Infidelity Counselling
For couples deciding whether they can come back from this
Everything is louder now. One of you is asking questions at midnight and can’t stop, and the other is answering them for the fourth time and can feel it going nowhere. Ordinary things — a phone face-down on the counter, a late meeting, a name in a story — have all become evidence. Neither of you is the person you were three weeks ago, and neither of you knows yet whether this relationship is something you’re ending or something you’re rebuilding. You do not have to know that before you come in.
Vista Counselling provides infidelity counselling in Langley, BC with Dr. Kevin Klassen — a Registered Marriage & Family Therapist trained in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, the Gottman Method and PACT, counselling couples since 2009 — in person at our Langley office or online across BC.
You can’t undo it. You can decide, together, what happens next.
After the Discovery
The first weeks after an affair comes out are their own thing, and they are not a preview of the rest of your life. Sleep goes. Appetite goes. The betrayed partner swings between wanting every detail and wanting none of it, sometimes inside an hour, and then feels unstable for swinging. The partner who had the affair is often braced for the next question and quietly hoping the subject will close — which lands as evasion whether or not it’s meant that way. Often both of you are exhausted and worn down — which makes it that much harder to make sense of yourselves, let alone each other.
None of that is a character assessment. A relationship is meant to be, among other things, the place your nervous system goes to settle. For some couples it was exactly that, right up until the discovery — which is why the alarm now has nowhere to go: the person whose job it was to help you settle is the person who caused the injury. For others, if they’re honest, the relationship hadn’t been that place for a while — the affair came out of a distance that was already there, and the discovery lands on top of a loneliness that predates it. Either way, the result in those first weeks is a system that can’t stand down. Much of what feels out of character is that, and it is one of the reasons a third person in the room helps: it gives the conversation somewhere to happen other than midnight.
Not all of this work follows a physical affair. Couples come in dealing with an emotional affair that never became anything else, a years-long financial secret, hidden drinking or hidden use, pornography use kept secret — which some partners feel as acutely as an affair — and relationships where nothing specific happened at all but one person has been living a life the other one didn’t know about. The injury is the same shape in all of them — you believed something about your life that turned out not to be true — and the work is much the same.
What We Work On
Closeness After an Affair
Everything in the four areas above is, at heart, safety work — and doing that work together is itself a first form of closeness returning, because closeness of every kind runs on safety. An affair strains every kind of closeness at once, not only the kind it happened in. Emotional intimacy — being the person the other one confides in — is usually the first casualty. The working partnership takes its own hit: you still have to parent together, run a household, and show up in each other’s lives, often while barely able to talk, and how the two of you carry those responsibilities through this becomes part of the repair whether or not you name it. This is the part couples most often find hard to raise, so we’ll raise it — at whatever level of detail you want, and no more.
Physical closeness follows its own path, and it’s worth naming plainly because so few people do. It tends to move in one of two directions, and both are ordinary. For some couples it stops: being touched by the person who caused the injury can feel like a betrayal of your own hurt, or like agreeing the matter is closed when nothing is settled. For others it intensifies, sometimes urgently, in the first weeks — which surprises people and leaves them wondering what is wrong with them. Nothing is. Both are what a nervous system does when the person it looks to for safety — or kept hoping to — becomes the source of the threat. The betrayed partner’s mind may also supply pictures — of the affair, of comparisons — at exactly the moments they’d least choose; that is an intrusion rather than a decision, and it isn’t something you can argue yourself out of.
These kinds of closeness rarely return at the same speed, and none of them returns on demand. Most of what makes them possible again is the safety work above — whether the truth is being told, and whether each of you is becoming someone the other can count on. We treat all of it as one thread of couples work rather than a specialty of its own. If sexual difficulties are the main thing you’d like help with, rather than one part of a wider picture, and it seems preferable to refer you to a clinician who specialises in that work, we’ll talk that through together.
Who Does the Work
Dr. Kevin Klassen, PsyD
Registered Clinical Counsellor & Registered Marriage & Family Therapist. More than 20,000 clinical hours since 2009. Trained in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, the Gottman Method, and PACT — the RMFT designation reflects specific, extensive, supervised training in working with couples and family systems.
What Sessions Look Like
We usually begin with a joint session and an individual session with each of you. After a discovery the individual sessions matter more than usual — there are things each of you needs to be able to say once, out loud, before you can say them to each other.
Sessions are structured, and deliberately so. Couples arrive expecting either a courtroom or a confessional, and it is neither: nobody is here to rule on who was more wrong, and nobody is required to perform remorse on cue. What we do instead is slow the conversation down to a speed at which it can actually be survived, so that the same exchange you have been having at home for six weeks can go somewhere different in the room.
Underneath the structure, the work has a direction — though not a hard line down the middle. Safety and connection aren’t separate stages, because building safety together is itself a way of connecting: answering a hard question honestly, keeping a small agreement, staying in a conversation that a month ago would have ended with a door closing — each of those is safety work and a moment of connection at the same time. Early on, the weight sits on safety — the areas described above, the truth told in workable amounts, the questions that won’t stop given somewhere to go, agreements you can both actually rely on. Over time the weight shifts toward connection: how the two of you reach for each other again — emotionally, practically, physically — and what you want this relationship to be now. Not a return to the one you had, but something the two of you build knowing what it has survived.
The three approaches Kevin is trained in each contribute something here. Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy treats the affair as a rupture in the attachment bond and works underneath the arguing to the fear driving it. The Gottman Method emphasizes the importance of genuine atonement leading, in time, to re-attunement and renewed closeness — a direction of travel rather than a script. PACT attends to what the two nervous systems are doing in the room, which is where the escalations start. In practice these are integrated around the two of you rather than run as a single fixed protocol.
Where there is violence, intimidation or coercion in a relationship, joint sessions are not the right starting point — there is more on that in the FAQs below.
What we don’t do: we don’t decide whether you should stay together, and we won’t pretend to know how this ends. Couples come out of this work in different places — some closer than they have been in years, some clear that they’re separating and able to do it decently. We can’t promise an outcome; no honest therapist can. What we can do is make sure the decision gets made with the truth on the table rather than in the middle of a fight.
Standard sessions are 50 minutes. Because this work sometimes benefits from more room, longer sessions can be arranged — by request, or where Kevin recommends it.
Infidelity Counselling FAQs
What counts as an affair?
Whatever broke the agreement the two of you had — spoken or assumed — and was then kept secret. For some couples that is a physical relationship. For others it is an emotional one that never became physical, or hidden spending, or hidden use, or a friendship conducted in deleted messages. Couples often arrive arguing about whether it “counts”, and that argument is usually a proxy for the real question: can I trust what you tell me? We work on that question rather than adjudicating the label.
Can a relationship actually recover from this?
Some do and some don’t. Any specific figure you find online is worth treating carefully — the research varies enormously with who was asked, when, and what was counted. What we can say is that recovery is slower than either of you wants, it is not a straight line, and it depends far more on what happens after the discovery than on what happened before it.
Do we have to decide whether we’re staying together before we start?
No — and most couples can’t. It is entirely reasonable to come in undecided, and it is a legitimate goal of the work to get to a decision you can both live with rather than one made in the worst week of your life.
Does my partner need to tell me everything?
Honesty is not optional, but there’s a difference between the truth and a full transcript. Some detail steadies people and some detail gets replayed for years, and which is which is different for every couple. Working that out deliberately, rather than in the middle of an argument, is part of what these sessions are for.
Will we have to talk about our sex life?
Only as much as is useful to you. For some couples it’s a brief acknowledgment inside the wider work; for others, what happened to physical closeness — before the affair or after the discovery — turns out to be a real part of what needs repairing, and it gets real attention. Either way it moves at your pace, we’d rather name it than leave you to raise it, and nothing about it is required of you.
What if the contact hasn’t fully ended?
Then the work looks different, and it’s important to say so. Trust can’t be rebuilt while the thing that broke it is still happening — no amount of couples work changes that. What therapy can be, in that situation, is the place where that decision actually gets made: where ending the affair becomes something genuinely chosen rather than promised under pressure, so that the repair between the two of you has something real to stand on. If that’s where you are, you can still come in — but come in honest about it.
Do you see us together or separately, and is what I say privately kept private?
Both — we usually begin with a joint session and an individual session with each of you, and individual sessions may continue alongside the joint work. What you share individually is confidential, with one exception we state up front: if it’s a secret that directly affects the couples work — an affair that is still going on is the clearest example — Kevin won’t carry it into joint sessions on your behalf and pretend otherwise. He’ll work with you, in your individual sessions, toward disclosing it yourself. Couples work built around a secret the therapist is helping to keep can’t do its job — it would quietly repeat the very thing you came in to repair.
What does it cost?
Sessions are 50 minutes. The fee is $200 per session. Many extended health plans reimburse Registered Clinical Counsellors — check whether your plan covers RCCs or RMFTs. Longer sessions can be arranged where they’d be useful — just ask. Full details, including our cancellation policy, are on our FAQ page.
Is couples counselling right if there’s been violence or intimidation?
Not usually, and not as a first step. A partner with a short fuse, or arguments that get loud, is ordinary couples work and we see it constantly. Where there is violence, intimidation or coercion, we’d start with individual support instead, because joint sessions can make things less safe rather than more. If this is your situation, VictimLinkBC is free, confidential and available 24/7 — call or text 1-800-563-0808.
Infidelity Counselling in Langley
We see couples at our Langley office — free on-site parking, easy access from Highway 1 — serving Walnut Grove, Brookswood, Murrayville, Surrey, Cloverdale, Aldergrove, and the wider Fraser Valley, in person and online across BC. Directions are on our location page.
Not sure whether this is the right fit for the two of you? Contact us with your questions or book an appointment online — we respond within 1–2 business days.
Related Services at Vista
Infidelity counselling sits inside our broader couples counselling work, and draws on all three of the approaches Kevin is trained in — Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, the Gottman Method, and PACT. Where the relationship itself is what you want to work on more broadly, marriage counselling is the same work without the specific injury at the centre of it. And where the discovery has set off something one of you carries alone — old trauma, anxiety, a nervous system that hasn’t stood down in months — individual counselling or EMDR may run alongside.