9 Sad Reasons Why People With Wounded Hearts Are Often Unfaithful
There's no doubt our past affects our present, repeated unhealthy relationship patterns usually have a common origin.
Viktor Gladkov, rosleymajid, rattanakun, wing wing | Canva Not too long ago, I received an invitation to write for a website for adulterers. Even as a former "other woman" some of the articles on there shocked me.
I read the ones where cheaters explained why they chose to have serial affairs, and every one of them complained about a dead marriage. Yet, none of them addressed the central question: Why are people unfaithful?
Based upon these articles, it seems the vast majority of long-term cheaters blame their stale marriages for their infidelity with no insight at all about what has actually caused the staleness to develop.
That's the main reason why people are unfaithful and have stale or unhealthy marriages and relationships.
Here are 9 reasons why people with wounded hearts are often unfaithful.
1. They refuse to see that the same issue will manifest in all their relationships.
If you don’t learn what killed your relationship, the same thing is going to keep killing every relationship you have.
Scary, isn’t it? So, figure it out and fix it before it's too late. You can do this!
2. They don't understand that many affairs begin in childhood.
Many — not all, of course — dead marriages and screwed-up relationships start somewhere and you guessed it, they all begin in childhood.
So, if you want to know why you're now strangers to each other in your relationship, you need to know the childhood history of both you and your spouse.
Knowing the background of the other person in the affair helps, too. When we know and acknowledge the influence of our past on our current behavior, we have taken the first step in healing the past wound.
3. Water seeks its own level, so to speak.
If you know you're emotionally unhealthy but you believe your spouse is fine, or you believe your spouse is unhealthy but you're fine, you're both in the same situation.
We tend to pair up with a person who has the same degree of emotional health we do.
4. They are unwilling to look at life-long patterns that affect their self-esteem.
I didn’t know myself well enough to choose a career to make me happy. I always chose to please my parents and struggled due to the choice.
I built pie-in-the-sky daydreams about how I’d compensate by becoming a best-selling author one day. I crashed down in major depression when I saw this was, to say the least, highly unlikely.
I idolized anyone smart, well-rounded, and funny, who had career success and no money problems. I didn’t have sex or have a boyfriend until age 32, due to low self-worth, career, and weight issues.
I was also primed by my BPD mother to be an emotional rescuer and fixer. My parents fought a lot, and I had an emotionally unavailable dad who died in a plane crash when I was 12.
Meanwhile, my affair partner was an adult child of an alcoholic. Patterns repeat until we see them and then we can find ways to stop the repetition.
5. They don't fix their issues in therapy.
With thumbnail sketches like those above, you have all you need to read up on how childhood affects people emotionally. You might as well, anyway.
With a dead marriage or facing the fallout from an affair, you will either end up in divorce court or end up in therapy.
In therapy, if you've selected a therapist worth their fee, you will be guided to do this very same work right now.
Be brave. Head the radioactive fallout off at the pass and start now.
Jerry Wise, a relationship expert, self-specialist, and life coach on YouTube has a series of very good videos on how having an alcoholic parent affects who you are today.
I also checked out modern references on codependency by life coach Lisa A. Romano, which informed me of the pitfalls of pursuing a relationship with my affair partner, in or out of wedlock.
Look at my history. There’s so much to choose. I started with books on problematic relationships like Victoria Secunda's When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends. I stumbled onto many sources on borderline personality disorder, especially those by Randi Kreger on how children and families are affected by a mother with this.
Then, I got brave enough to attack my own problems.
When the married guy I'd been with came back after two and a half years to give me the opportunity to resume and deepen the affair, he told me about his time in marriage counseling. His obvious failure in marriage counseling showed me I had learned more by the method I'm outlining here and made more progress than he did when he was aided by two therapists.
6. Because of astrology
Feel free to roll your eyes, but I was devastated by my breakup so I turned to astrology, as so many do.
It gives you a roadmap, as well as a cogent warning about looking far enough ahead in transit and the dangers you face if you continue to take the "Easy Affair Route" instead of the "Difficult Healing Route". A look at some of those outcomes for myself scared me right back onto the straight and narrow path, pretty darn quickly.
If you wish to use astrology as a tool, the one rule you need to apply is common sense. What is it telling you and does it sound like the truth? Of course, you need to be very, very honest as you apply that rule.
For instance, when I first started snooping around for answers from taro and astrology, I received the message I was very controlling and I needed to stay out of power and control. I felt wounded. It was his wife who was controlling, not me! But a closer look at my behavior showed me how very controlling I actually was.
Unless and until I did some reading, some healing, and mended my ways, I would have continued to tell myself what a "good" person I was!
7. They don't take responsibility for their role in bad relationships.
The problems in your relationships — however many of them you have right now — are not residing solely in your partner. You have some contributions, too.
Maybe it's codependency, or maybe you can't recognize the signs of an abuser.
If you’re not with a narcissistic abuser, chances are, your contribution to the relationship problems is more than equal.
8. They haven't made the active choice to heal childhood wounds.
You need to choose to heal your childhood emotional wounds and actively work toward growing past them.
Start healing with Jonice Webb's "Running on Empty No More" to point you in the right direction.
9. They don't realize how profoundly beneficial it is to do the work to be faithful.
Those of you willing to do this work are the warriors and the champions. Those who do not do the work will be stuck in the cycle of being unfaithful in one way or another.
You are so tough. You are so brave. You can do this.
You will reap the results: Increased happiness, the opportunity for a better life, and the ability to thrive.
P.D. Reader is a level one student in the NCGR School of Astrology, but her work focuses on spirituality, lifestyle, and relationship topics. She runs Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship Medium.