the relationship of your parents becomes the model for your own relationships. What you grow up observing as a child becomes your norm, until you are older and can compare your childhood family experience with others. Then you may question your upbringing and its impact on your own life. Unless you develop a discerning attitude, you will repeat what you observed in your parents. You naturally gravitate toward what is familiar, finding comfort in the known and avoiding insecurity in the unknown. Even if you judge your upbringing as deficient, you have no positive role models on which to base a different life for yourself, unless you were fortunate enough to find some surrogate parental mentors.
If your parents’ marriage was troubled and you came to admit that, you undoubtedly told yourself, “That will never happen to me.” You will make every conscious effort to be different from your parents. But genetics always seem to take over and you may catch yourself behaving in ways you detested in your parents. Biology appears to be destiny and you pray you do not have the cheating gene.
Furthermore, as you focus closely on your past family life, you may discover a subconscious urge to repeat what you grew up with in order to create a different result. You unconsciously repeat your parents’ marriage in order to repair it and gain mastery over a painful past. In psychological jargon, it is called “repetition compulsion.” You are compelled to repeat a painful past to make it different.
As the saying goes, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.” Children naturally imitate their parents as a way to stay bonded with them. When your parent was unfaithful, he or she betrayed not only his or her partner, but also you and the whole family. The decision to venture outside the marriage caused a severe disruption in family life. Peace and stability in the family were shattered. Furthermore, your secure relationship with your parents was strained beyond the breaking point. Even though you were not fully aware of the reason for the disruption, you instinctively knew that something your parents did caused it. At some level, you blamed your parents, developed mistrust of them and were angry with them. In turn, their preoccupation with the betrayal caused them to be emotionally unavailable to you and the other children. Their absence and your reaction strained your bond of closeness with them. The fear of losing them was intolerable to you as a child. One way of compensating for the strained relationship was to become like them. You identified with them to keep them close—to maintain the bond—when you feared losing it.
When you repeat your parents’ relationship, you may be drawn to identify with either your mother or your father. The tendency is to identify with the parent of the same sex, but that does not always happen. In the case of parental infidelity, there is a powerful tendency to identify with either the betrayer or the victim, thereby becoming unfaithful in your own marriage or marrying someone who cheats on you. If you identify with the betrayer, you gain a sense of his power and freedom, which is really an illusion. It is called “identifying with the aggressor.” The person who has the affair seems to have the upper hand over the other who is victimized. Relatively speaking, the betrayer is more powerful, the victim more vulnerable.
Are there signs that you may be drawn to the betrayer role? Remember that having an affair is a conscious choice. No one is irresistibly drawn to be unfaithful with another. The more you know yourself, the more information you have to make a conscious decision about what behavior is in your best interest. Look within yourself honestly and ask the following questions.
AM I A BETRAYER?
• Do I have a strong desire for power and control, for doing what I want?
• Do I feel dissatisfied in my marriage?
• Do I sweep problems under the rug and not address them?
• Do I crave the attention of women and/or men?
• Does my self-esteem depend on how others react to me?
• Do I like to flirt?
• Am I easily bored and looking for excitement?
• Am I preoccupied with sex?
• Do I believe that I cannot be happy without a satisfying sex life?
• Do I feel neglected by my spouse?
• Do I feel smothered in my marriage?
• Do I have difficulty communicating with my spouse?
• Do I lack a strong sense of commitment to my marriage?
• Do I lie easily to myself and others?
• Can I justify cheating to myself?
• Am I seriously considering divorce?
Your honest answers to these questions may alert you to character components that make you vulnerable to betray your partner.
PATH OF HEALING: GIVING UP THE SHAME AND GUILT
The path of healing leads to an honest acceptance of yourself and to forgiveness of your unfaithful parent for not providing you with an adequate role model for your own relationships. How do you arrive at self-acceptance and forgiveness? For those who have been unfaithful to their spouses, they must face the shame and guilt they feel.
As much as you may rationalize it, when you are unfaithful to your spouse, you are filled with guilt, shame and self-loathing. Guilt has a bad reputation in our Puritan society because its excesses receive so much press. However, pangs of guilt serve a purpose in alerting us that we are not living up to our standards. They indicate a refusal to accept the limits of our own moral standards. Sometimes those standards may be unrealistic and we live with a constant sense of failure. However, most often, we can discern and measure ourselves against reasonable standards. In the case of infidelity, we disregard the boundaries of marriage in becoming emotionally and/or sexually involved with someone other than our spouses. Self-will and lust run rampant of moral restraint. The uncomfortable sense of remorse for violating our standards of behavior leads us to change and make restitution for the behavior, and the guilt disappears. Lingering guilt expressed in beating ourselves up serves no useful purpose and may be motivated by some hidden urge for self-punishment.
Guilt arises from the experience of missing the mark, making a mistake, not living up to personal standards or ignoring moral limits. Shame emerges from a deep sense of personal deficiency. It proclaims, “I am a mistake.” It attacks our sense of self-worth and leads to self-loathing. While guilt touches the surface of our behavior, shame grips our inner cores and destroys our feelings of personal worth. If we think of ourselves as worthless, we then begin mistreating ourselves and allowing others to abuse us. We treat ourselves as junk and invite others to do the same. Of course, this occurs mostly on an unconscious level. So there is an urgency for us as betrayers to either face our guilt and shame honestly or suffer the consequences of a miserable life.
One of the best mechanisms I know that helps resolve shame and guilt is to utilize the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The steps are used to heal a broad range of compulsive behaviors: drug addiction, eating disorders, gambling, sexual addiction, excessive shopping, compulsive emotions and codependent behavior. The steps embody both psychological and spiritual wisdom in addressing the character defects that underlie the compulsive behavior and allowing natural goodness to shine through. There is often a compulsive character to the unfaithful behavior of betrayers whose origin is in childhood. They see their behavior as giving in to an irresistible natural urge, something automatic and thoughtless. Most often, those who cheat on their spouses do not see clearly the connection between their behavior and that of their unfaithful parents or the devastating effect on their partners. Self-awareness and a firm resolution to change promote recovery.
