Infidelity & Affairs: Facts & Myths and What Works, offered by the Zur Institute

 

Introduction

Infidelity, contrary to what most people assume, is neither rare nor exclusively male behavior nor is it certain to end the marriage. In fact, almost a third of all marriages may need to confront and deal with the aftermath of extramarital affairs and women’s infidelity statistics are swiftly catching up to those of men. Infidelity has become an equal opportunity sphere. Even more bad news is that Internet or online affairs have become extremely prevalent and, some claim, pose one of the biggest threats to modern marriage. The good news is that extramarital affairs are survivable and marriages can even grow stronger when members of the couple deal constructively with the affair by facing it, apologizing and ultimately forgiving or by simply accepting it.

The marital infidelities of many famous people have been dealt with publicly. These include presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson and French President Francois Mitterand (whose mistress stood beside his wife at his funeral) and other public figures, such as Prince Charles, Marion Barry, Gary Hart, Frank Gifford, poet James Dickey, writer John Cheever, Martin Luther King, television evangelist Jim Bakker and Representative Bob Livingston, Eleanor Roosevelt was strongly rumored to have had an affair with journalist Lorena Hickok and similar rumors surrounded Princess Diana extra marital affair. Actors and actresses have long provided endless material to the tabloids on affairs and infidelity. Some better known examples are Spencer Tracy’s life long affair with Katharine Hepburn, Bill Cosby, Sophia Loren and a seemingly endless stream of other Hollywood celebrities. Correspondingly, many movies have dealt with affairs, most notably, The Bridges of Madison County, Out of Africa, The Horse Whisperer, Matchpoint, Icestorm, Closer and, of course, The Graduate.

Long before our modern era, infidelity was a recurrent element in literature and art. History is laced with accounts of faithlessness. The Ten Commandments devotes a specific commandment to it. Thou shalt not commit adultery. King David had an affair with Bathsheba. Homer’s Iliad describes the affair of Helen of Troy, and the list goes on – works, such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’ The Golden Bowl are prime examples.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead once suggested that monogamy is the most difficult of all human marital arrangements. Similarly, many anthropologists have repeatedly claimed that Homo sapiens throughout its evolution, like most animals, has not been naturally monogamous. This has made it very difficult to comply with the Western-Judeo-Christian proscription. Barash & Lipton poignantly wrote in their book The Monogamy Myth “Infants have their infancy. And adults? Adultery.”

Clinton’s assertion that he did not have sex with Monica raised the question of not only what sex is but also how marital affairs are defined and whether sex or intercourse are the defining factors in infidelity. With the introduction of the Internet, the definitions of affairs or infidelity become more elusive and complex. The common belief is that affairs are about sex but, in fact, affairs are most often about secrecy, sexual attraction and sexual activities. Infidelity is essentially disloyalty or unfaithfulness to a sexual partner in what was supposed to be a sexually exclusive relationship. The root of the term infidelity is ‘lack of faith’ and disloyalty, as in ‘infidel’ which is the denial of belief in a certain religion. Secret sexual or intimate online relationships constitute an affair even when they involve neither actual intercourse nor oral sex nor actual physical contact. Adultery, unlike infidelity or affair, is a legal and biblical term.

The literature about affairs has struggled to differentiate between platonic friendships and emotional affairs. While sexuality is not the determining factor in such differentiation, the issue of faithfulness, exclusion, deception and betrayal are. Similarly, there is some confusion between infidelity, an affair and extramarital sexuality. Many couples in many cultures seem to accept infidelity as part of the culture and unavoidable aspect of marriage. These couples do not face a crisis when the infidelity is exposed. Another example is a man who discovers his homosexuality in the later part of his marriage and comes to an agreement with his wife that they will stay married but both will pursue extramarital sexual relationships. In this example, extramarital sexual relationships are neither associated with betrayal or unfaithfulness nor do they involve deceit and secrecy.

During their professional careers, most marriage and couples psychotherapists have dealt with marital crises brought about by affairs. While extramarital affairs are very common, couples psychotherapists are often uninformed about how to address the infidelity crisis. The professional literature in the last couple of decades has provided increasingly helpful information and assistance to therapists by presenting statistics and data, mapping the complexities of marital infidelity and articulating helpful models to assist couples through the crisis. Many authors in this area ground their work in Systems Theory, Family Systems, sex research, personality theory and Social Psychology. They also adopt theories and research generated by sociologists, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. However, some authors adopt a moralistic and rigid view of affairs. Ignoring the fact that affairs are common and part human nature, their prescription for healing infidelity is that the “sinners” must fully confess and repeatedly atone before they can be forgiven by the victimized and betrayed spouses. The latter approach may be more harming than helping for couples in crisis as it often focuses on one-sided blame to the exclusion of the marital, sociological, evolutionary and technological (i.e. Internet) roots of modern affairs.

Another major misperception among lay people and psychotherapists is that extramarital relationships are never consensual and are always harming to the marital relationships. Some couples have reached a consensus regarding extramarital sexual relationships, as is the case when one partner has decided to pursue gay relationships with the consent of the partner. Consent to extramarital sexual relationships can be passive or active; it can implicit or explicit. This paper emphasizes the importance of understanding the nature and context of each affair and each couple so that healing and resolution can be achieved.

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Approaches to Affairs and Infidelity

Researchers, psychologists, anthropologists and clinicians significantly differ in their approaches to dealing with infidelity. Their views on infidelity effect their rationales for the causes and significantly color their proposed solutions. The different approaches are not mutually exclusive and, except for # 2, the moralistic view, complement each other. Following are brief descriptions of the different approaches to marital affairs.

1. Family or Systems View:
Infidelity, in this view, is seen as a “family affair” that must be understood and treated within the marital system rather than from an individual perspective. Therapists who have taken this position use marital therapy and Systems or Communication Theories to understand the relational dynamics that led to and/or sustain the affair. They shy away from blame and focus on issues of intimacy, communication, expectations, agreements and conflict management in the marriage. They look carefully at the familial legacy of each partner and pay attention to the phases of the marriage, i.e., years of marriage, ages of children, empty nest phase, etc. This approach contends that strengthening the marriage and increasing the quality of communication and intimacy can reduce the chance of infidelity. This approach also views the infidelity crisis as an opportunity for individual growth and a chance for strengthening and solidifying the marriage. The systems view also takes into consideration that the affair may serve the supposedly betrayed spouse. Some partners may even encourage the spouse to have an affair, as is the case with gay spouses who wish to avoid sexual entreaties from their partners by encouraging them to instead satisfy their sexual needs with others.

2. The Moral-Puritan View:
Affairs, in this view, are seen as primarily individual, sinful and immoral acts of betrayal and therefore are likely to irreversibly damage marriages unless the betrayer fully confesses, repents and atones. Authors and therapists who take this puritanical-moralistic, often religiously based, position, generally view the betrayed partner as an innocent victim and put almost exclusive emphasis on the spiritual, emotional and relational rehabilitation of the betrayer.

3. Individual View:
This view focuses on the betrayer’s emotional deficit, personality, addiction or phase of life issues. Men often philander as a way to affirm their sense of masculinity by “scoring” with as many women as they can. This approach looks at issues of sexual addiction, early history of abuse, personality disorders and exposure to parent’s infidelity. It also attends to issues, such as middle-aged crisis, and often does emphasize marital discord as a significant causal factor in the affair. The focus in this view is on the individual’s stage in life, development, history, culture and personality rather than a moral or familial focus.

4. Cultural View:
Affairs, in this view, are not seen as inherently pathological but are a quite normal and even a healthy part of marriage with some people or certain classes in certain cultures. Unlike the puritan or the pathological views, this anthropological approach cites the Japanese’s “love wife” practices, the courtesan of the 16th century era in Europe (as depicted in 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons) and many other cultures where extramarital sex has been an accepted norm. Along these lines, the anthropological view also cites the Middle Eastern harem and many polygamous cultures as examples of cultures where multiple or extramarital partners are an accepted and normal practice, especially and often only for men.

5. Anthropological View:
Most anthropologists have documented that humans are not biologically designed to be monogamous and while they may be able to “civilize” themselves to monogamy, nevertheless they will follow the “be fruitful and multiply” tenet at every possible opportunity. Monogamy in the animal kingdom is so rare that those romantic Hallmark cards with pictures of swans or other types of lovebirds should more accurately feature the flatworm. Swans may mate for life, but they’re not necessarily faithful to their mates. To a degree, on the other side of the debate is anthropologist Dr. Fisher’s claim that human beings are among 3 percent of the world’s 4,000 species of mammals pre-programmed for monogamy. With a handful of researchers, she has been investigating the “monogamy gene.”

6. Modern Culture and Media as a Promotional Culprit of Infidelity
Affairs, in this view, are seen as a result of a permissive, modern, mass media culture that subtlety promotes affairs in the same way as it promotes violence. We live in a society that is preoccupied with sex and commercializes this sexuality in any way and form possible. Along with the obsession-fascination with sex, there is titillation surrounding other’s affairs. The media has been sensationalizing affairs such as those of Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby and Prince Charles. Similarly, movies such as Same Time, Next Year, The Bridges of Madison County, and Prince of Tides and TV shows, such as Desperate Housewives, Sex in the City, normalize affairs and create a permissive atmosphere. The Internet and its booming pornographic and sexual businesses have probably contributed not only to an epidemic of online affairs but also to real life affairs, as well.

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Typology of Affairs

Affairs come in different formats. Not all affairs are the same: they serve different purposes, are carried on by different types of people, fueled by a variety of motivations and having different impacts. One of the most apparent weaknesses in infidelity research and scholarly writing is the lack of differentiation between types of affairs. This has often lead to inaccurate, misleading and unhelpful generalizations or stat averages regarding the nature, implications and what constitutes effective intervention with affairs. Understanding the individual, biographical, familial, marital and cultural-anthropological etiology of affairs is crucial to planning effective intervention. The types described below are neither always mutually exclusive nor presented in order of importance or frequency.

Following are short descriptions of eleven different types of affair:

1. Conflict Avoidance Affairs:
Men or women who go to any lengths to avoid any and all marital conflicts sometimes resort to affairs to have their needs, which were not expressed to their spouses, met. This type of affair usually does not last long and may repeat itself several times during the marriage.

2. Intimacy Avoidance Affairs:
“Intimacy avoiders” are frightened and therefore reluctant to be intimately close and use the affair to keep themselves at emotional distance from their spouse. The affair serves as an emotional-relational barrier in the marriage. This type of affair also usually does not last long and may repeat itself several times during the marriage. When both members of the couple are intimacy avoiders, this type affair can, in fact, help some couples sustain an emotionally distant marriage.

3. Individual (Existential or Developmental) Based Affair:
Middle-age crises, empty nest, depression, sense of emptiness are factors that can fuel an affair. Men and women may turn to a lover to revitalize self, individuate or mask anxiety, depression or other unwelcome feelings that they experience as a result of the existential anxiety of facing one’s old age and mortality or one’s spiritual void. A partner may turn to an extramarital affair as a way to affirm their sense of masculinity or femininity. Some extramarital affairs are about yearning and loss and the freedom to enact one’s own desires and fantasies, which has very little to do with the marriage itself.

4. Sexual Addiction Affairs:
Sexual addicts, like any addicts, are compulsive and display poor impulse control. They use sex over and over again to numb inner pain and/or a sense of emptiness. Generally, among married couples, men are sexual addicts more often than women. Sexual addicts are compulsively attracted to the high and the anxiety release of sexual orgasm. But such release often comes with a price — feelings of shame and worthlessness.

5. Accidental-Brief Affairs:
This type of affair is neither planned nor characteristic of the person. It “just happens” when a person is at the right (wrong) place at the right time; often it surprises the person who commits the infidelity. Curiosity, pity, drunkenness, and even politeness may lead to such a brief and often never to be repeated affair.

6. Philandering & Other Individual Tendencies:
Some individuals are prone to infidelity, often due to insecurity and low self-esteem and a constant need to “score,” conquer or get affirmation about themselves. Narcissistic and impulsive individuals may be especially prone to marital infidelity. Many men are socialized to ‘score’ and get reinforcement for womanizing. Philanderers perceive extramarital sex as an entitlement of gender or status and often take advantage of opportunities without guilt or withdrawal symptoms.

7. Retribution Affairs:
Sometimes, one partner wants to “get back” at the other partner by having an affair. This may be payback for the other person having an affair, withholding money, love, emotion or any another perceived wrongdoing.

8. Bad Marriage Affairs:
This kind of affair is a direct result of a bad marriage with poor communication, intimacy, support or sexuality. It can also arise from incompatible cultural and familial values. When there is marital dissatisfaction, discontent and lack of love, one or both partners may be seeking comfort and intimacy in another lover’s arms. Dissatisfied spouses who experience their partners as emotionally or sexually withholding or view their partners as easily sexualizing others or as moody are especially vulnerable to affairs.

9. Exit Affairs:
“Affair exiters” use the affair as a jumping board to end a marriage. This can be a conscious or unconscious act intended to ensure that a backup relationship is in place before leaving the original marriage. The left-partner often blames the affair rather than looking at how their marriage got to this point.

10. Parallel Lives Affairs:
These kinds of affairs include those who are involved in long term extramarital relationships while continuing to be part of the original marital dyad. Examples of those are Spencer Tracy’s life long affair with Katharine Hepburn or Prince Charles’ long affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. Such extramarital relationships are often known, accepted or tolerated by the spouse and other family members but are neither addressed nor talked about.

11. Online Affairs:
Online affairs have become extremely prevalent since the inception of the Internet and the proliferation of online dating, chatrooms and pornography. Some have argued that online affairs pose the biggest threat to modern marriage since women entered the work force. Fueled by what Copper called, “the Triple A engine” of “accessibility, affordability, and anonymity”, the Internet population seems to be exploring sexuality in ways that are unprecedented. Hundreds of thousands of web sites are primarily or exclusively designed to promote and financially benefit from pornography and eroticism and their frequent derivative, online affairs. Online affairs may include watching partners online on video, communication via Instant Messaging, chatrooms, simple emails or via the telephone. Online affairs can be even more disruptive than any other form of affair because it can take place any time of the day or night and often takes place in the family home. The fact that there is no actual physical contact during the sexual act often intensifies the relationship and increases its potential to be highly disruptive to the individual and the family. The frequency of this form of affair is likely to increase as the Internet grows and intrudes upon more aspects of personal and emotional lives.

Consensual Extramarital Sexual Relationships:
Sometimes the extramarital relationships are explicitly incorporated into the marriage life. Many couples in many cultures seem to accept infidelity as part of their marriage. These couples do not face a crisis when the infidelity is exposed. “Open marriages” were popular in the 1970’s following the sexual revolution. An example of a consensual extramarital affair is the case when one spouse discovers later on in the marriage that they are gay but the couple decide to stay married for reasons that range from deep care and love for each other, children or taxes. In such a case, the couple may decide to preserve the marriage and that each person may pursue extramarital sexual relationships.

Emotional vs. Sexual:
Some authors have differentiated between emotional vs. sexual types of affairs. The importance of the latter is due to sex-differences in responses to spouse’ emotional or sexual involvement with the extramarital partner. The emotional and/or sexual typology can be applied to several of the eleven types of affairs described above.

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Women and Affairs: Equal Opportunity Betrayal

In the last couple of decades, it has become clear that women are no longer the only “victims” of marital affairs but, in increasing numbers, are also the perpetrators of such affairs. The prediction is that before long they will initiate affairs as frequently as men.

There are several reasons why women are likely to catch up with men’s infidelity statistics:

• Most women are working outside the home, which automatically increases the opportunity to meet a potential sexual partner and have an affair. Travel, late night meetings and many other work-related activities significantly increase the possibilities for affairs.
• Women use the Internet in increased numbers, which opens endless possibilities to meet potential partners online and to have online or actual affairs.
• There is a significant decrease of physical, negative legal and emotional consequences and risk for women found to be having an affair.
• While women still face physical risk if their husband finds out about their affair, long gone are the days of women automatically losing everything as a result of infidelity, including children, properties they owned prior to the marriage and even their lives.
• The first written evidence of laws treating women as possessions of men dates to about 1100 B.C. in Mesopotamia.
• Change has been gradual and slow to come. However, since the 1970s, most states have adopted “no fault” and “equitable distribution” divorce laws, in which nearly all the assets accrued to either partner during the marriage belong to the marriage and, in a divorce settlement, are split evenly.
• Women are more willing to risk divorce, as they are increasingly more capable of taking care of themselves and their children economically, physically and emotionally.
• There is a decreased pressure on women to serve primarily, or at all, in the role of mothers and home-keeper, which increase the risk of divorce.
• Societal messages to women reflect a more accepting attitude toward women’s affairs as illustrated by the generally positive light in which they are depicted in a number of popular books, plays and movies. Most notably, in the movie The Bridges of Madison County, TV series Desperate Housewives, Bernard Slade’s play, Same Time Next Year, and, it often seems, every other novel that is published.

Research on gender differences in infidelity shows that the first few years of marriage are clearly a red zone. It reveals two distinct patterns in the timing of affairs. A married woman’s likelihood of straying is highest in the first five years, and falls off gradually with time. (Men have two high-risk phases, one during the first five years of marriage and again, after the 20th year.)

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Clinical Guidelines

Therapists encounter infidelity not only in couple therapy but also when working with individuals who have affairs, partners betrayed by affairs, the “other” man or woman, or children who report their parents’ affairs. Sometimes friends of those who have had affairs and have ended up being part of the cover up or in other roles, also report distress in therapy.

Regardless of how the affair is introduced in therapy, therapists must attend to the following important issues:

• Therapists must identify the type of affair they are dealing with so they construct appropriate and relevant clinical interventions. For example, affairs that are fueled by sexual addiction will require a different response than affairs that are brought about by revenge or marital dissatisfaction.
• One of the concerns with some infidelity research is that it does not always account for the different types of affairs when it provides general conclusions or averages from survey type research.
• Therapists must take into consideration that some affairs are neither driven by marriage dissatisfaction nor by discontent. Some cultures accept affairs as normal and some even expect it in marriages. There are also situations where spouses and marriages have benefited from affairs in a variety of ways.
• As in any other clinical intervention, therapists must design their clinical intervention according to the clients’ factors, such as culture, history, personality, sexual orientations, length of marriage, children and age and context factors, such as setting and culture.
• Therapists’ must be aware of their own values or biases in regard to affairs and infidelity. Some therapists take a moralistic and punitive approach to affairs and discard any or all cultural or other factors involved. Therapists who hold such strong moralistic feelings towards affairs must self-disclose them to clients prior to the beginning of treatment and respect clients who choose to get help elsewhere.
• Therapists should weigh carefully the time and place for individual vs. couple sessions. At times, family sessions may be appropriate if the other family members or old-enough children are involved or drawn into the infidelity conflict. Individual, couple and family sessions can be conducted in conjunction with each other if the clinical situation requires it. Rigid rules, such as ‘never see spouses individually when you see them in couple therapy’, can be counter-clinical and potentially harming.
• Individual sessions in conjunction with couple sessions may especially be clinically indicated in situations where the affair involved sexual addiction, or online addiction. Unlike affairs that are a clear result of marital dissatisfaction, individual addiction is often treated best in individual therapy in conjunction with twelve steps or another rehabilitation program. Individual therapy may also be indicated in a Parallel Lives type of affair.
• The phase of recovery from an affair must be factored into the clinical interventions. Different therapeutic interventions are required at different phases.
• Therapists should not be wedded to the Trauma and Betrayal model of dealing with affairs and realize that many couples and many cultures view it as neither traumatic nor the ultimate act of betrayal.
• Therapists should know when to leave the affair as a secret and not to expose it. This is especially true when the couple adapted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to infidelity.
• There are situations where spouses are not aware of the affair. Sometimes therapists become privy to information about the affair before the spouse is aware of the situation.
  • If the information were disclosed in individual therapy with the involved spouse and, the therapist did not have a clinical relationship with the patient’s spouse, the therapists could not reveal such information without the written consent of the patient.
  • The situation is more complex when the affair is privately disclosed by the involved partner to the therapist while the couple is involved in marital therapy. Therapists should be prepared to deal with this not-that-uncommon eventuality by having a statement in their Office Policies regarding individual secrets in the context of couple or family therapy. Therapists should make a careful risk-benefit analysis regarding the clinical option they have in regard to disclosure of the affair to the unaware spouse. In many situations, the best solution is for the involved spouse to disclose the affair to the unaware spouse in the next couple session. However, when such disclosure may increase the chance of domestic violence, therapists must be very careful not to insist on a disclosure.
  • Psychologist Janis A. Spring, author of After the Affair, contends, like many other scholars, that some people are actually better off not knowing whether a spouse has cheated in the past. For instance, a disclosure might trigger unnecessary crisis or insecurities in a spouse with a history of emotional problems.
• Psychologist Shirley Glass, a pioneer in infidelity research, holds that marriages fare better after a voluntary confession than after an unwanted discovery.
• Research has shown that couples, where one member was unfaithful, began treatment more distressed than couples uninvolved in any affair; however, evidence suggests that couples who were affected by an affair which was revealed prior to or during therapy showed greater improvement in satisfaction than ‘non-infidelity’ couples.
• Peggy Vaughn has emphasized that many therapists reinforce the idea of personal failure and personal blame by focusing only on the personal shortcomings or inadequacies of the couples they counsel or only on the problems within each particular marriage. She asserts that:
  

  Seeing affairs ONLY as a personal failure of you or your spouse or your particular marriage inevitably leads to personal blame, personal shame, wounded pride, and almost universal feelings of devastation. Self-help strategies alone seldom bring full recovery from this experience, either as a couple or individually. Recovery depends on getting beyond our strictly personal view of affairs and gaining an understanding of them within a broader framework.

• Therapists should be aware of the fact that even though a partner has strayed, this neither always means the he or she are no longer in love nor are sexually satisfied within the marriage.
• Therapists can include many motivations for couples to work through the infidelity crisis. These include love, shared history, children, finances or life-style and a desire to grow old together.
• Narcissistic, impulsive and low self-esteem individuals may be especially prone to marital infidelity.
• When the couple’s goal is to enhance the marriage, therapists should help them develop strategies for minimizing the chance of future affairs. These may include:
  • Increase effective communication between the partners.
  • Identifying and teaching the couple to attend to couple-specific red-flags or warning signs that may signal that another affair is taking place or about to take place.
  • Never assume that another affair is not possible.
  • Threats, ultimatums and trying to be perfect do not work.
  • What does work is honest communication, realizing that all marriages are vulnerable to affairs, good conflict resolution skills, awareness, honesty in regard to anything that may affect the marriage, remembering that honesty is more than ‘not-lying,’ self-knowledge, understanding that attraction to others is not the problem but acting on it and being dishonest is and commitment to the integrity of the marriage.
• Therapists should help couples understand the difference between an extramarital affair, an emotional affair and friendship. Most importantly therapists should not confuse open, intimate relationships with a person outside the family with secretive, sexual or intimate relationships outside the marriage.

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Online Resources

• Shirley Glass: http://www.shirleyglass.com
• Peggy Vaughan, author of The Monogamy Myth, offers a support group, B.A.N (Beyond Affairs Network), for individuals and couples recovering from affairs: http://www.dearpeggy.com/.
• Beyond Affairs Network, an international support group for betrayed partner, originated at www.dearpeggy.com. This site also has articles, Q & A, and extensive information about recovering from affairs.
• Michelle Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce Busting Center. www.divorcebusting.com. Online support forum.
• Divorce Information. www.divorceinfo.com. A clearinghouse for divorce information, including articles and research.
• Marriage Builders, Inc. founded by Willard Harley, Jr., Ph.D. www.marriagebuilders.com. Links to articles to build mutually enjoyable marriage and a section on recovery from infidelity.
• Smart Marriages, founded by Diane Sollee, Director of Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC. www.smartmarriages.com. Articles, books, audiotapes and videotapes; Directory of Marriage Education programs; annual conference.
• COSA – Codependents of Sex Addiction, www.cosa-recovery.org. For friends and family members whose lives have been affected by another person’s compulsive sexual behavior.
• The Healing Heart, http://www.network54.com/Forum/233195/. Affair Recovery Forum — for the betrayed partner.
• Talk to Tara, www.talktotara.com. Author interviews, audio book reviews & celebrity interviews in RealAudio.
• Evolution of Jealousy http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Harris_4-26-04.pdf

Online Support and Self-Help Groups

• BAN – Beyond Affairs Network by Peggy Vaughan. www.dearpeggy.com. An International Support Group for people recovering from a partner’s affair.
• CODA–CoDependents Anonymous. www.codependents.org. 12-Step program to develop healthy relationships.
• S-Anon. www.sanon.org. 12-Step program for partners and families of sex addicts.
• SA-Sexaholics Anonymous. www.sa.org. 12-Step program.
• SAA-Sex Addicts Anonymous. http://www.saa-recovery.org/. 12-Step program.
• SLAA-Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. http://www.slaafws.org/. 12-Step program.
• SRA-Sexual Recovery Anonymous. www.sexualrecovery.org 12-Step program based on rational recovery instead of “Higher Power”.

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