Women Who Cheat
By Tammy Nelson
Understanding the message of the affair
Even though our ideas about sex and sexuality have greatly advanced over the last half-century, our culture still holds a double standard about infidelity. While no one is entirely surprised by the behavior of a Bill Clinton, an Elliot Spitzer, or a Tiger Woods—men will be men, after all—we still tend to pathologize women or shame them (or both) for having affairs.
In my view, far from being evidence of pathology or marital bankruptcy, a woman’s affair can be a way of expressing a desire for an entirely different self, either separate from the marriage altogether or still in it. An affair can be what I call “a can opener” for women unable to articulate for themselves why they’re unhappy in their marriages, much less empower themselves to leave or begin an honest conversation with their husbands about what they feel is wrong. In my practice, I’ve heard many women say, “I didn’t even know what I wanted until the affair was over and I realized that I really wanted to end my marriage,” or “I had no idea that I used the affair as a way to wake up our relationship.”
Many infidelity treatment approaches today are based on the idea that the unfaithful spouse is a perpetrator, someone who wronged the other person. While the pain caused by infidelity can’t and shouldn’t be denied, it generally isn’t understood well enough that many women cheat because they struggle with their self-identity in their lives and lack of empowerment in their marriages. To some extent, the affair makes up for a felt lack of an adult self. Sometimes, understanding an affair as an unconscious bid for self-empowerment, relief from bad sex, or a response to a lack of choices or personal freedom is an important first step toward a fuller, more mature selfhood.
Searching for the Bartered Self
Sarah came to therapy with her husband, Rob, for couples therapy after he caught her cheating. Married for 10 years, he felt hurt, angry, and hopeless about the marriage. He sat across from Sarah on the couch, with his head in his hands. “I have no idea how we’re going to get past this. Sarah says she wants to work this out, but I don’t know if we can put this marriage together again after what she’s done.”
Rob had read emails between Sarah and her boyfriend that explained in detail how much they were enjoying virtual sex—watching each other masturbating over a webcam—which had both shocked and devastated him. He’d thought their sex life was good, but admitted that having kids had gotten in the way of their relationship. He thought they still loved each other, and Sarah agreed. They were both unclear why the affair had happened, but said they wanted to recover their marriage, if possible.
At the end of their first joint session, Sarah asked whether she could see me individually. Rob consented, so I asked if they’d be OK with an open secrets policy: what’s said in the individual session stays in the session. They agreed that whatever Sarah said could be kept private, though she could share with Rob what she wished to from our individual sessions.
In our first individual session, Sarah asked if therapy could be a place where she could talk honestly about the affair. This led to a discussion of the difference between privacy and secrecy, both in her marriage and in her sessions with me. Keeping secrets in her marriage had given Sarah a sense of space—a secret place where she could grow her sexuality, dream her dreams, and keep a part of her that no one else had control over. Our first conversation revolved around how the space she’d created could be shifted from secret to private, and how she could keep a differentiated, individuated boundary around herself in her relationship. This could give her a healthy degree of separation from her husband without having to lie or be deceptive to stake out her space.
I then explained to Sarah that, in my view, infidelity recovery has three phases: crisis, insight, and vision. The crisis stage occurs right after disclosure or discovery, when couples are in acute distress and their lives are in chaos. At this point, the focus of therapy isn’t on whether or not they should stay together or if there’s a future for them, but on establishing safety, addressing painful feelings, and normalizing trauma symptoms.
In phase two, the insight phase, we talk about what vulnerabilities might have led to the extramarital affair. Becoming observers of the affair, we begin to tell the story of what happened. Repeating endless details of the sexual indiscretion doesn’t help, but taking a deeper look at what the unfaithful partner longed for and couldn’t find in the marriage—and so looked for outside of it—as well as finding empathy for the other, who was in the dark, can elicit a shift in how both partners see the affair and what it meant in their relationship.
Phase three is the vision phase, which includes seeking a deeper understanding of the meaning of the affair and moves forward the experience and resulting lessons into a new concept of marriage and, perhaps, a new future. In this phase, partners can decide to move on separately or stay together. This is where the erotic connection will be renewed (or created) and desire can be revived. In this phase, the meaning of monogamy changes from a moralistic, blanket prohibition on
outside sex to a search for deeper intimacy
inside the marriage. A vision of the relationship going forward includes negotiating a new commitment.
Establishing Safety
During early sessions in the crisis phase of treatment, Sarah’s view of the world was shifting, and she didn’t know what she wanted. She wavered about whether she wanted to stay with Rob, wondering whether she should move on and seek genuine emotional independence alone or stay and try to be both fully herself and fully married to Rob. She wasn’t sure she could trust me to understand her and didn’t trust her husband, either, even though she herself had acted in a way that wasn’t trustworthy.
Gradually, Sarah revealed that she’d felt that she had no space of her own in the marriage, literally or figuratively. Her husband had a home office, but she had no comparable space for herself. Her dependence on Rob was nearly total: he balanced the checkbook, paid the bills, earned the money, and told her when she could make ATM withdrawals. He even counted the cash in her wallet and decided how much she should spend at the hair salon. She’d never been encouraged or allowed to feel empowered and independent. As a result, she’d started rebelling against her husband like an adolescent against a too-strict father, sneaking out at night or during the day when he was at work and having clandestine sexual encounters.
Sarah’s affair consisted primarily of quick liaisons in the back of her car. Her boyfriend met sexual needs not being fulfilled at home. Although the sex was quick, furtive, and secret, he gave her orgasms and oral sex and was willing to experiment in ways she found exciting. But while buoyed by the thrill and energy of this new relationship and her long-buried ability to feel pleasure—even wondering if she might be falling in love—she also felt guilty. Frightened by the growing intimacy with her lover when they were together, she began meeting him online, masturbating with him through a webcam.
After Rob discovered the affair, he’d demanded Sarah’s email and voice mail passwords, which she gave him. Although this made her feel exposed, vulnerable, and humiliated, she thought her husband deserved the transparency—as the “innocent” party—and that she should be punished. All these thoughts conformed with many of society’s constructs about women who have affairs, but they reinforced her long-brewing resentment that her marriage wasn’t an equal partnership: she was the “bad child”; her husband, the aggrieved parent.
At this point, I reframed the affair for Sarah in a way quite different from her own perspective (and that of many therapists). I asked whether it was possible that the infidelity was less a transgression than a move toward self-respect and self-empowerment. Could she have been seeking autonomy and individuation, as well as a more mature state of sexual development? Was she trying to find her voice, maintain a stronger sense of herself, create a personal boundary that no one could cross,
and remain in her marriage? Yes, she’d betrayed her husband; this was beyond doubt, I added. And this method for finding herself was clearly not working if she wanted the marriage to survive. But perhaps she’d paradoxically
tried to sabotage the marriage as a desperate attempt to develop more emotional maturity and become a more independent and grown-up wife.
As we spoke, Sarah realized that, while her intentions in having the affair hadn’t been conscious, she did want to grow into a fuller woman and mature sexual adult. She admitted she thought she could bring that woman back into the marriage and into the relationship. This made one point crystal clear: she could no longer be satisfied with the marriage as it was.
Gaining Awareness
Having gotten a clearer portrait of Sarah’s marriage, we moved on to the insight phase of treatment. What did the affair mean about her? What did it mean about Rob? And what did it mean about their marriage?
As we explored these questions, Sarah discovered quickly that the affair had far more to do with her marriage than with her husband, whom she said she loved and with whom she wanted to stay—but only if it could become a more equal partnership. When I asked what the affair told her about Rob, she said, “I felt that
he wanted me to fill a certain kind of role; it wasn’t just about replaying my mother’s position. Rob liked being in charge, liked bossing me around and being a kind of father. I know why, too. He recently lost his job, and the only place he felt any power or control was at home. He was mad that they’d fired him and took it out on me. In a way, he’s always done that: when people reject him, he gets angry and controlling. But with us, the more he tried to control me, the more I wanted independence from him.”
We worked in sessions to identify some key areas where she could feel more autonomy and still be in relationship with Rob. She started small, choosing their television shows, making decisions on where to go to dinner, instead of saying, “I don’t care where we go. Where do you want to go?” When Rob asked her to have sex, she told him she wasn’t ready yet, but would let him know when she was. Although Rob felt he had little or no control in these situations, he did begin to appreciate signs of the new, more adult Sarah, someone equal to him, with whom he could have a conversation and negotiate choices. He realized it was a relief that he didn’t have to do it all himself, and he actually felt less lonely in the marriage.
When I asked Sarah what the affair meant about her marriage, she said, “In the affair, I felt stronger, more mature, sexier, calmer, more charming, and more alive.” We talked about whether she could integrate her sexier, more mature self into the marriage or whether the relationship was fundamentally flawed. To her, being in her marriage meant giving up a sense of personal power, while having an affair gave her a sense of independence, choice, and more control. She didn’t know how to have a grown-up relationship with her husband that encompassed safety
and desire.
Reenvisioning a Marriage
Treatment in the third phase included helping Sarah get in touch with her fantasies and reconnect with pleasure—one of her greatest challenges in therapy. She felt guilty when she thought about her own pleasure, and had compartmentalized her needs into the affair, as something separate, wrong, and forbidden. Her fantasies and desires were something she felt shame about sharing with her husband. Bringing that sexual part of her into the marriage was the beginning of erotic recovery for her and for her marriage, but she still had to learn to connect with her desires and to communicate them to Rob.
I asked her to write down some of her sexual fantasies and share what she thought the desire or longing underneath them was. For instance, if the fantasy was to have someone grab her hair and kiss her, was this spurred by a longing to be held, to be out of control, to know that she was wanted and desired, or all of the above? The goal was to normalize her sexual needs: her affair had been a breach of monogamy, not a sexual pathology.
“If you could have anything you wanted, what would you ideally expect from your sex life with your husband?”
Sarah answered shyly, “That he’d pursue me and we’d try new things in bed.”
When I asked her if she knew what the longing underneath might be, she said, “My real longing underneath is to be totally special to him.”
Sarah went on to work on a vision of a more intimate and adult sexuality. This included asking Rob to behave in ways that made her feel special and trying to make him feel special as well. By this point, she was committed to creating a mutual vision of a new monogamy with her husband, and I suggested they return for couples therapy and focus together on their erotic recovery.
Several months later, Rob and Sarah are still working on an agreement for a new, monogamous marriage together. Sarah is committed to sharing her real thoughts and feelings with Rob. In this way, her adult self and her adult needs become a priority that can be talked about and negotiated in the relationship. She feels they’re now given as much importance as Rob’s needs.
Rob’s commitment to Sarah is that he tries harder to share his feelings and work on creating a more emotionally intimate relationship. They both try to be conscious of the distant and disconnected roles learned in their childhoods, and focus instead on the emotional intimacy they really want from the relationship.
Their new monogamy includes a focus on their erotic recovery. The affair created an erotic injury to their relationship, and Rob and Sarah continue to work on this as a goal of healing. They’ve made a commitment to sharing their fantasies and talking about what’s working in their love life. When they feel distant or dissatisfied, they want to learn to talk about it and turn toward each other instead of shutting down or turning to someone else outside the marriage.
Sarah now understands that her journey to self-empowerment and freedom can happen at the same time that she’s a wife and partner. Her adult choices include staying in a mature, monogamous relationship, while creating space for working on her own self-identity. Her worth in the relationship continues to be a focus of our couples therapy. Her cheating makes sense to her now in the context of her life issues, but she has a new empathy for Rob and how it affected him.
As therapists, it’s important to discern what our goal is for the women we treat in infidelity therapy. Are we helping them end an affair or end their marriage? Is it our job to remind them of their vows or simply to help them heal? By viewing women’s infidelity as a possible search for a new way of being, we can help them reenvision a fully committed relationship with greater empowerment and equality.
CASE COMMENTARY
By David Treadway
While I admire the sensitive work Tammy Nelson did in rejuvenating Sarah and Rob’s marriage, both emotionally and erotically, I believe that zooming in too quickly to examine the root causes of an infidelity without addressing the emotional impact of the betrayal on both parties usually leads to incomplete healing. Although I say to couples that each partner is 50 percent responsible for what’s not working in a marriage, I always add that choosing to have a secret affair is 100 percent the responsibility of the unfaithful spouse. Most of the time, couples need a way of healing the fundamental breach of trust before being able to fully repair the relationship.
In working with couples following a secret affair, I use a four-step model based on the treatment approach of clinical psychologist Janis Abrahms Spring:
Step 1: The betrayed partners have as much time as needed to share their hurt, anger, and sense of devastation while unfaithful partners listen as nondefensively as possible without explaining or rationalizing their behavior. The therapist helps the partner who had the outside relationship to be compassionate and caring about the impact of the affair. Needless to say, this may take more than a single session.
Step 2: The unfaithful partners are then taught to write a letter in which they take full responsibility for having done harm, indicating what they’ll do to ensure it won’t happen again and what concrete steps they’ll take to make amends. In addition to agreeing never again to see the other party in the affair, other ways to make amends might include giving up drinking for a year or getting rid of the boat where the affair took place.
Step 3: The letter of amends is read in session, and the concrete actions that constitute an attempt at atonement are agreed upon by both partners.
Step 4: Only at this point is the challenge of learning how to forgive discussed, and only if betrayed partners are ready to begin to work on it. If so, they’re coached on how to write a forgiveness letter that involves accepting the attempts at atonement and expressing a willingness to let go of a sense of injury. This all takes place with the understanding that forgiveness can’t be legislated; it has to grow over time.
It’s my experience that patiently and thoroughly working through this difficult process without shaming and blaming is what allows a couple to move on to achieving a level of intimacy and trust that they typically never had before. I remember a man named Paul who’d gone on to transform his relationship with his wife after her affair and referred to their new sense of connection as his “second marriage.” In one of our last sessions, he put his arm around his wife, smiled at me conspiratorially, and said, “You know what I like best? Here I have this extraordinary woman and a brand new ‘second marriage,’ and the lawyers didn’t get a dime!”
AUTHOR'S RESPONSE
I agree with David Treadway’s observation that working with couples after an infidelity takes lots of finesse and that, of course, the feelings of the person who’s been deceived and betrayed need to taken into account and addressed. Like Treadway, I think Janis Spring’s “secrets policy” can be invaluable, offering helpful clinical guidelines for individual work when necessary.
Since this case study was told from Sarah’s point of view, it doesn’t delve into Rob’s feelings, nor do we get to see much of the couples work. Instead, the focus is on the special issues of identity and empowerment for women who have affairs. If I’d told the fuller story of the therapy with this couple, I’d have devoted more attention to the third phase of treatment—the attempt to help them develop a new vision of their marriage, which I call the “new monogamy.”
However, the most important message I hope readers take away from this case is that even after the wrenching pain of an affair, therapists still have an opportunity to help troubled couples create a new relationship with better communication, fuller intimacy, and realistic hope for a better future together.
Tammy Nelson, Ph.D., M.S., a board-certified sexologist, licensed professional counselor, certified sex therapist, and Imago therapist, is the founder and executive director of the Center for Healing. She’s the author of The New Monogamy; Getting the Sex You Want;
and What’s Eating You?
David Treadway, Ph.D., is director of the Treadway Training Institute. He’s the author of Home Before Dark: First Year with Cancer
and Intimacy, Change, and Other Therapeutic Mysteries: Stories of Clinicians and Clients.
Tough Customers
to face in a room with someone in a state of transferential rage—yelling, pounding the chair, blaming us for his/her problem? And couples! No wonder so many couples therapists favor coaching clients in highly cognitive skills-building and problem-solving techniques. In one interview of our upcoming webcast series on emotion, Sue Johnson remembers many years ago watching a therapist basically scold couples who seemed to be getting too upset, even sending one partner out of the room to calm down. The title of that session must surely have been, “No emotion here, please—therapist at work!”
Or have the rumors been exaggerated?
© 2013 Psychotherapy Networker
I was shocked and confused by this article. I have been licensed for over 35 years, trained in Humanistic-Existentialism, and we ALWAYS worked with the emotional aspect of the person. A common question utilized during therapy was, “How did you feel about that?”. In working with my interns I always emphasize the emotions and how they connect us as human beings. So…this is not “news” to me. Unless…has the majority of the psychological community been actively avoiding emotions? Then perhaps I am out of touch with what has been happening. Has CBT taken over that much?
I can understand why you might be confused by this article. Psychotherapists have always considered emotion the realm of their expertise. Humanistic approaches, however, have not been the the dominant modalities of the last decade and even humanistic approaches existed prior to the recent revelations in neuroscience of what emotion actual is. Most psychotherapists lack an true understanding of what an emotion actually is and therefore lack an understanding of how to help facilitate change in regards to various emotional states. If you have not read Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio or The Emotional Brian by Joseph Ledoux, you may be missing the point of the above article. For one thing there are neuroscientific distinctions between an emotion and a feeling. There are various parts of our brain that play various roles in processing and integrating and regulating emotional states. Emotions also precede cognition and can occur without conscious awareness. Emotions play their symphony in the arena of the body and the body state feeds information back to the brain (either consciously or unconsciously). The right brain is dominant for processing emotions and the right brain is also dominant for instinctual survival related functions. The right brain is dominant for regulating the autonomic nervous system and regulating the internal organs and it is these visceral shifts that inform us about the emotions we are having, if we are even aware of these visceral shifts. Most psychotherapeutic approaches live in the left brain exploration of how a client “feels”, but fails to delve deeper into the subtle contours of the bodily experience of emotional states that often underly their conscious awareness. Most psychotherapy lives in the realm of language and cognition around emotions rather than in the “felt sense” experiential non linear processing of emotional physiological states of the right brain and body in order to help the client return to physiological homeostasis or increase capacity to tolerate and experience the full realm of human emotional experience. I hope that helps clarify things. I highly recommend looking into the work of Damasio and LeDoux.
Still, after several decades as a neuropsychologist, I smile when I read people talk about left brains and right brains. As if we have two brains like we have two arms, two legs…
Unfortunately yes in many cases.
“Has CBT taken over that much?” I can’t imagine where the notion of CBT being a therapeutic method that dismisses or ignores or does not use a client’s felt emotion came from? Quite frankly just the opposite is true Ole! In addition, the question “how did you feel about that” does not always get to the deeper identification of emotion. My follow up questions are always, “what does it feel like?; constriction? spasm? bubbling? buzzing? stabbing pain? etc. and “where in your body did you or are you feeling that right now?”
Jeffrey Von Glahn, Ph.D.
It’s certainly welcome news that emotion is once again a respectable topic. However, the idea of “emotional release” – or dare I even say “catharsis” – as having any value in itself remains as taboo of a topic as ever. The current manifestation of this attitude is the suffocating fear of “re-traumatization,” which says that a client is being “re-hurt” if he seems “too upset.” A testable definition of re-traumatization does not exist. Hence, even in this era of evidence-based research there’s no study that shows that a client is being “re-hurt.” Neuroscientists, unfortunately, are only compounding the problem. They are just as guilty of urging the therapist to not let a client’s emotional experiencing get too intense. For a fundamental re-conceptualization of catharsis and of the value of what I call therapeutic crying, see my article in the May/June issue.
Those questions all serve to get a client thinking about and analyzing their emotions, which isn’t a bad thing. But I sense the article is talking about a different process and it sounds intriguing. Even after 23 years as a clinician, I experience myself getting very “in my head” when a client is experiencing raw and powerful emotion. And I can almost put words to it, “Oh no, I’m not joining you THERE.” While I can empathize, say all the right things,ask all the right questions, it’s most definitely “from a distance”. Not that I’m supposed to literally “join” my client in that place, but I think to allow myself to be a bit more impacted and moved by their state rather than just analyzing it, and helping them analyze it would be best. Regarding this seminar, I may be signing up for this one.
Hi Brian, I love the statement: ‘Emotions play their symphony in the arena of the body and the body state feeds information back to the brain (either consciously or unconsciously).’ and would love to include it in a newsletter that I’m writing about trauma and the recognition that it is held in the body. Was this originally from Damasio or Ledoux? Or is this your statement? May I use it?
Thanks, Judy
I believe it was probably Ledoux. In one of his books or even lectures. I am sure he repeats himself. My words are just a paraphrase of his original statement.
Hi Brian, I love the statement: ‘Emotions play their symphony in the arena of the body and the body state feeds information back to the brain (either consciously or unconsciously).’ and would love to include it in a newsletter that I’m writing about trauma and the recognition that it is held in the body. Was this originally from Damasio or Ledoux? Or is this your statement? May I use it?
Thanks, Judy
I believe it was probably Ledoux. In one of his books or even lectures. I am sure he repeats himself. My words are just a paraphrase of his original statement.
Thanks for responding so promptly!
Would you like me to quote you? or should I say it is from Ledoux?
Cris,
That sounds a bit condescending. The brain has many integrated and specialized functions and it’s complexity certainly goes way beyond the pop cultures use of right brain and left brain. Despite the fact that such discourse oversimplifies thing our neocortex is indeed split into two hemispheres and indeed has a right and left side. Even our Amygdala has lateralized functions and the vagus nerve has a left node and a right node and the right node is more integrated with regulating emotional state, in particular it is only the right vagus which innervates the sino atrial node of the heart. The word “dominance” does not imply sole or exclusive control without integration contralareral parts of the brain. As far as right and left arms and legs, this is one function where control is very much specialized in a contralateral right/left split.
While my above statement may be a short concise reference to the works of two of the most prominent and renowned neuroscientist of our time, I don’t quite find my understanding of neuroscience to be anything less than comprehensive. While my statement above may not be a thorough review of what neuroscientists know about the brain, nothing I said above is factually untrue. If you disagree that the left brain is dominant for linear and language based operations and that the right brain is dominant for regulating the autonomic nervous system I would live for you to show me the neuroscientufic studies that have shown that to be the case.
Sincerely,
Brian
Brian, didn’t mean to trip your trigger so. I can see you’re very into neuroscience. That’s good. Still, there’s only one brain, slang notwithstanding. The not-so-informed are easily misled by a perversion of terminology.
Thanks! I will be sure to say left side or hemisphere so as not to give people the impression they have 2 brains. I just thought people with half a brain could figure that’s what that means.
So I am sure your years in the field give you a knowledge to contribute that goes beyond making sure none of us are misinformed about how many brains we have?
Let me reword the opening sentence of your fifth paragraph to more accurately represent the reality of many of us in the field– not the academicians who have “controlled” the thinking more or less from the onset of psychotherapy/psychology.– Luckily, for those that need it, neuroscience is also beginning to catch up in its growing recognition that which therapists have long known, that working sensitively and skillfully with clients’ emotions is critical to clinical success.
However, some of the other comments are shocking in their apparent unawareness of the dominance the “scientific” ,cognitive branches our field has taken. Just about every study that compares “psychotherapy” to other forms of “treatment” (pharmaceutical, no treatment, etc) uses CBT for the “psychotherapy.” In fact a Harvard study a couple years ago seemed shocked in presenting their findings that emotionally based therapy seemed to be at least as successful as CBT. (Of course the drive is toward quantitative outcomes and reduced costs– both of which are hard to measure in long term depth therapy.)
I believe Ledoux uses the metaphor of the emotions playing their symphony in the body. If you want to quote LeDoux you need to find his exact quote as that sentence I constructed are my own words, although it was inspired by LeDoux.
Then, may i quote you (as Brian J Whelan)?
If you prefer no, then I’ll rework it. If you want to see a sample of my newsletters, go to my website — http://www.spiralwisdom.net.
Check out the archives too.
thanks
Amen
Looking forward to this series. I started recognizing the importance of dealing with emotions when I began implementing Gottman’s approaches in my work. If an out-of-control client can have the space to work through those emotions and come out the other side with the guidance of a professional, isn’t therapy providing a tremendous value?