There are many different conscious and unconscious factors that contribute to a situation in which infidelity occurs. Not all couples addressing issues of infidelity are treated effectively by the same approach. As a marriage and family therapist, I constantly observe my interventions in therapy and seek to integrate ideas espoused by my colleagues. I find my experience with clients to be a great teacher in addition to all of the techniques and theories found in textbooks and workshops. I am convinced that there is no one right way that is effective for all. With identities altered to protect privacy, the following are some examples of my experiences:

Early in my practice I had been working with Eric for about three months. Then, I attended a workshop on marital therapy. Fortified with a weekend of wisdom from one whose ages of practice imbued him with credibility and authority, I proceeded to encourage Eric to interrupt a process he was experiencing. He had been juggling a marriage and a sexual relationship with his secretary for the last two years of his fourteen-year marriage. Following the workshop blueprint, I suggested that Eric either tell his wife about his lover or discontinue the affair. Eric, who had been very open and vulnerable in therapy, came in for one more session in which he seriously considered the options I posed to him. He never came back again. At the time I saw Eric as resistant to therapy; I don't anymore.

Paul came to see me shortly after he had been divorced. He had originally gone to a therapist individually to deal with his affair. When Paul expressed ambivalence about ending the affair, the counselor insisted that he tell his wife. Trusting that this would be helpful somehow, he followed this guidance. His wife divorced him immediately. Paul is bitter and depressed over the loss of his ten-year marriage and his three children. He didn't want the divorce. His deepest anger was with himself for trusting someone else's judgment about his life rather than his own unfolding process and sense of timing.

Other individuals get caught in a repetitive pattern. After ending an affair and brief work on ways to improve the marriage, the individual terminates therapy only to come back later in the same situation.

Juanita came in to see me after moving to Georgia about a year before. She had been married twenty years, enjoyed being a wife and mother, but now was involved in her fourth affair. She came asking me to tell her to end the affair. I told her I didn't care if she continued the affair or not; it was her life that was involved, not mine. For months she angrily struggled with me, insisting that since I was a marriage and family therapist, and she was paying me, I should tell her what to do. I suggested she ask the mailman or the butcher. I also offered to bring in my secretary, who was excellent at telling people what they should do. Juanita stayed with it. She finally acknowledged her own responsibility for this decision and, on her own, decided to end the affair. This was a new beginning for her to explore life in a nondependent way rather than needing to find someone to tell her how to run her life.

Elaine's call for an initial appointment was very secretive. Her nervousness seeped through as she scheduled under a fictitious name and left a phantom phone number. Elaine and her husband, Douglas, were currently seeing another counselor. She had obediently told her husband that she had been having an affair. Only…she said, “It only happened once,” and “I'm not seeing him anymore.” From that point on she became swept up in a spiraling snowball of lies…with her counselor, as with her husband, as with her lover. I had no investment in Elaine's doing or telling me anything in particular.

Elaine ended up divorcing her husband, severing ties with her lover, and spending a couple of years getting more grounded within herself. She then settled into a much more satisfying relationship with a man she lived with for six months and intended to marry.

Therapists are often driven by unconscious motivations. Some feel successful is they have been able to “save the marriage.” Others feel heroic if they finally have been able to help someone “get free from that bitch/bastard.” I have heard comments like, “they should have gotten divorced five years ago,” or, “once a partner is involved in an affair, there is no way to work on the marriage while it continues.”

We all carry with us our biases, our bigotry, our blindness. We all have our opinions, our values, our judgments; so do neighbors, siblings, parents, children, friends, and bank tellers. None of us is so wise as to have a monopoly on truth. Why would someone come to a therapist and pay a lot of money for something they could get just for walking across the lawn? Confidentiality? Yes. Experience? Yes. But the greatest gift a therapist can give is direction for people to listen to themselves. It is this gift that allows people to move beyond their limits of past experience and become more of the people they have the capacity to be.