Highly regarded relationship experts have expressed how a couple can heal after an affair.
American doctors John and Julie Gottman made an appearance on The Diary Of A CEO podcast, with host Steven Bartlett, and spoke of how a couple can rebuild their life together after someone commits an infidelity.
The doctors have been together for 36 years and don’t believe there’s such thing as ‘the one’, and that 75 per cent of relationships can be 'treated' and 'cured'.
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Having developed a three-step method to help this process, Julie said: “We developed a model based on our research called atone, attune and attach. The AAA model and here's what in a nutshell it involves.
“First the person who did the betraying needs to respond totally transparently to every question the hurt partner asks them, however, the hurt partner shouldn't ask about the kind of sex they had.”
The pair went on to explain AAA and what it means for a relationship to move on.
Atonement Phase
The pair explained how the person who was betrayed need to be able to express how they feel without criticising the person who cheated.
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It’s hard to navigate this, but Julie explained that if she had been cheated on, she’d have some pretty strong feelings too.
She said: “I feel destroyed, I feel like my world has fallen apart, I feel so empty, so abandoned, so rejected, so she has to describe, or he has to describe their own feelings... so that's the atonement phase.”
Basically, you express how you feel without saying ‘you made me feel’ or ‘because of what you did’.
Attune Phase
In the attune phase, the doctors shared how the marriage or relationship went wrong and its flaws.
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The expert said: “A lot of times what you see are couples who at first might have had terrible conflict, it was so bad they started avoiding conflict, once they avoided conflict, they got more emotionally distant and the person who did the betraying got lonely.
“So oftentimes the affairs are not about just getting more sex, they're about loneliness and beginning to talk to somebody else about how unhappy they are.”
Attach Phase
The third and final phase is something that Julie calls ‘attach’, as it’s about recommitting to each other.
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She said: “In many cases, I've seen the sexual relationship doesn't resume until phase three, especially if the woman is the one who's been betrayed, but there are some where the woman will kind of throw herself at the man sexually to compete with the affair partner and be better than the affair partner, so you know it can be both.”
Steven then asked whether they had known of a case where cheating had helped a relationship, and Julie shared: “Very often when they get help.
“If they don't get help, it's not going to, you know it's worse, but when they get help it can help them change all the patterns in the relationship and help them learn who the other person really is, what their needs really are, how they want you to turn up in the relationship that they had no idea of before, so it can create more intimacy, different kind of trust, of course, but more intimacy and more connection.”
Topics: Sex and Relationships, Podcast, YouTube
Britt Jones