It can be terrible to find out your lover has cheated. You might get hurt, angry, sad, or even physically sick. But above all, you might be asking, ‘Why’? And how will you recover from this?
Dr. Talal Alsaleem, PsyD, LMFT, the father of modern infidelity counseling, is an award-winning licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in helping people recover from infidelity—whether alone or as a couple.
He teaches how to use the trauma of an affair to rediscover, establish, and maintain healthy relationships with oneself and others through a trademarked seven-step methodology known as the Systematic Affair Recovery Therapy (SART) treatment program.
In addition to offering intensive, one-on-one weekend retreats for couples ready to dive deep and address issues head-on versus spread treatment out over the course of weeks or months, Dr. Talal also shares his proven framework with other clinicians via CE-credited training and lectures.
His book, Infidelity: The Best Worst Thing that Could Happen to Your Marriage, is available on Amazon.com, and you can find his docuseries, The Infidelity Chronicles, via YouTube.
In this episode hosted by Aditi Kutty, Dr. Talal defined relationships as partnerships that people enter with other individuals, and those partnerships are based on the expected promise of need fulfillment reciprocity.
He said that infidelity is considered to be unfaithfulness, even when you have two people in a relationship, and that most people would say people cheat because some are not happy with their partner or relationship — to satisfaction, it is true that one of the leading causes of infidelity, but it’s not the only one.
Dr. Talal also argues that you may have seen or been in those relationships where you just don’t get it. You see people who seem to be compatible; they seem to be with the right partner who is willing and ready to fulfill their needs, but despite that, they deal with infidelity. He added that sometimes infidelity happens because of an individual factor that has nothing to do with the relationship and that sometimes this happens because of an environmental factor that is bigger than the relationship.
Moreover, Dr. Talal shared some ways to fix broken relationships and best practices to avoid infidelity in a romantic relationship. In order to fix relationships, people can attend infidelity counseling sessions. And one way to prevent infidelity is by doing a system check, which includes being honest with yourself about what individual issues you have that have impacted the life that you haven’t dealt with, assessing yourself, and making sure that those issues are treated well.
There are ways to heal from infidelity. People who experience this can seek infidelity counseling. The goal of infidelity counseling should not be repairing their relationship; rather, the goal of infidelity counseling should be healing from this trauma to ensure that it doesn’t control your life.
Regardless of whether it allows you to pair the relationship or if you’re going to go your separate ways, this will still be a helpful way for you. And there are a lot of people who are able and willing to repair their relationship and make it better and stronger than it was before.
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