Blog on 22nd July, 2019 By Raffi Bilek

In our last post I offered some ideas on how parents can go about reconnecting with adult children who have become distant and disconnected. In this post I’d like to talk a bit more about what is often behind that distance. Why have your kids decided to distance themselves? Obviously, there are many possible answers […]

Blog on 29th October, 2018 By Raffi Bilek

Crushed. Devastated. Hopeless. These are some of the emotions you may be experiencing if you have recently discovered that your partner has been having an affair.

Blog on 27th July, 2016 By Raffi Bilek

If you’ve just discovered your boyfriend or husband watching porn online – perhaps extensively – you may be feeling shock, anger, disappointment, betrayal, and more.  You also may be confused about what this means for your marriage. Or, you might be very clear about whether you want to fix it or end it.  Many women […]

Blog on 31st May, 2016 By Raffi Bilek

When someone has an affair and is discovered or comes clean on their own, their instinct is often to soften the blow and/or minimize the damage, especially if they still care about their partner and want to cause the least pain possible. As a result, they will reveal only a part of the information, or […]

Blog on 10th December, 2015 By Raffi Bilek

A common dynamic that I encounter in doing marriage counseling is that one partner will want to convince the other of some aspect of him/herself and get frustrated/angry/hopeless when they can’t seem to do so. Let’s take trust for an example, in a relationship between hypothetical clients Martin and Tia. Let’s say that there has […]

Blog on 19th October, 2015 By Raffi Bilek

In the short video below, renowned relationships researcher John Gottman discusses recent findings on the science of trust.  Significantly, he explains that betrayal is not the opposite of trust, and that one of the key ingredients of trust is commitment.  The great destroyer of a person’s ability to build trust in their relationship is the […]

Blog on 24th September, 2015 By Raffi Bilek

In the wake of the Ashley Madison leak, I got a lot of questions from friends and colleagues about the extent of the infidelity problem in America (at least, for those who consider it a problem). I don’t know that I’m really the best person to answer that question given that people usually don’t come […]

Blog on 23rd January, 2015 By Raffi Bilek

Here’s another article I wrote on managing a relationship after an affair – this one directed at the cheater: https://www.wellness.com/blog/13274483/how-to-recover-from-an-affair-when-you-re-the-cheater/raffi-bilek Learn more about our work with couples and infidelity here.

Blog on 15th December, 2014 By Raffi Bilek

An affair is often thought of as a death blow to a marriage –the worst thing that could possibly happen to the relationship, from which there can be no recovery. The truth is that a couple can still save their marriage . . . https://www.wellness.com/blog/13270625/how-to-recover-from-an-affair/raffi-bilek Learn more about our couples counseling services here.

Blog on 8th October, 2014 By Raffi Bilek

It is commonly thought that adultery is a certain death blow to a marriage. After all, what could possibly do more injury to a relationship than an affair? It strikes us as the worst thing someone could do. Heck, it even made it into the Ten Commandments! I once heard a counselor say to me, […]

Blog on 3rd September, 2014 By Raffi Bilek

Many people aren’t sure how to answer this question. When a married man is sending inappropriate text messages to another woman (or vice versa), does that “count” as an affair? The answer is really a subjective one. When a man cheats on his wife, or a woman on her husband, the problem is not so […]