Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

Coaching for Affairs: A Better Choice than Counseling and Retreats?

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 3 • Episode 45

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On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches when to use marriage counseling, marriage coaching, and retreats, if you want to end your spouse's affair.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

Coaching for Affairs: A Better Choice than Counseling and Retreats? (Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Are you confused about the best kind of service to use to end your spouse’s affair? Today I will teach you when to use marriage counseling, marriage coaching, and marriage retreats to put love and faithfulness back in your marriage.

Marriage counseling, marriage coaching, and marriage retreats are three types of services that people use to improve their marriages and to reconcile. 

Best services when you are both motivated

Key principle: Motivated people work on change. Unmotivated people don’t.

(0:59)

Marriage counseling and retreats are both better when you want to work together as a couple. Working together as a couple will be best when you are both motivated to build a faithful and loving relationship.

Being motivated is a key distinction here. Willingness to participate is not the same as being motivated to participate. People who are willing, but unmotivated make minimal effort and frustrate progress. When only one person is motivated to build a relationship or for an affair to end, then Individual marriage coaching is going to be the best choice. 

Regardless of whether you are going to counseling or coaching, only the motivated person should go.

So now, already you have learned the two service choices you have when your spouse is also motivated to work with you and the service to use when your spouse is not motivated to work with you. 

When both people are motivated to work on the marriage, you choose either marriage counseling or a marriage retreat. When only one person is, you choose marriage coaching.

(2:06)

And, you know the only one who should have marriage coaching is you.

But, there are actually good times to use these three very different services.

Let’s take a closer look at the best time to use each of these services and the benefits of each. You may choose to use one, two, or all three of these services in the process of reconciling, though not at the same time. They can each help with a different aspect of the process.

Marriage retreats are for general marriage improvement.

If a couple are newly married or have grown distant from each other, there is no affair, and both want to improve their relationship, I recommend them to attend a marriage retreat and not marriage counseling. Most of the time, emotional distancing happens before affairs occur. Marriage damage, caught in time, can help to prevent affairs from happening.

(3:07)I

Marriage retreats can also be used for enhancing a marriage after the affair has ended, provided there are no critical issues that need to be worked through. Just as with a newly married couple, husbands and wives can learn how to enjoy their relationship with each other more.

Marriage retreats are skills focused.

Just like coaching, retreats are skills focused, but are better for couples.

Retreats are a very good choice for marriage enhancement. Rather than meeting with a counselor and talking about problems, marriage retreats are motivating and entertaining ways to help a husband-and-wife learn to enjoy each other more, and to do better at the job of marriage. Just getting away for the retreat can be enjoyable in itself.

Just as with marriage counseling, dragging an unmotivated spouse to a marriage retreat will be a disappointing, frustrating, and unenjoyable experience.

(4:03)

If your spouse is not yet ready for something like a marriage retreat, you may need to do some work on your own to get your spouse to the place where he or she would want to go. Coaching can help you with the skills for getting your spouse to enjoy the relationship more and to be more motivated to work together on your relationship.

Coaching is often the beginning of a path to getting a spouse to become more hopeful and motivated to work on the relationship together.

Marriage retreats don’t require disclosure.

Because you won’t be meeting with a counselor in marriage retreats, they are often more comfortable for people who don’t like to talk about their problems, or who are afraid of being blamed by their counselor. There is no chance for a counselor to take sides in a retreat, because you are learning as part of an audience and your issues remain private.

(4:56)

My personal favorite retreat for couples is called Weekend to Remember. This retreat has sound Christian values for marriage and has many locations. Your church or denomination may also offer marriage retreats.

Marriage retreats are not helpful during an affair.

As you might be able to guess, a marriage retreat is not going to be helpful for ending your spouse’s affair. Spouses who are having affairs are not motivated to build their relationship, because that would remove their justification for having the affair. Even so, marriage retreats can have their place later on in the reconciling process. 

Once your spouse’s affair has ended, a marriage retreat can help your marriage to continue on in a positive way. So keep that in mind for later on. Some people like to go to marriage retreats periodically as a refresher on how to keep the love alive in their relationship.

(5:52)

How about marriage counseling?

Good marriage counselors will teach the kinds of skills that you would learn in a marriage retreat. However, in addition to that, the counselor will help you both to talk to each other about important areas of conflict in a controlled environment. This can help to reduce conflict, promote understanding, and teach communication skills. 

When problems are resulting from misunderstanding or failure to communicate, marriage counseling is an excellent choice. Once misunderstandings have been cleared up, and the counselors repertoire of skills has been exhausted, progress often stops. When it does, repeatedly rehashing the same issues won’t lead to more progress.

Marriage counseling does not tend to be helpful for ending affairs.

Why not marriage counseling for ending an affair?

What do you suppose happens when a couple goes to marriage counseling and only one of them is motivated to improve the relationship? If you think the counselor works to convince the reluctant spouse to work on the marriage, then you are mostly wrong.

(6:57)

A few counselors do try this, with the result that the reluctant spouse feels ganged up on and does not return to counseling. There is nothing that the counselor can do that will motivate a reluctant spouse to work on their relationship, let alone give up an affair.

When people who are having affairs go to marriage counseling, it is not because a spouse wants to give up an affair. If they did, they would have given it up already. Most of the time, they are just trying to help the faithful spouse adjust to the reality of the situation.

Occasionally, people who are having affairs will go to counseling to appear to be working on the relationship, mainly to prevent divorce or separation. People who want to have their cake and eat it too, know their spouse isn’t going anywhere as long as the marriage counseling is going on. For this reason, people can be in marriage counseling for years, all the while an affair is going on.

(7:55)

Marriage counseling with unmotivated spouses

To get away with an affair, a spouse may to go counseling to pretend to be working on the relationship. If that is the case, they  minimally participate in sessions. They also don’t follow through with counseling homework. This is because they are trying to keep emotional distance in their marriage.

People who want to have an affair, while also keeping their marriage, must maintain a balance which prevents their spouse from leaving, while also preventing the relationship from becoming very close. In such a case, you will clearly be able to see that when you get closer, your spouse becomes more distant, and when you become more distant your spouse becomes closer.

People who are having affairs, whether separated or not, are not motivated to become emotionally close. If they became close, they would lose all justification for having an affair.

Marriage counseling during an affair

Experienced, ethical counselors make it quite clear in marriage counseling that if an affair is going on, that the joint counseling will not help to build the relationship. The couple may continue in counseling to work on getting along in preparation for co-parenting or amicable divorce.

(9:09)

Ethical counselors make clear that in order to work on building the marriage, the affair must stop first.

In fact, the unfaithful spouse must stop all contact with the affair partner.

Often the counselor will recommend that husband and wife get into their own, individual, counseling, with the idea that they will have couples counseling in the future. This mainly benefits the counselor and is not a good path to reconciling. The individual sessions will NOT be used by the therapist to persuade the cheating spouse to give up their affair.

Perhaps one of the worst things about marriage counseling for an affair is that it creates delays that allow the cheating spouse to have his or her cake and eat it too. It provides the reassurance the cheating spouse often desires–that their marriage is not ending.

(10:00)

If you can imagine the frustration and building resentment that occurs with ongoing marriage counseling, with a spouse that continues to have an affair, then you will have a good sense of what it is like to be in marriage counseling with an unfaithful partner.

Can marriage counseling play any role in ending affairs?

I think that marriage counseling can help couples to talk, who otherwise can’t. This can be useful for discovering problem areas, if they were previously unknown. If you have no idea why your spouse might enjoy someone else other than you, marriage counseling could help you to discover some of your own areas of weakness in maintaining relationships.

Once you have this clarification however, further marriage counseling is not likely to be helpful for the reasons I already mentioned. If you do want to use marriage counseling to learn about how you might have contributed to marriage problems, then I recommend making that clear at the outset.

(11:00)

You can say something like:

I would like to go to marriage counseling so that I can discover how I contributed to our marriage problems and don’t make the same mistakes in my future relationships. 

If your spouse doesn’t want to do this, or says that you are in no way to blame, then there is no value in going to marriage counseling while the affair continues.

If you try to use marriage counseling in this situation to help your spouse understand how you feel, in the hopes it will make your spouse give up the affair, you are in for a lot of sadness. Your spouse will either apologize that it hurt you so much, while continuing the affair, or justify having the affair by blaming you for it. 

On the plus side, if you use marriage counseling to express your feelings, you will be able to get out your feelings in a safe environment. On the minus side, you’ll feel even worse about your spouse. From a counselor’s perspective, this is good for helping you to let go of your spouse in case the relationship ends. From a coach’s perspective it is not good because instead of creating connection or desirability, it just creates distance and bad feelings.

(12:14)

Counselors‘ primary concern is your emotional well-being. Coaches’ primary concern is your relationship skills. Understanding this can also guide you one way or the other depending on your primary needs.

How about marriage counseling once the affair has ended?

Marriage counseling can be useful once the affair has ended, provided your spouse is motivated to work on building your relationship. Remember that for couples counseling to work, both people must be motivated for the same goal. Otherwise it will create more distance, just like it would at home.

Once the affair has ended, both of you can talk in counseling about your relationship prior to the affair, and how you two can both work on improving relationship satisfaction going forward. This is most useful when the relationship prior to the affair was unsatisfactory.

(13:08)

Many people, men especially, will have an affair even if their relationship is good, if they feel very secure about not losing their spouse.

Couples counseling is not going to be very helpful after the affair if the relationship was good prior to the affair. More important would be having good boundaries going forward to prevent affairs from continuing to happen. Such boundaries training is uncommon in marriage or individual counseling. Boundaries training is also not part of marriage retreats. On the other hand, you can get extensive boundaries training in individual coaching.

In the absence of particular issues, it might be much more helpful to go to a marriage retreat following the end of an affair.

(13:57)

Hopefully, my discussion up to this point has helped you to learn when it would be most useful to go to marriage counseling, or to attend a marriage retreat. Now let’s consider the role relationship coaching plays in ending affairs.

Relationship coaching is an individual approach

Getting a spouse to give up an affair requires several skills. It is NOT helpful if your spouse is present while you learn those skills. It is better if the cheating spouse does not even know if their spouse is in coaching.

Just as with counselors, not all coaches do the same things. I will talk about what I do.

There are three main groups of skills that my clients focus on to end their spouse’s affair:

An effective approach to having success and ending a spouse’s affair is to help your spouse to value you as much as possible, while having good boundaries which do not allow your spouse to have his or her cake and eat it too. In days gone by, this is what single people would do to build their relationship before marriage, maintaining good boundaries until the wedding ring was on the finger.

(15:03)

This approach is still the best way to start a relationship, rather than the no boundaries, do whatever feels good approach.

The two main things that you can do to increase your value are to work on how desirable you are to your spouse, and how connected your spouse feels to you. Both of these things result because of changes that you make. You can’t convince your spouse to desire you, but you can be the kind of person that your spouse desires. You can’t convince your spouse to feel connected to you, but you can have the kind of interactions that gradually helps your spouse to feel more and more connected to you.

Perhaps you can imagine what it is like for people who start to live their lives again, with energy and positivity. It brings a freshness and helps their spouse to see in them something they haven’t seen for a long time. The relaxed and friendly interactions help to build the relationship, while the boundaries make their spouse more interested in recommitting to them.

(16:05)

Can you imagine becoming the kind of person who will make your spouse feel like it is a big mistake to choose someone else over you? If you can, then you can imagine what it is like to work on these things in coaching and you can understand better how coaching is a positive and secure approach.

Let your experience be your guide in choosing the right service for your situation.

Do you have an empathetic spouse who is happy to give up an affair if it means improving the relationship with you in marriage counseling? If so, you have a motivated spouse and I recommend you make an appointment with a marriage counselor–provided that your spouse end the affair first.

On the other hand, have you found that talking to your spouse about his or her affair only leads to frustration, conflict, and shutting down? That you get blamed when you are actually the victim? In that case, individual coaching would be a far better choice for you.

(17:10)

Coaching greatly improves your chances to end an affair which is in progress

Many people have trouble trying to do affair interventions on their own, because they often try to move too fast, or don’t know how to respond to their spouse’s behavior or words. The three main things that I do to help people to and their spouse’s affair, is to help them to increase desirability and connection, while using appropriate boundaries.

I also help people to have the correct pace to avoid getting resistance or rejection which can slow down or prevent progress.

Whenever you encounter resistance, you can also look for the same sorts of problems that I do. You’re either starting off with the wrong steps, not coming across in a way which builds connection, or are trying to move too fast. Any one of those can prevent you from making progress.

(18:04)

If that happens repeatedly for you, I recommend that you hire a relationship coach to help you do the right steps, in the right order, at the right pace. If you would like to work with me, I have a coaching package designed especially for people who want to end their spouse’s affair. You can find it along with my other coaching packages at coachjackito.com.

(18:28)

[Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.