Phase 2: What was going on?

These are highlights from a teleclass I did with Tammy Nelson. You can purchase recordings of this class at her website: The New Monogamy; Love, Sex and Fidelity

Phase two could be labeled the Investigative Phase – what was happening, how did this happen, what was going on? As much as the betrayed can remain open, curious and take it in (may take quite some time), it will help the couple begin to take in what was happening for the unfaithful to get to that point.

There’s a common path of couples – Commitment for life immediately creates regression back to what we know of life-long connection: family. We are no longer 2 adults hanging out, partying together, focusing on our desire for each other. We begin almost immediately repeating developmental patterns that we’ve learned from childhood. Within a month to a year, we begin to parentify our partner, i.e. “I can’t believe you never pick up your socks!” Parentifying the relationship desexualizes the partnership. Now we are no longer 2 equal partners, now you’re my parent nagging me and why would I want to have sex with you? We either stay in the child-like dependent relationship expecting our partner to fill all of our needs like a mother or father, or we rebel like an adolescent. It depends on the developmental need and the role you play in the relationship. Then we begin to try and find ourselves outside of the relationship. The affair becomes a way to fill a developmental need in the unfaithful. Growth is trying to happen. Unfortunately, this scenario set up the person to have to “leave” to become an individual. In adolescent rebellion, one has no choice but to break the pattern/role/relationship with partner because that’s what adolescents do.

Being unfaithful is not the only type of betrayal to consider. One woman had an aversion to having sex with her husband because of his smell and I wondered if that she had kept that a secret as well. Does it cause more moral problem to sit with that secret than an infidelity? Does one type of betrayal tops all others? When I see couples come in after a revelation of an affair, emphasizing this betrayal as if it is the most important one and the 1st one, often the other partner has had their ways of leaving the relationship or betraying their partner. For example: a man doesn’t touch his wife for 8 years of marriage and when she initiated once, they made love she was able to get pregnant. After another 8 years of her trying everything she initiates an affair with a colleague and when he finds out he is distraught and hurt. She threatens therapist’s office or lawyer’s office. They come to my office and he is in detective mode, wants to know how, when, where, etc. I was puzzled by his intense curiosity about every detail of her affair when he was uninterested in all the details of what she had not done. Abandonment and betrayal can manifest itself in many ways, which is why I don’t always look at faithfulness as the virtue of all virtues. Sometimes people can be sexually faithful and can be indifferent, neglectful, dismissive – there are lots of ways to treat partner painfully and betray the emotional contract.

A lot of people have affairs on the heels of a loss. A committed husband, father, finds himself suddenly in throws of a passionate desire for another woman who has nothing to do with his life, the kind of person he has been or the kind of woman he has lived with. The betrayal for his wife is that she never imagined he could be this man because her deal for herself in marrying him was a kind of resignation of a certain erotic bond that she couldn’t have with him in return for an emotional stability, connection, security that she also wanted. So here is this man who goes and taps into a part of himself that she gave up in order to be with him and she says, “Who is this guy?” It turns out that a year earlier his mother had died, his last surviving parent. This man who has always said that his needs come second, who had learned to keep himself hidden, who had never asserted himself or put his needs up front because it was much too exposing of himself, goes into a rebellious act. When his wife speaks of how there has always been a connection for her between the emotional closeness and her sexual desire, his first thought was, “Whenever we were particularly close sexually it was not that good between us. You in relation to me because you abdicated eroticism and me because I have never been able to be ruthless, to actually unleash my desire, to not be all constantly thinking about you.” This thinking about the partner makes the partner feel that you are not there. So while you experience yourself being busy with them, they experience you as being busy with yourself. His second comment was, “I never questioned my love for her and I don’t see my affair as a threat.” It had nothing to do with each other.

The good news is, the affair can enhance their relationship by bringing this dynamic into their awareness. It can break them out of the pattern and be a relationship enhancer in that it brings the relationship back to an equal level. So they can stop blaming each other and begin to look at the three parts of Phase II:

1) What was going on for me in that moment that I felt I needed to do that; what was unfinished for me that I was acting in that developmental stage?

2) What was going on for my partner who was betrayed?

3) What was going on for us?

If you really want to understand your partner’s affair, ask them what they found there. It is a calming question because it’s a question that emphasizes differentiation, otherness; a question that says the 2 of us are having a very different experience about this same crisis. Taking them from blame to understanding is the essence of Phase II of affair recovery.