Beyond Betrayal: Five Psychological Types of Affairs and Clinical Interventions for Healing (2 CE Hours, 2026)

Course Description:

Infidelity is often treated as a single clinical phenomenon requiring standardized stages of recovery, including disclosure, accountability, and rebuilding trust. While these elements are important, they are not sufficient when the psychological and erotic functions of different types of affairs are not understood.
This training reframes infidelity as a set of distinct emotional and erotic strategies rather than a single form of betrayal. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalysis, trauma theory, attachment research, and sex therapy, participants will be introduced to five psychological types of affairs, each rooted in different relational conflicts, emotional needs, and regulatory functions.
Particular attention will be given to clients who maintain a “secret sexual self,” including compulsive sexual behavior, anonymous sexual encounters, and paid sexual relationships. These patterns often represent attempts to regulate shame, dissociation, and overwhelming emotional states rooted in early relational adaptations rather than unmet romantic attachment needs, and they require a different therapeutic approach than emotionally bonded affairs.
Through clinical examples and applied intervention strategies, participants will learn to assess the underlying psychological function of an affair, tailor treatment to the specific injury and relational dynamics involved, and develop more individualized, psychologically informed approaches to healing that integrate attachment, sexuality, trauma, and emotional regulation.

Learning Objectives:

• Compare at least five psychological types of infidelity based on their underlying emotional, attachment, and erotic functions.
• Describe how differing psychological functions of infidelity influence assessment, case conceptualization, and treatment planning.
• Identify trauma-informed and sex therapy interventions relevant to presentations involving secrecy, shame, compulsive sexual behavior, and relational rupture.
• Apply a more differentiated clinical framework to infidelity recovery work with individuals and couples.

Activity Schedule:

TBD

Speaker Bio:

Juliane Maxwald, MA, LP, CST, is a licensed psychoanalyst, couples therapist, AASECT-certified sex therapist, author, and educator based in New York City. She has over fifteen years of experience helping individuals and couples navigate sexuality and intimacy, trauma, addiction and compulsive behaviors, anxiety and depression, and relationship difficulties.
Her work is grounded in contemporary psychoanalysis and informed by trauma theory, somatic awareness, and relational, sex-positive approaches. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, Juliane helps people understand the unconscious emotional patterns that shape how they love, desire, relate, work, and live. By making complex psychological ideas understandable, practical, and deeply human, she helps people recognize the unconscious in everyday life.
Juliane is the author of Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality and teaches, supervises, and consults nationally for psychoanalytic, trauma, and sex therapy organizations. Her work bridges psychoanalysis with everyday experience, making psychological insight accessible to clinicians and the general public alike.

Class originally recorded: upcoming

Social workers completing this course receive 2 general continuing education credits.