Disclosure Intensive Overview

This disclosure intensive provides a structured and stable facilitated path for partners to navigate out of discovery crisis, secrecy, and relational dishonesty. Its purpose is to offer full honesty — a truthful and complete account of what happened. No more lies, no more guessing, no more staggered discoveries or false promises.

Disclosure creates ground when everything feels like freefall. It helps partners move through the confusion, betrayal, trauma, emotional dysregulation, fear, and rupture that secrecy causes.

This is not a simple exchange of information. It is a carefully facilitated process designed to create honesty, emotional safety, and clarity. Both partners engage in an intentional preparation period — individually and together — to explore what happened, why it happened, the impact it has had, and what is needed to move forward without causing further harm or re-traumatization.

The goal is not to predetermine the future of the relationship. The goal is to create a safe and honest foundation from which each partner can make informed, empowered decisions. This structured approach protects both partners from further injury and supports the possibility of repair, accountability, and a new relational beginning rooted in integrity and truth.

Reasons For A Disclosure

Honesty

End the hidden double life — the secrets, denial, and relational lies. Each partner commits to being honest and truthful with themselves and with each other in disclosing what has happened and the impact it has had.

Safety

Become a safe physical, emotional, and sexual partner. Stop the continuation of relational trauma to yourself and your partner. End incomplete or staggered discoveries. Establish a structured and boundaried communication process that creates a safe container in which to speak, listen, and process together.

Recovery

Take full personal responsibility. Offer your partner the honesty and reality they have not been given. Begin recovering integrity, authenticity, and the capacity to be present. Individuate and accept your imperfections.

Awareness and Integration

Disclosure supports the development of awareness — both self-awareness and relational awareness. It is not only about revealing facts, but about integrating what has been hidden, compartmentalized, or denied. Greater awareness allows each partner to see more clearly how past experiences, attachment patterns, and unhealed wounds shape behaviors and responses. This conscious integration supports empathy, accountability, and growth.

Why and What Happened

The disclosure preparation process provides space to understand what happened and to explore why it happened. This includes taking responsibility for the double life and developing insight into the interpersonal, relational, and sexual factors that contributed to the acting out. Recovery involves becoming self-aware, coming out of denial and defenses, and preventing the same patterns from being repeated.

Intimacy Foundation

A completed disclosure can begin a new relationship foundation built on honesty and acknowledgment of the trauma and pain that have occurred. Without honesty and trust, there can be no emotional safety, vulnerability, or genuine intimacy. Disclosure offers reality — and with it, the possibility for each partner to make grounded, informed decisions.

There may be varying degrees of ambivalence, fear, or uncertainty about the relationship’s future while moving through this process. Disclosure is not intended to predetermine a specific outcome and may lead toward reconnection or toward separation. If one or both partners have already decided to end the relationship, this is not the appropriate disclosure process.

Understanding Disclosure Boundaries

Adherence to the boundaries of the disclosure structure creates psychological and emotional safety for both partners and the facilitator. These boundaries are essential, as relational and sexual secrets, betrayal, and dishonesty are—by nature—relationally and emotionally traumatic and unsafe. They trigger and undermine core attachment needs and create fear, uncertainty, and disruption to one’s sense of safety, identity, and well-being.

The boundaries include:

• Agreement to the intentions and structure of the disclosure process
  
  
• Understanding and agreeing to the disclosure timeframe
  
  
• Maintaining the boundary of not sharing about past acting-out history until the disclosure meeting
  
  
• Participation in the preparation processes, exercises, and letter writing
  
  
• Scheduling and attending consistently all couple and individual preparation meetings

An important boundary in this process is to stop all sharing of discovery information or asking and answering questions about what has taken place in the past until the couple’s disclosure meeting. Both partners need to hold this boundary from the beginning of the disclosure process. Staggered disclosures or partial sharing of information often evoke strong emotional reactions that rarely find resolution.

How Do I Get Through It

I do not know your exact path through this difficult process—but I want to support you in finding it, one that feels secure, useful, meaningful, and empowering to you.

A three-month timeframe can be particularly difficult, and I would even say an unreasonable ask—to continue waiting in the dark and unknown until the disclosure date. If you choose to engage in this process, it’s understandable that parts of you may feel impatient, angry, or struggle with the waiting and uncertainty.

You have not had control over the secrets or the double life that have taken place in your relationship. Much of this disclosure is about giving you control back—by receiving the truth from your partner about what happened. You determine what you want to know and what you do not. Your questions about the past are an integral part of this disclosure process. This will be further discussed in your impact process and inquiry.

Role of Disclosure Facilitator

The facilitator guides and supports a safe, respectful process for both partners to express themselves with honesty and authenticity regarding what has happened and to begin processing its impact. The facilitator supports each partner equally, with neutrality, and holds truth and the relationship in deep regard.

The Practice of Rigorous Honesty

Coming out of denial and disconnection and into honesty with oneself is the first step. Taking ownership, being truthful, and being accountable to your partner offers them the honesty and shared reality they have not had.

If you have lived a double life within your relationship, coming out of denial and being honest with yourself marks the beginning of recovery. Disclosure asks for full accountability and ownership of what has occurred, along with a sincere commitment to begin recovery in earnest. The challenge is to interrupt long-standing patterns of shame, secrecy, control, and manipulation.

Agree to honesty, and notify your disclosure facilitator if you find yourself struggling with honesty—within yourself or within the process. Bring forward any memory gaps, withheld information, or omissions. Understand that disclosure is a one-time opportunity to be fully transparent. Incomplete honesty undermines the purpose of this process. Most relationships do not survive dishonesty that continues or is discovered during disclosure. A thorough relational and sexual timeline is an essential part of this work.

There are situations in which each partner has not been fully relationally or sexually honest with the other. It is essential that both partners practice honesty throughout the process. Discuss with your facilitator any secrets you are holding or withholding from your partner.

Preparation for the Disclosure Meeting

Three written documents are shared and processed during the disclosure meeting: the Disclosure Letter, the partner’s responses to specific questions, and the Impact Letter. Preparation for these writings follows a structured, guided process. Additional guidelines, exercises, and support will be provided along the way. The categories below are general; throughout the disclosure work — an ongoing assessment — we will refine structure and content to support your relationship’s unique needs and circumstances.

For the partner writing the Disclosure Letter:

• Early Relational Attachment Blueprint
  
  
• Rigorous honesty inquiry
  
  
• Relationship and Sexual History Timeline
  
  
• Personal ownership and exploration of the “why” — the underlying patterns, motives, and factors related to the double life and acting-out behaviors
  
  
• Writing the Disclosure Letter
  
  
• Answers to Partner Questions
  
  

For the partner writing the Impact Letter:

• Emotional stability, safety, grounding, and regulation through uncertainty and betrayal
  
  
• Relational and emotional individuation
  
  
• Clarifying non-negotiable relational boundaries and needs
  
  
• Relational Attachment History
  
  
• Question List
  
  
• Impact Letter
  

Begin the Supported Disclosure Process

Please contact me to discuss the Supported Disclosure Intensive

Text Dr. Mark Pugsley at ‪(505) 750-4108‬. Include your first name with texts.

We Will Review

Detailed Disclosure Overview

Assessment Process

Disclosure Timeline

Disclosure Cost