Affairs Counselling in Lewes

Most people who contact me after an affair are thrown by more than the affair itself. They start going back over ordinary things — an evening that now looks different, a message, a stretch of weeks when their partner seemed somewhere else — and asking what else they missed. It is common to end up doubting your own memory of the last several months, or longer.

I see this a lot. When something you believed about your relationship turns out not to be true, it becomes hard to know what else you can rely on. Sleep tends to suffer. People find it difficult to concentrate. Some want every detail and then can’t bear the details once they have them; others would rather not know very much at all. There isn’t a tidy way to react to finding out.

I’m Claire Sainsbury, an accredited member of the BACP, and I work with couples and individuals across East Sussex after infidelity. Some people come within days of finding out. Others come years later, because it was set aside at the time and has started to trouble the relationship again.

Affairs are more common than the silence suggests

Around one in five British adults say they have had an affair at some point.¹ For sexual infidelity within marriage the figure is usually put at around 18 to 20 in every hundred, though estimates move about depending on the study and on what each one counts as an affair.² Emotional affairs blur the line further.

The numbers don’t make it hurt less. They are worth knowing, though, when someone has started to believe that what has happened marks their relationship out as uniquely shameful. Couples rarely talk about this openly, which makes it easy to underestimate how often it reaches a counselling room.

Why it happened can take a while to see

There is no single reason. Opportunity can be part of it. So can dissatisfaction with sex, or with the relationship more broadly. In my experience emotional disconnection comes up a great deal, sometimes in couples who have been living alongside one another for years without either quite noticing how far apart they had drifted.³

Understanding that background doesn’t excuse the decision to have an affair, and I’m firm about that distinction in the room. Responsibility stays with the person who made the choice.

The circumstances, though, are usually more ordinary than someone setting out to betray their partner. An affair often begins with a colleague who listens, or a friendship that slowly becomes the place where someone talks about the things they’ve stopped talking about at home. Messaging lets that develop quietly, a little at a time, so that by the point the line is obvious it has already been crossed in smaller ways many times over.

Part of the work is looking at what the person was after there. Attention, perhaps. Excitement. A break from being somebody’s parent or carer or dependable partner for a while. The honest answer can be uncomfortable, and often the person who had the affair doesn’t know it at first.

After discovery

The first weeks are often very hard. People describe intrusive thoughts, broken sleep, trouble concentrating, and moods that swing without much warning. A betrayed partner can become intensely watchful, alert to small changes in behaviour or to anything in the account they’re given that doesn’t quite fit. These responses can resemble the symptoms seen after a trauma, though that is a matter for individual assessment, and I wouldn’t diagnose anyone from a description on a page.

The person who had the affair is often frightened of losing the relationship while also sitting with guilt or shame about what they’ve done. That combination can make conversation strangely difficult. One partner may need answers at exactly the moment the other is least able to give them. I’m not suggesting the two positions are the same; they aren’t. But therapy has to hold both if the couple are going to get anywhere useful.

What we actually know about recovery

The statistics on couples surviving affairs need reading with some caution. One small, self-selected survey of people who had been unfaithful found that roughly 15.6% of the relationships carried on without professional help.⁴ Figures reported for couples who do get professional support are a good deal higher, often somewhere around 60 to 75%.⁵ These aren’t comparable studies, and they don’t all mean the same thing by “recovery” or by a relationship “surviving”, so I wouldn’t use them to give any couple a percentage chance of staying together. What they reasonably support is a looser point: couples do recover after affairs, and structured help can make a real difference.

Much of the difficulty at home is in the conversations. One person may need to keep returning to the subject; the other may grow defensive, or ashamed, or simply worn out by it. A reasonable question turns into a row neither of them meant to have. Some couples stop discussing the affair at all because every attempt goes so badly. Others can talk about almost nothing else.

A good deal of the early counselling is about those conversations. We slow them down, work out what tends to happen just before they tip over, and find ways to talk about painful things without doing fresh damage each time. Sometimes the trauma symptoms need attention in their own right. Sometimes physical closeness is difficult for a good while. It doesn’t run to a fixed sequence.

Finding support around Lewes

There are accredited relationship counsellors in Lewes and across East Sussex, alongside services in Brighton and Hove and therapists who work online. The BACP register is a sensible place to start. Whatever else you weigh up, it’s worth asking anyone you’re considering how much work they’ve actually done with infidelity, because it varies more than you’d expect.

My own practice is in Hove, a short train ride from Lewes, and I also work online. The research on remote couples therapy points to outcomes broadly comparable to meeting in person, and for some people not having to travel simply makes it easier to attend.⁶ ⁷ Infidelity and betrayal make up a large part of the couples work I do. Depending on what’s happening for a couple I may draw on CBT, DBT skills, and Emotional Freedom Technique — that’s tapping, not the similarly-named Emotionally Focused Therapy. They aren’t a three-part programme, and I wouldn’t expect every couple to need all three; what I use depends on what is in front of me and on what each person is struggling with at the time.

Couples sessions here are £110 for 55 minutes and individual sessions £90 for 50 minutes. You don’t have to arrive as a pair, either. Sometimes it works better for one partner to begin alone while the other decides, and it is rarely too late to start, even when the affair itself was years ago.

If you’d like to talk it through, you can reach the practice through the contact page at thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/contact or on 07947 073298. It would be an initial conversation, not a commitment to anything further.

References

1. YouGov. One in five British adults admit to having had an affair. 2015.
2. Summarised prevalence estimates drawing on Natsal and General Social Survey data: roughly 18–20% of marriages involve at least one incident of sexual infidelity; figures vary by study and definition.
3. Reviews of the drivers of infidelity (e.g. Current Opinion in Psychology, 2017; Archives of Sexual Behavior): emotional dissatisfaction, unmet needs and emotional neglect are recurrent contributors, often more than sexual desire alone.
4. Health Testing Centers survey (2019, n=441 self-selected respondents who had been unfaithful): approximately 15.6% of relationships continued without professional intervention. Small, self-selected sample — indicative only.
5. Couple-therapy outcome data, including the 2012 AAMFT practitioner survey and the Marín-Córdova & Christensen (2014) five-year follow-up of couples in affair recovery.
6. Kysely A. et al. Couples Therapy Delivered Through Videoconferencing. Frontiers in Psychology, 2022.
7. Bradford A.B. et al. In-person vs. teletherapy outcomes among married couples (1,157 clients). Psychotherapy Research, 2024.

This article is general information and does not replace individual clinical assessment. Cited figures vary between studies depending on how infidelity and “recovery” are defined, and are best read as indicative rather than precise.