Infidelity & Sex Addiction—Affairs of Heart, Body, and Mind

Defining Infidelity

The definition of infidelity keeps expanding, but at its core, infidelity is the act of being unfaithful to your partner.

According to relationship experts like Robin Kay and Terrence Real, infidelity requires two things: a betrayal and deceit.

Infidelity usually includes at least one of these elements:

1. Secrecy

2. Sexual Involvement with a non-primary partner (physical or virtual)

3. Emotional Involvement with a non-primary partner

The meaning of infidelity is not fixed. Therefore, couples must create their own definitions of infidelity and their own relationship terms. Not all acts of infidelity are equal. Our experiences of fidelity and infidelity are personal and value-laden.

Emotional Affairs

Emotional affairs describe a bond between two people, outside of a marital or monogamous relationship, that imitates the closeness and emotional intimacy of a romantic relationship. Generally, the term emotional affair is used when the betrayal does not involve physical contact, but rather an intense emotional or flirtatious closeness that should only be shared with one’s romantic partner.

It is important to establish an understanding with your partner about what constitutes infidelity for each of you, and how you both feel about the possibility of infidelity occuring. Your relationship will be stronger if you take the time to openly discuss your thoughts, feelings, and previous experiences with infidelity.

Coming Back from Infidelity

Restoring trust in a relationship after a fidelity breach is difficult at best, and sometimes impossible, without help from a talented psychologist or other relationship expert. In emotionally intense situations like these, it is useful to have an objective and trained third party to help you make sense of what occurred and why, and to guide you back to relationship harmony. It not only helps to seek out a psychologist who can provide guidance about forging relationship repair; sometimes infidelity is the clue that the relationship was already in trouble. In that case, infidelity becomes a symptom of an even more serious problem (i.e., a fractured relationship). In that case, we don’t want to return the relationship to its previous state, but instead improve the quality and strength of the relationship so infidelity and other breaches of trust are less likely to recur. Don’t give in to shame and avoid getting the help you need to promote positive change in your relationship. As soon as you notice your relationship is unstable or in disharmony, get some help from a qualified, experienced professional.

Sex Addiction

People who struggle with sex and pornography addiction usually have a history of faulty attachment relationships in childhood which also produce faulty emotion regulation. When there is insufficient or chaotic bonding between children and their parents (or caregivers), children do not learn to self-soothe, regulate their own emotions, or respond adequately to the emotions of others. Unlike other addictions where total abstinence is usually encouraged (alcohol, nicotine, narcotics), sex addiction does not get successfully solved by avoiding sex.

If you are addicted to sex or pornography, in addition to learning behavioral and cognitive techniques to control your impulsive habits and change your thinking, it is very important to seek the help of an experienced psychologist who can help you identify any unresolved attachment trauma, process the messy emotions related to those early relationship failures, and then build an internal regulation system that allows you to identify and regulate your own emotions instead of using sex or pornography to manage or distract you from your emotions.

Once you have completed these steps, and practiced the emotion regulation skills your psychologist has helped you cultivate, you should be able to direct your energy toward yourself and toward healthy relationships instead of toward addictive behaviors.

But there may be more to your reliance on casual sex, multiple sexual partners, and/or pornography than you are aware of. If you were raised by abusive, neglectful, inconsistent, smothering, or absent parents, or if you were subjected to bullying, your identity most likely was negatively affected.

For most individuals who are survivors of childhood trauma, in addition to the insecurity that you may be secretly carrying inside you, you may be under the influence of a fundamental belief that you are unworthy of love or deserving of pain. That toxic belief can lead you to sabotage potentially satisfying relationships by diluting the intimacy you could have with your partner by relying instead on pornography, multiple partners, infidelity, and other destructive behaviors and distractions. So instead of building the lasting and secure love that you crave with a partner, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy and wind up alone having led the people who tried to love you to mistrust or hate you instead.

All hope is not lost. A well-trained, experienced psychologist can help you identify the unresolved attachment trauma that may be affecting your way of relating to yourself and others. She should help you process your true feelings toward the people who failed you, assess the damage to your self-concept, recognize that you no longer need to treat yourself or others the way you were treated, and help you build a healthy identity that allows you to feel deserving of love, not terrified of, or compelled to destroy love.