Affair Recovery Counselling Brisbane

Infidelity counselling for couples navigating betrayal, rebuilding trust, and deciding what comes next

Michelle Janssen | Couples Counsellor | Paddington Brisbane | Online Australia-wide

If you are reading this at midnight because your partner cheated and you do not know what to do next, you are in the right place.

Or maybe you are the one who cheated, and the weight of what you have done is sitting on you, and you genuinely want to repair it.

Either way, this page is for you.

I am Michelle Janssen, a Gottman-trained couples counsellor in Paddington, Brisbane. Affair recovery is a core specialisation of mine. I work with couples through infidelity every week, and I know how much it matters to have the right support.

What Counts as Cheating?

Not all betrayal looks the same. Infidelity includes:

Physical affairs involving sexual contact outside the relationship.

Emotional affairs, a secretive emotional intimacy with someone else, often with romantic feelings attached. Many people find these more devastating than physical affairs because of how personal the connection feels.

Online affairs including sexual or flirtatious messaging, dating apps, only fans, or secret emotional connections pursued digitally.

Micro-cheating, behaviours that cross your agreed boundaries without looking like a full affair. Hiding contact, saving someone under a different name, seeking validation outside the relationship in secret.

What makes something infidelity is not just the act. It is the secrecy, the breach of trust, and the impact. If it has broken something between you, it matters.

What Betrayal Does to You

Being cheated on is not just heartbreak. Research increasingly recognises it as a form of trauma, with symptoms that mirror PTSD:

- Intrusive thoughts and images you cannot switch off
- Hypervigilance, constantly checking your partner’s phone, tone, whereabouts
- Waves of rage, grief, or panic arriving without warning
- Numbness, dissociation, inability to concentrate
- Physical responses to triggers, nausea, racing heart, dread

Researcher Shirley Glass, whose book Not Just Friends is foundational in this field, documented how infidelity shatters a person’s entire sense of reality, not just their relationship. This is not weakness. This is your nervous system responding to a genuine threat.

Betrayal trauma is real. It responds to real clinical support.

For the Partner Who Was Cheated On

You do not have to decide anything right now. Stabilise first. You are allowed to ask questions and expect honest answers. You do not have to forgive on anyone’s timeline. Asking your partner to cut contact with the affair partner is not controlling. It is necessary.

Try to avoid making permanent decisions in the acute crisis phase. Not because your feelings are not valid, they are, but because decisions made in shock rarely reflect what you actually want.

For the Partner Who Cheated

Genuine repair moves through three stages, drawn from Gottman Method research:

Atone

Your partner needs to feel that you truly understand the depth of what happened, not just intellectually, but emotionally. This means full accountability, tolerating their pain without withdrawing, answering hard questions honestly, and demonstrating through consistent action over months that you are trustworthy.

Attune

Once safety is re-established, the deeper work begins. Understanding what happened and why, not to excuse it, but to build insight that protects the relationship going forward. Esther Perel’s work in The State of Affairs speaks powerfully to this stage: the affair, examined honestly, can become a turning point toward a more truthful relationship than the one you had before.

Attach 

Building something genuinely new. New agreements, a shared understanding of what happened, and a deeper bond than existed before. Many couples describe what they build here as the relationship they always wanted.

Why Specialised Affair Recovery Therapy Matters

Affair recovery has its own clinical landscape. It is not the same as general couples counselling, and it matters who you work with.

My approach is grounded in the Gottman Method, informed by the research of Shirley Glass, Esther Perel, Janis Abrahms Spring, and Sue Johnson. I hold a Master of Counselling, am a PACFA Clinical Member, and seek regular clinical supervision.

My sessions are 90 minutes because this work needs real space. Available Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday in Paddington and online across Australia.

If you are ready to start, or if you are just not sure yet, reach out. 

info@brisbanecouplescounselling.com | 108 Latrobe Terrace, Paddington Brisbane QLD 4064

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