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

Brad:

Affairs happened when someone closes a door to their spouse and they open a door to someone else. I'm no longer communicating with you because this negative cycle has beat me up where I'm not asking for my wants and needs.

Morgan:

You are listening to Healing Broken Trust podcast with Brad and Morgan Robinson, where we talk about healing from affairs and fidelity trust and cheating in your relationship. If you're wanting to heal your marriage, this podcast is for you. We're on episode 10. We're talking about why do people cheat, why do they cheat? And I think that this one is pretty straightforward. But before we get started, I want to remind you to go to healing broken trust.com/episode 10. That's healing broken trust.com/episode, the number 10, episode 10, and download those free resources that will really help you to walk through this process to truly heal from what you're going through right now. So let's jump into episode 10 and learn why people cheat on our show. We've talked about the different types of affairs, but there is still this looming question of why do people cheat? So Brad, you want to begin to answer this question for our listeners?

Brad:

Yeah, Morgan, people cheat. There's three primary reasons why people cheat. The first two are not that common, and the third is extremely common. The first reason is sometimes people cheat because they're sex addicts. They have a compulsive tendency to act out. And like all addictions, it's negative impact on the addict and on family members increases as the disorder progresses. And what I mean by that, as people get deeper into this, it gets worse and worse over time. The addict usually has to intensify the addictive behavior to achieve the same results. And let me explain that. When somebody has an addiction, it doesn't satisfy what you start out doing in the beginning, typically doesn't satisfy those urges. So somebody can start with pornography and self-pleasure. A lot of people can stay there who are addicts, but most people will begin to escalate into other things where they start acting out with other people, they start going to prostitutes, they start seeing escorts, they start acting it out. And so over time, the addict will intensify their addictive behavior to achieve the same results. And that's where some affairs come from.

Morgan:

So that fantasy must then become a reality to further satisfy that addiction.

Brad:

And if you think about it, they've been basically viewing pornography. They've been viewing and breaking down mental barriers that most people have to an affair.

Brad:

They're

Brad:

Actually mentally rehearsing an affair when they're viewing pornography. Another thing that's going on is the other type of people who have affairs are the philanders. And I would say that's more an attitude than anything else. And this attitude says there may be something, this attitude of flander, they believe that cheating is okay for them to do. It's something that guys or girls do, and it's more of a rationalization. Okay, just as long as you don't get caught. Sometimes this attitude says there's no way a man or woman is supposed to be monogamous.

Morgan:

It's a myth, right?

Brad:

Yeah, it's a myth. You can't be monogamous,

Morgan:

Which is not true. It's not accurate at all. But they believe that.

Brad:

And this kind of attitude can lead to serial cheating and very flirting behavior, especially when their spouse isn't around. The attitude of the philander says there is nothing wrong with it. They may rationalize what they're doing or saying to themselves, as long as I'm not having sex with them or intercourse with them, it's okay. So kissing is okay. Spending time with them is okay. Sharing intimate parts of my life is okay because I'm not doing X, Y, or Z with them. And of course, they may even believe sex is okay too. Just don't get caught. And I've had different people tell me before that they viewed having an affair as a rite of passage. And it's something that men do as a part of growing up, as a part of maturing their certain

Morgan:

Rites of passages,

Brad:

Certain rites of passage.

Morgan:

And that's what we see in TV and movies all the time. Oh, you're a virgin. That's supposed to be some kind of bad thing.

Brad:

But there's people like that. There's attitudes that affect someone to have an affair, and we're going to get into that in a little bit later. But most individuals I work with, I would describe them as someone who's burnt out in their marriage.

Morgan:

So that's the third category.

Brad:

That's the third category.

Morgan:

Most people fit into the third

Brad:

Category, and we're going to spend most of our time talking about that. But these are people who are burnt out and there are attitudes that affect somebody having an affair. And there's those outside influences, family and friends. Have they had an affair? Have your mom and dad had an affair? If they have, you're more likely to have an affair yourself or coworkers cheating. What are coworkers attitudes about infidelity? What was your family's attitude about infidelity, your friend's attitudes about infidelity and pornography? Like we mentioned earlier, when you're viewing pornography, you are mentally rehearsing an affair. Those are outside influences that affect somebody, make it easier for somebody to cheat. Romance novels. Reading that, you're also mentally rehearsing having an affair. A lot of our entertainment, a lot of movies, a lot of different cultural things that we have, they really do not support the idea of monogamy. And they make infidelity attractive. They make it funny, they make it make it okay, a normal part

Morgan:

Of. So society is what they're telling us, which is not true

Brad:

When you're exactly right about that. So those are attitudes. Those are cultural things. Those are outside influences that make it, that can be associated with family, friends, coworkers, viewing pornography, reading, romance novels or entertainment. Even celebrity culture, it makes it easier for somebody to cheat.

I would even say even certain types of jobs make it easier for people to cheat, especially if you travel for a living, you're in certain professions where it's just easier to cheat. And so affairs really start Morgan here, and I want to get into the root of why people cheat. It really starts with the negative cycle that a couple is in. Most couples I would say are not happy if they're having an affair. The exception with that may be the philanders or the sex addicts. I would say almost everybody else, if they're in this burnt out category, they're not happily married. If they're cheating, I wouldn't classify that as a good marriage. And let me explain the negative cycles, because this is where infidelity starts. There are three kinds of negative cycles. There are the first kinds, the most common kind, and this is a negative cycle where the person who's having the affair is a distancer. They are somebody who is more withdrawn, not very emotionally expressive, typically in the relationship. They avoid. They avoid, and they may not start that way in the relationship though they may get to that place because they feel like they don't matter to their spouse.

Morgan:

They don't know how to ask for wants and needs.

Brad:

They don't know how to get. And so they may get to that point with their spouse. So they may not start that at that place of being a er. They may start at a place of being a pursuer

And a pursuer, and you can go through and listen to our recordings on that. We've talked about that before. So go listen to that. Who are pursuers and who are distancers. But pursuers are the ones who fear being abandoned, fear, rejection. They want to be close. And if they don't get it, they'll escalate their attempts for attention and connection into things like blaming, criticizing, demanding, and distancers are people who will kind of shut down emotionally. They will shut down because they don't think engaging with somebody who's upset with them is going to be that productive. And so that's where negative cycles typically start. And that's the most basic kind. And the person who cheats is a distancer. They're the one distancing from connection

Morgan:

To the relationship and their spouse, right?

Brad:

Yeah.

Morgan:

They're more invested in the affair or other things than they are in the relationship at that point, wouldn't you say? Or is that kind of later on?

Brad:

That's later on. But that's true. But that would happen later on. They become more interested in that for right now before the affair even starts. And you can have a pursuer who becomes a distancer. You can have a pursuer who also gets burnt out because they don't feel like they're getting through and they start shutting down emotionally, and then they have their own affairs. So that's where affairs start is that you have a negative cycle. Couples get into, and we've talked about how to get out of negative cycles, we've discussed that. Go listen to that. And so that's where a fair start. Morgan and every relationship has a negative cycle. And that first one, that's the pursuer. Distancer is the most common type of negative cycle. Then there's a negative cycle where couples are basically fighting all the time.

Morgan:

So they're pursuing, pursuing attack. Attack.

Brad:

Yeah. Well, the one who's been distancing feels like they're getting attacked by the pursuer because the pursuer is like, I'm not getting through to you. So they're

Morgan:

Blaming,

Brad:

Criticizing, demanding. It escalates. Then the distancer feels like they're getting their back against the wall, so they'll attack back. But they're primarily a distancer, and so they're just attacking back,

Morgan:

Can't put baby in a corner, right?

Brad:

Yeah. And they may be getting resentful as well. And so that's the second type. Then the third type is really what I would consider a void avoid. And these can be looked at as two different types of situations, but basically what they do is they avoid each other and they can avoid each other. They don't like conflict, they don't like stirring things up. And that can be both of them. So the pursuer, even though they want that connection, they're not really criticizing or blaming because they don't like conflict. So they're stuffing what their feelings are.

Morgan:

And

Brad:

Then the er, they're stuffing what their feelings are and what's going on with them.

Morgan:

And sometimes they think, oh, everything's okay. There's no argument.

Brad:

Well, exactly. They think they're in a strong marriage. And I got to tell you, a lot of people have affairs in this kind of situation

Morgan:

Where one pushing stuffing and they're really not being honest about how they feel.

Brad:

Well, even in the avoid, avoid situation, a lot of people have affairs in that. And then the other type of avoid, avoid affair is an affair where the person who was the original pursuer gets burned out, like I mentioned a moment ago, and they're avoiding, they're distancing, and you have the ER as well. And sometimes the one who was the original pursuer, like I said, they'll get burned out and they'll distance. Then the one who was the original ER will see, oh my gosh, they're pulling away from me. I don't like this much distance between us. Then they can become the pursuer.

Morgan:

So they sort of switch roles.

Brad:

Yeah, they'll switch roles. But basically I'm saying all that to say, well not spend a lot of time on that just to say this. That's where fares start. They start with a negative cycle because a couple does not feel close and people can say they have a good marriage and still have an affair. And I would say for the most part, that's probably hogwash unless there was a sex addiction affair or a flander is affair. And the people who are most likely to say that were probably people who were the avoid, avoid. Well, we never fought,

Morgan:

So we must have had a good relationship, but they weren't close to each other emotionally, they just assumed all relationships were like that. Typically,

Brad:

Yeah, we're good because we don't fight. They may have good communication skills, but they're not really talking about anything

Morgan:

Of significance, of

Brad:

Significance, emotional, their relationship and their feelings. They may be great at communicating about picking up the kids and planning their retirement and things like that, but not what's going on between them as a couple,

Morgan:

That deep emotional intimacy.

Brad:

And so affairs start with the negative cycle. Morgan, this leads into a progression of things that happen. And this doesn't necessarily happen in any chronological order necessarily. These things that I'm discussing, negative cycles create the affairs. Affairs start with a negative cycle, and that leads to the person who's having the affair, who ends up having the affair, feeling like they're burned out, they're tired, they feel beat up by the negative cycle, they end up feeling like they're not good enough for their spouse and because they're tired, because they're burned out, because they're beat up by the negative cycle. They don't ask for their wants and needs.

Morgan:

And I think it's very interesting to point out that you say they're beat up by their negative cycle. A lot of people think well beat up by my spouse, but no, it's beat up by that negative cycle. It's what's happening between you that's wearing you out.

Brad:

What's happening between you that's wearing you out's that negative cycle. And so the spouse will end up not asking for wants and needs. They stop reaching out, they stop communicating. And what happens is resentment develops. Sometimes they're really angry with their spouse, just resentment develops. And that's really important because from there they start feeling alone. They start feeling sad and depressed, they start feeling numb. And what's really happening, Morgan, is they're caring less about their marriage or their relationship and their easy fruit for an affair. And so there's these different things that happen because people get beat up by the negative cycle, resentment develops, start feeling alone, start feeling sad and depressed, start feeling numb, and they're starting to care less about maintaining that marriage, maintaining that relationship and their easy fruit for an affair. And the other thing that can happen is they're closed off to their spouse emotionally and they may be seeking connection elsewhere. So sometimes people are easy fruit for somebody else to initiate with

Brad:

Them,

Brad:

But at times people could be resentful enough where they're going to go initiate with somebody else.

Morgan:

Wow.

Brad:

And so that happens as well

Morgan:

And they begin to rationalize, is that right? Rationalize this connection with a friend who is just a friend or just a

Brad:

Coworker. And Morgan, what's happening is if Affairs happened when someone closes a door to their spouse and they open a door to someone else, I'm no longer communicating with you

Because this negative cycle is beating me up or I'm not asking for my wants and needs. What happens is closing a door to their spouse and they're opening a door to someone else, and then they're going to share with them. Contact can be made with the affair partner and sometimes they've been friends with the affair partner all along. So when the betrayer gets involved or the involved spouse gets involved in the affair, it's typically somebody they've known for a while. It's generally not somebody they just met. It's not a one night stand type of thing. Typically it can be though, but they have contact with the affair partner. It's somebody that they may have known all along and the affair makes 'em feel good about themselves.

Morgan:

If there's depression, it lifts the depression.

Brad:

If they've been depressed, they've been feeling alone, they haven't felt attractive. If they haven't been having sex with their spouse and they get this attention from somebody else, they begin to feel good about themselves. They like how they feel. And Morgan talked about before in understanding why affairs happened like we've talked about before in finding meaning. The question to ask to understand why this particular affair happened is to ask how were you different? And that's generally how people feel about themselves. How did you feel about yourself? How were you different? How did you feel differently? How were you different as a person

Morgan:

While the affair was happening,

Brad:

While the affair was happening? What did you like about yourself?

Those are all things for people to consider to talk about because that's generally what's going on. And so far we have a fair start with a negative cycle that leads people to feeling burnt out, tired or feel beat up by that negative cycle. They don't feel like they're good enough for their spouse anymore in a sense. They may already feel rejected by their spouse, maybe even abandoned by their spouse. At times, people do feel that way, and that happens more often than you would think. So they no longer ask for once and needs. There's resentment there. They start feeling alone, they're sad, they're depressed, they feel numb, and then they start caring less about the marriage. Those are the things that can happen in any order that get people to start caring less about their marriage or relationship, and they're easy fruit for an affair

Brad:

To

Brad:

Be picked off or to initiate their own, and they have contact with the affair partner who may be somebody they've known all along. It may not be somebody new, and what can happen from there is they develop feelings for the affair partner or they can fall into limerence,

Morgan:

Which

Brad:

Is a romantic love, love addiction, obsessive love infatuation,

Morgan:

But it's not based on a reality.

Brad:

Yeah, that's not based on a reality,

Morgan:

Right?

Brad:

It's based on a fantasy,

Morgan:

But

Brad:

Then they can develop feelings for that person and the affair will be going on. It's happening once the affair is discovered. It can make it difficult for some people to end the affair once they've been caught once they've been found out, but that's the general framework of why people have an affair. A lot of clients have discussed this with people who've been involved in an affair, and I would say the overwhelming majority of people who've cheated, have cheated because of what we talked about just a moment ago, feeling burned out or tired, beat up by the negative cycle, and they even feel beat up by the negative cycle of avoid, avoid because they don't think they matter anymore to their spouse. They feel like they're not good enough. They feel like they're not wanted anymore. They have real concerns about it, and so they go through this progression, this stage of feeling like they can't communicate, they can't share. Their spouse isn't there for them. They're no longer dependable. I can't go to them. They're going to be angry with me. They're going to be upset somehow. I don't make them happy.

Morgan:

Somehow I'll fall short or I'll fail or I won't measure up to their expectations,

Brad:

And part of this is so they go through this serious of progression, this psychology of betrayal. They'll go through the psychology of this mindset of someone who cheats. They'll develop, they'll have contact with the affair partner. The affair will start, feelings will develop for the affair partner. The affair will happen and will be happening. Then once the affair is made known,

Morgan:

Because it always will eventually,

Brad:

Yeah, typically it's more often than not, it's made known. Then Morgan, once it's made known for some people, almost every couple, there's a period of ambiguity, that uncertainty that they go through. Are we going to stay together or are we going to be done? We'll keep talking about this. Thank you for listening today. Yes, have a wonderful week guys. Thanks for listening to Healing Broken Trust. If you like this episode, you can always get our show notes and more details and links to the resources we discussed@healingbrokentrust.com. Also, as long as you're online, head on over to healing broken trust.com/retreat for details on an upcoming one-on-one retreat with me. If you like us, please subscribe and leave a review for us on iTunes. As always, everything discussed on this podcast is either my opinion or Morgan's opinion and is not to be taken as relationship advice because I'm not your therapist, nor have I considered your personal situation as your therapist. This podcast is for your entertainment and education only, and I really do hope you've enjoyed it. See you Until next time.

Ep 21: 10 Types of Affairs

Morgan:

If the person that you're striking up a friendship with knows more about your relationship and what's going on than your spouse does, then you're heading down that path.

Brad:

Yeah.

Morgan:

You are listening to Healing Broken Trust podcast with Brad Morgan Robinson, where we talk about healing from affairs, infidelity, trust, and cheating in your relationship from the perspective of a professional marriage therapist and a fair recovery expert. If you want to save your relationship after infidelity, this podcast is for you. Welcome to episode 21 where we're talking about the 10 different types of affairs. We're asking the question, are all affairs created equal? This is a really important question because not every situation is going to look exactly the same. It will help you to know and recognize the different types of affairs that are out there so you can know how to handle your unique situation better. And if you haven't already done so, go to healing broken trust.com/episode 21. That's the number 21, and download the resources that go along with this episode. Also, if you haven't yet seen the information on our one-on-one retreats and you'd like more personalized help, check out the retreatsPage@healingbrokentrust.com slash retreat today. And let's get started. You don't see specialty group private practices where the entire practice is devoted to working with couples or just one area of specialization,

And that's what we do. We specialize in relationship therapy. The average therapist out there might see three or four couples a week, but we see 50 couples every week coming through our office. On average, every therapist who works with us is committed to researching the best methods for working with couples. And research has shown that the more common method for working with couples was only about 35% successful, and only 17% of the couples actually maintained their improvement after two years.

Brad:

That's

Morgan:

Research,

Brad:

And that's a huge relapse, really,

Morgan:

Definitely one of the methods that we use emotionally focused couples therapy has also been researched, and it was discovered that 86% of couples make significant improvement in counseling. And that's the couple saying that they've made significant improvement.

Brad:

Right? Yeah. Not the therapist saying, Hey, they got better. It's the couples saying they made significant improvement, not just improvement.

Morgan:

Exactly. And then they followed those couples and they found three years after counseling, 90% of those couples actually kept their progress, which is a big deal. I mean, people usually want to know, is this going to help us? Are we going to get back to where we were again? And so that's a big difference.

Brad:

Yeah, is it's

Morgan:

Huge. It's

Brad:

A huge difference.

Morgan:

We help relationships related at any place, whether you're wanting to stop your divorce, wanting to remarry after divorce, or maybe you're just wanting to prepare for marriage or you're just having trouble connecting with each other. So we really help relationships really to any place. Today we're talking about the different types of affairs, and there are 10 different types of affairs that we've identified, right, Brad?

Brad:

Yeah. There's at least 10 different types. And these are just categories just to understand if you've gone through an affair, if you're in one of these categories, your affair is in one of these. It may not be a complete description of it, so it may be like we're going to talk about there being a one night stand, and then we're going to talk about somebody who's a burned out spouse. Maybe there's a combination of these different categories at times. So not every affair nicely fits into these categories, but we've put 'em into categories to help us understand them,

Morgan:

And that's really important.

Brad:

So there's 10 different types. I'll just briefly list off the names of these 10 different types. So there is the one night stand, there is the liran affair, there's the sex addicts affair. There is the shared interest affair, the emotional affair. There's the idealized love affair, and there's the philanders affair, the sexual abuse affair. And I'll explain that. Lemme just because that's going to throw people off. That's basically when someone's abused, taken advantage of and their spouse thinks that they were having an affair, but they were actually raped or they were sexually abused. Oh gosh. And that obviously is very complicated because the one who was abused is their spouse thinks they cheated on 'em and they were actually taken advantage of. And then there's the revenge affair, and that's when someone's been betrayed. They want to get even with their spouse and they get 'em back.

And then the exit affair, there's the one night stand and the one night stand, this very well may be a one time betrayal. It can be more than one time, and it can happen more than one time without that person being a sex addict. And so there's a fine line between a few one night stands and being a sex addict to really be diagnosed as a sex addict. You don't want to meet with a therapist that specializes in that, which is something that we can do at marriage solutions. You don't want to self-diagnose yourself with something like that. You can have more than one night stands, but commonly one night stands occur when a spouse is away from home, usually on business or a pleasure trip, something like that. And they happen in the heat of the moment. They give into temptation, and that usually happens when there's drinking and they can be anonymous.

So they're traveling business pleasure by themselves. There's drinking. They give into temptation boundaries, poor boundaries, things like that. Now, when this kind of affair happens, it's not necessarily an indication of problems in the marriage or that the betrayer is dissatisfied with her spouse. In fact, one of the distinguishing points in this type of affair is the betrayer wants to stay in their marriage. So sometimes we get people who have an affair, and one of the common elements is they're burned out. The marriage really has issues, but they really want to be a part of the marriage. This is someone who can be happily married and still does this because alcohol is involved. They're away from home, but maybe they're curious, some temptation involved.

Morgan:

You want to talk about the characteristics.

Brad:

The core of this material is really bad choices, bad boundaries, the lack of integrity mixed with the opportunity to act. Typically there's no emotional involvement. And it happens typically with a perfect stranger who's befriended in this situation. And we've worked with plenty of people with this, and this can be very hard to understand and make sense of why did this happen? As we talked about before, getting to why and understanding why it makes it more bearable, not knowing why just makes us much harder.

Morgan:

We've been able to help people recover their relationship even after this.

Brad:

Oh yeah, definitely. So this type of affair, the one night stand may be motivated out of loneliness or curiosity just generally result to poor boundaries and misguided thinking that this could never happen to me. I'm going to get close to the edge of the line, but I'm not going to cross it. Normally, individuals who have had one night stands tell themselves that they will go to the grave with this secret. I'm not telling anybody this is not an indication that they want out of the marriage. In fact, they fear that if they tell this secret, they're going to lose the marriage. And that's really the wrong approach with that. And

Morgan:

That's something that we've talked about in the past, being completely open and forthright and honest, because that really is what begins the healing process for the

Brad:

Relationship.

Morgan:

This hiding doesn't help

Brad:

But the one night stand basically. Obviously they don't want to disclose it, then the whole marriage is going to be shattered. So characteristics of this type of affair, it's really an affair of convenience or opportunity. It's not something that's really sought out, but rather it occurs as the opportunity is presented. The berio does not want to leave the marriage. That's another characteristic. And then it's not really an ongoing relationship. It happened a couple times. A relationship can develop from this. And one of the ironic things with this is when people are betrayed, especially when it's a one night stand, they say, gosh, this would be so much easier if you had a relationship with this person. I can understand it better. And then when people have been betrayed by their spouse having a long-term relationship, they're like, gosh, you just had a one night stand.

Morgan:

And everybody thinks the grass is greener on the either side.

Brad:

Yeah, exactly. They think the grass is greener. And here's the important thing, if you're listening to this and you've been the one who had the affair, it's just as hard. Even if it was a one time mistake or year long mistake, it's still just as hard. There's different elements that maybe make it harder as far as pain goes. Either one's about a 10,

Morgan:

About painful.

Brad:

Yeah. And then

Morgan:

Are these typically sexual relationships? We've talked about emotional affairs we talked about.

Brad:

Yeah, they're typically sexual. Yeah. Okay. It's pretty, alcohol is involved. Yeah, it's typically just pure sex and that kind of thing. Let's go on to the liran affair.

Morgan:

So the liran affair, this type of affair is really characterized by two different or two individuals who believe they are in love and with this type betrayers believe that they have fallen in love. It's the love addiction affair that we've talked about, and they feel powerless over powerful emotions. It's not uncommon for them to feel guilty about what they're doing, but at the same time, they feel like they are no longer in love with their spouse, and they know that they will never be happy unless they're with their lovers. So it's this guilt complex we talked about where they want to go home to their spouse and they want to be there with their spouse because they feel guilty. But the whole time they're really thinking about this love object that we've described it as in the

Brad:

Past, Morgan, you hit the nail on the head. They feel guilty about having the affair, but also they're miserable at home. And so they go home to their spouse because they feel bad about having the affair. But then when they're home, they crave being with the affair partner because of that limerence catch. And we talked about limerence before, but they crave that limerence. And so then they'll go back to the fair partner. And so they bounce back and forth and it can really stretch out over a period of time.

Morgan:

Yeah. And usually it develops from an existing friendship that begins really where the boundaries have been breached. And so basically those boundaries, they weaken and then they finally give in. And I think it's really interesting, something we've talked about in the past that sometimes people in a limb and affair, they really, really try to quit it. They really try to go back to their spouse and then they go back to work or where that person may be, and all of a sudden they see them in the hallway and it's like a light switch switches, and they're like, oh my gosh. And they fall into this lime affair again. They fall

Brad:

Back to it again.

Morgan:

And it's like an addiction. I love addiction.

Brad:

Yeah. Morgan, what you were saying is important. Usually this kind of affair starts as a friendship first. It begins as the boundaries between the two individuals weaken. This type of affair is not like the one nine stand. It's not based on sex necessarily

Morgan:

The ideal of that person.

Brad:

Yeah. Well, it's the feeling of being in love.

Morgan:

Oh, yes.

Brad:

In fact, the power driving the relationship, it's really the strong emotions generated by the growing romance

Brad:

And

Brad:

It's thence. We've talked about this before. I'll just remind our audience. Rin is a fancy term to describe a few basic feelings of love, love, sickness, infatuation, obsessive love, love addiction. It's this romantic love. And so when people are having a liran affair, they're feeling this romantic love feeling, and it really starts a growing romance. And that's why they want to leave their spouse and be with this person.

Morgan:

The betrayer believes he or she wants out of the marriage. So they think they want out of the marriage. The betrayer believes he or she is in love with the affair partner and is willing to sacrifice life with their spouse for the opportunity to be with the affair partner. And typically, this type of affair is a long-term relationship versus the one I stand where it's very temporary and very one night standish.

Brad:

Yeah, it's a long-term relationship that develops into romance develop.

Morgan:

And then frequently there's a pattern of betrayer swinging back and forth between their marriage and their affair partner. And when they are at home, like we talked about trying to do what's right, they're miserable and they feel like they'll never be happy. And when they're with their affair partner, they have this euphoria, this ecstatic euphoria, but they may be feeling so guilty that they can't stand it. So they move back home only to feel miserable and to realize once again that they can never be happy unless they go back to the affair partner. So it's this back and forth, back and forth dance. And then this dance of insanity can continue for years. So this back and forth can happen for a very long time. Versus the one night stand, maybe short betrayers often seem incapable of making a decision about what they're going to do, and they don't want to be in the marriage. Other factors may keep them from choosing to divorce, for example, feelings of guilt or failure may cause them to stay. There may also be strong feelings regarding what's best for the kids. So they may decide to stay for the children, but a lack of commitment to the marriage is a real problem. So

Brad:

Choosing to leave isn't the solution. But this kind of affair too, Morgan, I want to include this and this type of affair with limine affairs. The betrayers have most likely already made the decision to leave their marriage when people are experiencing kind of made up the mind, I think I'm done. I don't think I want to be here anymore. And so we'll see them come to counseling usually out of respect or something like that.

Morgan:

But at that point, most of the time they've decided that they're done. They already decided care for their spouse.

Brad:

They just want to end on good terms. And so that's usually why they come to

Morgan:

Counseling. But we've been able to help people break out of the li and affair and actually rekindle their relationship with their

Brad:

Spouse. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so they want to leave. They've already made the decision to leave. They believe they can't be happy unless they get to be with the one they love.

Unlike the one night stand, this kind of affair indicates a deeper problem in the marriage. The marital problem is not the cause of the fair necessarily, but there are defects in every marriage. And sometimes those defects definitely play a role in an affair. And so at the very least, they can serve as inhibitors to the betrayer wanting to work on the marriage. Well, you've got these flaws, you've got these things. Why do I want to stay with you? And part of that is limerence at play. And part of that's just the reality of that's what marriage is like. Everybody has issues.

Morgan:

And we talk about you put two flawed human beings who're not perfect, and you put 'em together and you think, oh, it's a perfect union, but there's no such thing. You've got two flawed human beings. You're going to have a relationship with flaws.

Brad:

So

Morgan:

It's

Brad:

Natural. Well, and let me say this, Morgan, because one of the things, I know people listening to us talking about this, if they're in this, they may think, well, holy crap, this is hopeless. They want to leave. They're in love. They no longer love me. They feel like our marriage has issues. They went out of their marriage. They've been bouncing back and forth for a long time. It's not hopeless. One of the key things of overcoming a lime Orrin affair is really the person experiencing limerence, knowing that it's RINs, just them knowing, okay, I'm experiencing, and here's the characteristics. These are the factors that go into that. And we've got a show on that that we've already done. But just knowing that many times, that causes people just to put on the brakes

Morgan:

And to understand what's going on with

Brad:

Them because they think they're in love. They think they found their soulmate, and many times they're grateful to know that, Hey, this is what they're experiencing. And so that's one of the key things. And the other key thing is when you do this, and we haven't discussed this yet, but you have to start doing last resort techniques. You have to start doing things as a spouse when they've decided they want to leave.

Morgan:

And that's something that you've really developed a lot. The last resort technique, when your spouse is trying to leave you when they're done, there are ways to actually save your relationship.

Brad:

And I'll just briefly go over that, and we're going to do this in a future show. Basically there's four things that you want to do, and these are one sided. But when you're trying to get someone back, they're leaving for very specific reasons. And so we're going to discuss those in a different show. We're not going to get into those today, but there's things that need to be done. And so it's not hopeless at the very least.

Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. It's not hopeless. We can definitely help. There are ways to rekindle the relationship. And today we're talking about the different types of affairs. There's 10 different types, but we are on the third, the sex addicts

Brad:

Affair, the sex addicts Affair. These affairs are committed by individuals. This could be male or female, to have an ongoing pattern of sexual betrayal such as frequenting, topless bars or adult bookstores, viewing pornography, compulsive masturbation, prostitution, repetitive encounters with sexual partners and other behaviors that are destructive to both the individual and to the marital relationship.

Morgan:

So this is kind of that stereotypical one that everyone thinks, oh, if they've made the mistake of having an affair, that they all kind of are lumped into this category. But it's not entirely true that everybody is,

Brad:

No, it's not a sex addict. Not everybody who has a one night stand is a sex addict or goes to topless bars. Whoever better be that goes to topless bars is not a sex addict. But here's the important thing with this. If you have, I would say a majority of these things that we just listed, a pattern of sexual betrayal, like topless bars, adult bookstores, viewing pornography, compulsive masturbation, prostitution, repetitive encounters with sexual partners, those can be evidence of a sex addict. And let me say this, I know we talked about one night stand a few minutes ago, when a sex addict has a one night stand. This is someone who seeks out the opportunity for sex. And so I had a guy one time I worked with, he would pick up women from bus stops on his car and he would have sex with 'em. And he did this 17 times. So he had 17 one night stands,

Morgan:

Oh my gosh, that he

Brad:

Could remember, that he could remember at this point. And the guy is a sex addict. Now those a little bit more than one night stands. And so if you've traveled for business and you've had one night stands, you may not be necessarily a sex addict. You probably have very bad boundaries, but it is worth exploring so that you can get the right treatment for it. Because one of the things in rebuilding your marriage back is the behavior has to stop. Trust has to be rebuilt. And each time that a one night stand reoccurs, you are demolishing any sort of progress that's been rebuilt.

Morgan:

And these people that are seeking out these sexual relationship, there's not even really a relationship. Sexual experiences. Sometimes they feel like they just can't find the fulfillment in their marriage.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah. It's

Morgan:

A deep void.

Brad:

Well, even though they're married, they haven't found complete fulfillment from their marriage. In fact, they're enslaved by desire to satisfy their longings. They're driven by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. They're powerless over their extramarital attachments to these behaviors to people or objects like pornography. They're really powerless to this. These individuals look to extramarital attachments to meet the need for love and acceptance instead of allowing their mate to fulfill these needs.

Brad:

And

Brad:

So this is really important. What they have is they have a huge amount of toxic shame. They feel really unacceptable as a person. They feel unlovable. They feel shame is what gets them into sex addiction. And these individuals are looking for sex to meet the need for love and acceptance that they have. And unfortunately, it just creates more, and I'm going to get into this in a minute, but that shame that comes from being a sex addict just creates, in fact, more of a compulsive need for sex addiction.

Morgan:

This category is not about the marriage as much as it is about the addiction. Is that correct?

Brad:

Yeah. Yeah. Sex addicts don't typically have affairs because there's issues with the marriage. Now, they may blame the marriage when they get caught. Well, you did this to me one time, or that happened, or this happened. So that's my excuse for seeing topless bars and pornography and having a string of 17 women. They can use that as an excuse, but not that the marriage didn't have issues, but that's them trying to save face. Most likely, they would've pursued these same behaviors whether they were married or not, or if they were married to Miss America, they still would've pursued these kinds of things. And so this is key. The shame and fear associated with this type of behavior perpetuates the dual life of an addict propelling the destructive behaviors. It just creates more of this. And so they often feel hopeless. They feel trapped by these behaviors, and they're afraid to come clean because they don't want to lose their marriage or give up their addictive behavior. And so this type of betrayal, it's especially difficult for the spouse who's been betrayed because their suffering is not just from the betrayal, it's from their inability to understand their mate's behavior.

What the addict has done seems so foreign. The spouse cannot comprehend it. So finding out why is really important in this.

Morgan:

Yeah, that why is so important.

Brad:

Yeah. One of the things a sex addict could do is even have sex with someone of the same gender when they're not a homosexual, they could still have a sex with someone of the same gender, and that really makes it hard. And so figuring out why, what makes it hard to recover is not knowing why,

Morgan:

Because they really have a deep void that needs to be filled. It's

Brad:

A shame. Shame and the guilt. Yeah. There's so much shame there. I'm such a bad person and they're trying to remove that toxic shame. I'm such a bad person that they're looking for sex and acceptance. It's

Morgan:

Almost like sometimes self abuse, sometimes pursuing something that will

Brad:

Exactly. Yeah. I'm just going to go through these characteristics real quick. One of the things that can happen with this is when the betrayed spouse, they're in such a shock because it is outside the norms of healthy sexuality, obviously. And so they're so shocked about this

Brad:

At

Brad:

The magnitude of the compulsive behavior that makes it also difficult for a couple to recover.

But the characteristics of this is it's a habitual pattern of extreme behaviors that are either sexually related or they're relational. So that means somebody can have a series of flings that are emotional affairs, like through text messaging or emails or things like that, and not quite reach sex, but they may have phone sex or something like that. Typically, the betrayer wants to save the marriage, but they still have a compelling drive to look elsewhere to meet their needs. They want to save the marriage, but they still have this compelling need to be a sex addict and act out sexually. Often these behaviors began before the marriage, and this was really important. They stopped after they got married, and then they began again after the addict realized that being married couldn't meet the needs that they have the same way as acting out does

Brad:

The addictive

Brad:

Behaviors. And so that's really important. So they may stop for a little bit and then kind of go back to it after getting married. It is common for the betrayer to have made past efforts to stop the behavior and to have actually been successful for a season only to relapse after believing things were better.

Morgan:

They

Brad:

Kind of feel like to

Morgan:

Let their guard down,

Brad:

They feel like, well, I can stand over the edge of this cliff and look down. And this is important. And this is a huge part of why this sex addiction continues is betrayer has a deep sense of shame and guilt, and the behavior creates more shame and guilt, and they have tons of shame that leads them into this kind of lifestyle

Morgan:

Negative cycle.

Brad:

Yeah, just reinforces it. The sex addict needs to be an individual counseling for their addiction. Being remorseful, not cure a sex addict, you need to go to a therapist who specializes in this. Recovering from an affair is not possible until the betrayer gets the help they need for their addiction. I say this because unless they get the help they need, it will happen again and again until this is dealt with directly.

Morgan:

And what's really important is you really need to go to someone. You can't just say, oh, my spouse is a sex addict, but you're not the therapist. So go to a qualified person before you just make the assumption that they're an addict.

Brad:

Because a sex addiction diagnosis is a heavy diagnosis and you need to make sure that it's a legitimate diagnosis, something that you have to fill out. And yeah, that's legitimate. In Oklahoma, one out of six couples will do marriage counseling with a professional before divorce, which is really low. That is low. That's pretty bad. But it talked about the lime affair, and we're going to talk about the second type of the liran affair. This first type is more the classical type of liran affair where a person feels like they're madly in love with someone and they want to leave the marriage because they want to be with that person as their soulmate. But may happen is they may leave the marriage to be with that person and then come back. They may leave home to be with that person, and then when they're away, they feel guilty, so they'll come back home. And that's just a stance of insanity that

Morgan:

Happens. And then while they're at home, they feel the longing to be with their other

Brad:

Partner, the other person. And that puts you through the grinder when you go through that. Then there's a sex addicts

Morgan:

Affair, and there's very, a small percentage of people that actually have a sex addiction

Brad:

Affairs. Yeah, actually there's a very few number, but when they do, it's very clear because it's a lot of people,

Morgan:

A lot of people that they've had an affair with is what you're saying.

Brad:

Yeah. The shared interest affair, that's what we're going to talk about today, the emotional affair and the idealized love affair, which is the second type of limmer and affair. We're going to talk about Flanders men and women who are Flanders, who think it's pretty much normal or morally to have sex. They cross the line and they don't think they're cheating or they think it's okay to cheat

Morgan:

Sex outside of marriage, right?

Brad:

Yeah. It could be sex, it could be kissing other types of sex other than intercourse. Then there's a sexually abuse affair where someone's sexually abused their spouse. Mistakes set for an affair, the revenge affair. This is when someone's been betrayed and they don't have their spouse to help them try to heal, and they want to make them feel the same pain they have. So the revenge affair and then the exit affair. And so the shared interest affair, and let me say this before we get into this. Every affair, these are put in the categories. Some of this is information that I've created. Some of this is information from Rick Reynolds. He's a therapist down in Austin, and some of this is from Dave Carter who's also, and all three of us work with infidelity, and there's pretty much about 10 different types of affairs, and there could be more than that. But just for the sake of classification, they're put into 10 different types of affairs. So not every affair may clearly fit into one category that we're discussing in this series of types of affairs. So may not fit perfectly. There may be more than one category that your affair sits into. And so it's good

Morgan:

To know.

Brad:

It's very important to know that. So the shared interest affair in this situation, the betrayer, they'll be involved with a single person, and at the same time, they don't want to leave the marriage to the person having the affair. They look at their fair partner as a soulmate. And these affairs frequently spring from a relationship in which the two individuals share something in common, such as music, art, or other interests. Could be movies, it could be technology, it could be just something that they don't have in common with their spouse.

Brad:

And

Brad:

So they turn to the affair partner for understanding companionship and support. It is as if the betrayer develops two lives, they share one part of themselves with their mate, and then they reserve another aspect of life for their affair partner.

And pretty much every affair has, I would say most affairs have some element of this where they kind of have a duality. You kind have a secret fantasy life, but this is a little bit more developed in this type of affair. So let me repeat that last thought. The betrayer will develop two lives. They share one part of themselves with their mate, and then they reserve another aspect of life for their affair partner. Daily activities and information are divided into two realms that which will be shared with her spouse and that which will be shared with the affair partner. Usually this type of affair indicates that there are other deficits in the marriage.

Morgan:

There's just a lack of closeness, and somehow

Brad:

There could be a lack of closeness. There could be closeness, it could be lack of time together, that kind of thing. Lemme be clear here. Marital problems is no excuse for infidelity. Just because you have issues doesn't mean it's okay to go cheat.

And those are areas that need to be addressed in order to strengthen the marriage. So some of the common characteristics of this type of affair is the individuals want to stay married who have the affair. It's unusual for the affair partner to be referred to as a soulmate. It can't happen, and there may be a little bit of limerence in this type of affair as well. The betrayal's life is divided into two parts, the part shared with their spouse and the part they share with the affair partner. So in two different distinct needs are being met by these two different relationships. An important part of figuring out why and this kind of affair is asking, how are you different?

Morgan:

Interesting. Yeah,

Brad:

Because why is an affair? Because you're different in this type of relationship. You like how you feel in that. So asking how you're different would help understand a little bit more of the motivation, why someone had that affair and what they were drawn to. And so Morgan, the next part is the emotional affair.

Morgan:

This fifth type of affair is commonly referred to as an emotional affair. This is the fifth on our list, although some would not consider an emotional entanglement, an affair because it hasn't been consummated. And a lot of people don't see it.

Brad:

If you're not having sex, it's not an affair,

Morgan:

Which that's what they might think. But truly,

Brad:

That's what betrayers many times think.

Morgan:

Yeah, this type of relationship can be just as devastating and destructive as a sexual affair. Emotional affairs are not commonly discussed. And frequently their lack of sexual involvement, like we said, is used as to why it's not an affair. But technicalities in no way absolve the reality of the situation. So usually when a person has to put the word just in front of the word friend, there's a problem. The notion that a lack of sexual involvement somehow prevents this type of relational intimacy from being an affair. And it really is baffling. And anytime someone other than our mate is permitted to enter the most intimate areas of our life, we're just giving something that we have no right to give, and we have already given and committed our heart to another, to our spouse. And so sharing intimate details of your life with someone else other than your spouse, that's an affair. One good way to identify this type of affair is if your mate's best friend,

Brad:

Best friend,

Morgan:

Yes, has more information or insights about your mate's life than you do, does this friend know more about your marriage than you do if your mate is closer to a friend than to you? It is already an affair. And it may seem harmless because they've yet to cross the sexual physical line, but it is an affair nonetheless. And a lot of times these do lead to the physical affair. So the characteristics really are boundary issues. That's a factor. The betrayer is better friends with that individual than his or her spouse. The betrayer keeps secrets with his friend instead of with his or her spouse. The betrayer does not want to choose between the friend and the spouse, and the betrayer wants to stay married. Usually this one seems more sneaky to

Brad:

Me.

Morgan:

It seems a lot more sneaky. It kind of sneaks in.

Brad:

Yeah. People honestly have a hard time knowing if it's an affair.

Morgan:

The

Brad:

One who's been betrayed, they say, yes, it's an affair. The one who was involved in it many times, they don't feel like it was an affair because, oh, it's just my friend. I did talk about things, but they were telling me things. They were telling me about things going on with them. And so a little bit more, I want to go over a few more things that kind of help clarify this. It's an emotional affair if you're keeping the details of this relationship secret from your spouse, that's one way to note. It's an emotional fear. So you're keeping the details of this relationship secret from your spouse, you're saying, and doing things with the other person that you wouldn't do with your spouse present. So you're saying or doing things with this other person that you wouldn't do with your spouse present.

Morgan:

If your spouse wasn't there, you probably would change your tune.

Brad:

Maybe you wouldn't even go to that area. You're sharing things with the other person that you wouldn't share with your spouse, and you're making an effort to arrange to spend time with the other person. And this is important too. People who get involved in emotional affair typically weren't looking for an affair. They didn't intend to have an affair, and they didn't think they were vulnerable to having an affair. And so that's really important.

Morgan:

And the truth is, we're all vulnerable. We have to always keep our antenna up, our antennas up

Brad:

And about half of emotional affairs do develop into a physical relationship.

Morgan:

Interesting.

Brad:

And about 79% of people weren't seeking an affair. Were not seeking an affair. And that's information from dear peggy.com. He was an affair recovery expert as well. And so many times people just think it's harmless. But the fact is that these things do turn sexual. And many times the distance between no physical contact and kissing is a longer distance between kissing and physical intimacy.

Morgan:

Will you say that one more time?

Brad:

Yeah. That the distance between no physical contact and kissing is a much longer distance than when people start kissing. And the

Morgan:

Physical

Brad:

Intimacy that develops,

Morgan:

It's much easier to go from kissing to physical.

Brad:

It's just a natural progression of things. And so that's an emotional affair. The next type of affair, and this is the other type of a lime affair,

Okay, strongly lime idealized love affair. This is a love addiction that's characterized by repetitive pattern of moving from one relationship to the next, falling into a love that doesn't exist. Although this pattern has an addictive quality to it, these are not necessarily sexual relationships. They also do not fall under the category of people who have become emotionally involved in an inappropriate friendship. There is a compulsive pattern to their behavior. It is about the feeling of falling in love with that one right person. So this type of affair is about the feeling of falling in love with that one right person of

Morgan:

Butterflies, that you get that thing.

Brad:

And of course they can't find that one right person. So this never ending search for the one right person prevents full commitment to a marriage. And having discovered that their mate isn't the right person, Mr. Or Mrs. Wright, these people will compulsively pursue the search for their soulmate. And we've had this in our office where people will come in and want to leave their spouse because they think they found their soulmate, they think they found it, and they've met their spouse through an affair as well.

Brad:

And

Brad:

So it's kind of this progression like this, and it's really, they're looking for that falling in love, that perfect fairytale type relationship

Morgan:

That doesn't, that's not accurate, doesn't

Brad:

Exist

Morgan:

Realistic,

Brad:

And they're looking for the right person instead of trying to be the right person.

And so falling in love is not this falling in love thing that they're looking for is not love at all. When this occurs, it is not even about the other person. It's how it makes them feel about themselves. Anyone who has fallen in love will eventually fall out of love and then must choose to love because love grows in stages. You have the romantic love, then you experience disillusionment, and then you have mature love where you choose to love. So anybody in every relationship moves past romantic love, nature's way of helping us bond with each other, develop a relationship with each other, but it moves on to disillusionment, begin to see flaws and weaknesses. And then you have to choose to

Brad:

Love.

Brad:

And these people keep thinking, well, crap, I want this romantic love feeling. I like this being in love feeling. And they keep looking for that. And when it ends with one relationship, they go to the next for it. And so pretty much anyone who has fallen in love is going to fall out of love. And you have to choose to love

What real love is. True love is based on knowing the other person and letting that person know you. This is a healthy intimacy and not this false intimacy. The love addict has mistaken for love. They've clung to and obsessively pursued, and that's that part of limerence. So characteristics of this, it occurs in male and females, but it can happen more often with females. The betrayer will be ambivalent about their marriage. They also tend to overvalue the person they're infatuated with. They may think this person is the greatest thing ever. They're incapable of judging the negative characteristics of the affair partner. While they may see the defects, they won't give these defects any weight, whether they see them as unique or special. So even the negative flaws of this person they look at is unique or special.

Morgan:

And is that before they actually join in a relationship with that person and then see more clearly, or is it just like an infatuation that wears off over time? Is that

Brad:

It could be, yeah. Usually it wears off over time

Morgan:

And then they start to see those flaws maybe differently at that time when the infatuation wears

Brad:

Off. Well, yeah, they'll notice 'em as flaws then. But when they, they're involved in and this in love feeling, they don't even really consider, many times they don't even consider the weaknesses. And when they do, they might look at it as, oh, he only has a temper because he's just passionate about stuff. Yeah, he's a passionate, he gets so passionate, he punches holes in the wall. Gosh, I love somebody who's so passionate about

Brad:

Life.

Brad:

That's how they'll look at it. It could be something that silly so occurs more often with females. They tend to be ambivalent about their marriage. I love my spouse, but I'm not in love with my spouse.

We'll hear that, and that's a sign of this kind of affair or even any affair really. But they tend to be ambivalent. They've experienced this kind of relationship with someone else, and they want to try to recreate that with their spouse, and they may decide to leave them and they don't feel that emotional bond that's there. They also tend to overvalue the person they're infatuated with. We were talking about that a moment ago. They're really incapable of judging the negative characteristics of the affair partner. And that's because of nce. And we talked about that before in a previous show. The Thence is also known as love sickness, love addiction, infatuation, obsessive love, romantic love, and it really just clouds your judgment on how you see things. These defects may be seen, they don't really consider it. They may see 'em as unique or special, kind of what I was talking about with the anger. This may not be an actual relationship with a person they're infatuated with. It could be like an obsession that's not reciprocated

Morgan:

Interesting.

Brad:

So it could be somebody they work with.

Morgan:

It's like a challenge.

Brad:

It could be like a challenge, but that's also how ence works. It's when eye contact's made. It's when you find someone that you think is attractive or you think that's interested in you, and there's eye contact with them. Many times, that's kind of when Rin starts. We've talked about that progression.

Morgan:

It's fall. That's the fall

Brad:

Like

Morgan:

You talked about. Yeah.

Brad:

And so they may not even have a relationship with this person. And these betrayers will often frequently complain about the lack of romantic love in their relationship. They feel like they've married the wrong person,

Morgan:

The marital relationship. Yeah.

Brad:

They'll complain about the lack of love in their marital relationship, and they'll complain about, gosh, I think I married the wrong person here. And they'll experience obsessive thoughts about the romantic partner, this lime object. And that's really what happens is this person becomes objectified that they feel in love, they're in love with. They wouldn't say that, but that's typically how psychologists described this experience. This person becomes an object. They experience obsessive thoughts about this new romantic partner. They spend time, they spend as much as 80% of their time awake thinking about this person trying to determine how this other person feels about 'em. And the obsessive nature of this relationship creates unrealistic expectations of the love object. So this kind of relationship, but they're so obsessed with it that they create unrealistic expectations, interesting of this person that they're in love with. This person's got to be God or walk on water, or they have these really unhealthy, unrealistic views of who this person is.

Morgan:

And you had mentioned just a couple of seconds ago about most of the time they feel like, well, maybe they married the wrong person, but it seems like a lot of these affairs, they might say that, well, I just don't know if I married the right person. But I could imagine once you dig in and find out, well, why they had the affair, what the reasons are, how they view their relationship and love and that other person, that's when you can determine that it's this really, we shouldn't be pathologizing our spouse or trying to just based on one radio show trying

Brad:

To figure out, because these affairs, honestly, every affair has a lot of these characteristics,

The duality between the spouse and the affair partner, the feeling of love, feeling like you've made a mistake. There's a lot of commonality in a lot of these different types of affairs. But what we've done is we've really classified these to make it easier to understand what's happening in those affairs. One of the key things to understanding why is really asking that question, and we've been over this before, but it's worth repeating, how are you different in this affair? That's so important because a lot of this, as you can see from each one of these affairs, it goes from someone to talk to someone I have a shared interest in, and then someone who I think is this right person. Yeah. The soul need. It goes from these different experiences, and each person going through an affair has different

Brad:

Motivations.

Brad:

And so just to classify one, it's always this way. It's not always that way.

Brad:

There

Brad:

May be similarities, but these categories are helpful in just understanding where your spouse is at. And if you've had an affair, you may fit in more than one category. You may fit in two categories or three categories. In recovering from an affair, it really, it's important to disclose all secrets. And that's very hard for people to do because the person who had the affair has so much shame and embarrassment. They feel like talking about the affair only makes it worse for their spouse. But healing from an, it's important to be honest, transparent, and show your spouse that you're willing to do whatever it takes. And if it's difficult to talk about the affair, you need to talk about your fear with your spouse on why this is so difficult for you because your spouse thinks that you don't care about 'em or they think you're still involved in the affair. But if you talk about how this is difficult for you to talk about this, how you're afraid of making them hurt, how you're ashamed, don't want to relive this, how you want to put this behind you, the guilt is so strong that will help your spouse begin to heal as well.

Speaker 6:

But

Brad:

Your spouse is going to keep asking for answers and want to talk about it, talk about your fear, talk about how hard this is for you to talk about it. That's okay too.

Morgan:

It's a great place to go and

Brad:

Start. It's a great place to start.

Morgan:

And we've said in the past, the first 90 days are the hardest. It's, would you say two years to rebuild the

Brad:

Trust? Yeah. Typically it depends on how well couples manage that negative cycle if they get into. And that's what we try to help couples really with. And honestly, you don't see that too much in a fair recovery, especially some of the books or information online.

Morgan:

You don't see what too much.

Brad:

You don't see people really address the negative cycle, in my opinion. They give you instructions on how to talk about it, but they don't talk about the motivations behind each person, what they're needing. And so getting professional help dealing with the negative cycle, because ultimately honesty is important for building trust, but ultimately what helps you heal besides the honesty is the emotional connection with your spouse. And you've got to get out of the negative cycle because the negative cycle you're trying to heal with many times is the negative cycle you had before the affair.

Morgan:

And the negative cycle is that pattern of a

Brad:

Bit pattern of interacting,

Morgan:

Interaction, yeah,

Brad:

Yeah. Attacking each other of avoiding each other. So you got to deal with that.

Morgan:

Right. Do you want to recap what we talked about and then we'll go on to the last few?

Brad:

Yeah. There are 10 different types of affairs. I've identified some of these. Rick Reynolds from Austin, Texas has identified some of these as well, 10 different types of affairs. There is the one night stand, this occurs generally when someone has had too much to drink and being anonymous is involved, they want to stay in the marriage. It's not an ongoing relationship at times. It can morph into an ongoing relationship though. And let me pause and say this, Morgan, we're categorizing these affairs for the purpose of understanding them. Our listeners who have gone through an affair, their affair may contain more than one category. Kind of like I was saying a moment ago about the one night stand that can lead into a relationship. I've seen that in my office. It begins that way, but then a relationship starts so it becomes an emotional affair. Your affair, your experience may not fit nicely into only one category can be divided into two or three categories. And so this is just to help us understand things better. So there's the one night stand, we talked about that. And then there's the liran affair and liran affairs. This is more the classic liran affair. There's another liran affair that we talked about last week, but in this classic liran affair, this is when two people feel like they're in love and they feel powerless over these emotions of love. And limerence is that feeling, and we've spent time talking about this too.

It's that feeling of infatuation love, romantic love, obsessive love. When you're not around that person, you feel despair. You wonder, do they feel that way about me? So there's despair there. So they want to be with their affair partner. And then what can happen as well is there is feelings of guilt because you see what you're doing to your family, what you're doing to your spouse. And in fact, we had someone in our office this past week, very first session who came in with this, and this is kind of that classic liran affair. And so you see this, it can kind of grow in stages, so you don't always see at this level of maturity. This guy's been at, and let me say this,

Brad:

He

Brad:

Was already in that place of ambiguity after one month of experiencing this. So that liran feeling develops quickly and it causes doubt

Morgan:

Sometimes by locking eyes that someone could fall into this love sickness that's

Brad:

Infatuation. They think they either find that person attractive and they lock eyes with 'em. And then the other part of that is they feel like that person could be interested in them. Those are things that are at play

Morgan:

And it's the love object that we've talked about

Brad:

To Yeah, they're a love object,

Morgan:

The object that satisfies their imagination.

Brad:

And so when someone experiences a limmer and affair, they believe that they want out of the marriage. Sometimes it's a friendship that's developed into a romance. The betrayer is willing to sacrifice life as they know it, to have the opportunity to be with that affair partner, this dance of insanity, of going back and forth between the marriage and the affair partner, the guilt and the shame about leaving, and then the ecstasy when they're with the affair partner. That can continue for a long time. And so then the next type of affair that we discovered was a sex addicts affair. We discussed characteristics of sex addiction. What happens with that?

Morgan:

And there's a very small percentage of affairs that are actually, because we think that sex addiction is every affair. When we look at it on TV or something like that, people assume it must be just like 99% of the affairs are,

Brad:

And I'm not a sex addiction expert, but I would say very little has been sex addiction or very extreme cases of sex addiction.

In our practice, we've seen at least 200 couples, probably with an affair. I can easily think of three that had an extreme case of sex addiction. And then there's people involved in pornography, and that's not necessarily sex addiction, but I can think of three, maybe four out of 200. So it'ss not as common as the media portrays it, but it's also, it's something that's very real. Then we talked about the shared interest affair. This is when the beary is involved with a single person, but at the same time, they don't want to leave the marriage and then to the person having an affair, they view this person as a soulmate and the betrayer wants to stay married and their life is divided into two parts. The part shared with their spouse and the part that's shared with the fair partner, and they feel like two different sets of needs are met in those two different relationships. Sometimes these affairs frequently spring from a relationship where these two individuals share something in common, such as music, art, or another interest could be anything, computers, and they're just techies and they like discussing that kind of thing.

Morgan:

They connect on

Brad:

That level, they connect on that level, and so it's something that they don't share in common with their spouse. So they turn to the affair partner for understanding companionship and support. Then we talked about the emotional affair, and most affairs obviously have an element of emotional of what an emotional affair is. We talked about that boundary issues are a factor, how the betrayer can be better friends with this person than with their spouse. How the becher can keep secrets with this person instead of with their spouse, how the betrayer doesn't want to have to choose between their friend and their spouse, and ultimately the becherer does want to stay married.

Morgan:

Some for that one is if the person that you're striking up a friendship with knows more about your relationship and what's going on than your spouse does, then you're heading down that path.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a good point. And this is the other limmer and affair that we talked about. I call this the I want to be in love affair. There's two different types. The one that we described earlier with the guilt and the ambiguity about staying and going where the guy after a month had already just been liran with someone was already kind of wanting out of the marriage. And then this is the other liran affair. I want to be in love affair, and this is kind of a love addiction that's characterized by repetition, repetitive pattern of moving from one relationship to the next, falling into a love that doesn't last, kind of keep looking for the perfect person, the perfect love. The perfect love experience is really what they're looking for. It's

Morgan:

An idealized, just an idealized version of a human being,

Brad:

And it occurs with men and women. I've seen it happen with both. They're all about falling in love more than anything else, and they've got to find that one right person. That's a search that never ends. They've bought into a lie. It's almost like a fairytale they've bought into.

Morgan:

Someday my prince or princess will come.

Brad:

Yeah,

Morgan:

We've talked about that.

Brad:

Then the a flander is affair, and the flander is someone who basically believe that cheating is justifiable. It's morally in some way, as long as it's not intercourse, it's okay. Honestly, you'll see this a lot. People who go to a lot of these conventions for work or trade shows, things like that. A lot of these conventions, there's a lot of people hooking up at those kinds of things, like a one night stand. They're anonymous, maybe not any alcohol involved, but they'll have these different things. And in a way, it's kind of like this, Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. It's this kind of flander attitude they may have and they can be influenced by a parent who was a cheater.

Morgan:

It's kind of a rite of passage. Yeah.

Brad:

I remember my dad telling me his dad was a cheater, and my dad telling me one time that having an affair was a rite of passage. And I remember thinking, dad, that's the dumbest thing anybody's ever told me that you've ever told me either. And that was he's older and he's from a different part of the country. That's just part of his generation or his mindset at the time.

And the people that are most the harm with this are people who, honestly, I think it's morally just people who have lack of integrity, the moral factor, people who they think it's okay for me to do it, but if you were to do that, me as a man, it's okay, but for you as a woman to do that, that's not acceptable. And so there's a double standard there, obviously. And then some cultures, I have an unsaid expectation that men will have women on the side, and some women are okay with that. And so that's a kind of flander affair, and we talked about that a little bit more detail last time. Then I want to get into the sexual abuse affair.

Morgan:

So basically this is the eighth type of affairs that we've identified, and this affair occurs when somebody has been raped or forced into sex by another individual, but the spouse of that person doesn't believe that he or she has been taken advantage of, so it's quite tricky. Maybe sometimes that person has experienced an emotional affair. Maybe they've had an emotional

Brad:

Affair. Yeah. Morgan, you some examples of this while we're talking about this so people can understand. Well, I had a situation one time where a woman was having an emotional affair

Brad:

With

Brad:

A guy, and when it turned sexual, she resisted it. She didn't want to go sexual, and the guy raped her, basically he raped her against her will. So the

Morgan:

Husband didn't believe her.

Brad:

Yeah. Had a very hard time believing that something like that happened. He's dealing with his own pain, doesn't trust her. He's been deceived enough. He's like, well, this is a pretty creative deception. So he had a hard time believing that. And then another time, there's a third time, I've seen this a few times. Another time this happened is where, and that's actually happened a couple of times where women have gotten raped and their husbands,

Morgan:

It's very hard for them to believe

Brad:

That. Yeah, it's very hard to believe it because of the boundaries they were crossing

Morgan:

And the trust that was violated

Brad:

Originally. Yeah, and I know this probably is a little controversial as talking about this, it's very hurtful for the person who's been involved. There's shame from being abused like that and then turning for support and not getting it. So both people are suffering and getting help with this type of affair, I would say is very vital.

Someone who's got experience in working with affairs and with couples, it's very, very, very important because it is just vital. Another time where I've seen this is a guy that knew a female that he worked with. She was sending him pictures. He didn't tell his wife anything about it. He didn't say stop it or anything. He kind of felt flattered getting these kind of lewd pictures. One day she comes on him sexually and in the middle of it, after about a minute into it, he says, I can't do this. I just can't do this. This isn't right.

Morgan:

And

Brad:

Tries to back away. Yeah. Tries to back away from it. And then she accuses him of raping her. This is a very, very, very dangerous thing. And it's obviously hard for both people involved. It's obviously hard for the one who's in the middle of it who experienced this. I usually say the injured spouse, the one who's been betrayed, both her kind of injured in the situation, but the one who wasn't involved, the one who feels like they've been cheated on, it's really hard for them. And consequently, that makes it much harder for the one who was involved in that kind of thing.

Morgan:

So the moral of the story is if someone is sending you text messages or always be above board and talk to your spouse about everything, being open and honest is so crucial because things like this happen.

Brad:

Well, and part of what makes it hard is that person was still involved in some gray, and that makes it hard for the one who's been betrayed to really go along with the story and believe everything. They were like, whatever. Come on,

Morgan:

You were already doing something.

Brad:

And then another time, a woman who was just drugged and she was taken advantage of. And so there's things like this that happen. There are people out there that do this kind of thing, unfortunately,

Morgan:

And they prey on people too.

Brad:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Morgan:

They're looking for you to let your guard down and to,

Brad:

Yeah. And it's men and women that do this. It's women as well. It's not just men.

Morgan:

Oh, right. Yeah.

Brad:

That prey.

Morgan:

Well, there's some characteristics here. Yeah, go ahead. A few of these are sexual contact was attempted or forced on the spouse. Kind of like in your examples, the spouse may have started to be a willing participant at first, but changed their mind at some time during sexual activity. Sometimes. Usually in the beginning I would say, well, but then again, it could be in the middle.

Brad:

And lemme say this, Morgan, the spouse, they might've been willing to participate in it first and then change their mind, or they could have been not involved and forced. They could have been passive, not involved at

Speaker 6:

All.

Brad:

And because this is rare, the spouse who wasn't involved, the spouse who feels like they've been betrayed, they typically don't believe their spouse was raped or taken advantage of, which only leads to more shame for the injured spouse,

Morgan:

For

Brad:

The involved spouse.

Morgan:

Absolutely. I mean, gosh, just imagine not being believed when you've been hurt from that. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible. Yeah.

Brad:

Yeah. It's horrible. It's ridiculous pain.

Morgan:

So both people need healing big time. And this happens like you said, with both men and women. And Brad, do you want to go on to the revenge affair?

Brad:

Yeah, the revenge affair. This is a affair that occurs after a spouse has been betrayed. They feel like they're not healing fast enough or they feel like the betrayer isn't helping them heal or they're not getting it. They're not being honest, they're not. They're continuing the deception. They're still involved in their own affair in a way. They're kind of throwing up your hands saying, you know what?

Morgan:

If you're going to do that to me,

Brad:

I'm going to do it to you.

And so they want to make the spouse who's having the affair understand the pain that they're in and to wake 'em up sometimes and to wake 'em up. And typically this occurs after several months of trying. And I've seen this typically, it's kind of almost like a last ditch effort where they're trying to get a response out of their spouse on a matter to 'em. And so typically several months after trying to recover from the affair, they feel like they're not getting answers as to why it occurred or they're not getting that person there to help them. And they're like, you know what?

Morgan:

I'm lonely. I'm tired.

Brad:

Yeah, I'm going to do this on my own. I'm tired of hurting. And so they have kind of a revenge affair. And I've seen this happen a few times where people just get so exhausted, so burned out, and they feel like they're the only one trying to make it work, that they're like, I'm going to show you what it feels like. And then they go do it. That can be difficult if you don't have a therapist who's trained in an infidelity, that can be difficult. I remember the first time I saw that the first two times I saw that that was pretty difficult because you got someone who's burned out having their own affair. Then you've got someone who, who's been caught in an affair for some time not helping their spouse heal. And then all of a sudden they feel betrayed and they're like, Hey, you just hurt me. How come? But they have

Morgan:

No ground to stand on because they also have done it

Brad:

Well. But that's what the spouse who just had the revenge affair thinks. But now that person's been hurting as well because just now you abandoned me. You're not there for me anymore. And it gets complicated because both people are hurting, both feel abandoned. The spouse who just had the revenge affairs is saying, look, you've been abandon me all this time and now you're not helping me.

Morgan:

It's kind of like that whole adage of two wrongs, don't make a right because still pain begets pain and more

Brad:

Pain. It doesn't make it right. It doesn't help. And that's a tricky type of affair because when people get into that, both are hurting both one answers. And what's really hard about this is both of them are thinking of their own pain at the moment, and it's pretty deep. So both people are caught in their own pain and it's pretty hurtful.

Morgan:

It's really hard to step back and help your spouse when you feel so abandoned and hurt. Do you want to go to the next one or you want to say anything more about, I can talk about the next one.

Brad:

Yeah, go ahead and talk about the exit affair.

Morgan:

Okay. So the exit affair is an affair that occurs because the spouse doesn't care about the future of the marriage. So they're trying to do what they can to get out. They've reached a place where they simply don't care and really about being with their spouse. They get into an affair either as a way to end the relationship with their spouse or they're very susceptible to an affair because they're really investing so little time into the marriage. And when working with this type of affair, the betrayer may experience the feelings of ambiguity that we discussed earlier in the show. But what can be helpful in rebuilding the romantic love and influencing the betrayal to stay in the marriage is finding ways to do new, different and exciting activities together. But really another thing we've said in the show too is it's important not to try to go and do a romantic candlelight dinner because that person is really thinking

Brad:

Something like

Morgan:

New, different. They're thinking, gosh, I'm not in love with you. Why are we doing this? So one person you've talked about before, they've got tickets to the basketball game and they went and did that together because it's something that they knew that their spouse would really love and it would kind of wake them up.

Brad:

And it doesn't necessarily have to be things expensive, just new and different. It releases adrenaline in the brain. That helps. The other thing that helps though is honestly getting help. There's very little hope for this person when they're leaving. That's why they cheat. That's why they do this. It's almost kind of this rubber stamp, I'm done. This is me sticking the landing, so to speak.

Morgan:

And they're often very tired and withdrawn.

Brad:

So getting professional help that helps doing those exciting activities together helps. Also. The other thing is you have to deal with the negative cycles that come up because the negative cycle is what has led the person who's having an exit affair and to be burned out, to be vulnerable enough to have an affair. And let me say this, I would say most affairs that I've seen have had elements of an exit affair,

Morgan:

Tired. They're ready to leave, they're done.

Brad:

Most affairs that I've seen have had elements of an exit affair. Let me just describe briefly the psychology of a betrayer. Not every betrayer fits this category, and we'll spend more time talking about this on a future show. But briefly, the psychology of a betrayer that you get caught into a negative cycle. This person, because they're in a negative cycle, they then become resentful. They begin to not share things as much. They begin not to express their feelings and emotions and share things as much. And so that negative cycle creates that kind of climate for that. So this person, because there's a negative cycle there, it goes on long enough, they get to a place where they're not really talking as much. They're kind of more withdrawn. So they're not sharing as much. They're not opening up as much. They're not confiding as much. That right there makes them vulnerable. Vulnerable for an affair, obviously. And then they start feeling resentful, but they got hurt that are there. They feel resentful. They feel alone, they feel sad. And then they start kind of feeling numb, maybe a little indifferent. And then they start, this is the key thing. They start caring less about the marriage. And because they're caring less, they're extremely vulnerable to an affair, to someone new,

Morgan:

To

Brad:

Someone that's there

Morgan:

That

Brad:

They can open up to, that they can open up to share human. They have to talk about something. And that's why all these different things that we've seen, they really tie in well, I think to the exit affair. Not everybody that has it is really wanting to leave the marriage, but many times you'll see that where they're just kind of burned out. And that might be a better way to describe this as the burned out affair instead of the exit affair. But what they do is they care less about the marriage. They're vulnerable to someone else, vulnerable to an affair, and then they experience it. They experience that romantic love. They experience

Morgan:

That connection,

Brad:

That connection again, and

Morgan:

The attention from another person.

Brad:

And they feel good because they've been miserable and unhappy,

Morgan:

And they can feel like they can open up to that person in a way they couldn't with their spouse.

Brad:

And here's the tricky thing too. You'll have someone who before would never have an affair, but they get worn out so much that they're vulnerable to it and they're already thinking of it, and they'll justify it in their mind, well, we're not happy. We're going to divorce. I want a divorce. I want to leave.

Brad:

Yeah, we

Brad:

Splitting up

Brad:

Anyways.

Brad:

Yeah, we're splitting up anyways. And so then they's the way they justify it. But that's kind of a common thing that you see with a lot of affairs and the psychology of the betrayer. And so you could call the exit affair, probably the burned out affair.

Morgan:

Yeah, that makes sense. And if you'd like to read a little bit more about these affairs and just more information in general, you can check out our website,

Brad:

Go to our website. We have these on there,

Morgan:

Marriage solutions tulsa.com.

Brad:

Yeah, go to the blog on our website. Check that out. You'll get a lot of this good, helpful information,

Morgan:

And you can give us a call as well and can set an appointment with one of our therapists. 9 1 8 2 8 1 60 60.

Brad:

Yep. Our practice Marriage Solutions here in Tulsa, we have one of the only group practices just dedicated to marriage counseling. This is a think tank. This is an organization where we collaborate with each other. Everybody here has advanced training. We collaborate with each other.

Morgan:

We research and have created some

Brad:

Of the best methods for working with couples, and we're a place that's just marriages only and you want to go to a place like that because getting good help with a marriage is extremely difficult,

Morgan:

And we help couples and individuals with relationship issues. For example, if your spouse is leaving you and you'd like to stop your divorce, we can help you with that. We've helped people where they've already divorced each other and they've had second thoughts. We've helped them to remarry each other through couples counseling, and so there are a lot of different issues within the relationship that we can help you with. But yes, couples premarital, already married, couples experiencing difficulty and trauma, as well as if you just want a refresher on your relationship.

Brad:

Yeah, the couples that we've helped you have been divorced, they feel like your marriage has been restored,

Not just okay, they got back together, that kind of thing, but they feel like their marriage has been restored, and that's what's amazing. That's the most important part. Thanks for listening to Healing Broken Trust. If you like this episode, you can always get our show notes and more details and links to the resources we discussed@healingbrokentrust.com. Also, as long as you're online, head on over to healing broken trust.com/retreat for details on an upcoming one-on-one retreat with me. If you like us, please subscribe and leave a review for us on iTunes. As always, everything discussed on this podcast is either my opinion or Morgan's opinion and is not to be taken as relationship advice because I'm not your therapist, nor have I considered your personal situation as your therapist. This podcast, it's for your entertainment and education only, and I really do hope you've enjoyed it. See, until next time.

Ep 29: Childhood of the Betrayer

Transcript

Brad:

They get these message that they have to be self-reliant, it's either outright told to them or it's implied that they got to be self-reliant and they also get messages that are either told to him or hinted at that they can't ask for needs to be met. They got to bottle things up, it's almost like sometimes they got to take care of their parent instead of being able to just be open and honest about how they feel.

Morgan:

Have you been wondering how to break free from the affair once and for all? Now's the time to take back your life, your emotions, find happiness, joy, and fulfillment with your marriage. Healingbrokentrust.com is the place where you can find resources to take the healing journey to the next level. You'll find incredible resources for every stage of your affair recovery journey. Connect with our team of qualified affair recovery therapist who stay current with the ever growing, ever changing affair recovery research that's available to help you heal wherever you are in the process. Take our home study course focused on helping you communicate and express yourself in a way that gets you what you want. You can also book an incredible one on one intensive retreat where instead of dragging out the pain over months or years you can condense the time it takes to heal in just a matter of days using scientifically proven methods that work to help couples lower their guard, let go of the fear, melt the anger, and experience each other at a deep, emotional level you may have never experienced before. So what are you waiting for? Go to healingbrokentrust.com. So go to healingbrokentrust.com and we'll talk to you soon.

Morgan:

Wherever you are welcome to Healing Broken Trust podcast, we're joining you from our lovely home in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's a Saturday afternoon during nap time and so it's just you and us for the next half hour or so. We have an interesting topic that we're about today, right Brad?

Brad:

Yeah, this is a really fascinating subject. We're talking about what does the childhood look like, the typical childhood look like of your average person who's unfaithful. So I think this is really fascinating. Of course, I'm a therapist so I'm fascinated by things like this, but I think our listeners will be fascinated by this too.

Morgan:

Yeah, I think so too. So...

Brad:

Because sometimes people get stuck on the why, they don't understand why they did it, and none of this is excuse making, but if you want to understand the psychology of the one who's unfaithful, the psychology of the betrayer this is often a good place to start.

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

But it doesn't explain everything so here's what you cannot do, you cannot say you had a crappy childhood, that's why you cheated on me. Because the one who had the affair often doesn't' feel that way. These are things that may influence them, have affected them, but they often won't say it's because of blah, blah, blah from my past is why I cheated on you. They're going to be unhappy about their relationship. But as we'll talk about this we'll see how this influenced them, whereas someone else who was unhappy, or equally unhappy who didn't experience some of these things didn't make the same choices.

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

So this is the thing that kind of influences us in some ways subconsciously it impacts us. So this isn't excuse making justifications, anything like that, but it is a way to understand where did they come from, what kind of past did they have, what's the average past look like? And I'm in a unique situation where I get meet people every day who've experienced infidelity, who've betrayed their spouse, so I'm one of the few people on the planet who kind of knows what kind of past they have, what kind of background they have. And so...

Morgan:

Yeah, you've seen so much.

Brad:

Yeah, and it's a lot of fun because you're past isn't your destiny, but if we don't really work on it, and heal wounds we may end up hurting other people.

Morgan:

Gotcha.

Brad:

So that's kind of what we're talking about.

Morgan:

That's really interesting. So speaking of one of the things that you had actually brought up, why do some people cheat or why are some people unfaithful and others are not when they have similar pasts that are bad?

Brad:

Yeah, I think part of that really depends on the type of emotional or relational resiliency they develop. A lot of folks will, at least, I don't know if this is accurate, but I think a lot of people have a very unhappy childhood, but they don't always make terrible life choices. Some people have a good childhood and they make terrible life choices, so it's not always predictive. But what really helps people is the amount of emotional support they had. It doesn't matter that you went through terrible things as a child, you immigrated from a different country, you're a refugee, or you were a victim of violence as a child, or a parent died as a child. Those things don't have to predict later behavior but oftentimes they can. But the real factor is did you have somebody there for you emotionally. So those things aren't always causes

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

To being unfaithful. What the real factor is is did they have emotional support, did they have people that they could learn on emotionally, did they have warm parents, did they have both parents who were warm. It's not just enough to really have one not with the way parenting works. You need to have both warm parents, and both parents be involved, and both parents be attentive. You may have been able to get away with dad being out of the home a lot 50 years ago because you had grandparents who were more involved throughout the whole upbringing of the children. Today parents are usually relying on themselves, you don't always have close family units. So...

Morgan:

Absolutely.

Brad:

So anyway, the big thing is really resiliency. If you've got emotional support and you've got people there for you in tough times as a child you're going to probably do better...

Morgan:

Do better.

Brad:

Relationally, because here's the thing Morgan, you can even have siblings in the same family. Just as an example, the dad is abusive, or they experienced really deep, traumatizing things, but say the mom comforts the younger sibling because the child's the baby, mom gives it maybe more attention and consideration, and the baby could be like 10 years old and then the other child's like 13. A 13 year old maybe looks a little bit more independent and the child's going through the same stressful as the 10 year old's going through, but they're getting more attention, more warmth, they're learning that they're still valuable, that they're still loved. The 13 year old who wants to be independent on their own they're still going through hell because they're not getting the same...

Morgan:

Message.

Brad:

Message, and so they're not developing that same sense of resiliency. I would say that's really the hidden things that's there.

Morgan:

Okay. So can you paint a picture of the childhood of a typically betrayer or someone who...

Brad:

Is unfaithful.

Morgan:

Is unfaithful, yes. What does it look like?

Brad:

Well I would say the typical childhood boils down to really one thing, or maybe a couple things. The theme is a childhood with cold, emotionally detached parents, inattentive parents, parents who are not just inattentive, but maybe even rejecting, their distant themselves, they're preoccupied with their own issues and problems. They love their kids just as much as I love our son, I'd give anything in the world for our son. They would give anything in the world for their children but they don't really know how to connect emotionally themselves. So you can't give a child something that you don't have yourself. Sometimes there's just this void, lack of emotional connection, this distance. So what this creates, and this is really the important thing, is it creates somebody who is out of touch with their own emotions and feelings, and they feel uncomfortable feeling vulnerable, they feel weak being vulnerable, and so they don't ever want to share that part of themselves with anybody, and they don't share it with their spouse because they don't want to share it with anybody.

Brad:

They love their spouse more than anything and they really cherish their spouse, and I think this is true for almost everybody who cheats. I think there's very few people who really don't care for their spouse at all. I think I would bet money that almost everybody who has an affair really, genuinely cares about their spouse. But here's the thing I want to get to is is they feel uncomfortable being vulnerable, and expressing emotions, and vulnerability, and needs. So when they get unhappy in a relationship they don't go to their spouse and say, "I'm really unhappy, this is really unfair," because they hate conflict. So what they do, and this is all stuff they learned in childhood, so what they do is they just bury it, they keep it to themselves. What ends up happening is is they resent the heck out of their spouse and that's the justification for being unfaithful later.

Morgan:

And something I...

Brad:

They never speak up though, they never say, "Hey, this bother me."

Morgan:

Now their parents would be maybe cold, or distant, or inattentive but I imagine since their parents really do love them that can't be 100% of the time that they're inattentive or distant, it might be inattentiveness or distance surrounding certain things in life or moments in life when they need their mom or dad, but their parent wasn't able to respond and maybe ... I'd like to ask you, is that true, would that be something that you could say that maybe their parent wasn't 100% terrible or distant all the time, maybe their parent just wasn't able to respond when they needed something, or in a moment of crisis, or does it need to be all the time?

Brad:

I think that's great question. I think the biggest wounds people development are wounds of abandonment and betrayal by close loved ones. If I get betrayed by somebody that I'm not emotionally close to that hurts and I might hold resentment towards them. But if you get betrayed by somebody who's your emotional world that will keep you up at night, that will make you obsessed. It won't just put a chip on your shoulder, if it's a colleague who hurts you. That will bother you and it may even bother you for a while. But if it's your own safe haven, the person that's supposed to be there for you, if they betray you, and honestly, if you've never had anybody there before, a parent, a grandparent, mom, dad, any siblings, if you never had anybody there for you emotionally and then you get betrayed it's a lot harder thing to ever trust another person with again.

Brad:

So here's the thought process, and I want to answer your question. And help me make sure I'm answering it, but this is something I jotted down. This is how the person who has an affair thinks, and this is typical because usually the one who has an affair is the one in the relationship who's more the avoider, or the one who shares the least emotionally, they're the one who tends to be more independent, they're the fixer in the relationship. Women can fit that mold. You see a lot of guys with that. Usually a pursuer in the relationship will have an affair when they've been trying for a long time and they feel like they're not getting through to their spouse, and they'll have an affair when they start giving up on the relationship. Their affair is sometimes more about wanting to be attractive, and pretty, and somebody's interested in me.

Brad:

Sometimes it's more about that, and an avoider will have an affair for different reasons, they just don't really trust anybody, and they may not say that. An avoider can be somebody who's really happy, cheerful, outgoing, but what they're avoiding is their emotions because they're uncomfortable, it's a foreign territory for them, they don't know how to navigate it. So an avoider would say, "I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others. I find it difficult to trust them completely. It's difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being." So I'll read that again. An avoider would say, "I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others. I find it difficult to trust them completely. It's difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being." So I don't really trust you, but at the same time I'm nervous about you getting too close to me. So they're kind of an island, they really thrive on feeling independent, and not needing other people too much, but they do need other people.

Brad:

So what they do is they kind of start turning off emotions, and feelings, and withdrawing, and they shut down with there's an argument, they get quiet, they hold back, and they don't like conflict at all, and so they'll hold back these things. So what happens is over time they build a lot of resentment. Really what they're scared of is giving themselves completely over to the person and fully trusting another person, so they sometimes can have a really low commitment to a relationship. But the irony is is they're not really giving anything extra or special in the affair than what they've already given in their marriage. So even though sometimes spouses read text messages, or love letters, or whatever, they're read this and they're like, "Oh my gosh, he's given this woman all these things that he's never given me." Or he hasn't given that to me in a while. I would venture to say he's not giving her anything, he's not giving anything that he's never given before. He doesn't know how to be truly vulnerable and truly let someone in because of some of these things that we need to get into.

Morgan:

So he's not necessarily giving more to that relationship than he's given to yours because he doesn't know.

Brad:

Yep. Now he may be giving more...

Morgan:

Verbally.

Brad:

Well in this time period.

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

Like he's having an affair...

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

Obviously he's giving more that relationship than the marriage.

Morgan:

Right because he's invested in that more than he's invested in the marriage, and so he might be having sex or something with his other person but he doesn't necessarily let them into his vulnerable dark places.

Brad:

No, no, no and it may feel that way because there's love letters, flowers, pictures, sexting, different things like that. But no, they're not giving anything emotionally of themselves more. They don't suddenly become a different person and now I'm going to be vulnerable with you. Typically that's not what happens.

Brad:

So what does the typical childhood look like of someone who has an affair? What you typically see Morgan is you see parents who are consistently cool, who are consistently inattentive...

Morgan:

Oh so there's consistency to the parents behavior. So it has to be something projected over time.

Brad:

I think it could be both. Like back to your question is it big events that do it, or I think it's a pattern, a behavior that's modeled that they see. But at the same time, if the event is big enough they can lose their trust and just decide I need to learn to lean on myself.

Morgan:

Especially if the event doesn't ever find resolve. If they don't find resolve after that, or healing, or they don't fix the relationship after the big event.

Brad:

Yeah, you got to mend it. You've got to be able to restore, you've got to work through it. I would say the thing that's probably the biggest is there's events but what really does it is I think sometimes it's a combination of both to be honest with you.

Morgan:

Consistency?

Brad:

Yeah, consistency, inattentive, consistency cool, consistently rejecting, even sometimes just being angry, having a parent who is angry with you snapping at you. You learn not to open up. You learn not to open up when they're rejecting, when they're inattentive, when they're just whatever, cool. So what happens is you see this pattern of behavior from the parent's side of just being detached and not really caring about their child emotionally. But you often see because of that these events that happen where they may be the ones hurting the child in abusive ways, or exposing them to risk and harm. So it's more this parenting style that produces these other things, that create...

Morgan:

This illusive cool person who's maybe detached emotionally that then turns into someone who betrays their partner because they don't know how to connect emotionally.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Here's the other thing, I kind of go into a child having this, it later becomes like a potential future cheater. One of them is from the parent they will send messages to the child that they will be punished If they try to seek closeness from the child. So when of the things that can happen is Morgan and I ... I think we might have talked about this on a podcast, but this just ... And I hear about stuff all the time in my office, but this is one I saw firsthand. Our son, we had to take him to the doctor and while we were in the waiting room there was a little five year old girl, big waiting room, the parents were on different sides of the waiting room, little five year old girl looking at fish I the fish tank, and I didn't see it happen but she fell on the ground, tripped and fell. She's of course crying and both of her parents were immediately like...

Morgan:

They didn't do anything.

Brad:

Well they didn't do anything, number one, but do you remember they...

Morgan:

I do.

Brad:

Both of them were saying like, I think it was more the dad, the mom kind of agreed with the dad, unless your arm is cut off...

Morgan:

Or you're bleeding to death.

Brad:

Yeah, unless your arm's cut off or you're bleeding to death quit your crying.

Morgan:

Yeah, don't cry.

Brad:

What that signals to the child is ... But here's the thing, nobody thinks back to that and says, "You know when I was five I couldn't be open." But what they learn is subconsciously, over time, they develop a mental model that becomes their blueprint for future relationships that they can't go to somebody for support. So...

Morgan:

Yeah, they can't go to their parent, that attachment figure.

Brad:

Yeah, they can't go to their parent, I'm going to get punished. So what happens when they enter into a relationship is I can't go to my girlfriend or my boyfriend I'll get punished for it. So what they do is they...

Morgan:

They hide.

Brad:

They hold it in and then they resent their spouse, or their girlfriend, or boyfriend because they're not sharing what they're really feeling and needing, and they magically assume you should know, and they're resenting the crap out of them. Then they are really unhappy in the relationship because they don't ever give themselves to someone completely they kind of get into these affairs, they can either flirt with someone else or they're really susceptible to someone flirting with them. Or when the opportunity arises, because of travel or other things, they're kind of susceptible to it. Nobody's ever going to say when they cheated it was because of this in the doctor's office when I was five.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

The girl's not going to remember that because there's going to be a crap load of other examples that she'll have. But what it is it's the pattern that develops...

Morgan:

That consistent message.

Brad:

That consistent message, and what develops is this mental model this is how relationships work. At that young of an age when that model gets developed you have no idea if this is healthy, or unhealthy, or not, you just know this is how relationships work because that's what you see in your family. You're five years old, you may just be getting to start kindergarten, you may not even be in kindergarten yet. There's a whole lot of crap that's happened yet and you're not even able to logically say this is dysfunctional. You can't even say that. But what's crazy about that is the parents who are 20-25 years older than their daughter are sending those kind of messages to her. I think, and I know, they love their child just as much as we love our son, but that child doesn't get that impression.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

They don't feel lovable, and they can't show that vulnerability because there's a new model that gets developed so what they do is they turn off emotions because they feel weak and inadequate and what they're really getting away from when they withdraw, and shut down, and are quiet, and aren't vulnerable, is they're really getting away from those feelings of feeling inadequate, that's what's really going on. It's not about always getting away from their spouse. Sometimes they don't want to create conflict, but they're really trying to get away from "I feel inadequate and I don't want to express that kind of vulnerability because I'll weak, and if you think I'm weak and not strong you won't like me very much."

Morgan:

Yeah...

Brad:

And so that's...

Morgan:

I'm not going be ... Those feeling of...

Brad:

I'm not going to be good enough.

Morgan:

Yeah, and those feelings of weakness are going to be validated, those feelings of inadequacy are basically validated by the partner. So they don't want to go there.

Brad:

Well yeah and they value peace because they feel closest to their partner or spouse when there's not conflict. Obviously you have to deal with crap in a marriage to really have a good marriage, you can't just brush stuff under the rug, you got to be open and honest.

Morgan:

And that's also why it's important that if your partner does come to you with something that's vulnerable, or that gives you a glimpse of what's really happening inside their mind, in their heart, to not swipe at them and get upset with them because it validates that fear of they're not going to accept me, I'm not going to be okay. So I think being able to look out for those things as they come, if they are vulnerable with you, to be able to see it as it comes your way, I think is really valuable, and I think that's just a tremendous thing. I know you teach people how to do that in the retreats and stuff like that.

Brad:

Yeah, because this is not set in stone. You really need therapy help because this could change, and hopefully listening to this is helpful. But this isn't set in stone, people can change out of this.

Morgan:

Right, yeah, so that's a good question that you're leading into I think. If they've had this childhood, and they've responded the way they have, and it's led them down the path of infidelity, getting to this once a cheater always a cheater, is that really possible? Can they get out of that? Can they change? Can they be different? If they identify these patterns in their life can they change? Can they become no longer someone down that path I guess?

Brad:

Yeah, that's a good question. I think they can change, I think the best way to change though is couple's therapy. You have to have that because you have to feel like you can let them into your secrets, into your vulnerability, into the deepest, and darkest, scariest place emotionally. You have to be able to let them in and you have to feel like you can trust them for you not to cheat on them.

Morgan:

You know what I think is so interesting, some of these...

Brad:

Let me finish this thought here...

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

Because if you don't do that you're always going to be prone to having another affair. Now your spouse, if you cheat on them, you may eventually earn their trust, work your butt off, you do all these things, they finally trust you. But for you to never stray again you have got to know that you can trust them emotionally and lean on them emotionally, and you got to feel like there's nothing holding you back. You've got to feel like yes, I can give myself completely do you, there's nothing holding me back, and you've got to feel like you can share anything with them. If you feel like there's things that you cannot share people are going to get in trouble there.

Morgan:

Because then you're starting to keep those secrets. Those secrets kind of start seeping again and then that vulnerability or that resentment can seep in again.

Brad:

I want to finish this and then I'll fly it on to the parenting that they've experienced. So the first one is parents are consistently inattentive, consistently cool, rejecting or angry in their responses to the young children. Children are met with threats of punishment for trying to get close to their parents, like that little girl in the doctor's waiting room.

Morgan:

Or they say, "Grow up. You need to stop crying." But crying for a little kid is their language, they don't have English skills, they don't know how to speak...

Brad:

Well and Morgan...

Morgan:

Like an adult.

Brad:

You bring up a good point. You bring up a good point. When earlier when we were talking about resiliency, you develop resiliency because you feel like you got somebody who has your back. The people who are probably the weakest with the least amount of resiliency are the people who have this relationship style that we're talking about because they don't ever know how to trust anybody else or fall back on someone else. People like this can be maybe great soldiers, go to Antarctica, be the sole man who goes to Mars on a one person mission to Mars because they've turned off their relationship needs and ability to...

Morgan:

That part of their brain.

Brad:

Yeah, they turn that off. But when their spouse dies, or when somebody dies, or when they're really in a crisis they break down, they suffer the worst, they never really truly recover. And the real issue is they don't let anybody in. They think the real issue is I'm just depressed, or work sucks, or this, or this, or that...

Morgan:

Which could be true, but the real issue is...

Brad:

Yeah, those things are important. But the real issue is they don't know how to really let anybody in, their defenses, they turn off their emotions. So Morgan the third thing is, and this is something we hinted at, there's violent or abusive behavior on the part of an attachment figure. An attachment figure is somebody that you trust, that you feel like you can go to in times of difficulty like a parent, grandparent, older sibling, maybe even a younger sibling, close friend of the family, but you get abused by that person. So what that tells you as a kid is man I cannot be open. I can't even go to my own dad, he's an alcoholic and he's beating the crap out of mom, and he's threatened to beat me, gets in my face, he's hit me where I've had marks, I couldn't go to school. If I can't trust dad who can I trust? And so...

Morgan:

What does that say about me as a person.

Brad:

Yeah what does that say about me if my own dad doesn't like me and he's beating the crap out of me.

Morgan:

Yeah.

Brad:

That says a lot. So that creates somebody who's got this relationship style of being able to really be where they feel really uncomfortable being close to others. They find it difficult to trust them completely. It's difficult to allow themselves to depend on someone else, and they're nervous about someone getting too close, and they find that they're in relationships where the other partner always wants them to be more open, reveal more.

Brad:

Then the last thing you hinted at. They have parents who either outright says, or hint at, that they need to be more self-reliant, more independent...

Morgan:

That's right.

Brad:

You got to be tougher, you got to stand on your own feet. Don't get me wrong, you got to do that age appropriately, but if you're doing that at an inappropriate age level. Your high school student loses his girlfriend and he's sad about that you can't just tell him sorry bud, move one, you're going to meet a girl in college. You can do that later, but you can't do that...

Morgan:

In the moment when he's hurting.

Brad:

Well yeah, you got to just comfort him and try to be there, and listen. Eventually you can say, "I went through the same thing, and that's when I met your mother, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I know right now it doesn't feel that way but I'm always here and if I can talk with you about it I'm here."

Morgan:

Yeah, instead of the opposite where it's like, "Grow a pair, stop crying."

Brad:

Yeah.

Morgan:

"Suck it up. Be a man."

Brad:

Yeah.

Morgan:

That doesn't work, it doesn't draw them closer, it doesn't teach them how to manage their feelings, or their emotions, or their needs. They just shut down, and pull away from you, and that's how they respond to their spouse.

Brad:

Absolutely. The other thing is they get these messages that they got be self-reliant, it's either outright told to them or it's implied that they got to be self-reliant and they also get messages that are either told to them or hinted at that they can't ask for needs to be met. They got to bottle things up. It's almost like sometimes they got to take care of their parent instead of being able to just be open and honest about how they feel. One of the things that's dangerous about this Morgan, and this is not meant to make anybody feel terrible. But unless we think about these things and work on these things on ourselves, because we have that mental model we can do it to our own kids. So we have to be aware of this and think about this, and we have to really be able to provide for our own kids secure attachment.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

In relationships we always ask, "Are you there for me?" And if we feel like our caregiver is there for us we feel worth of love and will have a secure relationship style where we feel like we can be open, and honest, and totally give ourselves to somebody.

Morgan:

Yeah, and I think as I've listened to you say this it really brings to mind kids of parents who are alcoholics, who maybe were a sexual abuse survivor, incest survivor, and like I say, it's not always physical bruises, but there are emotional bruises, there's psychological bruising that happens and if you don't deal with it, if you don't handle it, if you don't heal from it, and you can't really do it alone, it's not anything you can do alone, and it's typically much better when you can heal with the one that's your spouse, the one that's your...

Brad:

Oh yeah, it's a heck of a lot better. Here's the thing Morgan, it's your spouse who's validating in confirming you, it's a deeper level of change...

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

Than individual therapy.

Morgan:

Than just individual therapy, yeah.

Brad:

Let your spouse validate in you, not a stranger who's nice, it's your own spouse.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

And that...

Morgan:

That attachment figure...

Brad:

Yeah, that attachment figure.

Morgan:

That person in your life that's supposed to love you unconditionally like your parent was supposed to love you unconditionally. So I personally, I understand this at a personal level just how difficult it can be to have be the caregiver to the parent. So if that's you, I know I haven't been an unfaithful person, so you can totally not come away as an unfaithful person, and that sort of thing. But it does affect and impact your relationships with other people, and the most important relationship with your spouse, it does impact that. So it's really important to get the help, to heal this is really what I'm trying to say.

Brad:

Yes, of course. Because, Morgan, to answer your question once a cheater always a cheater, I think you're prone to do it again if you don't get the help. This is not something ... It's not even that you have to come to us, we're available, we have retreats, we work, it's what we do. We love it. But you've got to the help because if you don't, and you can't let somebody in, you're prone to repeat the past, and even when you had. People hate doing this crap but they still find themselves drug to it because they're not really working with somebody who knows how to help them.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

It's like trying to lose weight. It's like you see somebody who's obese, who's really overweight, they've done everything they can, they yo-yo diet, they're trying to break it but sometimes you got to go get outside help. Some things are just bigger than us and we got to go get help, there's no shame in that.

Morgan:

No.

Brad:

Nobody would say to somebody who's overweight, that's been yo-yo dieting for years there's any shame in going to get help with that.

Morgan:

No.

Brad:

You would encourage them to do it.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

So if you're listening to us and you are yo-yoing in your own version of a yo-yo diet in your relationship, and trying to be faithful, and trying to heal from an affair don't do it. Nobody thinks you're crazy if you go get help it's not a sign of weakness, you don't think that about anybody who's that way with their weight, why think that about yourself? Don't be naïve, don't be dumb about that.

Brad:

The other thing Morgan, I want to give a couple examples...

Morgan:

Oh yes, yeah please.

Brad:

Of childhoods. The big thing here is they are emotionally just like I said, those four things. That's the common thing. You just need one of those to really develop into an avoidant relationship style. Here's an example of some of these things that we're talking about. One of them is a parent teaching a child to lie, we don't tell mom about this, keep this a secret for me, I'm going to tell you what it is, but keep this a secret from mom. What does that child lean about relationships? That it's okay to have secrets. It's okay to not fully give yourself over to someone, so it's foolish to trust somebody. Hide things to keep the peace so that child learns that. People don't really question things that they learn from their parents, they just kind of automatically they hear it and then they act it out, they live it out...

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

And they don't question it. You eat it, you don't contemplate it.

Morgan:

They're kids.

Brad:

Yeah they're kids and it's where you start learning these relationships. So anyway, the second thing is I had a client once, I had him what his happiest childhood memory was and he said, "Christmas because that's the time of year", he said holidays actually, "because that's the time of year that I knew my mom loved me, that's the only time she ever said she loved me." So this particular person never really had just one best friend, he had a bazillion friends but he never really let anybody in on his emotional world because first he couldn't do it with mom. Then it played out into his relationship where he could never really give himself to his wife.

Morgan:

So they were just very shallow relationships.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah. An abusive dad, one that's physically abusive, that hurts mom, that's abusive towards the child. That's an alcoholic, you just learn you can't trust. There's a common theme you're not there for me, I can't trust you. I can't get my needs met through you, I've got to shut down because this is scary. We develop that template and then we use that even though our spouse isn't that way. Maybe they are, but most likely they're probably not that way. We still act like they are, we still hide, and withdraw, and don't fully give ourselves because our first example were of never giving ourselves completely. So what happens is when our spouse wanting us to be more open with them it feels very foreign to us, it feels very uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable. And most people can't do it on their own, so it's kinda ... What we talked about, therapy, going to therapy. Having a parent who's not an attachment figure but like a grandparent, you got to go to a grandparent to get your needs met, you can't even go to your own parent. Your parents are so messed up you can't even go to them but you go to go to a grandparent.

Morgan:

Or a teacher.

Brad:

Yeah or a teacher, or someone else, a coach, somebody who's been sexually abused. Just the general theme is cut off parents who aren't there. We're going to hear it from all the time people who say ... Because here's the golden question, I hear people all the time who say, "I had a great childhood." And I'll follow up with the golden question, "Well who did you go to when you were hurt, sad, or afraid? When you were lonely as a kid." "Well nobody." Or if they say they could, "Who did you go to? So you could go to somebody, who was it?" "It was probably mom that I could go to." "Well can you give me examples of when you did that." "Come to think of it I can't. Did I go to mom? I don't remember ever going to her actually. Or it never occurred to me that I could." Those are all things that are examples in this avoidant attachment style and many people who end up becoming unfaithful that's kind of the childhood that they had.

Brad:

So hopefully this has been beneficial for you guys. We don't want to lead you into any confusion or anything, so hopefully this has been beneficial. This is not destiny, this doesn't have to be this way, it doesn't have to because it's your childhood or your spouse's childhood doesn't mean it's predictive of future results in the future, but you do have to go do work on it because most likely it can be, maybe it will be. So you got to go to work on it.

Brad:

Here's just some other childhood's that ... Let me move my papers around so I can share this. Other examples of childhoods, the kind of childhood that we want is we want to be able to say, "We had a secure childhood that produces where we feel like our caregiver is there for us and we feel worthy of love because our caregiver was attentive, they were responsive to us, and they were engaged with us." So somebody that has a secure style would say, "I find it relatively easy to get close to others and I'm comfortable depending on them, and having them depend on me. I don't worry about being abandoned, or about someone getting too close. I'm very comfortable in this relationship." So people who are securely attached who are married to each other are going to be the ones who have the best relationships because they both feel comfortable being vulnerable and open.

Brad:

But, now earlier when I was talking about a pursuer who gets burned out and then they have an affair, this is typically what they're going to say. They're going to say, "I find that other," this is what an anxious partner would say, a pursuer, "They're going to say I find that others are reluctant to get close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me and won't want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner and this sometimes scares people away." So an anxious is going to say, "I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me." So they're really anxious about the state of their relationship. "I want to get very close to my partner and this sometimes scares people away." So those folks will have an affair when they start feeling like I'm not going to get my needs met in this relationship, kind of like what we talked about last time in "Hell or High water, Despair and Detachment", that they will begin to grieve that they're not going to get their relationship needs met and then they're vulnerable to an affair happening.

Morgan:

Yeah, so definitely check out that episode. It's called "Hell or High Water, Despair and Detachment," because it's really helpful to understand what happens whenever you start to burn out of the relationship and where it goes from there.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Morgan that's it for right now. Any questions, anything else we need to look over?

Morgan:

Well I think that you've really described avoidant attachment pretty well. Can you sum it up in more of a definitive way, what in a couple of words does avoidant attachment mean?

Brad:

Avoidant attachment in a few words means I don't trust you and I'm uncomfortable getting close to you.

Morgan:

Okay, so an avoidant attachment person if they don't feel like they can...

Brad:

I don't feel like I can give all of myself to you because I don't trust you. And you may be perfect, but if I'm afraid you'll me as weak then that causes me to hold back.

Morgan:

And that holding back causes the negative cycle to spiral and it can open up vulnerabilities for them to cheat, to have an affair.

Brad:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Morgan:

Okay, and ultimately what we're saying is that their children is a big indicator of...

Brad:

This is where avoidant ... Childhood is where the avoidant detachment's created.

Morgan:

Yeah.

Brad:

You don't go from a secure attachment style all throughout childhood and then you leave home, and you're an adult, and then develop an avoidant attachment style. That typically doesn't happen. You've got to develop a lot of ... A lot of crap's got to happen for that to develop. But an avoidant attachment style in just a few words is I don't really trust you with myself, giving you all of myself, and my emotions. I prefer my independence and that's because of the way they were raised. They couldn't really trust their parents.

Morgan:

Okay, and then ultimately it boils down to if you can get help and you work on these things you don't have to go down that path, it doesn't necessarily have to be the end for you. You don't have to experience infidelity in your relationship if you can identify what's really happening emotionally and take the necessary actions. I think that's great. Thank you very much Brad for explaining this to us and I think that's the show.

Brad:

Yeah, thank you guys for listening.

Morgan:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Healing Broken Trust podcast. Are you ready to take the next step? Go to healingbrokentrust.com and schedule your one on one coaching call today. That's healingbrokentrust.com.

Ep 31: When They Have A Baby As A Result of An Affair

Ep 37: Your Approach Is Failing

Transcript:

Morgan:

Hey, let's get away to a beautiful location for a destination retreat that will transform your relationship. This opportunity is unlike anything you've done before. Two days with Brad will give your relationship the boost it needs. Then enjoy the beautiful scenery. Go to HealingBrokenTrust.com for more information. Do it soon because time is limited.

Brad:

You're not a failure, your spouse isn't a failure. Your approach is failing you, the strategy you're using is failing you. You may have been to therapists, you may have gone to counseling. You may have done different things on your own to try to heal, but it's really the strategy or the approach that you're taking, that's what's failing you.

Morgan:

Welcome to today's show. I'm Morgan Robinson here with Brad, my husband.

Brad:

Hey guys.

Morgan:

We are excited to bring this week's show to you. First we want to say thank you so much for making us the number one podcast for affair recovery. It is our pleasure to be here and to bring this information to you. Today we're talking about are you stuck? If you're stuck in the process of healing from infidelity, there's a simple concept that we're going to talk about today, and really we're going to break it down into seven points.

Morgan:

There's different things that people do, ways that they approach the healing process that really does not serve them well. We want to point these out so that you can avoid them, so that you don't fall into the pitfalls and the pothole along the way, or whatever. Brad, you want to start us off?

Brad:

Thank you, Morgan. I just want to say, sometimes when couples get stuck in this affair recovery process, they often feel like, "Man, we're not any good together. We suck. Gosh, you suck."

Morgan:

Counseling isn't working or whatever you're trying to do.

Brad:

Yeah, whatever you're trying to do. Really, this is just a simple concept, and we're going to show it in seven areas that is probably the most common, or very common areas that people fall behind in this. To be honest with you it's really, you're not a failure, your spouse isn't a failure, your approach is failing you.

Brad:

The strategy you're using is failing, and so you may have been to therapists, you may have gone to counseling, you may have done different things on your own to try to heal, but it's really the strategy or the approach that you're taking, that's what's failing you, it's not that you are a failure or that your spouse is a failure.

Brad:

You may disagree with me on that, that your spouse isn't a failure, but I don't think they are. I just think the strategy or the approach that they're trying to take is failing you guys. If you're getting stuck in this process and you're not really finding healing, you're not really moving forward, it's probably the approach or strategy that you're taking, it's not really you.

Brad:

I'm certain that you're very successful in a lot of areas of your life, but it's just the approach that you're taking in this, in this crisis. Right now the building is on fire or the smoke alarms are going off. The wrong strategy is to say, "You know what? I got some time. I'll just wait, and I bet it's a false alarm" or "I don't need to start walking out of the building and getting to safety." That's a wrong strategy, that's a wrong approach.

Brad:

You're not a failure, just you've been using the wrong strategy and the wrong approach. These are areas where people tend to have the wrong strategy in.

Morgan:

Okay.

Brad:

I heard this from a client and it's really funny. They gave me this name, and so I'm using their words. If they're listening, they're going to know who they are, but it's kind of smiling as I say it. Trickle down info, trickle truth is what he called it. If you have trickle truth, this is where you're basically not really coming forward with the truth, the honesty that the injured partner needs to be able to heal. That's a strategy that's going to fail you.

Brad:

Because people, they need the truth, they need the truth. They don't give it up. They don't just say, "Okay, I guess I'm not going to get it." They continue to feel like they're being lied to, they continue to be hyper vigilant, they continue to really struggle, and so they need that truth.

Brad:

Just get it over with, just bring it all out. Just dump it out there. Then you can get on with more of the healing journey and really the main parts of the healing journey. Because the truth part is a big component, but it's not probably even the main component, Morgan, to be honest with you. It's a part of it, but it's almost like playing the game Monopoly. It's part of the game that allows you to pass go and you get $200 every time you pass go, but that's not how you win Monopoly. It's not who passes go more. There's other strategies that help you win Monopoly.

Brad:

Part of the affair recovery process is you do need the truth though. Don't get me wrong. If your spouse needs the truth, if they feel like they're not getting the full story from you, they're going to need that to be able to let it go and heal because they need to see you as trustworthy, but there's so much more to the healing process than just that stage. That's one area where people take the wrong approach.

Morgan:

Absolutely. If you think that just withholding parts of the information is actually going to help your relationship, we've talked about this before, it's not. It's not going to do what you think it will, it's not going to help.

Brad:

It's always been a crash and burn scenario, always.

Morgan:

Always, absolutely. Let's go on to the second point. I hear this often when I talk to people over the phone. They assume that their partner needs to go fix themselves, or they need to go learn why they did it before they can join them in counseling. They're saying "Hey, you go fix yourself. You go visit the marriage counselor by yourself or you go to individual therapy, and maybe I'll join you later, because you need to figure out why you did it. You need to figure out what's wrong with you," or whatever their thought process is, "Before I'll come with you."

Morgan:

That's really just a false strategy. It's not a strategy that helps. It's not a strategy that actually really gets you answers. One thing I tell people, and this is very true. Let's say your spouse ... Yes, there are situations where they do need individual therapy, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying if they go to therapy, if they go see the marriage counselor by themselves to understand why they did it, and they figure out why they did it, it doesn't fix the communication problem in the relationship, and it doesn't help them come back to you and explain to you why they did it. Because number one, you're still traumatized.

Brad:

Morgan, part of it is, is many times people will have an affair because they felt rejected first or unwanted first, and this is barring cases of sex addiction, where somebody felt unwanted first or undesired by their spouse. They got caught in a negative cycle. The answer they came up with may be, "I wasn't happy with you. You hurt me."

Brad:

Most of the time, you're really going to be benefited by working with an expert to help you work through the affair recovery process. There might be limited circumstances where it's a good idea to go figure it out on your own, and go get individual treatment, but really both of you need to be getting help in your marriage.

Morgan:

Right. Really, before you self-diagnosis, because I think that's the biggest thing. You self-diagnose, and you think, "Well, this is my answer. This is what our problem really is." You need to let the professional do that first. Let them know what you think is going on so that they can get a really good full picture of both sides so then they can say, "Yeah, that's the case" or "No, let's do this." Make sure you don't self-diagnose and assume that somebody needs to go by them self first, because that's really going to shoot you in the foot.

Morgan:

Okay, ready for the third one?

Brad:

The third one we have here is really minimizing your partner's feelings. Thinking that they should be able just to stuff what they've experienced and be able to just, so both of you can go on your merry way and be happy with each other. "You've got to stuff this pain and trauma that I caused you so that I can be happy again." That's pretty selfish.

Morgan:

Yeah, and I don't think that people consciously, always consciously do that, but they'll do it in certain ways, and I'm sure you'll explain.

Brad:

Yeah. People feel like, "Hey, stuff this, bottle this. I hurt you in this way. I'm stuffing my pain so we can be together." That's the strategy that's destined to fail because what's not happening there, you're not taking on your spouse's emotional needs. Your spouse is not seeing you as a safe person who cares about them and their pain.

Brad:

They're just saying, "Hurry the heck up. Let's get this process over with. Let's enjoy life. I'm tired of trying to answer your questions. I'm tired of you getting triggered. I'm tired of you asking about the affair partner. Let's just go on." An approach that really fails is minimizing your partner's feelings.

Morgan:

Downplaying it.

Brad:

Downplaying it. You really have to take on their emotional needs. You got to work to be a safe person for each other. That goes both ways, but you really got to work to be safe for each other emotionally. Morgan, that leads us to the next one.

Morgan:

Yean, and sometimes people will say, "Oh, I got it, I know, I hurt you. I got it, I know, I hurt you." That's really still that minimizing and downplaying.

Morgan:

Anyways, let's go on to number four. Time will heal all wounds. The strategy that really just doesn't work. Time will not heal the wounds. It might minimize some of the trauma for a time but it's not going to make the trauma go away. We find a lot of people that are just not able to be vulnerable with each other anymore. They're not able to let each other in because there's this lack of trust that's always going to be there if you don't deal with it. Do you have anything to add?

Brad:

Yeah. What I would add to that is time doesn't heal squat. What really helps people heal is really being able to heal in each other's arms. Just thinking, "We're going to drop this, we're going to bury it, and we're going to go on." Usually what happens when people take the time heals all wounds approach is numbness sets in, and emotional distance sets in.

Brad:

People really get to a point of feeling, "I might be better off just on my own. They hurt me in this really dreadful way." It's not the one who had the affair who thinks about leaving, it's the one who got betrayed because it's like, "This is it? This is the makeup? This is the honeymoon? This is how things are going to be? I'm over here traumatized and you don't care."

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

Time doesn't heal all wounds. Usually the people who have that strategy are people who are not getting help, who are not getting expert help. They're the ones who will adopt that strategy of, "Hey, time heals all wounds, we don't need counseling. Let's just do it on our own. We'll be okay. It's going to be hard, six months, but we'll make it."

Morgan:

That's the same group of people that will minimize.

Brad:

Yeah, yeah. They'll do that as well.

Morgan:

Ready for the next one?

Brad:

Yeah. The next one here is thinking that just getting answers to your questions alone will solve all of the relationship problems. Because really what's underneath the questions that people ask persistently is really, "I'm afraid. Can I trust you? Can I get my needs met with you? Am I safe with you?" Every time you hear your spouse ask a question, and every time that you ask a question, it's really because what you're saying is, "I'm still afraid. I want to know that I can trust you. I want to know that my heart is safe with you."

Brad:

Sometimes our head says, "This is scary," but our heart still loves our spouse. We want them with us, we want them close. Sometimes we think that we have to always get it logically. Sometimes if we approach it in a black or white way ... Obviously, infidelity's always wrong in my book. I don't think there's ever really a circumstance where infidelity is right. If there is, I would be shocked if there's actually a circumstance where it's okay to cheat or have an affair. I don't think there is.

Brad:

When people have an affair and go through that, it's not a black and white thought process for them, it's actually very gray. To try and think that you can understand it through logic alone or understanding alone, you can't. Obviously given the story and details helps but that alone will not help you heal. That will just say, "At least you're trying and you're trustworthy, and I can understand you, and you're more predictable." People sometimes get stuck in this loop of, "I need these questions answered," and that alone doesn't always heal.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

There is a point though, because I need to be careful, there's a point where that's really needed in the healing journey, but there becomes a point where that's not really going to ever help somebody heal.

Morgan:

Right, so answering why is not going to be the end all, be all. It's not going to be the thing ...

Brad:

It's important.

Morgan:

It's important but it's not going to be the thing, the only thing that causes you to somehow love your spouse again, trust your spouse again, fully open up to your spouse again. It's not going to be the only thing that leads to complete healing.

Brad:

No.

Morgan:

Let's move on to number six. Not sharing your vulnerable side. Your emotions, your vulnerability, what's really deep inside, what's really going on for you. Not sharing that is a terrible strategy. You'll just land flat on your face every time, but that is so scary for so many people.

Morgan:

Because that vulnerable side is like I mean, "First of all, you've hurt me with this affair. Second of all, before the affair happened, there was this terrible negative cycle, and we were always at each other's throat. I could never really count on you. I could never really get close, for whatever reason. Now you're asking me to be vulnerable? I couldn't be vulnerable before."

Morgan:

This is where therapy's really, really important because you have that safe place. You have that safe person, so that you're not going to be torn to shreds because they're not going to let it happen. You can learn to get to that vulnerable place so that you don't let this happen again. Because that's really, answering why, understanding all the detailed questions, I mean that's very important but it's not going to be the thing that allows that vulnerability to just magically appear.

Morgan:

It's the professional who knows how to help you get there. That's where you're going to start really healing and being able to then get close to your spouse again, and have those bonding events that we've talked about in previous episodes. Brad, do you want to add to that?

Brad:

Yeah. All I would add to that, Morgan, is really that approach of encountering the vulnerable side, sharing your vulnerable side, sharing your deep, primary emotion, sharing the sadness, and the hurt, and the fear, and letting your spouse see that part of you. In these conversations when they encounter that, they encounter somebody who's safe. They encounter somebody that maybe the don't believe always or trust as far as they can throw them, but they're a tad more believable, they're a tad more ...

Morgan:

Safe.

Brad:

Safe. That vulnerability is really the key to healing. Most people, I say most, I really think probably almost everybody really struggles to do that because of these negative cycles that people get caught into. These negative cycles are just really a ...

Morgan:

They're intense.

Brad:

Well, they're intense but it's the pattern we had before the affair, and if it's not addressed we're going to be healing with the pattern that we had before we had the affair.

Morgan:

Ready for the next one?

Brad:

Yeah. This a big one, Morgan. It's thinking that you can do it on your own. Nobody in their right mind who gets diagnosed with cancer is going to think, "Hey, I can do this on my own." They're going to think, "Hey, this is a crisis. My life is falling apart. I'm just going to go do this on my own."

Morgan:

Take supplements.

Brad:

"I'm going to take supplements, eat fruit I like. Just go vegan and that's going to cure my cancer." Not too many people have that kind of ... That's a wrong strategy, that's a wrong approach.

Morgan:

Steve Jobs.

Brad:

Yeah, well the wrong approach is really just thinking you can do it on your own. Part of that is not being in intensive therapy. If you are working through the healing process and you're only doing an hour a week of counseling, that's not really an effective approach. I really discourage it. Sometimes I have that happen for financial reasons but ...

Morgan:

Where people want to do once a week?

Brad:

Yeah, do once a week.

Morgan:

For an hour?

Brad:

Yeah. Once a week for an hour. Then it's like they don't come in every week and then they get escalated and it's like ...

Morgan:

Right, yeah.

Brad:

"Sorry guys it's, you're dealing with some major stuff here."

Morgan:

You have to follow the process.

Brad:

Yeah, but a big part of this is just thinking the financial cost outweigh any benefit of getting help for your marriage. It's like, "Man, this is going to be way more expensive than any benefit that we're going to get out of it."

Brad:

Really, you need to think about, when is the right time to get marriage counseling? If it's not now, then when? Is it when the kids are older and you've been healing with the same pattern that you have now when they leave the house? There's numbness and the one who got betrayed is like, "Screw this. I'm done." When is the right time? If it's not now, then when? If this isn't a time to get marriage counseling and to go see an expert, and to get help, I don't know what is.

Morgan:

Right.

Brad:

If you broke your arm, and you see a bone protruding out of your arm, through the flesh, that's a good time to go to the emergency room.

Morgan:

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Brad:

That's not a time to go do it on your own and patch things up.

Morgan:

Exactly.

Brad:

That's one of the biggest mistakes people make. As many couples as I see who've experienced infidelity, there are so many others that never go talk to anybody, never go get help or if they do, it's one and done. It's just one session. They're not getting the help, they're not looking at resources. Obviously you guys are the exception to that. You're listening to this podcast and you're learning and you're growing. Many of you guys have inquired about working with us for retreats, that's an option that we have for you guys. We would love to work with you personally, but you can't hold on to that kind of false belief.

Morgan:

Yeah, exactly. If you'd like to learn more about how you can work with us, you can go to HealingBrokenTrust.com, that's HealingBrokenTrust.com. We have resources there for you, and you can set up your retreat. You're also welcome to call our office, and the phone number is there on the website as well.

Brad:

You're also able to do a coaching call as well.

Morgan:

That's right. If you would like to learn more about it, you can talk to our office or you can schedule a coaching call and learn more about how you can take advantage of the retreat. All right guys, have a great week.

Brad:

Thank you. Bye, bye.