BH - Me - D-day 4/2024 age 42, 19 years married
WS - Her - EA 1/2023, PA 7/2023 - 6/2024, age 41
2 Teenage Children
Her - Love of my life...still is, trying to reconcile.

Couples Therapy

I am trying to decide if my wife (WS) and I (BS) need a new couples therapist or if I'm just making a big deal of nothing.

Back story:

My wife told me about her affair the end of April 2024. It was a year long emotional and physical affair, where they both said they loved the other. They had unprotected sex hundreds of times, which eventually resulted in a pregnancy and she had an abortion. Really difficult for me.

From the start I wanted to reconcile. For the first 6 weeks she had a really hard time breaking contact off with him, and he kept reaching out to her. It has really been hell for me, and only recently have I been able to think about other things some of the time.

She is also suffering a lot with her own issues and emotions surrounding the affair. Feeling lots of guilt for what she has done, mourning the loss of her relationship with him, mourning the loss of the baby she aborted, etc.

We both have triggers.

It makes for a lot of volatility when we have discussions. But also she has been really good to help me through my issues, and put my needs and the needs of our kids first. She is doing many of the steps that people recommend to reconcile.

Since the affair, my wife has continually said the affair is 100% her fault. But she also has been bringing up all sorts of things she is blaming me for not doing before the affair, or things that contributed to her having an affair, etc. Things that were almost never communicated prior to the affair. It seems like she is saying something like this for every thing she blames me for: "the affair is 100% my fault, however there were things you weren't doing that I was able to get from the affair, and are part of the reason it happened."

On the one hand I'm glad she is trying to explain why it happened to me. I do really want to understand that. On the other it seems like blame shifting her affair onto me. It's hard to tell which is which.

In the period from then to now we have tried three different couples therapists. The first one was horrible, the second one I liked because she seemed to be able to empathize with my predicament. My wife wanted to go with someone else though; the therapist we are currently seeing every two weeks.

My concerns:

This therapist is very knowledgeable and competent. I don't have any issues with that. But in our last three sessions he has pretty much skipped over the affair completely and wen't straight into using the Gottman methods of repairing relationships. We asked for Gottman techniques, and to get started repairing our relationship ASAP, so I'm glad to learn these skills, and maybe I just need to communicate what I want.

It just seems strange that a couples therapist seeing a couple because of infidelity hasn't yet addressed the issue directly. He's talked about trust in general and what it means to each of us. He's recommended some books, which we are reading. We worked on how we communicate better, which is a good thing.

However focussing only on marital issues we have, or had before the affair, feels to me very much like blaming the affair on our marital issues, and not on the decisions my wife made. Or maybe I'm just focussing too much on that and the way to repair our marriage is actually to fix those issues?

I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's not addressing it directly because we are months into this process. We have had many discussions already, we have had full disclosure already, backed up with a lie detector test which I requested she take.

I expected that a couples therapist would work through and address the affair first, and then proceed on to things that strengthen the marriage.

However I've never been here before and thats why I'm seeking advice from everyone here.

Does it sound like we need a new therapist?

Should I bring up my concerns in couples therapy? (I also considered writing a letter to him alone to avoid stressing my wife out)

Am I focussing too much on the affair, and should really be focussed on repairing issues we had in our marriage instead?

21 comments posted: Wednesday, September 25th, 2024