The Affair Recovery Room

When Dana Killion's husband finished rehab for alcoholism, he came home with more than a commitment to sobriety. He came home with a confession: a pattern of infidelity that ran through more than twenty years of their marriage. "It caused me to question everything," Dana says. Their marriage, his commitment, what had been real, and even her own identity. Over the next eight years, Dana walked thro...

Anger has a bad reputation. We treat it as the thing to fix: control it, suppress it, or let it out and hope that helps. But anger isn't the problem. It's the announcement that there is one. In this episode, Tim uses the image of a fishing bobber to reframe what anger actually is. When the bobber dips, you don't stare at the bobber — you want to know what's on the line. Anger works the same way, a...

In this episode, I talk with psychotherapist and author Lauren LaRusso about her new book, Beyond Infidelity . Lauren's perspective is both professional and personal: her marriage ended after her husband's affair. Mine ended after I was the one who broke trust. We come at this experience from opposite sides, and that contrast shapes much of our conversation. Lauren makes a claim that may shift how...

This bonus episode is an introduction to Tim Tedder’s upcoming interview with therapist and writer Lauren LaRusso, author of the book Beyond Infidelity: How to Turn the End of Your Relationship into the Beginning of Your Life . In this episode, Tim talks about the book, explains why he recommends it, and plays clips from his conversation with Lauren. LINKS and EXTRAS Episode Page: https://www.affa...

Long before we could think about it, we learned how close was safe to get. Those patterns (researchers call them attachment styles) quietly shape how we handle conflict, disappointment, and closeness for the rest of our lives. Bev Mitelman, founder of Securely Loved, joins Tim to explain the four attachment styles and how they show up in infidelity: why the dismissive-avoidant pattern carries the...

Three conversations. Three very different women. One idea that surfaced in all three: good sex doesn't begin with technique, and it doesn't begin with your partner. It begins with being honest about yourself. In this bonus episode, Tim revisits the three-part series on sexuality — sexual shame with therapist and intimacy coach Jocelyn Silva, sexual pleasure with intimacy coach Linda Landon, and se...

Episode Notes You apologized. You meant it. It didn't land. If that's happened to you, on either side of the conversation, this episode is about why. Two words in, an apology can still be intact. "I'm sorry." Nothing has gone wrong yet. It's the third word that decides everything, and there are four that show up in that position over and over again, each one quietly erasing the ownership that came...

After an affair, the sexual relationship rarely returns to what it was. Some couples find themselves in an unexpected surge of intensity. Others can't imagine being touched at all. Most land somewhere in between, unsure whether what they're experiencing is healing or avoidance. In this conversation, sex and intimacy coach Xanet Pailet joins me to talk about what sexual reconnection actually requir...

For many couples, especially those recovering from infidelity, sex carries an impossible weight. The betrayed partner may feel pressure to perform, to compete, to prove something. The involved partner may be desperate to demonstrate change. And underneath it all, many people have never learned what genuinely brings them pleasure in the first place. In this second episode of our series on sexuality...

Sexual shame rarely announces itself. It settles in early—a look on a parent's face, a warning message from the pulpit, a silence where an honest conversation should have been—and it quietly teaches us that something about who we are is wrong. In this episode of The Affair Recovery Room , Tim sits down with therapist and intimacy coach Jocelyn Silva to trace how that shame shapes us, and how it ca...

In this first PageTalk episode of the podcast, Tim revisits his recent article The Betrayal Often Begins Before the Affair , which was posted on AffairHealing.com. Written after the release of the previous episode ( Unshakeable ), the article explores how betrayal often begins long before an affair, in the quiet erosion of a couple's emotional connection. Tim shares his own reflection on breaking...

Suzanne Leydecker built a life that looked good from the outside: a husband at Goldman Sachs, children, a home in New York. Then one night, over what had been an ordinary date-night dinner, he told her he was leaving. He'd already arranged for his mother to fly in and help her "pull herself together." In this conversation, Suzanne talks candidly about the months that followed—the summer she buried...

If you've been betrayed, you already know that the pain doesn't stay in the past. It follows you into ordinary moments—a song, a smell, a place, a glance at a phone—and suddenly you're flooded all over again. That's not weakness; it’s trauma. It deserves real treatment. In this episode, I talk with Laurel van der Toorn, trauma therapist and founder of Laurel Therapy Collective, about a modality th...

Most people who follow this podcast are betrayed partners, and understandably so. The pain of being cheated on is acute, disorienting, and often traumatic. The Recovery Room is committed to honoring that experience. But genuine recovery, the kind that produces lasting change and real safety in a relationship, requires more than behavior management from the person who had the affair. It requires so...

One of the most disorienting effects of betrayal is what it does to a woman's sense of self. She may have been strong, capable, even confident—and then the discovery of infidelity strips away the ground she was standing on. She doesn't just lose trust in her partner. She loses trust in herself. In this conversation, Tim talks with life coach Zerina Dervini about why betrayal hits identity so hard...

Six years ago, Elisa's husband told her he was leaving their marriage for another woman. In the original three-part "Elisa's Story" series, she shared the raw experience of that first year: the shock, the grief, the impact on her sons, and the anxiety of navigating co-parenting with the woman who had replaced her. Now, six years later, Tim Tedder revisits that conversation with Elisa to explore wh...

Joni Woods grew up with a clear picture of what marriage was supposed to look like—and an equally clear sense of what a faithful wife was supposed to do when it didn't. For fifteen years, she stayed in a marriage defined by criticism, control, and abuse, holding the appearance of a healthy relationship together while her church community watched. It wasn't until her children became targets of her...

What makes a man emotionally unavailable? And what does it take to change that? In this episode, Tim Tedder sits down with Jason Lange, a men's coach and group facilitator, to explore one of the most underaddressed dimensions of relationship healing: the inner world of men. Jason draws on his own journey to explain how many men enter adulthood without two fundamental skills: self-awareness and the...

The hardest part of healing isn't the moment you decide to forgive. It's every ordinary moment after that—the birthday parties, the graduations, the holidays—where you choose it again and again. In this final episode of A Conversation with My Ex , Tim and Konnie talk about the relationship they've built in the years since their divorce. It hasn't been without struggle. There have been seasons of t...

Affairs often have multiple victims. This episode gives voice to some of them. Tim and Konnie's story has been told, in their own words, across two honest episodes. But there were others in that story, too. Five children who didn't choose what happened, didn't cause it, and couldn't stop it, but who carried it nonetheless, each in their own way. In this bonus episode, released before the final con...

In this second episode of A Conversation with My Ex , Tim Tedder and his ex-wife Konnie talk about the disclosure of Tim's affair—first the partial truth, then the full confession he chose to make a week later. What followed was one of the most revealing stretches of their marriage: Konnie processing devastating grief while Tim watched, emotionally unreachable, from somewhere he couldn't explain....

In this first episode of A Conversation with My Ex , Tim Tedder sits down with Konnie, his ex-wife, for an honest, unhurried look at the relationship they built and the choices that dismantled it. They talk about meeting in college, the early years of their relationship, the slow accumulation of disconnection, and the affair that brought everything into the open. What you won't find here is score-...

The common explanation for why affairs happen is usually a marriage story: we grew apart, I felt neglected, something was missing. And sometimes those things are true. But they're rarely the whole story. In this episode, Tim talks with Kayla Crane, a licensed therapist specializing in inner child work and trauma, about the childhood roots of adult behavior — and what that has to do with infidelity...

Porn addiction doesn’t usually start in an overwhelming rush. It starts quietly—a habit that feels manageable, maybe even harmless. But over time, it rewires the way we experience desire, connection, and satisfaction with a gradual subtleness that’s hard to see until the damage is already done. In this episode, I talk with Jeremy Lipkowitz, founder of the Unhooked Academy and host of the Unhooked...

Healing after betrayal is not a moment. It's not a decision you make once and then move forward from. It's a process, and for most people, it's longer, harder, and more layered than anything they could have imagined at the beginning. Michelle knows that. She lived it. She wrote about it. And now she’s talking about it with us. In part two of this conversation, Michelle picks up where episode one l...