Ep 10 - Why People Cheat, What Makes A Cheater?, What Leads To Infidelity? Why Did This Happen To You?

One of the big goals of this program, along with helping your relationship heal from betrayal is to help you create secure attachments with each other. When couples have secure attachment bonds and genuinely feel emotionally connected and secure with each other, the chance of an affair is very small. As you share your primary emotions with each other and you see that your partner is sympathetic and understanding of where you are coming from, it deepens your bond with them. Throughout this program, as you share your primary emotions with each other, you've been moving from an attachment style like the anxious pursuer or the dismissive avoider to an attachment style that is secure. And this is possible even if you have never had a secure emotional connection with anyone in your life. You may still have tendencies of a pursuer or distancer, but you are largely secure with your partner. Eventually you will reach the place where your emotional bonds with them runs deep and you know you can depend on them emotionally. You know they are there for you emotionally, you don't feel the need to pursue or avoid, you feel free to be yourself. Adults with a secure emotional bond with their partner, are very likely to be faithful because what they experience in their marriage is a deep emotional bond. Sometimes when we are working through an affair, we don't really understand the reason why it happened yet. Sometimes we make it out to be more complicated than it really is. The reason is typically because of a lack of connection they feel with their spouse because they didn't feel emotionally connected and maybe even felt like they were running out of gas in life, experiencing depression and looking for something exciting to make them feel better. Now those things are even true for many sex addicts and philanders. Of course those reasons don't justify an affair, but it can be helpful in understanding the events that made the person vulnerable to betray someone so important to them. Sometimes people cheat because they feel unworthy of love, they feel that being in a relationship with someone from a distance is easier than actually having a close, authentically intimate relationship. They want emotional connection, but they don't know how to actually let someone in emotionally and having an affair is a safe enough distance because they aren't making a commitment to that person. Now those who have a dismissive attachment style or who tend to be distancers, probably have very little interaction with their parents. They may have been rejected physically or even emotionally. As a result of this, they learn to suppress their own needs and learn to become independent without relying on others. They learn that it isn't safe to depend on others for emotional support. Those with this type of attachment style really don't open up easily or think about relationships to a great extent which also makes them very vulnerable for an affair or even multiple affairs. Page 2 of 4 When a pursuer has an affair, it is because they are looking for intimacy and a boost to their self-esteem. They typically see their partner as someone who doesn't care for them much and maybe even see them as emotionally neglectful of their needs, but at the very least, they see this person as emotionally distant. Pursuers in a relationship will often start sliding their way from the marriage and start shutting down emotionally before they have an affair. One woman told me recently that she detached from her spouse before she had an affair. So don't let yourself become too hung up on why this happened. It's harder to understand why it happened when you have been betrayed by someone who is a sex addict because if you aren't one yourself, it's hard to understand how sex addicts think and how they could deny you sex when you've offered it to them, but at the same time, they are engaged in sex with others. That can be really challenging to understand that. Part of creating safety is understanding how the one who betrayed you was thinking and who they were as a person at the time leading up to the betrayal and who they were during the betrayal. Understanding why is meant to give us enough insight to make us feel like we're safe from that happening again and we can prevent it from happening again because we know why, we know what caused it. If we know what caused it, we can then get to work on preventing it from happening again. I've added some questions for you two to go over that. It may give you a little insight if you are having a hard time understanding why the betrayal occurred. Understanding why is helpful because it can also reveal what you meant to your spouse when they betrayed you....