What are the stages of affair recovery?
The best-researched model of affair recovery describes three stages: first absorbing the shock, then understanding how the affair came about, and finally making an informed decision about the relationship and moving forward, together or apart. Other well-known approaches, including the Gottman Institute's, use different names for broadly similar ground.
There is no single official set of stages, and you may see lists online with five, six or seven steps. Many of those are not based on research. The models below come from named clinicians and researchers, and each is described in their own terms.
Snyder, Baucom and Gordon: impact, meaning, moving forward
Douglas Snyder, Donald Baucom and Kristina Coop Gordon are psychologists who have studied couples recovering from affairs. They describe an affair as an interpersonal trauma and built a three-stage treatment that draws on research about trauma and forgiveness. They tested it in small studies; in one, most of the six couples who completed treatment were less distressed at the end, and the injured partners reported more forgiveness. The approach is described for the public in their book Getting Past the Affair.
Stage one: absorbing the blow
The first aim is to limit further damage and get back some equilibrium. That covers basic routines, boundaries around contact with the affair partner, and ways to talk about the affair without every conversation becoming a new injury. The first days after discovering an affair covers this stage in practical terms.
Stage two: giving meaning
Next, the couple works to understand what made the affair possible: pressures in the relationship, individual history, circumstances and choices. The goal is a shared account both people recognize. Understanding is not excusing, and the partner who had the affair remains responsible for that choice.
Stage three: moving forward
Finally, the couple looks at their beliefs about forgiveness and reaches an informed decision about the relationship. In this model, moving forward can mean rebuilding or separating. Forgiveness after infidelity looks at what forgiveness does and does not mean.
The Gottman approach: atone, attune, attach
John and Julie Gottman's Trust Revival Method describes three phases for couples who have decided to try to rebuild. The Gottman Institute's own articles set them out as follows.
- Atone: the partner who had the affair accepts full responsibility without defensiveness, answers questions honestly and offers transparency, while the hurt partner is able to express anger and pain.
- Attune: both partners work on understanding each other's emotional world and on handling conflict so that each feels heard, building what the Gottmans call a new relationship rather than returning to the old one.
- Attach: the couple gradually rebuilds physical and sexual closeness, at a pace that feels safe to both.
What it assumes
The model assumes both people have chosen to try. It is less a guide to deciding whether to stay than a guide to what rebuilding involves once that choice is made. If you are still deciding, should I stay after infidelity may be more useful first. Attunement skills overlap with the Gottmans' wider work on repair attempts and on the Four Horsemen.
Shirley Glass: walls and windows
Shirley Glass was a psychologist and infidelity researcher who wrote Not Just Friends, published in 2003. Her best-known idea is not a stage model but an image. In a committed relationship, she argued, there is a window between the partners and a wall that keeps others out. In an affair, a wall goes up between the partners and a window opens to someone else.
Recovery, in her framing, involves rebuilding those walls and windows in the right places: closing the window to the affair partner and reopening honest, transparent communication between the couple. Her work also drew attention to affairs that start as friendships, including at work, which the library covers in its article on emotional affairs. A Gottman Institute article notes that Glass worked with John Gottman and Caryl Rusbult on a model of how affairs develop step by step.
Do you have to go through the stages in order?
No. The researchers describe their stages as a map, and real recovery rarely follows it neatly. Couples often revisit the early crisis months later, for example when a new detail comes out, on the anniversary of the discovery, or when something ordinary triggers a memory. That is common, and it is not proof that recovery has failed.
The stages also move at different speeds for each partner. The partner who had the affair may be ready to talk about the future long before the injured partner is. Pushing to move on before the other person is ready usually slows things down. If a setback leaves you in crisis, call or text 988, and if you are in immediate danger, call 911.
What stage models cannot tell you
No model can tell you how long recovery will take, and none can tell you whether your relationship will continue. Research on couples therapy after an affair is still limited, and much of it involves small samples. The honest summary is that many couples improve with help, some rebuild something they describe as more honest than before, and some decide to separate.
It is also worth being wary of any program that claims it can make a relationship immune to affairs or names a date by which you should be over it. Those are claims no one can back up.
How counseling uses these models
Counselors trained in different approaches lean on different models, and many draw on more than one. What they share is a rough order: stabilize first, then understand, then decide. A counselor can also notice when a couple is trying to skip ahead, or when one partner is stuck in the first stage and needs more individual support.
Laura Bass offers infidelity counseling and couples counseling in Charlotte. For the general shape of that work, see what happens in infidelity counseling, and for the whole library, the infidelity recovery guide.
Common questions
How long does each stage of affair recovery last?
There is no reliable answer. The research models do not attach time frames to their stages, and couples move through them at very different speeds. The early crisis may ease in weeks for one couple and last much longer for another, depending on how the affair came to light, whether contact has ended, and how honest the aftermath is. Setbacks are part of the process.
Which stage model is the right one?
None of them is the only correct one. Snyder, Baucom and Gordon's model has the most published research behind it, the Gottman method is widely used by trained therapists, and Shirley Glass's ideas remain influential. They overlap more than they differ. What matters most is that the approach fits your situation and that the counselor using it does not decide the outcome for you.
Are the five stages of grief the same as affair recovery?
Some writers, including a Gottman Institute blog author, borrow the familiar grief stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance to describe how betrayal feels. That can be a useful way to name emotions, since an affair involves real loss. It is not a research-based model of affair recovery, and the feelings rarely arrive in that order.