Betrayal Repair Work Phase 1/4: The Apology
Over the years, I've helped couples work with betrayals big and small—affairs, broken agreements, hiding behaviors, lies, and omissions.
Through lots of trial and error over the years, I’ve settled on what I think is the most effective way to work with this. It’s a 4-phase process for couples that works consistently if both parties can engage in it in good faith and they want to heal and stay together and move forward from an event like this but don’t know how.
It’s mostly the same process regardless of the size of the betrayal, but can get condensed and simplified for smaller issues and can get scaled up to be more robust in the case of a bigger betrayal.
I’ll share the 4-Phase Process with you in the next 4 weeks, but here’s a basic overview. Sometimes all 4 phases can happen in a single session if some of the groundwork has already happened between them but more typically it happens over the course of a few months.
The Apology
The Amends Process
Forgiveness/Letting Go/Moving Forward
The Deeper Work (How’d We Get Here?)
Part one is (hopefully) obvious. The apology.
I’ve found that it doesn’t go very well with couples when I try to invite people to apologize in a very specific way that doesn’t use their words because it ends up feeling forced or scripted. So keep this in mind when you’re facilitating a process like this for couples. They only need to get it right enough for them.
Before I share it, I’m going to set up an example scenario. Let’s say a monogamous couple comes to you for sessions and Partner A (Sam) has cheated on Partner B (Casey). These are not real people. I used these names because they’re gender neutral and they’re not based on anyone in particular.
Indiscretions like this can look smaller (like flirty messages online that don’t go further) or they can look bigger (like multiple years-long affairs with multiple people and lots of lying or a second secret life). For our purposes here, let’s imagine that Sam and Casey have been experiencing lasting conflict that they haven’t been able to solve and then Sam sleeps with someone once while they’re away on a trip and then shares it afterwards with Casey.
In Phase 1, The Apology, Sam, the person who has broken trust, has to do 5 things genuinely:
stop defending their actions or making excuses of any kind
apologize empathetically from the heart and mean it
(optionally) understand what went on for them that they did this (I say optionally because some people in Casey’s shoes need this and some don’t and there’s more about this in Phase 4).
Listen openly to Casey sharing the impact of Sam’s actions on them.
Share convincingly with their partner that they understand and apologize for the impact.
If a new or existing couples client comes into session with me because of a betrayal, I’m inviting Sam, the person who broke trust, towards these things. That might take 5 minutes and it might take 5 weeks, depending on the people. Sometimes it’s an easy process and Sam is willing to fall on their sword and say yep, I f*ked up.
If they’re not there yet, this is what we (compassionately and exploratorily) spend our session time on until they can do those 5 things. I’ve found that if Sam can’t or isn’t willing to do those things, those are couples that are far more likely to break up because both Sam and Casey can’t move on.
Once Sam is able to do a Phase 1 Apology, then the couple is ready to move on to Phase 2: The Amends Process. I’ll be telling you all about that next week.
See you then!
Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)
