Before any repair work can begin, you need to understand how infidelity impacts each person in the relationship. You'll discover:

• Why infidelity is often considered a betrayal trauma, including attachment injury, nervous system disruption, grief, and the collapse of a shared reality
• How the betrayal of infidelity leads to hypervigilance, anger, shame and other protective responses—and how to distinguish these understandable reactions from treatment resistance
• What separates betrayal trauma from general relationship distress, and why treating one as the other stalls the work

Fidelity means something different in every relationship, and what was broken depends entirely on what was agreed to. In this section, you'll learn:

• How gender, sexual orientation, culture, religion, and family expectations shape both the injury itself and what recovery will need to look like
• Where monogamy assumptions, consensual nonmonogamy, and agreement violations change your case formulation
• What power, stigma, secrecy, and social consequence cost a client before they disclose anything to you
• One question that reframes the entire case: what did fidelity mean in this relationship?
• How to surface your own assumptions and bias about infidelity before they quietly steer the treatment

Deeper processing collapses when the floor underneath it is unstable, so this work begins by building the floor. Wayne walks you through:

• Five dimensions of safety that have to be in place before conjoint work can hold: physical, emotional, informational, relational, and internal
• How to assess readiness for conjoint work honestly, including when the answer is that a couple is not there yet
• Why stabilization sequencing determines whether a couple arrives at hard material with the capacity to stay in the room
• How therapist regulation and co-regulation function as active clinical interventions in a dysregulated system

Two people sit in front of you, and four systems of parts are activated at once. You'll learn:

• How to identify protector and vulnerable parts in the betrayed partner
• Where protection and vulnerability show up in the unfaithful partner, including the parts that present as indifference
• Why hypervigilance, minimization, shame, defensiveness, pursuit, and withdrawal are better read as protective strategy than as pathology
• Unblending techniques that increase Self-led presence in both partners, so the work can proceed from Self instead of from protection

Disclosure is the highest-risk hour in this work, and it goes badly more often than it needs to. Inside this session, Wayne shares:

• Why the purpose of disclosure is coherence for the betrayed partner, and how that purpose keeps the session from becoming an interrogation
• How to assess readiness and prepare both partners for what is about to happen
• What belongs in a disclosure, and which details reliably deepen the injury rather than resolve it
• A five-phase IFS-informed disclosure model you can follow start to finish
• How to manage escalation, shutdown, shame, and dissociation in real time
• What post-disclosure containment and aftercare require in the hours and days that follow
• Clinical case application of the full disclosure process

Whether repair holds comes down to the unfaithful partner's capacity to stay present to the pain they caused. You'll discover:

• How empathy and compassion differ, and why the distinction changes what you ask for in session
• What defensive, performative, and shame-based responses signal about the parts driving them
• How to hold accountability without annihilation
• Where compassion becomes exoneration, and how to keep it from crossing that line
• Practical methods for building an unfaithful partner's tolerance for remaining present to their partner's pain

Both partners lost something real, and grief that goes unnamed keeps resurfacing as conflict. Wayne covers:

• What is actually being grieved after infidelity: trust, identity, the imagined future, intimacy, and the shared story
• Why naming the losses carried by the unfaithful partner serves the betrayed partner as well
• How emotional knowing lags behind factual knowing, and why protective responses persist after the facts are settled
• Memory reconsolidation informed interventions for grief that will not move

Forgiveness gets pushed early and often, usually by someone other than the client. You'll learn:

• How forgiveness differs from reconciliation, trust, acceptance, and forgetting
• Which parts resist forgiveness, which parts fear it, and which parts reach for it prematurely
• Why therapist-driven forgiveness derails recovery, and how to catch it in your own clinical instincts

The relationship that existed before the betrayal is over, and what comes next has to be built rather than restored. In this section, you'll discover:

• Why the rebuilding frame limits what a couple can reach, and what creation offers instead
• How trust, transparency, boundaries, intimacy, connection, and shared meaning get constructed deliberately after betrayal
• A process for developing new relational agreements that both partners can realistically keep
• What separates attachment from connection, and why the difference matters in the aftermath of infidelity
• How to read the difference between healing that ends in reconciliation and healing that ends in separation

Everything from both days assembles into one arc you can bring to your next case. You'll learn:

• The full Betrayal Recovery Arc: Safe Enough, Discovery, Empathy, Grieving, Forgiveness, Creation
• How culture and context re-enter the work at every phase
• Self of the therapist across the arc, including what this work asks of your own system
• Case formulation and treatment planning, phase by phase, from first session to resolution