What to Expect During a 3-Day Affair Recovery Intensive

If you’re thinking about a 3-day affair recovery intensive in California, you might be wondering: What on earth are we going to talk about for three full days?? I completely understand the hesitation—this is a big investment of time, energy, and money. Your relationship is on the line, and it may feel like one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. That’s why I’m breaking down what actually happens in a 3-day affair recovery intensive, so you know what to expect and can move forward with confidence.

A typical format for my affair recovery intensives in California includes 4 hours of meeting time each day for 3 days. While every intensive is different because I tailor it specifically for each couple based on their needs and goals, the basic outline is always similar.

Day 1: Creating Safety and Stability

Since the affair has come to light, you and your partner have been having some difficult and emotionally charged conversations. You’re likely stuck in patterns that aren't serving you. They are the patterns that lead to yelling, shutting down, and feeling like you’re not being heard or understood. Day 1 of the 3-day affair recovery intensive is about understanding your emotional reactions and tracking your conflict patterns so that discussions will begin to feel productive.

I begin with outlining your goals for the intensive and then I use an assessment to help us understand the thoughts that are particularly triggering to you and your partner. This tool is important because we will return to it on the last day of your intensive and you will be able to see the growth and changes that have occurred during our time together.

I also introduce the Brainspotting process, which will be used to help you feel a sense of safety within yourself and with your partner. This helps to set the stage for the open dialogue that needs to happen as we move forward in the next two days.

Day 2: Processing the Betrayal

Day 2 of your affair recovery intensive in California is about processing the betrayal from a clear and grounded place. We address many of the questions that you may have if you have been the partner who was betrayed. You have likely already asked many questions and might find yourself asking the same questions over and over again as you try to make sense of what’s happened. While this is a typical pattern for couples in your position, it is also draining. I will help you discern and understand the need behind your questions so the conversation is fruitful.

I also slow things down and continue to identify patterns that are keeping you stuck. I allow space for you and your partner to pause, and I use various interventions to help you each understand your core attachment wounds that are being triggered by the affair and by your partner. Doing these interventions will allow you to have more capacity to hear your partner and to speak from your heart so they can understand you in a deeper way.

During day 2, we also begin to understand the patterns that have existed in the relationship that led to the affair.

Day 3: Reconnection and Moving Forward

On Day 3 of the intensive, we focus on rebuilding trust. One of the reasons these 3-day affair recovery intensives in California are so effective is because simply being present as your partner uncovers their core attachment wounds helps strengthen your bond. By holding space for those intimate, vulnerable conversations, you create new opportunities to support and reconnect with each other.

We also focus on making agreements that are necessary to help you feel connected and supported going forward. I help you identify practices that will help you continue healing in a healthy way. We also revisit your assessment from day 1 so you can see the progress you have each made individually and as a couple through our work together.

The Benefits of a 3-Day Affair Recovery Intensive in California

In their final assessment, most couples have a significant shift in the way they feel. They find they are sleeping better, they have fewer ruminating thoughts and less anxiety, they feel a sense of connection with one another—despite having had some really difficult conversations—and they feel more regulated and able to continue moving forward.

How Preparation Sessions Support the 3-Day Intensive

In order to dive right into this three-day process, you will begin with an initial consultation and a couple of prep sessions. The initial consultation session is typically done online with both you and your partner—we discuss your goals, your relationship history, and briefly go over your conflict pattern.

I also meet individually with each partner prior to the intensive. This allows me to better understand your personal history, including any past trauma, as well as your unique concerns, perspectives, and needs in the relationship. These one-on-one sessions help ensure that both partners feel fully seen and supported, and they give me important insight into how to guide you as a couple through the healing process.

Begin Your Healing Journey

Walking into a 3-day affair recovery intensive in California can feel overwhelming at first—but knowing what to expect brings comfort and clarity. Over the course of those three days, you’ll move from the raw pain of betrayal toward deeper understanding, guided conversations, and the beginnings of rebuilding trust.

👉 If you’d like a deeper look at how intensives work and why they’re so effective, check out The Ultimate Guide to Affair Recovery Intensives. And if you’re ready to begin your own healing journey, click here to schedule a consultation and take the first step toward your 3-day affair recovery intensive California couples experience.

Navigating Anger After an Affair: Why It’s Essential in the Healing Process

If you’ve recently discovered your partner’s affair, the emotional impact can feel absolutely devastating. First and foremost, I want to say: I’m so sorry. The wave of emotions you're experiencing—sadness, fear, confusion, and yes, anger—are not only valid, they’re a completely normal part of the process.

Many couples who come to me for affair recovery intensives are surprised by the depth of their emotional reactions. Often, the one emotion that feels the most overwhelming—and the most taboo—is anger.

But here’s the truth: anger has a place in the healing process. It’s not only normal, it’s necessary.

Why Anger After an Affair Makes Sense

When we experience betrayal, anger is often our psyche’s way of saying, “This is not okay. Something must change.”

Whether you’ve seen unhealthy expressions of anger in your past—like rage, violence, or passive-aggression—or you’ve been taught to suppress it entirely, many of us carry unhealthy beliefs about what it means to feel or show anger. Especially for women, anger can be labeled as "irrational" or "crazy," leading people to fear the emotion itself.

But anger is not the problem. What you do with your anger is what matters.

In couples therapy for high performing individuals, I often help clients reframe anger as a signal, not a threat. It tells us when boundaries have been crossed, when a pattern must change, or when a part of ourselves needs to be acknowledged. In the context of couples therapy and intensives for couples, we create space for anger to be expressed in a healthy, constructive way.

Unhealthy vs. Healthy Anger

It’s true that some expressions of anger—like yelling, throwing things, or slamming doors—might feel cathartic in the moment, but they usually lead to regret and further disconnect. That doesn’t mean anger itself is wrong. It means we need tools to express it differently.

In my affair recovery intensives and couples retreats in CA, I help couples navigate this often-volatile emotion. We explore:

• What the anger is trying to communicate

• How it can lead to healthy boundaries

• Why honoring anger can create movement toward healing

And most importantly, how to express it in a way that leads to reconnection rather than rupture.

Anger as a Catalyst for Change

Anger is not always a sign that the relationship is over. In fact, it can be the very thing that wakes us up to the reality that something must shift. It can be the beginning of a new conversation, one where both partners learn to listen more deeply and speak more honestly.

If you’re struggling with anger after infidelity, know that you don’t have to process it alone. An intensive for couples offers the time, space, and structure needed to dive into difficult emotions like anger without fear of judgment. These intensives are designed to help high-achieving, driven individuals and couples find clarity, healing, and direction—especially when traditional weekly therapy just isn’t enough.

Ready to Begin Healing?

If anger feels scary, overwhelming, or out of control, you’re not broken. You're human.

Let’s work together to create a space where that anger can be heard, understood, and transformed. Whether you're considering an affair recovery intensive, a couples retreat in California, or focused couples therapy tailored for high performers—I’m here to help guide you through it.

💬 Reach out to schedule a consultation. Your healing deserves dedicated time and care.

What leads to an Affair?

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how people give themselves permission to have affairs. I know they don’t do it outright - it’s not the first thing their minds jump to. But when I’m sitting with a couple, the betrayed partner always wants to know, how did this happen? 

What I've learned is that there is a cascade of things that happen in the primary relationship before an affair happens, and I want to share a few of those things with you.  

This can help you either look at your own relationship and work on things so you don’t get to that point, or if you’re in the trenches of affair recovery, it will help you understand how you and your partner got there. 

Just as a caveat, I’m in no way blaming the betrayed partner here for their partner’s choice to step outside the relationship. That was their poor choice, and sometimes that choice has nothing to do with them being in an unhappy marriage. (I think that’s important to note before we dive in.)

Before there is even a thought of an affair, many times an erosion begins to happen in the relationship. This erosion chips away at all of the factors that help couples build trust, opening them up for such a vulnerability. 

The erosion begins with feelings of loneliness. Couples stop turning towards one another and reciprocating one another’s bids for connection. Some examples are: when you feel like every time you walk through the door and say hello, your partner is too busy for a hug or a kiss. Or when you invite your partner to sit next to you on the couch, and they miss your subtle gesture and move into another room or on the opposite end of the living room. 

You may be the one missing the bids for connection - your partner begins to talk about their day, but you’re busy scrolling on your phone or checking the scores of last night’s game and don’t even hear what they have to say. 

Those are just a few examples. You or your partner may be reaching out to one another in a bunch of different ways, and not having your bids for connection reciprocated takes a toll. 

When your partner doesn’t reciprocate your bids for connection you make meaning of that, and the meaning that people tend to make is, “I’m not important,” or “what I have to say isn’t important.” When you internalize those types of thoughts, you can start to feel lonely and even stop making those bids for connection. 

The distance between partners grows when no one is reaching out to connect. 

After the connection stops couples can start to live parallel lives. They pass one another, make plans with friends or coworkers, or focus only on their kids. They have logistical communication - where are you going? What time will you be back? What’s for dinner? And stop having the connective type of communication that is so important to keeping marriage strong, “How are you feeling this week? What have you been thinking about?” 

At this point couples can find it difficult to reconnect - sometimes it’s easier to keep focusing on the kids or work  because you don’t know where to begin, or feel timid in making that connection out of fear of rejection. 

At this phase it can start to feel like your partner isn’t there for you. So seeking comfort outside of the relationship through friendships is common, but also dangerous. Spending time out after work, having drinks with colleagues, or staying late at the office begins to feel better than coming home to an empty marriage. 

During this stage, conflict can be high or avoided. When it’s avoided, partners begin to suppress their feelings, and then they tend to have big blow-ups over things that might be insignificant on the surface, but are more indicative of the feelings underneath - “I’m lonely, and I want to connect with you!” But saying those things might just feel too vulnerable. 

When conflict is avoided, self disclosure is also something that is commonly avoided. You no longer want to tell your partner all about your terrible boss, or run through all of the items on your to-do list for the next day because you internalize that they don’t care, or it’s not important. You may even begin to keep secrets from your partner. 

Keeping secrets can begin to happen quite innocently, because it is often done as an attempt to keep from burdening your partner. You might think, “she’s so busy with the kids, she doesn’t want to hear about all my work stress,” or “he’s so stressed with his own work, I don’t need to bore him with my work stresses.” 

You or your partner may then turn outside the relationship and begin confiding in a coworker, or someone who is part of your workout crew at the gym. Things typically start pretty innocently. But the moment you begin minimizing your partner’s positive traits and maximizing their negative ones, it can become a slippery slope. 

Actively looking towards others in an attempt to feel less lonely, more heard, and understood, can lead in all the wrong directions, and an innocent outing with coworkers, can lead to more and more one-on-one time with a member of the opposite sex that you feel connected to.  

I could go on about how that outside relationship can continue to develop, but I’ll stop here. This is where I hope you’ll stop and begin to recognize that looking outside the relationship is not the answer, even when it seems innocent, but it’s a wake up call that you need to do the difficult work to reconnect with your partner.  

2 Ways to Restore Trust

The road to rebuilding trust is a long one. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it takes commitment. If there’s been a trust violation in your relationship then this post is for you.

I bet you remember a time when trust was just there, it wasn't something you had to work for, or something your partner had to work for. In the beginning of relationships we typically go into them with a neutral playing field, and trust isn’t questioned - until it is.

Trust violations come in all different forms. In my practice I help couples work through some major trust violations such as infidelity. Some of the questions I often get in the first session when a couple discloses the trust violation that occurred is, “do you think this is fixable?”

That’s a pretty loaded question. One that I can’t readily answer based on what I learn in one 50-minute session. But that’s because it takes time to understand each partner’s investment in the relationship. If both partners are committed and are willing to really look at themselves and do the work in therapy, then yes, most things are fixable.

Another question I get asked often is, “do you consider this cheating?” I’ve had couples tell me about one partner creating a private social media account and flirting with the opposite sex and chatting through those accounts. I’ve had couples tell me about emotional affairs with coworkers that never become physical, but where love was professed and exchanged through emails. I’ve also sat with couples where one or both partners have had one night stands, or physical relationships outside the marriage for months or even years.

The point isn’t about what I think, or how I define cheating - and my answer is always the same: what does your partner think? If your partner defines your behavior as something that’s violated their trust, then that’s all that really matters.

So what do you do once the trust has been broken? How do you get it back?

Well, the first thing you need is patience. This doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen with one or even multiple “I’m sorries.”

Today I’m going to share 3 things you can do to restore trust in your relationship.

Let me just first start by saying that rebuilding trust can take months and even years in some cases, so if you’re looking for a quick fix, you’re not going to find it – but in the grand scheme of life, this is just a season in your relationship and commitment is about knowing  this relationship is your lifelong journey and no matter what, you’re going to do what it takes to make things work.

The two things I’m going to share with you represent only a short list of things that you can do to work on rebuilding trust and it might take some trial and error to get them right so patience is key!

Alright, let’s get into it, shall we?

The first thing you can do to rebuild trust in your relationship is to be open and honest. If you’ve been unfaithful and hurt your partner, the number one thing you can do is answer all of their questions openly, honestly, and without getting defensive.

If you screwed up you’ve gotta own that shit!

The biggest mistake people make is trying to protect their partner from the truth. They think, “if I just tell my partner a little bit of what happened, then they won’t be so hurt,” but what ends up happening is you give them a little, and then they bring it up again, and in that conversation you give a little more, and the next conversation, a little more.

Each time you give more than you did the first time, you negate any progress you’ve made. Your partner won’t see you as honest, and they will continue to sniff for clues, and pepper you with questions, expecting that there will be more they don’t yet know about - which keeps the cycle going.

It’s totally normal to want to shield your partner out of fear for hurting them, but it does much more damage in the long run so be open and honest from the get go.

Just as an aside – you might be wondering why your partner is asking the same questions over and over, maybe just in different ways. This is also very normal.

Betrayal is incredibly difficult to deal with. When your partner finds out you’ve cheated, they are really struggling to make sense of everything. The life that they thought they had, and the relationship they felt solid about is now no longer the same. They begin to question whether or not they ever really knew you because they were likely under the assumption that you’d never do something like that.

Asking the same questions over and over is a trauma response. When people’s lives get turned upside down, it’s just their attempt to make sense of what they once felt very normal about – the life and the relationship they didn’t question.

The second thing you can do to rebuild trust is to hold vigil for the relationship. This is a concept I talk about extensively when I’m helping a couple in therapy. Holding vigil for the relationship means that you hold the responsibility for bringing up the transgression.

As you work to communicate after an affair you’ll come to see the things that trigger your partner, and in those moments, it’s your duty to acknowledge that trigger and offer an apology, and the opportunity for them to talk.

For example, if you had extensive inappropriate text exchanges with someone outside of your relationship, it would be normal for your partner to feel triggered every time they see you on your phone. So the next time you’re texting on your phone – before you even see your partner become uncomfortable, you need to be the one to bring it up.

Say something like, “I’m sorry babe, I’m just responding to some work texts. I know this is a trigger for you, and if you want to talk, just know I’m here and I’m committed to working on our relationship.”

The worst thing you can do is try and fly under the radar, pray that your partner doesn’t bring it up, and move on even though you see their discomfort. You need to be empathetic to what your partner is going through – when a trigger comes up, betrayed partners get flooded with anxiety. Things might have been going well that day, and then this trigger comes up, and they struggle with whether to bring it up or not. Of course they don’t want to ruin a good day, but they are also afraid that things will get pushed under the rug, and you’ll forget about their pain. This is a really difficult position to be in, in addition to the hurt they have been dealing with because of the betrayal.     

Recovering from an affair is one of the most difficult things a couple can go through, but it is possible. Just remember what I said about the length of time it takes to rebuild trust, and don’t lose hope, because one of the best predictors of recovery is a couple’s ability to continue to hold hope for the relationship.

If that seems daunting, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. As a therapist I am the holder of hope, and the couple’s biggest cheerleader when they sit on my couch, and their hope is lost.

Needing therapy doesn’t mean that your relationship is over, it’s a sign that you are willing to try what you haven’t before to repair the damage that’s been done.

When Good People Cheat: The Unmet Needs Affair

“I never meant for this to happen,” is what I typically hear when I sit down with someone who has been unfaithful to their partner.

I genuinely believe them when they tell me this because doing this work, I’ve heard from plenty of partners who have strayed in some fashion, and this is a common thread. They are good people, and they’ve made a mistake, and it’s not my job to judge, but to help them understand what lead to their behaviors so that they can prevent it from happening again.

There are many types of affairs. The most common one that I see is what Mira Kirchenbaum calls, the “unmet needs” affair. In her book, When Good People have Affairs, she outlines many types of affairs and I often recommend her book to clients who have or are having an affair because it can really help them understand their behaviors better, in conjunction with the work we do in session.

The unmet needs affair happens when you feel as though there is something missing in your relationship with your partner.

It could be sex, intimacy, or intelligent conversation. But focusing on one aspect of the relationship that is missing is a trap, and many times people only come to realize what they’ve been missing after they’ve already crossed the line.

When you look outside of your relationship for that one unmet need, you are essentially negating all of the many other positive aspects that likely exist in your relationship.

A whole, healthy, relationship only includes sex or conversation as a very small piece that makes up the relationship, however the trap occurs when you begin to see this piece as a gaping hole – it has the potential to become everything, and with the help of an affair partner, you begin to negate the many other positive aspects that you once based your relationship on.

Getting involved with someone else in order to fulfill this unmet need is typically clouded by the electrifying rush that happens in new relationships. It’s quite normal for people to see their affair partner as the most amazing person they’ve ever met, however an affair relationship is only a façade – it exists in a vacuum, and lacks much of the other important aspects that secure, long-term relationships need to survive.

Using another person to fulfill that one aspect that was missing from your marriage is fundamentally flawed because without fully knowing your affair partner, you are unable to see all of their true characteristics, as this relationship will also have missing aspects to it.

If you think back to the beginning of your marriage, I’m sure there were fireworks. Things in the beginning of relationships tend to be intense and full of passion.

I once read that falling in love has the same impact as a drug on the brain. It’s easy to become addicted to that feeling, and those intense emotions cloud your judgment.

The beginning of a relationship is when you go out of your way for that other person – you stay up all night talking even if you’ve got to be at work at 7am, you write silly love poems, and drive an hour both ways just to spend an hour in the arms of your love.

If you’re stuck in the difficult spot of having already crossed the line and engaged in an affair to fulfill a need that was lacking in your marriage, you’re not alone. I know that there is a great deal of shame and pain that comes from making that decision, but there is also support for you to right your wrongs.

Although the road is long and difficult, I’ve seen some wonderful things come from those who are willing to look at themselves, their decisions, and learn from their mistakes.

Relationships can be repaired, and that shame can go away, but the first step is asking for help. If you could use some support and want to begin the process of understanding your behavior, give me a call at (909) 226-6124, and we can talk about ways therapy can help.