You didn’t mean for this to happen. No one does. It starts subtly—like all catastrophes do. A text that makes you smile longer than it should. A conversation that feels easier than the ones you’re used to. Then comes the rush. The kind that makes everything else feel black-and-white while this—this connection—feels full color.
Now you’re in it. Not just an affair. A feeling. A flood of something that looks a lot like love, sounds like love, but behaves like something far less noble. You’re not just betraying vows. You’re betraying logic. Because it feels real. Too real to walk away from. And yet, deep down, you know you if you pursue this affair further it’ll destroy your family.
The trouble is, our culture is fluent in falling in love—but illiterate in letting go. No one hands you a guidebook when you’re trying to climb out of an emotional trapdoor with your dignity intact. You’re not just ending a relationship. You’re ending a story you believed in, an identity you borrowed, a feeling that got under your skin.
This isn’t heartbreak. It’s limerence—emotional obsession that feels like the love of legend.
Dr. Debora Phillips and Robert Judd knew this terrain when they wrote How to Fall Out of Love. Not for the casually heartbroken, but for the emotionally hijacked. The spouses who want to come home but can’t stop reaching for a shadow. The ones who know the affair must end but don’t know how to feel that ending.
If that’s you, here’s your roadmap—not for guilt, but for freedom. You don’t have to hope the obsession fades on its own. You can shut it down. One intentional step at a time.
Thought Stopping: The Mental Brake Pedal
Picture this: your brain is a car on cruise control, and the affair partner is the playlist that won’t shut off. Every corner you turn, they’re there. Not physically—just the memory of their voice, the curve of a smile, the text thread you swore you wouldn’t reread but did anyway.
This is where most people feel powerless. Like the thoughts are driving them.
Enter thought stopping—a mental brake pedal pulled straight from the playbook of cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t come with a movie score. But it works. And it’s the single most powerful technique for falling out of love with someone who still lives rent-free in your mind.
Here’s how it plays out in real life.
You make a list—not of grievances, but of distractions. Anchors. Joyful, vivid, real-life things that have nothing to do with your affair partner. Your child’s laugh. The smell of your grandmother’s kitchen. A hike that left you breathless. A playlist that lifts your mood. The beach at sunrise.
Then comes the reflex.
The moment your mind starts to drift—an image, a what-if, a craving—you slam the brakes. You say, “STOP!” out loud, with force. You mean it. Then immediately shift your focus to one of those anchors on your list. Not just thinking about it—saturating your brain with it. Like flipping the channel on a rerun you’ve seen too many times.
It’s mental push-ups. At first awkward. Maybe even silly. But repetition builds strength. And with time, you start choosing where your mind goes instead of being dragged by it.
You’re not suppressing. You’re rewiring. Reclaiming agency over your own narrative.
Thought stopping isn’t magic. It’s discipline. But when you start stacking these small wins—one interrupted craving at a time—you begin to break the cycle. You start to make space. And in that space, healing sneaks in.
Daniel, 42, married, two kids, recently ended an affair that felt like oxygen to him. He’s back home now, trying to rebuild—but his mind is still tethered to the affair partner. The way she made him feel seen.
On his morning commute, without fail, she shows up in his head. A memory, a fantasy, a regret. That mental loop plays like a song he can’t delete.
But today, Daniel’s doing something different.
The moment she flashes across his mind—midway through a red light—he doesn’t let the scene unfold. He clenches the steering wheel, says “STOP!” aloud, firmly. Not like he’s scared—like he means it. He immediately pictures his daughter at the zoo last weekend, shrieking with joy at the flamingos. He makes himself remember every detail: her pink sunglasses, the popcorn she ate, how she kept calling them “flat chickens.”
It feels awkward. Forced. But it works. The craving fades. Not completely—but enough. Enough for Daniel to get to work without drowning in nostalgia.
He’ll have to do it again. Maybe a dozen times today. But every time he does, the loop loses just a bit of its grip. That’s the beginning of falling out of love—one mental interruption at a time.
Silent Contempt: A Joke That Wears the Crown
There’s a strange trick the brain can play when it’s asked to rewire itself after obsession—it can laugh. And laughter, as it turns out, is a scalpel. Enter: silent contempt.
This isn’t a tantrum or a revenge fantasy. It’s subtler. More strategic. Imagine the affair partner, not as they were in candlelight—intense, brooding, captivating—but as a cartoon: maybe with a squeaky voice, mustard on their shirt, while wearing socks with sandals. That’s the move.
The technique? Replace the pedestal with parody. The goal? Emotional demotion. Every time they appear in your mind’s theater, they don’t arrive as Romeo or Juliet—they arrive as comic relief. It sounds petty. It’s not. It’s psychological judo. You're using humor to knock the wind out of an obsession.
And it works—so long as the image doesn’t provoke pity. Pity re-engages sympathy. Sympathy reopens the door. The door leads back to the fantasy. And this is about closing it, bolting it, and nailing it shut.
Eventually, the brain stops sending the invitation altogether. Because when someone’s legacy in your mind is a punchline, they lose their grip on your heart.
Dan used to think about her every morning before his feet hit the floor. But after the crash—the affair exposed, the house almost lost, his kids barely speaking to him—those memories started to sting more than they soothed.
I suggested this technique of silent contempt. At first, it felt beneath him. Immature. But he tried it.
He imagined her as a reality TV contestant—overdressed, overdramatic, talking about their “cosmic connection” while sipping wine out of a Solo cup. He pictured her throwing tantrums when her Instagram posts didn’t get enough likes or speaking in motivational quotes she didn’t quite understand.
At work, when he saw her across the room, the image flashed in his mind: she was on a soapbox, delivering a TED Talk to pigeons in the park.
He never laughed out loud. But the power shifted.
She stopped being the symbol of passion and started becoming what she really was—a moment he’d mistaken for meaning. Over time, the spell broke. Not because he hated her. But because he stopped needing her to feel alive.
Covert Sensitization: Rewiring the Chemistry
Some people fall into love. Others trip and hit every branch on the way down. And when they hit the bottom—usually in the form of an exposed affair—they still feel the burn, the buzz, the pull toward someone who lit them up like a switchboard. That’s when the lighter tools—like thought stopping and silent contempt—sometimes aren’t enough. That’s when you bring out the heavy artillery: covert sensitization.
It’s not pretty. But it works.
Covert sensitization is psychological judo. It’s a way of tricking the brain—retraining it to associate the object of your obsession not with longing, but with disgust. Think Pavlov, but instead of a bell and salivation, it’s your affair partner and the smell of curdled milk.
Here’s how it goes: you create a short list of deeply unpleasant images. Think stale garbage juice on a hot day. Rotting meat. The way a public restroom smells in a bus station. Then you pair those images—deliberately and vividly—with any romantic or physical memories of the affair partner.
Touching their hand? Picture that hand covered in warts.
Their voice in your ear? Imagine it distorted like a glitchy horror movie soundbite.
The goal isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity. It’s breaking the spell of attraction by flooding the mind with a stronger emotional current—repulsion. The final stroke of the process is imagining yourself walking away. Physically turning. Taking your power with you.
It sounds harsh. And it is. But sometimes the brain needs to be shocked out of its fantasy. Because love, when it’s this destructive, isn’t love. It’s a habit dressed as hope. And covert sensitization is how you quit cold turkey.
The Story of Alicia and the Locked Door
Alicia, a 39-year-old, never planned on falling into an affair. It started innocently—late-night texts with an old college friend who suddenly reappeared on Facebook. At first, it was nostalgic. Then flirty. Then magnetic. He listened. He admired. He made her feel seen.
When her husband found out, he was shattered. Alicia ended the affair and promised to focus on their marriage. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the other man. She kept checking her phone, replaying memories like highlight reels in her mind. She was stuck in longing, even though she knew the cost.
When she found out about covert sensitization she tried it. It felt weird at first—using disgust to disconnect from desire. But Alicia was willing to try.
She thought about the affair partner’s cologne—the way it used to make her pulse quicken. Then she imagined that scent mixed with the stench of rotting fruit. She pictured their last kiss, but now it came with the sound of slurping noodles and the image of a trash can overflowing with soggy leftovers.
Every time a fantasy about him started to form, she’d interrupt it with a vividly unpleasant sensory image.
It wasn’t magic. It took repetition. But slowly, her feelings changed. The longing turned to distance. The cravings cooled. What had once felt like a locked door she couldn’t stop trying to open now felt like one she didn’t even want to walk through.
“I don’t want him,” she said one day. “I just wanted the version of me I was pretending to be with him.”
And that was the beginning of real freedom.
How to Break the Spell: The Power of Pattern Interrupts
Here’s a trick you won’t find in romantic comedies: write down every negative trait your affair partner has. Not just the big red flags—start with the small stuff too. The weird laugh. The way they always talked over you. The habit of leaving texts on read for hours. All of it. Write it down.
Then read it three times a day.
And again anytime they sneak into your mind like a commercial jingle you can’t shake.
Why? Because you’re interrupting the pattern. You’re not falling out of love—you’re cutting the wires to the fantasy. You’re short-circuiting the emotional muscle memory that’s been trained to flinch at every thought of them with longing.
Think of your brain like a record that’s been skipping on the same song. These reminders are your needle reset.
Also helpful: starve the fantasy. No contact. No casual social media check-ins. No listening to songs that sound like your heartbreak has a Spotify playlist. Because every text, every scroll, every sad lyric is fuel. And you’re trying to run this fire out of oxygen.
It’s not cruel. It’s clarity.
Because romanticizing someone who helped wreck your life isn’t loyalty—it’s emotional self-sabotage dressed up in nostalgia.
Falling out of love with an affair partner isn’t about flipping a switch—it’s about retraining your brain, challenging your beliefs, and reclaiming control over your emotional life. It takes time. It takes effort. And most of all, it takes a decision—a moment where you stop asking whether you can move on and start deciding that you will. The fantasy doesn’t fade on its own. But with the right tools, the right mindset, and a clear understanding of what limerence really is, you can step out of the fog and into a life of truth, clarity, and real connection.
If you’re ready to take that next step toward healing, we invite you to join our Healing Broken Trust Couples Workshop at healingbrokentrust.com/hbtworkshop. This workshop is designed specifically for couples recovering from infidelity, helping you rebuild trust, navigate the emotional fallout, and rediscover the kind of relationship that feels safe, honest, and deeply connected. You don’t have to figure this out alone. Let us guide you—step by step—back to a place of stability, hope, and love that lasts.
