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Couples in Crisis: Affairs & Infidelity

Advanced Systemic Solutions with Martyn Carruthers

Are you Recovering from an Affair?

Soulwork systemic coaching can help you evaluate, rebuild and maintain
a happy partnership ... or to end an unhappy partnership ... peacefully .

Who has Affairs? People like you!

• People with opportunity and available time
• People with unmet physical or emotional needs
• People who want to diminish the intensity or intimacy of a partnership

Systemic coaching integrates marriage counseling with success coaching, systemic family therapy, life coaching, post-abortion counseling, therapeutic coaching, addiction counseling and divorce coaching. Marriage counseling that does not resolve cross-generational entanglements, transferences and guilt is unlikely to provide long-term solutions.

Perhaps you are emotionally hurt by your partners' romantic, intimate or sexual affairs. Or perhaps you suffer guilt following your own acts of betrayal. Yet the casualties of adultery are not only betrayed spouses - the casualties may include children who will later be found in depressed corners of society.

A Free Lunch?

Some people use internet chat to create an emotional intimacy that they deny to their life-partners. Some courses train men to use hypnosis, NLP and subliminal seduction to seduce women for casual sex. But few lunches are really free, and your costs are higher than you think.

Systemic coaches say, "there ain't no such thing as family secrets!" Your children will feel and respond to your or your partner's romantic or sexual affairs, proportional to the length of time and emotional intimacy of your affairs. Someone you love will pay for your free lunch.

Infidelity is a dark shadow of partnership. Your affairs can provide excitement for the bored, adventure for the restless and pride for the egotistic. Your affairs also provide heartache, guilt, disappointment, shattered dreams and depression for anyone else.

Mother-Son Bonds . Fathers & Daughters . Emotional Incest

Types of Affairs

Probably you could have affairs. Happy partnerships do not eliminate the possibility of infidelity - and may even motivate you (if you are entangled with a parent or past-partner) to reduce the emotional intensity of your partnership. Affairs are often passionate, yet rarely mature into long-term relationships.

If you are considering or participating in an affair, you probably focus only on your own needs - and you forget or ignore the needs of your life partner and any children, and your affair-partner's relationships.

• Business sex (trading sex for money, promotion or favors; including prostitution) may have the least emotional consequences and the highest risk of venereal disease
• Sexual affairs and one-night-stands are usually short-term and rarely become love affairs or long-term friendships
• In-love affairs can be powerful and life-altering with overwhelming emotions - and usually end in overwhelming suffering for one or both of you
• Love affairs can become long friendships - although guilt may motivate you to separate or distance yourself from your affair partner

Men & Affairs

Men often want casual sex just for the pleasure of sex. Men may admit or boast that they pretend to be in love to have sex with women. (Many women say that men will pretend to love them as a preliminary for sex.)

Younger men usually seek sexual affairs rather than love affairs. Their primary motivations are physical pleasure, to succeed, to impress friends and/or to gain sexual experience.

Older men are more likely to have affairs with women who understand, accept and appreciate them. They may pay prostitutes to gratify sexual desires that they would not ask a decent woman to do.

Men who are emotionally bonded to their mothers (see Emotional Incest) are likely to have affairs to avoid or to sabotage a committed partnership. They are also likely to boast to their (mother-bonded) male friends about the number and variety of their sexual adventures. (See The Little Prince).

Women & Affairs

The longer a woman is married, the more likely she will have an affair. Women choose sexual affairs for pleasure and for experience. An affair may provide a woman with missing emotional intimacy. A woman may have affairs to create a reserve source of intimacy, especially if she feels bored, disappointed or uncertain about her partnership or marriage.

A woman is more likely to satisfy missing emotional needs in a partnership by mentally reliving past romantic affairs, or by preoccupation with the love lives of other people (gossip and soap operas).

Women who are emotionally bonded to their fathers (see Emotional Incest) are likely to have affairs with older men (see Daddy's Little Princess).

Reasons for Intimate or Sexual Affairs

You may say that affairs merely fulfill your needs, and helped you avoid feeling lonely or bored. You may imply, "I want to feel good regardless of the consequences of my choices on my partner or family - or on my affair-partner's partner or family".

You may justify affairs with: "I want ...

1. excitement and adventure
2. to seduce or be seduced
3. to feel desirable or sexually potent
4. to express love, intimacy, and companionship
5. to enjoy sensual pleasure and sexual release
6. to fulfill an impulse or compulsion
7. to defy my social, religious, or parental rules
8. to rescue or nurture someone
9. to avoid the reality of my aging
10. new or unusual sexual experiences

Attacking, criticizing or defending these justifications will not improve relationships nor resolve partnership needs. Systemic Coaching can help restore peace, balance ... and love.

But we were so much in love...

The experience of romantic love may seem to replace any need to develop physical, emotional and spiritual partnership skills. However, sooner or later, lovers will confront their responsibilities and either create deeper bonds, or separate.

[ Predictable Partnership . Enjoying Partnership . Consequences of Abortion ]

Affairs & Divorce

1. Affairs endanger marriage, although some people say that affairs helps them survive marriage.
2. Divorce is more common among people who have affairs.
3. Women who have multiple affairs, especially if the affairs start early in a marriage, have the highest divorce rates.
4. For a woman, if a male partner has a homosexual affair with another man - there may seem no alternative to separation.
5. For a man, if a female partner has a lesbian affair with another woman - this may not be perceived as betrayal.

Affairs & Recovery

Romantic or sexual affairs can control emotions resulting from suppressed or unmet needs. A first step to recovery and happy relationships is relationship diagnosis. Soulwork explores if you

1. avoid communicating your agendas, values and needs (partnership skills)
2. obsess about some other person (entanglements)
3. carry guilt or depression from previous relationships (entanglements)
4. experience ongoing conflict (complex conflict)
5. express your lost "sense of self" (lost identity)
6. identify with someone else (identification)
7. identify with two people (identity conflict)
8. express toxic or resourceless "I am ..." beliefs (relationship bonds)
9. express trauma and overwhelming emotions (trauma)
10. follow toxic role models (mentor damage)

One or both partners may use complaints and excuses to justify their deception and betrayal.

Coaching after Affairs

Romantic affairs have strong emotional consequences, which may be delayed until an affair is over.

• Blame: Following exposure, the partners may energetically and uselessly argue about topics such as "Who really caused this?" or "Why did you make me do it!"
• Denial: Many people who choose sexual affairs will deny and lie about their actions if the truth may bring immediate unpleasant consequences.
• Grief: The suffering of betrayal, broken dreams and shattered love may be overwhelming to the betrayed person. Suicide attempts may follow an affair.
• Guilt: The betraying partner, the betrayed partner and the "third person" carry burdens of guilt. This guilt may be immediate or delayed. Delayed expressions of guilt can manifest as anxiety, depression, hypochondria and psychosomatic disease.

Following a partnership crisis, it may seem impossible for the partners to avoid overwhelming emotions and childish behavior. We can help you make space for and referee desperately needed discussions and clarification.

• Individual coaching with both partners can clarify entanglements
• Couple coaching with both partners can identify and resolve transferences

Couple Coaching Flowchart & Testimonial

Healing Partnership after Affairs

Romantic affairs often last for about two years. Short-term solutions attempt to fix and forget the surface symptoms of affairs do not resolve or even expose the underlying entanglements. Soulwork systemic solutions can heal entanglements and emotional bonds, and dissolve partnership blocks between motivated partners - and with other family members.

Effective and joyous partnership results from partners knowing and respecting each other's values and needs; and by cooperating to fulfill those needs. Our systemic coaching provides partnership skills and helps people end and deal with affairs.

Predictable Partnership . Enjoy Partnership . Evaluate Partnership

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Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2009 All rights reserved. These Systemic Solutions were primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers. We coach and train people to succeed by solving emotional and relationship problems. This information is for your general knowledge only. Please consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing any medical treatment. Link to our pages, but get Martyn's written permission to post or publish his work.