I’m so scared. I feel like I just got thrown off a cliff. I’m in free-fall and I do not know if I will
land at all or be crushed to death when I do. This is crazy. Topsy-turvy. OMG.
Okay. I get it. Your world has turned upside down. Breathe. Can you listen to me for a minute?
Can you get the crazy thoughts spinning in your head shoved aside for just a bit?
Every single reason for cheating comes down to one thing: FEAR. Well, two things: Fear and
HOPELESSNESS. Let me explain.
People do not get married to control another person (regardless of the nonsense of the Duluth
Model’s take on abuse). People do not get married to cheat, either. Does that make sense?
Remember back to those first days….you got married for LOVE. Your partner did too. Some of
you will admit that that is not true. You couldn’t have known what love really was; you were too
young and inexperienced. Okay, I’ll give you that. But you THOUGHT you were marrying for
love. Some of you will assure me you did not love your spouse but just wanted to get out of the
miserable house you were in growing up. Okay, I’ll give you that. But you surely did not think
that the relationship with this person you chose to marry would be worse than the relationship
with your unloving parents. Surely you and your significant other must have at least believed that
you COULD grow to love one another.
So we’ve got the first step of this process figured out: You married either because you loved one
another or because you thought or hoped you would. Again, no one marries to be miserable, to
control the other …. or to cheat. No one. Ever.
Every single person starts marriage with the most important emotion of all: Hope.
Then what happens?
Someone wasn’t listening.
Simple as that. Someone had a need or a want and the other person did not hear it. Either it
wasn’t expressed at all and the partner was left to guess what it was – and guessed wrong or didn’t
know they should even be guessing. Or it was expressed, clearly, but the partner had no tools
whatsoever to figure out how to implement the process of filling the other person’s needs and
wants.
Or, worse, you, the person who got cheated on just now, had your own needs and wants and were
hoping those would be met by this significant other whose needs and wants were also not being
met – by you.
You get this? It sounds complicated, doesn’t it? But it’s actually not. It’s simple. You and your
S.O. (a) did not know what you felt, (b) did not know what you wanted or needed, (c) did not
know how to express what you wanted or needed. So you were both – whether you were aware of
it or not – needing something from the other at the same time and no one was giving anything to
anyone.
Make sense?
Now this situation is really the fertile soil for creating confusion and hopelessness. Confusion
because you didn’t even know what YOU wanted and surely didn’t know that there was
something your S.O. wanted! Not only that, more to the point, it creates real PAIN. It’s a
miserable place to be when you have unmet needs that you don’t know about and at some deep
level want the other person to fill and meet, yet that’s not happening. There’s an emptiness.
There’s a sense that life has no purpose. There’s a misery there.
But there’s that horrible hopelessness creeping in. The situation is hopeless! No one is taking
care of me! I’m lost! I’m really alone in this marriage! OMG, what do I do? And a terrible fear
sets in. A fear that nothing will change. A fear that I’m not good enough for someone to really
and truly love me. A fear that I’m not good enough to give love to the person I married. A fear
that nothing will ever work out. A fear of facing myself and learning what I want and need
because I’ll discover that my very soul must be rotten. I must be selfish, bad, horrible.
That is the fertile soil for cheating.
In comes Mr. X or Miss Y. They smile at me! OMG, I’m not rotten? I’m okay? Someone out
there thinks I’m okay! Wow. That’s amazing. That’s too amazing to believe. That’s fantastic!
That’s my lifebuoy coming to save me from #$%^.
Suddenly, the worries are gone. And believe me, I do NOT want to think those horrible thoughts.
I do not want to go there. Do I want counseling? Are you kidding? I do NOT want to be
reminded of the way I was feeling about myself. I do not want to remember that I thought I was
rotten. No! no! no! Maybe I’ll think my spouse is just missing something. Yes! that’s it! It’s their
fault! I’ve got it! I’ve got the solution – the whole problem was their fault. They didn’t meet my
needs. My needs were normal and reasonable and they weren’t there for me. That’s the answer I’ll
tell myself. And enjoy, bask, in the love and kindness and excitement of this new relationship.
Suddenly, I feel ALIVE!! I feel wonderful. I never thought I could feel this way. Oh, boy, this is
fantastic!
That’s what cheating looks like to the cheater. The cheater is not trying to hurt you and although
they clearly are rejecting you, that’s not what this is about. What this is about is that *they no
longer want to be rejecting themselves.* Remember, at the bottom of the whole mess is their
inability to express their needs and wants and their fear that there must be something wrong with
THEM – not you – if you’re not meeting those needs and wants. That’s the real story. That’s the
story they want to forget. They do not want to go there. Who would? No one. No one wants to
think of themselves as defective deep underneath, unlovable.
It’s so much easier to blame you.
But now you can see the truth. The truth is that, no, it’s as much their inability to connect to their
own needs and wants – and explain those to you – as it is your inability to meet them.
But here’s an important catch in the whole thing: You may NEVER, ever be able to meet those
needs and wants.
Do you know why?
It may be that the most basic need that this S.O. has is to love himself/herself because they don’t.
And you cannot fill that need. The only person who can is THEM. They must learn to love
themselves. And if they do not, they will chase skirts or torsos forever looking for what’s not
there.
There is no way out of this mess other than for them to learn to love themselves.
And for you to regain your self-respect, your dignity, and your love of yourself, too, after going
through this horror.
Neither of you is a bad, evil person. You were each lacking some vital things, that’s all. And now
you can learn how to acquire them. You can gain the missing self love, the ability to express
your needs and wants – because you will still have those – and to hear the other person. I will
help you. It will be my joy. <a href=”https://drdeb.com/book”>https://drdeb.com/book</a>.