Affairs Counselling Lewes

Affairs Counselling in Lewes: At a Glance

• Between 18–20% of UK marriages will experience infidelity — and without professional support, only 15.6% of couples recover on their own.

• Affairs counselling uses evidence-based methods including CBT, DBT, and Emotional Freedom Technique to help couples process betrayal and rebuild trust.

• Lewes couples have access to both local practitioners and specialist services nearby — including The Hove Counselling Practice, just 17 minutes away by train.

• Recovery is possible, and couples who complete therapy often report stronger, more honest relationships than before the affair.

• The conditions that make survival more likely — including timing, both partners' commitment, and the right therapist — are covered in detail below.

An affair doesn't just break trust — it breaks your entire sense of reality.

For couples in Lewes and the wider East Sussex area, the good news is that specialist affairs counselling is closer and more accessible than most people realise. The Hove Counselling Practice, led by BACP-Accredited therapist Claire Sainsbury, formally announced specialist infidelity counselling for Lewes couples in March 2026, offering both in-person and online sessions using a research-led, multi-modality approach. Whether you're deep in the raw shock of discovery or months down the line still struggling to reconnect, this guide covers everything you need to know.

1 in 5 UK Adults Cheat — Here's What That Means for Lewes Couples

Nationally, between 18–20% of marriages in the UK will experience at least one incident of sexual infidelity. Some regional studies have placed that figure as high as 36%. That means in any street, office, or social circle in Lewes, infidelity is far more common than it ever gets talked about openly.

What that statistic should tell you is this: you are not uniquely broken, and your relationship is not uniquely beyond repair. The silence around infidelity is part of what makes it so devastating — most couples suffer through it without realising how many others have faced the same crisis and come out the other side. The data also makes clear why professional support matters so much. Roughly 60–75% of marriages survive infidelity when couples seek professional counselling. Without it? That figure drops to just 15.6%.

The Real Reason Affairs Happen in Relationships

Most people assume affairs are purely about physical attraction or opportunity. The reality is considerably more complex, and understanding the actual drivers is one of the first things a skilled affairs counsellor will help a couple explore.

Emotional Disconnection as the Leading Cause

The most consistently cited factor behind infidelity isn't sexual dissatisfaction — it's emotional disconnection. When one or both partners feel unseen, unheard, or emotionally starved within the relationship, the vulnerability to connection outside of it increases dramatically. This isn't an excuse for the behaviour. It is, however, a clinically important explanation that good counselling takes seriously.

Affairs often begin not with physical contact but with emotional intimacy — a colleague who listens, a friend who validates, a dynamic that feels exciting precisely because it's free from the weight of daily life. Addressing that emotional disconnection is central to any meaningful recovery process.

How Unmet Needs Drive Infidelity

Unmet needs — whether for validation, excitement, intimacy, or autonomy — create the internal conditions for infidelity long before any external opportunity arises. In many cases, the person who has the affair cannot clearly articulate what they were looking for. That lack of self-awareness is itself something therapy directly addresses.

The Role of Opportunity and Circumstance

Opportunity does play a role, but it's rarely sufficient on its own. Remote working patterns, travel for work, and social media have all expanded the circumstances in which emotional and physical affairs can develop. For Lewes couples, as with couples across the UK, digital infidelity — emotional affairs conducted over messaging platforms — has become an increasingly common presenting issue in counselling rooms.

The Emotional Aftermath of an Affair

The immediate aftermath of discovering an affair is, for most people, one of the most acutely painful experiences of their life. Understanding what both partners typically go through helps to normalise an overwhelming situation. For those struggling with emotional loneliness in the wake of an affair, seeking support can be an important step towards healing.

What the Betrayed Partner Typically Experiences

The betrayed partner's response closely mirrors the symptoms of trauma and grief. Intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, inability to concentrate, sleep disruption, and intense emotional swings between rage and despair are all common. Many betrayed partners describe a profound loss of identity — a sense that the life they believed they were living was, in some measure, a fiction. This is a trauma response, and it deserves to be treated as one. For more insights, explore infidelity recovery for couples.

What the Unfaithful Partner Goes Through

The partner who had the affair often carries a complex and frequently misunderstood emotional burden. Guilt, shame, confusion about their own motivations, and fear of losing everything they value can create a kind of paralysis. Many find it genuinely difficult to provide the consistent reassurance their partner needs, not because they don't care, but because they are simultaneously managing their own emotional crisis. Affairs counselling addresses both experiences — not to equalise blame, but to give both people a therapeutic space that actually works.

Why Only 15.6% of Couples Recover Without Professional Help

The reason so few couples recover without support comes down to the nature of post-affair communication. Without a skilled third party in the room, most couples either avoid the hardest conversations entirely or have them in ways that cause further damage — accusations, defensiveness, stonewalling, and repeated re-traumatisation. Professional counselling provides structure, safety, and evidence-based tools that transform what would otherwise be destructive arguments into genuinely productive dialogue.

The following are the core barriers that prevent unaided recovery:

• Unregulated emotional flooding — conversations escalate before any real communication happens

• Absence of a safe framework — no agreed process for how difficult topics get raised or discussed

• Misaligned timelines — the betrayed partner needs to process longer than the unfaithful partner expects

• Untreated trauma symptoms — intrusive thoughts and triggers continue to destabilise the relationship

• Inability to rebuild physical intimacy — without support, many couples either rush this or avoid it entirely

All of these barriers are directly addressed within structured affairs counselling — which is why the gap between aided and unaided recovery rates is so significant.

Three Evidence-Based Therapy Approaches Used in Affairs Counselling

Not all relationship therapy is the same, and when it comes to infidelity specifically, the modality matters. The most effective affairs counselling doesn't rely on a single approach — it draws on multiple evidence-based frameworks depending on what the couple needs at each stage of recovery. The Hove Counselling Practice uses three primary modalities for post-affair work: CBT, DBT, and Emotional Freedom Technique.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for Rebuilding Trust

CBT works by identifying and restructuring the thought patterns that sustain emotional pain and dysfunction. In the context of affairs counselling, this means helping the betrayed partner challenge the intrusive, catastrophising thoughts that follow discovery — the constant mental replaying of imagined scenes, the automatic assumption that the affair defines their entire relationship history, the belief that trust can never be rebuilt. It also helps the unfaithful partner examine the cognitive distortions and rationalisations that allowed the affair to continue. CBT gives both partners practical tools they can use between sessions, which accelerates progress considerably.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for Emotional Regulation

DBT was originally developed for individuals with severe emotional dysregulation, but its core skills — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness — translate directly and powerfully into couples work following infidelity. The post-affair period is characterised by emotional flooding: sudden, intense waves of anger, grief, or panic that derail even well-intentioned conversations. DBT equips both partners with specific, practised techniques for managing those states without causing further damage to the relationship.

In practice, this might mean learning how to identify the physical signs of emotional flooding before it escalates, using structured pause techniques to prevent destructive arguments, or applying distress tolerance skills during the inevitably painful conversations about what happened. These aren't soft skills — they're clinically validated tools that change the actual neurological response to emotional triggers over time.

The combination of CBT and DBT is particularly effective in the early stages of recovery, where stabilisation — stopping the active bleeding, so to speak — is the primary therapeutic goal. Once emotional regulation improves, deeper relational work becomes possible in a way it simply isn't when both partners are in a constant state of crisis reactivity.

How the Three Modalities Work Together at Different Stages of Recovery

Stage 1 — Crisis Stabilisation (Weeks 1–6): DBT skills for emotional regulation and distress tolerance take priority. The goal is to stop destructive communication cycles and create enough safety for both partners to remain in the process.

Stage 2 — Understanding and Processing (Weeks 6–16): CBT frameworks help both partners examine thought patterns, challenge distortions, and begin to understand the relational conditions that preceded the affair without excusing it.

Stage 3 — Rebuilding and Integration (Weeks 16+): Emotional Freedom Technique supports trauma processing and the gradual rebuilding of physical and emotional intimacy. The couple begins constructing a new relational contract.

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for Processing Betrayal Trauma

Emotional Freedom Technique — often referred to as EFT or tapping — works by stimulating specific acupressure points while verbally processing distressing thoughts and emotions. While it may sound unconventional, it has a growing evidence base for trauma processing, and its application in post-affair recovery is particularly well-suited to the betrayed partner's experience. The intrusive, looping nature of betrayal trauma responds well to EFT's combination of somatic and cognitive engagement — it works on the body's stress response in a way that purely talk-based approaches sometimes can't reach. Claire Sainsbury's integration of EFT into the infidelity recovery protocol at The Hove Counselling Practice reflects a deliberate clinical choice based on its specific effectiveness with trauma symptoms.

What to Expect From Your First Affairs Counselling Session

The first session is an assessment, not a confrontation. Many couples approach their first appointment with significant anxiety — particularly the unfaithful partner, who may fear being put on trial, and the betrayed partner, who may worry their pain won't be taken seriously enough. A skilled infidelity therapist manages both of those concerns from the outset, establishing safety and structure before anything else.

How Couples Therapy Differs From Individual Therapy

In individual therapy, the relationship is between the therapist and one client. In couples therapy, the relationship itself is the client. That's a meaningful distinction. The therapist is not there to take sides, assign blame, or validate one partner's narrative over the other's. Their role is to hold a therapeutic space in which both people can speak honestly and be heard — often for the first time since the affair was discovered.

Affairs counselling for couples also typically combines joint sessions with individual sessions, at least in the early stages. This hybrid model — recommended by UK relationship organisations including Relate — allows each partner to process privately what they may not yet be ready to say in front of their partner, while the joint sessions focus on rebuilding communication and connection. The balance between individual and couples work shifts as recovery progresses.

What a Therapist Will and Won't Do in Sessions

A good affairs counsellor will create structure, ask difficult questions, reflect patterns back to both partners, introduce evidence-based tools, and hold the space when emotions become intense. They will not tell you whether to stay or leave, judge the unfaithful partner, minimise the betrayed partner's pain, or push the process faster than the couple can genuinely manage.

What surprises many couples is how quickly the sessions move beyond the affair itself. The affair is rarely the whole story — it's typically a symptom of longer-standing relational dynamics that the counselling process will surface and address. That doesn't mean the affair gets minimised or explained away. It means the work goes deep enough to actually change something, rather than simply managing the surface wound.

Can a Relationship Survive an Affair?

• 60–75% of couples who seek professional counselling after infidelity do survive and rebuild their relationship

• Without professional support, only 15.6% of couples recover long-term

• Survival depends far more on process — how the couple handles the aftermath — than on the nature of the affair itself

• Both partners must be willing to engage, though they don't have to be equally ready at the start

• Couples who complete the full therapeutic process frequently describe their post-affair relationship as more honest and more connected than before

Yes — and more often than most people expect. The question isn't really whether relationships can survive affairs. The evidence is clear that they can. The more relevant question is what survival actually requires, and whether both partners are willing to do that work.

Survival doesn't mean returning to exactly what existed before the affair. That relationship, in its previous form, is gone — and experienced affairs counsellors will tell you that trying to simply restore it is actually the wrong goal. What's possible is something different: a rebuilt relationship with greater honesty, more deliberate emotional investment, and a shared understanding of what went wrong that neither partner had before the crisis hit.

For Lewes couples sitting in the wreckage of a discovered affair, that might sound implausibly optimistic. But the data and the clinical experience both support it. The couples who do the work — with proper support, using evidence-based approaches, and with enough time — don't just survive. Many of them genuinely transform.

The key word is support. The gap between 15.6% recovery without help and 60–75% with professional counselling isn't subtle. It's the difference between trying to set a broken bone yourself and having a surgeon do it properly. The injury is the same. The outcome is entirely different based on the quality of the intervention.

What the Research Actually Says About Recovery Rates

The recovery statistics for couples who seek professional help after infidelity are consistently strong across multiple studies. Between 60–75% of couples who engage in structured couples therapy following an affair report that their relationship not only survived but improved in measurable ways — including communication quality, emotional intimacy, and relationship satisfaction. These aren't self-reported optimism figures. They reflect outcomes tracked over time, including follow-up assessments conducted months and years after therapy concluded.

The research also identifies what predicts failure. Couples who drop out of therapy early, who have one partner attending reluctantly with no genuine commitment to the process, or who seek counselling primarily as a formality before separation — those couples do not show the same outcomes. Willingness is the variable that matters most, and it's something a skilled therapist will assess and work with from the very first session.

The Conditions That Make Survival More Likely

Recovery is significantly more likely when the couple seeks professional support within the first few months of discovery, when the unfaithful partner takes full accountability without minimising or deflecting, when the betrayed partner is willing — even if not yet able — to eventually move toward understanding rather than just punishment, and when both people have access to individual therapeutic support alongside joint sessions. None of these conditions require perfection from either partner. They require enough commitment to keep showing up, even when it's hard.

Couples Who Rebuilt After an Affair Are Often Stronger — Here's Why

It sounds counterintuitive, but the clinical evidence and the lived experience of couples who complete affairs counselling consistently point in the same direction: the process of rebuilding after infidelity forces conversations that most couples never have. The affair surfaces everything that was unspoken — the unmet needs, the emotional distance, the patterns of avoidance, the things both partners had quietly given up on. Working through all of that, with skilled support, doesn't just repair the damage from the affair. It addresses the longer-standing relational deficits that preceded it. The couples who come out the other side aren't pretending the affair didn't happen. They're living in a relationship that was fundamentally rebuilt from deeper foundations — one where both partners actually understand each other, and themselves, in ways they didn't before.

Contact Claire Sainsbury MBACP for Specialised Lewes Infidelity Recovery Support

Recovery from infidelity requires specialised expertise and compassionate guidance from professionals who understand the complex dynamics of betrayal trauma and relationship healing. The journey demands patience, commitment, and skilled support to navigate successfully.

Professional guidance provides the structure, tools, and objective perspective necessary to transform this crisis into an opportunity for deeper understanding and authentic connection. Whether couples ultimately choose reconciliation or conscious separation, the healing work undertaken during this process creates lasting benefits for both individuals.

For specialised support in recovering from infidelity in Lewes, contact The Hove Counselling Practice, which offers couples therapy services both online and in-person to support relationships through their most challenging moments.