Our Process
Our Infidelity Coaching Process
At Smart Affair Repair, We Prioritize Understanding, Empathy, and Communication Through Our Infidelity Counseling Program.
Learn more about how we can help you heal from betrayal!
Our Affair Recovery Program
Welcome. I’m sorry you’re suffering. Affairs are one of the most damaging events couples can recover from. Smart Affair Repair was designed by me — Mike Kosim, LMFT — after almost 15 years of working as a Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Minnesota. I became frustrated with seeing couples whose previous therapist did not prioritize addressing the effects of the affair. I flipped conventional couples therapy to address the fact that affairs are a major injury in a marriage that needs to be prioritized in couples coaching.
When your relationship is threatened, you can experience hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, avoidance of triggering places or circumstances, and nightmares. When you experience such a damaging array of symptoms, more date nights, worksheets on “I” statements, and love language guides won’t save your marriage. There is an order of operations to follow when healing from an affair, and getting it wrong will greatly diminish its effectiveness.
Not prioritizing healing from the affair is like being attacked by a bear, running into your house to escape, and expecting to proceed with your life normally while the bear walks around your house checking your doors. Would that work for you? It didn’t work for a lot of couples I saw.
The Big Difference
You need to address all the nervous system activation that occurs when a relationship-threatening event happens. Here’s how we do that:
Radical Transparency
This Step Helps Generate Safety for the Injured Partner
1. Ensure that the affair is over. This takes several forms, including writing a letter or email with the injured partner that you both send to the affair partner.
2. Create a transparency agreement that both of you agree to. The purpose of this is to calm the injured partner’s nervous system and demonstrate that there is no current threat.
Affair Repair
Empathy: The affair-involved partner’s job now is to listen with empathy to the injured partner’s pain. Hint: we don’t have a time machine (I wish we did). Empathy and the ability to sit in all the feelings of the injured partner is how the affair-involved partner signals that “I’m back on your team.” At the same time, we help the injured partner ask for empathy so it lands. This means not getting defensive. This also means signaling when they’re at the limit of their endurance. We help you with tools to do this.
Effective Enlistment: The job of the injured partner is to ask for that empathy in a way that lands. That means reducing the anger you express while you’re asking for empathy. This can happen often, since the person you’re asking for understanding from is the person that caused you pain. But when you angrily ask someone to give you something, it tends to fall flat. We will help you with this.
Smart Affair Repair is a comprehensive, step-by-step marriage coaching program designed to help couples heal and rebuild after the devastation of an affair. By following these steps, you'll gain the tools, insights, and support necessary to transform your relationship into a stronger, more resilient partnership. Each stage of the program is crafted to guide you through the healing process, with the ultimate goal of creating a relationship that is even better than it was before.
Embark on a transformative journey with our comprehensive 4-Month Program at Smart Affair Repair, designed to guide couples towards healing and restoration after marital betrayal.
Contact us today to get started!