Why do we cheat on our spouses?
One question I am sometimes asked is, “As an adult child of an alcoholic, why am I drawn to cheat on my spouse?” My experience working with ACoA, as well as with adults from dysfunctional households, has led me to identify unique possibilities that can address the heart of this daunting issue.
When he is raised in a home that thrives on “non-assertive” communication, he is taught to deny himself. You are not taught to ask for what you need or what you want. Instead, he is taught to ignore his emotions, his inner needs, and to minimize his desires. Because your models of self-love have failed to reflect the importance of honoring yourself, your programming is dysfunctional. As an adult, you don’t gravitate toward healthy relationships that honor you.
Most ACoAs marry their emotional and dysfunctional counterpart. Your partners are beings who match the emotional set points of your childhood caregivers. Although their spouses may outwardly appear to be the exact opposite of their parents, partners are often emotional equivalents to the types of energy beings ACoA lived with as a child.
To further complicate matters, many ACoAs develop anxiety disorders because they have been conditioned to deny themselves. This denial of the Self creates energy blockages within the body. This blocked energy manifests itself in the physical body in many ways, such as headaches, dizziness, tremors, insomnia, upset stomach, skin rashes, asthma, mental confusion, forgetfulness, as well as addiction to distractions.
In my experience, ACoAs sometimes cheat as a means of escaping the mental chatter and general distress they feel within their being. Very often, when an ACoA discovers that they have married a partner who is similar to one of their parents, the shock is so overwhelming that they seek an external romantic relationship, as if seeking a Xanex. The extramarital affair acts as a distraction, and while it works as a way to temporarily hide from anxiety, the long-term consequences are far more devastating than the ACoA recognizes at this time.
In a perfect world, all beings would marry healthy partners, and of course they would be healthy self-actualized people before getting married in the first place. But in the world that we live in, in which most beings today sleep, and lead their lives on automatic pilot, they are ridiculously unaware that they are living their lives from dysfunctional belief systems that they learned in their homes. From childhood, all too often the The first round in marriage for ACoA is not the healthiest.
ACoAs, like many adults from dysfunctional homes, cheat for many reasons, but in my opinion, they do so primarily due to their inability to honor themselves, be honest, and accept the consequences of choosing to be honest and therefore So honor yourselves.
It is not easy to confront your own unhappiness within a marriage and verbalize such knowledge. It is heroic, rather than manipulating another being in our experience to help us escape our personal problems, to face our dead marriage head-on. Honoring the Self is a noble endeavor, especially when the superficial, material world we live in is full of beings who would rather avoid and deny, then confront and heal, and thus honor the Self.