of people who feel this way, particularly women, there’s a fantasy that being there for the family or the kids means you can’t prioritize yourself. Please hear me: YOU CAN. No one has to bear all the responsibility or do all the work or carry all the emotional load of a marriage alone. Your husband also bears responsibility for the family and your kids. He needs to step up and face the family situation. And if he truly can’t, perhaps you need to rethink whether you need to ask for more or make a change. People stay married for all kinds of reasons, including the kids. No judgments here. But taking care of yourself and figuring out what you need is important too. Sometimes relationships don’t work out and marriages end.
You and your husband sound like you’re in need of insight and support from a professionally trained couples therapist, if your husband is willing to join you in that work. There are many schools of marital treatment out there. In general, a couples clinician will work with you and your husband together; the patient or client here is the couple. This type of therapist remains neutral and provides support and strategies to help you two understand the difficulties in the relationship and improve communication, and—this is important—to allow both of you to have a place to discuss the trust issues in an environment of safety. I’m looking at you, B.
You haven’t said how old your children are, but affairs and parental relationship strife can adversely affect kids. Family therapy can also help. I recognize that’s a lot of clinicians … and a lot of money. You can search for clinics and providers through APsA, including some with sliding scale fees for treatment. William Alanson White and Ackerman are institutes that have training programs and offer couple’s therapy services, as well.
Learning of a spouse’s betrayal is traumatic. You need to have a place to bring your feelings and be able to be heard—as does your husband—where intense negative emotions like anger and fear, and deep wounds of betrayal, can be processed and, if necessary, contained by a neutral therapist. The therapeutic setting hopefully allows healing and keeps overly harsh arguments or upsetting revelations from creating further trauma, so repair can begin.
To respond to your question about trust, only you can know what is right for you and your family. I can’t say what that is, but I do know that talking about it—in individual and couple’s treatment—will help you understand what you’ve been through, allowing you to chart a path forward.
Sidebar: Atone, Attune, Attach
John and Julie Gottman have seen many thousands of couples and have a thing or two to say about communication and affairs. Their playbook for rebuilding relationships after one partner has had an extramarital relationship has three parts.
Atone
The person who has stepped outside of the marriage—emotionally or through a physical relationship—must own the behavior and commit to listening to how their partner is feeling and to showing they are contrite. The person who has had the affair must buy in and do what’s necessary to demonstrate that they want to repent and they understand the importance of making repair. Without this step the rifts cannot be bridged and the wounds cannot be healed.
Atoning is a process and requires commitment labor and love—and can take months, even years.
In the affair situation many couples therapists will stress the importance of ending the extramarital relationship. This removes the noise of the other dyad and helps repair and bolster marital bonds as well as begin to rebuild trust.
Attune
This involves working together as a couple to get closer emotionally. It means fighting for the marriage, working hard to listen and really understand the other person’s deepest anxieties and most difficult feelings. The goal here is to connect and manage conflict.
And here’s where a couples therapist comes in. Attuning to your spouse means talking and listening. Both of you have to be willing to participate in deep discussions about feelings related to the rift and breach of trust. Holding onto all the feelings, including negative ones, and tolerating the mistrust and hurt, is crucial to attuning. A skilled couples therapist can help you both learn how to express negative emotions productively, avoiding communication styles that can shut down the conversation—like criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling. Holding onto empathy for a partner, even during an argument and at a dark moment, is key to productive communication.
Sometimes one or both members of a couple who are feeling dissatisfied or doubtful about the future of the marriage can resist a suggestion to begin to work together. A seasoned marital therapist will know how to engage reticent dyads and how to use the resistance to help understand what’s not working in ways that move the couple forward.
Attach
Finding your way back to emotional intimacy and closeness involves working daily to reestablish trust. Small kindnesses and positive actions help, along with listening to what’s working and what else is needed. Couples can build a new “culture of appreciation” in the household by zeroing in on what’s positive and by establishing new routines and rituals. And finally physical connection helps, when everyone feels the time is right. Intimacy can be approached slowly over time with small steps to allow comfort and confidence in the bond and safety in closeness to build.
In Ask a Psychoanalyst, Stephanie Newman, PhD, responds to reader questions about therapy, relationships, and the psychopathology of everyday life. You can submit a question by emailing advice@tapmag.org.
This column is for general educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Reading or submitting a question does not create a therapist–client relationship. Submitting a question implies acceptance of our submission terms.
Published August 2026