"...A number of studies and clinical reports suggest that up to 90 percent of first time divorces involve infidelity. A 1997 study with Kristina Gordon found 'more than half of the marriages that experience infidelity ended in divorce'.
In clinical experience divorce rarely follows an affair
if the affair has ended.An extramarital affair threatens the primary pair bond and sets up an alternative attachment and thus an alternative orientation to life. This is like having opposite points on the compass to guide one. This is disorientating. All life forms are intolerant of disorientation and exquisitely sensitive to it. In addition human beings do not easily unwind one of those two pair bonds. Pair bonds are essential to survival. Thus the disorientation persists past the end of the affair.
An emotional and/or a sexual affair can be simultaneously over and unfinished. It can remain as an orientation, an attachment, even whilst it is for all intents and purposes over.
Millions of years of evolution have made pair bonding our primary buffer and mediator of stress. Secure bonding or attachment releases the cuddle hormone oxytocin, which is an antagonist to the stress hormone cortisol.
Most people report that distress in their pair bond (i.e. the primary couple or marriage partnership) is more disturbing than losing their job or even a life threatening accident or illness. The part of the brain that flashes on when the pair bond is in distress is the same as occurs during a heart attack..."
To read article, click on title Fidelity 101
Trauma, safety and fidelity after disclosure
"Intimate betrayal is humiliating. It assaults dignity.
Often its legacy is a traumatic injury and traumatic grief.
We mistake betrayal bonding for love, going overboard to help one who has been destructive to us or obsessing about them long after they have left.
We underestimate the cost of humiliated fury in personal and national history.
We have trivialized trauma in many ways. Everyday use of the term is synonymous with extreme distress rather than the neurological injury clinical psychologists understand by trauma. We report traffic accident deaths but not the years it takes the families, ambulance officers, witnesses and the injured to retrieve some quality of life from the wreckage.
If your lover had died, you could bury them. If it were a date rape or home invasion you could call the police and hopefully never see the offender again. But with intimate betrayal the wrong doer is alive and well, back from a big adventure. Always there, in your face.
When they hold you, you ask, 'is that how he held you?' and when they climax you ask, 'did you think of her'. When they talk about a new interest you ask, 'was that theirs?' When there is one of your anniversaries, you ask did your lover come here on our day and to our special place. The answers are always right next to your own experience of the times and places that were betrayed.
It is impossible to get away from other everyday events, which come out of left-field and trigger distress, flashbacks and reliving. You could see your partner and lover together or fear that you might. It's impossible not to scan the environment for risk factors and plan how to avoid them or contain your reactions to them.
It's the same when you walk out into what used to be a safe world, not knowing who you will bump into or who else saw 'them' together some time ago and they ask you about 'them' in a knowing, conspiratorial way perhaps assuming that it is sanctioned by you or that you're just too dumb to know. If the affair is ongoing, then these effects are multiplied since once exposed, the fact of it cannot any longer be denied without significant damage to your own self-worth.
The only way to begin healing intimate betrayal is to build safety. For some it may be a safety they had taken for granted or one they never have had either in marriage or their family of origin. It is not safe if the unfaithful continues infidelity in any way either actual, threatened or symbolic.
'Toughing it out' is making claim to an invulnerability that breaches all we know about intimacy and is thus another kind of infidelity. Continued deceit and denial is infidelity. 'Managing' the disclosure continues the denial.
Allowing an illicit affair to continue demands more than most betrayed are willing or able or ought to give in return for what? A mad idea that they will eventually get used to it and come to appreciate being devalued and misused by their partner's ongoing betrayal? That they will become a swinger too?
Complex post traumatic stress disorder
This is a likely result for partners of serial affair offenders, especially where the betrayed is blamed for the repeated affairs of their partner, is belittled and bullied at home and humiliated in public, and crucially feels unable to leave the situation i.e. effectively a captive.
'It seems that Complex PTSD can potentially arise from any prolonged period of negative stress in which certain factors are present, which may include any of captivity, lack of means of escape, entrapment, repeated violation of boundaries, betrayal, rejection, bewilderment, confusion, and - crucially - lack of control, loss of control and disempowerment. It is the overwhelming nature of the events and the inability (helplessness, lack of knowledge, lack of support etc) of the person trying to deal with those events that leads to the development of Complex PTSD. Situations which might give rise to Complex PTSD include bullying, harassment, abuse, domestic violence, stalking, long-term caring for a disabled relative, unresolved grief, exam stress over a period of years, mounting debt, contact experience, etc. Those working in regular traumatic situations, e.g.. the emergency services, are also prone to developing Complex PTSD.'
Source 'Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a clinically recognized condition that results from prolonged exposure to prolonged social and/or interpersonal trauma, including instances of physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, torture, chronic early maltreatment in a care giving relationship, and war. Van der Kolk and Courtois (2005) suggest that C-PTSD better describes the pervasive negative impact of chronic trauma than does Post traumatic stress disorder, as PTSD fails to capture some of the core characteristics of C-PTSD. These include psychological fragmentation, the loss of a sense of safety, trust, and self-worth, as well as the tendency to be revictimized, and, most importantly, the loss of a coherent sense of self. This loss of the coherent sense of self, and the ensuing symptom profile, is what most pointedly differentiates C-PTSD from PTSD.'
Source 'Herman (1992) divides recovery from C-PTSD into three stages: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning for what was lost, and reconnecting to society. Before this work can begin, a healing relationship must be established; Herman believes recovery can come only within a relationship and only if the survivor is empowered.'
Source Writing about trauma following these
guidelines can reduce its adverse effects and here's information on
complex trauma and recovery on site. Treating trauma with
EMD*R in couple's therapy is also possible.
The book 'I Can't Get Over It' by
Aphrodite Matsakis is a good one to start with.
Sometimes the repeat offender is suffering from a prior psychological trauma and cheats when they are dissociated. They cheat when they feel overwhelmed by traumatic responding and enter an altered state of mind to cope with that overwhelm. What is learned/experienced in that dissociated state of mind is more likely to be recalled in a similar state of mind.
Exploring the triggers for dissociation can be a fruitful way to understand the state of mind that supports serial infidelity..."
To read the rest of the article, click on the title Fidelity 108
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