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.
Learning to manage our fears
Peer Supervision Groups that Work
Women Who Cheat
Is Technology Changing Our Minds?
A Review of Jared Diamond's New Book
© 2013 Psychotherapy Networker
Tough Customers
Re: reconsolidation work: what does therapist focus on when client is resistant to experiencing the emotion of the contradiction between declarative statement and implicit memory? I imagine that seeing the loss of time, would be life experiences and error in perception could be very hard to allow into explicit memory and feeling. I’m thinking of Bruce Ecker’s example of the man who couldn’t change jobs. gkatzenstein
Bruce mentioned information about obsessive attachment to a former lover. When and where will this be available?
I was looking for that as well, KatCon.
To KatCon, jdombroski and all: Here are the two online supplements I mentioned in the webcast:
Free access to an online course in Coherence Therapy (normally US$33 tuition fee) titled:
Obsessive Attachment to Former Lover: Transformational Change of Core Emotional Schemas
Click here and then enter:
UserID: coherence
Password: therapy
Free download of Chapter 1 of our recently-released Routledge book,
Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation by Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley
Click here
—BE
As you indicated, when a client is guided into vivid knowledge that contradicts the emotional learning underlying the symptom—creating what we call a juxtaposition experience—resistance can develop if that dissolution would bring some initial grief or other distress. The resistance blocks the dissolution of the target learning. What the therapist then focuses on, in Coherence Therapy, is this: With sensitive respect for the client’s need for this self-protective resistance, the therapist focuses on bringing into awareness, in gentle, small-enough steps that are workable for the client, the specific loss or other distress that dissolution would bring. As the client becomes aware of and familiar with it, he or she becomes able to feel and process it emotionally. This eliminates the need for the resistance. (The guiding of a grief process is one form this phase can take; in fact, I did just that with the man who couldn’t change jobs, though I didn’t mention this in the webcast interview.) When the ramifications of dissolution feel tolerable to the client in all areas, the juxtaposition experience is repeated and now dissolution of the target learning readily occurs. Usually this focused resistance work requires a small number of sessions. We’ve addressed this important topic in some detail, with cases examples, in Unlocking the Emotional Brain. –Bruce Ecker
Very interesting and valuable work. Quite reminiscent of Alfred Adler’s theories and practice.
I’m looking forward to the in-process manual being released. The lack of accessibility of trainings has been a disappointment.
Interesting – I have been experiencing a reconsolidation of experience on my own – ongoing for a couple of years but did not know where to peg it – how classify it- with this information, I can look at it and work on it consciously. I work with very young children and am intrigued by seeing how I can incorporate this into my work with them.
My practice is entirely devoted to adoption related concerns.My clients experience what I call premature maternal separation often in a preverbal developmental stage. They develop powerful implicit memories that profoundly effect their attachment relationships even as adults.They often react with anxiety to expressions of love. Shame anger and feelings of isolation all become part of the schema. They also experience feeling one way and thinking the opposite about the same concept as in I know I belong but I feel that I dont. This disconnection in, my opinion, drives much of the maladaptive behaviors and anxieties my clients experience.Your concepts appear to perfectly explain this. Cognitive therapy has little effect on them. Can you expand on this for me please?
Robert– Understood in terms of coherent emotional learning, the “disconnection” that you describe is the parallel existence of two different learned models of how primary-bond connection works: In the emotional brain there is the implicit learning, including all the feelings, of abandonment and aloneness as what is to be expected from primary-bond connection (generating the anxiety in response to expressions of love); and in the brain’s explicit (neocortical) memory networks there is all the autobiographical knowledge of being included and cared-for consistently in a stable family (generating a largely cognitive sense of “I know I belong”). The implicit memory and model of abandonment generates vigilance and a range of pre-emptive behaviors for protecting oneself from ever again suffering the infant’s experience of abandonment—behaviors such as, for example, disconnecting and abandoning first and fast, before the other person does. Similarly, to open deeply into trusting and feeling a primary-bond connection is absolutely the wrong and worst thing to do, according to the implicit learning, because that would be making oneself maximally vulnerable to the expected abandonment (and that’s a major reason why the long time of being in the adopted family has not engendered richly felt feelings of belonging). Such behaviors and avoidances are widely described as maladaptive, though to my mind it makes more sense to see them as adaptive but very high-cost solutions to a very real problem (abandonment) that the person knows is real and that could in fact actually happen again. “I’ve got to make sure that never, ever happens to me again” is a phrasing that has felt powerfully true to quite a few of my clients who live in this territory. In my experience, the therapeutic process that has been most effective and reliable for bringing a transformational change in this whole configuration relies heavily on having the client feel tenderly accompanied by the therapist, but does not aim for reparative attachment, that is, does not focus on creating experiences of secure attachment (because such experiences only trigger the self-protective, avoidant responses mentioned above). Rather, the focus is on guiding the client to self-compassionately face and feel (in small-enough steps to be workable) the abandonment that was suffered, in its many aspects—the hurt, the terror, the injustice, the helplessness, the deprivation, the desolation—as well as other feelings in response to these aspects (despair, rage, grief, etc.). Again, the therapist’s empathic accompaniment is what makes all this possible. This thorough, complex processing of feelings and meanings results finally in an adult identity-state that is compassionate toward but differentiated from the abandoned infant state and is no longer inhabiting the infant’s version of how it feels to be abandoned. That is the key that allows a liberating shift to occur. Emotional memory takes one’s past experience and turns it into an expectation of the future. But now the adult lucidly recognizes, “I would not again have an infant’s experience of abandonment.” Then all the self-protective solutions are no longer emotionally necessary, so they fall away.
I appreciate Rich, but I get very frustrated with the way he interrupts the experts at exactly the moments they seem about to make their most salient points.
Golden information for me. Helps connect the dots between a lot of techniques and concepts underlying behaviors that we don’t understand in ourselves, and that our clients don’t understand. I will definitely investigate this further. I brought together mindfulness, neuroscience, and the relationship to the therapist beautifully.
Thanks!
I would like to share another of my cases that can be understood with coherence therapy concepts.I mediated a reunion with a 9 year old child to his mother after 7 years of separation. Briefly, the child was abandoned by his addict mother after he struck his infant sister. She demanded he leave, stated she didnt love him anymore and never wanted to see him again. Grandfather removed him and raised him for the next 7 years. The child spent 14 months in residential treatment, is heavily medicated, and targets all females with violence when he doesnt get his way. He is heavily medicated, needed trauma work, threatens suicide, runs away, hates himself, and experiences intense shame in failure. At the age of 9 he began to ask insightful questions about his mother. They became a daily event and he just wouldnt let go of the feelings to know about her. I believed that his memories of abandonment, explicit and implicit, were driving his violent acting out. I suggested a reunion. Reunion is a complicated process I have mediated many of them. Its also very risky. I counseled the mother and child for 6 weeks preparing them. I had the child write 10 questions he wanted his mother to answer which I presented to her. I also showed the child a current picture of his mother. Separated children will create a fantasy mother image which becomes lost the instant they see their actual mother. I wanted to ease the shock of this transition. Then I brought them together. The child wouldnt make eye contact or speak to her for 90 minutes. They engaged in parallel play only. Then they began to carefully react to each other talking touching playing. The session lasted 2 and a half hours and I debriefed the child over dinner. More contact was by phone and more visits over the next 2 months. The result were the child stopped the violence within a week, began to talk about his feelings instead of acting out, increased his resiliency, school behavior improved, and his medications were cut in half. It was as if his brain was rebooted. What I believe happened was when he was with his mother his implicit memory was triggered and the synapses unlocked. His anger and rage was being experienced while at the same time he was overjoyed to be with her all in the same moment. The mind cant tolerate this kind of conflict so it reconsolidated the memory. I hate you was changed to I love you in that moment by his experience with her. Most adoption reunions have this effect of healing for both mother and child or adult but they can also be disasters. Its very risky. It was also very difficult for me as I am adopted and never met my birth mother. I struggled to maintain a differentiated position and had to constantly review my ideas about this case. My own implicit memories were being triggered as well.
I hope this illustrates the process and would welcome reflection.