When Your Affair Corrects a Power Imbalance in the Marriage

When someone feels powerless in a relationship, an affair can become an unconscious attempt to balance the scales. Powerlessness often grows slowly — through years of being criticized, dismissed, or emotionally minimized. When a person's thoughts or needs are routinely overridden, they start to shrink over time in small, but cumulative, ways.

For example, my clients who struggle with powerlessness silence their opinions, stop expecting fairness, and hobble along with low self-worth in the marriage. Eventually, they encounter someone outside the marriage who sees them differently; who gives them attention, who treats them like they matter. That shift feels absolutely other-worldly. The affair becomes less about love and more about reclaiming a sense of control. It's a way of saying, "I still get to choose something in my life."

The problem is that the affair offers temporary relief, but the cost is high. The secrecy that feels empowering in the moment becomes another form of avoidance. You’re no longer just powerless in your marriage — you’re now divided within yourself.

The deeper truth is this: you can’t heal a power imbalance by creating another one. The affair might help you realize the downfalls and voids in your marriage, but at the end of the day, you still need to do the solid and worthwhile work on yourself to heal the parts of you that accepts less than you should, and that avoids asserting yourself.

What To Do About It:

Healing begins with reclaiming your agency in healthy, visible ways. 

1) Practice saying what you mean, even in small moments: Voice your preferences, your opinions, your no’s and yes’s. Start retraining your nervous system to associate truth with safety.

2) Second, rebuild (or build!) self-trust: Keep promises to yourself, even small ones, to remember that you can count on your own word.

3) Third, get curious about your personal patterns that led to powerlessness: These are often rooted in early conditioning to please, appease, or keep the peace. Working with a therapist or journaling through these patterns helps you rewrite them consciously.

If you need help because of an affair, we're here for you -- it's what we do. You can explore self-help resources that are expertly designed to help unfaithful spouses, affair partners, and betrayed spouses move forward, one of our private membership communities, or schedule a confidential session.

Lauren LaRusso, LPC, LMHC // Founder + Coach