Marilyn Verbiscer – Healing from the Trauma of Infidelity: Help Clients Rebuild Trust and Find Forgiveness After an Affair

• Help your clients recover from an affair whether they are healing with their partner or alone
• Infidelity affects approximately 50% of committed relationships…and you need to be prepared to work with these clients
• Innovative in-session strategies and take home assignments for couples
• Be more confident treating high conflict couples

Are you uncomfortable working with couples whose lives have been shattered by infidelity?

I’m sure you are because they ARE some of the most difficult and intimidating clients to work with as they bring so much trauma and conflict to the therapy room. But it doesn’t have to be this way for you…

This workshop will help you expand your therapeutic tool box with practical and clinically relevant in-session interventions to more effectively work with couples or an individual after an affair. You will also be provided with proven, unique, creative and fun homework assignments for your clients who are healing from the trauma of infidelity.

You will leave this workshop with more confidence and a solid treatment plan for helping your clients recover from an affair whether they are healing with their partner or alone.

1. Analyze the 6 difference types of infidelities and how they affect treatment differently.
2. Determine why and how relationships become vulnerable to infidelity.
3. Evaluate the trauma of the discovery and its impact on treatment.
4. Incorporate strategies for helping your clients rebuild trust.
5. Communicate the importance to couples for creating meaning and understanding of the affair.
6. Develop your skills to guide your clients through the process of fostering forgiveness.
7. Explore the different treatment techniques for clients who are left to heal alone.

Types of Infidelity and Their Impact of Treatment

• Physical Affair
• Emotional Affair
• Physical-Emotional Affair
• Atypical Infidelity, Complex Affairs and
• Split-Self Infidelity

Gender, Vulnerabilities and Opportunities

• Genetic Predispositions
• Warning Signs
• Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater?
• Opportunity in the Work Place, with
• Previous Partners and on the Internet
• Why and How it Happens

Rebuilding Trust Phase of Infidelity Treatment

• Trauma of the Revelation
• Oral History Interview and No Secrets Contract
• Assessing Trauma and PTSD Symptomology and Teaching Self-Soothing
• The Hallmarks of Salvageability
• Trigger Warnings
• High and Low Cost Trust Building Behaviors

Create Understanding and Meaning Phase of Therapy

• Why You Strayed…and Why You Stayed
• The Slippery Slope and Walls v Windows
• 4 Factors That Set the Context
• Create the List of Changes
• The Miracle Question

Fostering Forgiveness Phase of Treatment

• The Formal Apology Session
• What Forgiveness Is, What It Isn’t and the Potential Payoffs.
• The Choice and Repercussions of Not Forgiving
• Self-Forgiveness, Cheap Forgiveness and Genuine Forgiveness
• The Mistaken Assumptions and
• Maladaptive Personal Beliefs about Forgiveness

Recommitment Phase of Healing

• Building Rituals of Connection
• Reclaiming Places, People and Events
• Tarnished By the Affair
• Celebration to Signify Mutual Recommitment
• Vision of Marriage
• Reversing Walls v Windows
• Building Other Protective Factors

Healing Alone Is Better Than Not At All

• Individual Change is Relationship Change
• Even When the Partner Isn’t In Therapy
• Grieving the Loss When the Partner
• Divorces or Dies
• Trusting Again
• Healthy Social Networks, Support Groups and Seminars/Retreats
• Begin a New Life

More courses from the same author: Marilyn Verbiscer