Infidelity navigation: Summary * fidelity 101 * fidelity 108 * fidelity 2 * fidelity 3 * fidelity 4 * emotional cost * triangles * how to mend * models of mending * how to forgive * the unforgivable * relationship education * exits from intimacy * ending a relationship in peace * defences * emotional intelligence * re-romancing * on vulnerability

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Meditation navigation: Mind * how to meditate * loving kindness * embodied mind * the Sacred * Yoga Nidra * the resolve * Tonglen meditation * forgiving * Antar Mouna * Tantra * Vedanta psychology * inner smile * reciprocity * spiritual materialism * mental maps * trusting in mind * prayer * zen mind * manifestos

How to mend navigation: 1. How to mend * 2. Models of mending * 3. How to be a grown up * 4. Hold me tight * 5. Becoming vulnerable * 6. Emotional bids * 7. Constructive fights * 8. Exits from intimacy * 9. The answer

Trauma navigation: complex trauma 1 * societal trauma 2 * write it out 3 * life events scale 4 * compassion fatigue 5 * first aid 6 * first responders 7

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Last edit 04/10/11

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman (or man) scorned. Congreve

Nature doesn't outfit us with consistent judgment and perfect self-knowledge. Source

 

SUMMARY

• It is not normal to think our partner intends to harm us. A clandestine or secret affair, with or without sex is intentional. It is likely harmful, humiliating and traumatic when you discover your partner has strayed.
• Humiliated rage is likely to follow discovery. And then a seemingly endless questioning follows, fired by heart broken distrust - grasping for an evidentiary foothold in a world turned upside down.
• More on trauma in Fidelity 108 and here trauma page 1 * trauma page 2 * trauma page 3 * trauma page 4 * trauma page 5.

• Extra-marital intercourse occurs in both happy and miserable marriages. The statistics are wobbly, but at least 30% of marriages will NOT ever go down this road. If you add emotional affairs that prediction is significantly less. More on Fidelity 1
• The sexual or emotional high can be intoxicating. Ordinary people can do almost anything to maintain the rhythm of infidelity. Like drunken sailors crashing a life on the rocks and telling themselves everything's fine. Hooked.

• Affairs are a rebellion, and an attempt to find another version of ourselves. As Esther Perel puts it, 'it is not our partners we seek to leave but ourselves'. Interview with Perel.
• Infidelity outsources intellectual, emotional and/or physical intimacy to an external contractor, hidden by a sleight of hand or by misdirection.
• It may transfer a relationship problem to a concealed location where it appears to be cured.
• The excluded partner's choice of cure for what ails the relationship is stolen, in secret, by the strayer. It may involve a live third party, a virtual chat room partner or porn websites.
• When discovered this adds more layers to the personal and relationship problems back home.

• I have yet to come across a long term committed relationship shattered by infidelity that didn't have problems to start with. What relationship doesn't have them! But it seems to take forever to get back to working as a team on the original and solvable problems. The damage of the affair is so immediate with profound re-shaping of trust, in retrospect and in prospect.
• Whether the couple can stay together depends on reconstructing the identity union (the feeling of being a unique team). This cannot take place if there is ongoing infidelity, physical violence or ongoing verbal and emotional attacks. Source

• Miscommunication and misunderstandings about sexual exclusivity are common. Research evidence.
• My advice is get help early in the relationships preferably pre-marital and then early in the discovery of cheating.
• If financial infidelity has also occurred then get help even earlier. 'Men tend to hide income, while women tend to hide excess spending.'

• The situation is powerful. The place has a power and mystery of its own. How, where and when the actions are situated affects the outcome. In real estate its called location.
• Our capacity for self-deception is almost limitless. The unfaithful lie to both lover, partner and self in equal measure.
• Our brain camouflages its inner process - we regularly say one thing and do another, believing we actually did what we said we did. Thinking makes it so.

• The idea that you can 'affair proof' a committed monogamous relationship flies in the face of reality. Proponents of this view also proffer inflated divorce statistics (30% instead of the actual 2.8 adults per thousand population per year). More on Fidelity 2 and in 13 observations of intimate relationships.
• No secret is safe, absolutely. However, the majority of illicit one-night stands, flings and clandestine affairs likely go undetected by the partner or spouse. It is gambling with the heart and happiness of loved ones. Deceit robs the other of choice about a situation that directly affects them. More on secrets in Fidelity 3

• Some affairs continue even after the betrayed has used web cams, phone taps, hacked email accounts, employed a PI and then confronted the cheater, who initially denies and later repents but continues in secret to be re-discovered months or years later. The marriage repeats its cycle again.
• Both partners can deny blatant proof of infidelity - the betrayed unwilling or afraid to end the marriage and the strayer wanting everything to continue unchanged (or else!). "It will never happen again, I promise." More on Fidelity 1.3.4

• Some people in long term relationships expect to negotiate sex with few or no words. Direct references to sexual behaviours can be considered crude or improper. This is a problem.
• Infidelity may not be a result of sex addiction but a lack of frank negotiation for sex inside the marriage together with erroneous views about love. See Levine 'Demystifying Love' (2007).

• Infidelity raises the bar on the qualities expected in the primary relationship. If the strayer does not lift their game at home as a result, it leaves the betrayed wondering if their partner was ever that into them. Now both know what the strayer expects from a relationship and is capable of delivering in an affair, it is fair to wonder why it is not happening at home. Do I matter in those ways? Did I ever? Were we ever on the same team?

• Financial costs: It is not impossible for an extramarital affair to be deemed a de-facto relationship where, for example, there is a 'merging of lives into one'. This might expose a married strayer to financial claims in the Family Court of Australia. A de-facto relationship may exist even when the partners do not think so, and vice versa. It is the Court that defines when it began and ended, based on the law and the evidence. Read this collection of articles for a deeper understanding.
• The emotional costs are very high. Infidelity and recovery confirm the necessity of a self-differentiated, meaningful life; of valuing oneself and of intimate self-knowledge; of trusting that knowledge to one's partner - building mental maps of each other's inner world. More on Fidelity 2 and on mental maps.
• An affair may exhibit how out of touch with themselves and with each other the marital partners have become.

• Depression or a feeling of deadness inside are often unrecognised factors in the drive toward infidelity and in its aftermath.
• Attachment insecurity and trauma are sometimes an unrecognised factor in the capacity for serial re-offending. The two can coincide in the one person to whom their behaviour is inexplicable. Particularly when they dissociate.

• Voluntarily and proactively disclosing the 'unsettling, guilt-producing and controversial' facts of the affair returns hope and promotes healing but initially causes enormous distress. Once discovered, the strayer may only leak limited details under questioning. This sets up more questions. It is a toxic pattern that may require professional help to correct. More on Fidelity 2 and how to choose a therapist.

• An illicit affair may kill the assumption of goodwill that normally lubricates trust despite the rusted on mistakes and inevitable misunderstandings of everyday life. More on how to build a healthy family.
• Safety, peace, security and fidelity are the first concern. End the affair, voluntarily disclose accidental meetings. If it is a work mate, customer or client, then define the limits, redefine or change jobs. Open a window into the affair to re-build trust. Exhibit genuine empathy and contrition for the harm done. Make amends. More on Fidelity 108

• Together with the above is the willingness of both to be soft and vulnerable with each other; to be humble and contrite with the wounded, the wounder and the righteous - three roles that are within each of us. More on how to build a healthy family.
• However, being vulnerable is not safe when either partner continues to wound the other.

• It takes at least three to tango - an affair is a triangle. It is a family system best understood systemically. The betrayed person is a part of that system. More on family systems.

• Children are conceived in affairs occurring often at times of high fertility. It raises issues of paternity fraud and complex ethics about family blood lines when a child develops a life threatening, inheritable disease or requires compatible donor transplant. More on Fidelity 4
• Children accidentally or planfully involved in their parent's affairs are betrayed and wounded; are taught to lie; to deny emotional pain and some are publicly humiliated in both school and home communities. More on Fidelity 4

• Betrayal blindness and trauma are observable facts and co-create painful legacies. More on Fidelity 108
• Betrayal bonding is powerful and keeps hurting people 'attached' to each other. More on dysfunctional families.
• Some sex and romance behaviour is compulsive and has escalating negative consequences driven by denial and/or a history of childhood sexual assault. External link to effect of sexual assault on young men.
• For more on sex addiction consider a reader's question and my answer Item 1.10 here.

• Denial is a mental map that delimits vulnerability - more on site.
• A planful and playful relationship is both conscious and intentional - it doesn't just happen by accident. That is true of a vibrant, exclusive relationship, a sanctioned affair and a meaningful life. More on site about meaning at intro 1 and intro 2.

• The majority of marriages survive an affair if the affair is ended. Some never recover. For many it is a turning point for the better. A few are utterly transformed by their experience and bring the wealth of its opening back into their primary relationship. That requires generosity and forgiveness on both sides.
• How to mend a broken relationship on site. Turning points on site.
• Betrayal is betrayal is betrayal. For example, swingers, those in 'open marriages' and sex workers in committed relationships are devastated by infidelity as well.
• Infidelity opens a door into the intergenerational grief of betrayals inflicted by and upon our parents and grandparents. This grief could stop here, but marrying intimacy with duplicity ensures that it will go on.

• Coming to terms with all of the above is the end of masks, of the role-playing, false-self dilemmas. It is a beginning of the maturity that welcomes the sacred. Not religiosity but a broad spirituality that includes self, family and bio-community.

• If nothing sacred grows then anything remains possible until the next crisis raises the same issues again.
• It's not about legislating morality.
• It is about transforming values, personal responsibility or simply, character.

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Some topic headings on the following pages: Fidelity 101

• Definition
• Prevalence
• Timing & Duration
• Related to divorce
• Size and shape of the problem
• A story of infidelity and healing
• Why and how did this happen

Fidelity 108

• Trauma, safety and fidelity after disclosure
• Making amends and authentic help-seeking
• Collateral damage to self-control and self-image
• Crisis and change
• Early Disclosure, Extracting clues in the dark and Catastrophic extraction
• Personality Disordered
• Pay Back Time?
• Toxic Shame

Fidelity 2

• First steps in recovery
• Prediction and 'Prevention'
• Professional help for intimate betrayal
• Comprehensive external sites and articles
• Recommended Books

Fidelity 3

• Hiding behind secrets, privacy, ambiguity and vagueness
• 3.2 The other woman and long duration affairs
• 3.3 The 'other friends' and should I tell
• 3.7 A policy on secrets
• 3.12 Ultimatums
• 3.13 Reader's questions answered

Fidelity 4

• The children involved those conceived in an affair and
• how to help them cope if witnesses.