The Real Reason Why Women Cheat On Their Husbands

there's really only one reason that women cheat on their husbands and everything else that you might have heard or read or watched about why women cheat they're all going to boil down to this one reason that's what we're going to talk about today and I hope that you'll stick with me to the end of this video because at the end I'm going to share a little bit of a story from a client of mine who's actually lived through this um in the worst possible way Not only was his wife having an affair uh he heard

it he saw pictures like he was way way too too close to it and yet he has found hope he has found his way through this and he's been able to process all of the difficult emotions so that he can start to heal and move forward so if you're living with this right now first I'm going to help you understand why she did it but then at the end of the video I'm also going to give you some hope and some tools for getting through this if this is the reality that you're living in right

[Music] now so just a moment I'm going to share the one reason that women cheat on their husbands this video is a request from a client who actually wrote me an email saying hey could you speak to this in one of your videos and I'm going to share his request with you with his permission because I think his story is really going to resonate for you if your wife ex-wife or soon to be ex-wife has had an affair um you're going to understand just how this guy is feeling so here's what he said I wanted

to ask if you could do the same on why wives go outside the marriage bed and engage in emot otal and physical Affairs in my case our marriage seemed fine by all accounts but yet she started an emotional affair with another man that lasted for about 8 months and then it turned into a sexual Affair in the last four months until I found out about it during this time frame she was still able to perform her wely and motherly duties without missing a beat I had no idea absolutely no idea not even a slight suspicion

until the last part of the affair she was able to function at a high level with the family Dynamics with all of our day in and day out routines and schedules everything seemed seemed normal we spent an enormous amount of time together when not at work all our normal conversations about us family and work felt completely organic and natural we laughed and joked and cuddled and watched tons of Netflix together our sex life seemed normal and great yet she had this other thing secretly going on in the background through the holiday season she was all

about the family I could go on and on about how I'm just blown away that a person could have two different lives at the same time now this might be your story right maybe your wife did something similar just leading this total double life or maybe you did notice that there were other signs and symptoms that things weren't okay at home while this affair developed what I hear from a lot of men is that it's quite shocking and they don't understand how she could go about leading these two lives which one is true which one

is her what's the lie and it can start to feel like you don't know this person at all and that betrayal is very very deep right it's not just the sexual betrayal or even the emotional betrayal it's a sense that your partner this person that you've committed to share a life with might actually be somebody that you don't know at all so why did they do it why do women cheat on their husbands and how can they do it with such a a clean split living a normal life and yet having this wild Affair at

the same time so Affairs always always always boil down to one thing trauma and I want to Define this because trauma is not necessarily sexual abuse as a child or neglect or abandonment experiences trauma is what happens inside of us in response to some external circumstance that damages our ability to connect in relationships with other people right so a lot of different things can hurt our ability to sustain healthy relationships and any of the reasons you hear about Affairs boil down to trauma to a damaged ability to connect and relate so I'm going to give

you a couple of examples and then I'm going to speak specifically to what was going on in in this particular client situation so a lot of the reasons that you'll hear for women having Affairs are things like low self-esteem craving excitement anger or retribution for a partner's perceived uh lacks or errors you might hear things like oh it's because of insecure attachment or midlife crisis it's a way to numb emotional pain it's due to mental health conditions or it's due to emotional isolation in the marriage every single one of these reasons is actually about about

trauma right low self-esteem babies are not born with low self-esteem babies are born confident curious playful adventurous low self-esteem is something we learn something happens to us that teaches us that we're not good enough that we're not valued that we're not lovable and we learn how to cope with that in certain ways and that might be that we seek out a lot of external validation or attention and that can certainly lead to cheating for some women and for some men that desire that need maybe even a compulsive need for external validation and assurance that we

are good enough because at some point as a child we learned that we weren't and the thing to keep in mind with trauma is that when we when our ability to feel safe in relationships gets damaged quite young the way that we survive that tends to form a pretty rigid pattern so if something happens to us when we're young and we learn that we act out and seek attention and that makes us feel better that helps us get through that behavior pattern can become quite rigid quite ingrained and very subconscious and so I happened to

know in this particular case the man who asked me to speak to this his wife had quite a strong history of childhood trauma um on a couple of different levels and one of the ways that she coped as uh a young woman was to reach out and seek support and she actually coped through acting out sexually a lot of her Youth and this is something that happens to a lot of people men and women that sex fills the Gap where emotional connection and support is lacking so if that's not coming from your parents if that

wasn't available to you and again this is not just women this is for for men too often they'll use sex as a way to seek intimacy and connection when the emotional peace is lacking and sometimes sex actually becomes a safe way to seek connection because it is incredibly intimate but you can have sex without having emotional closeness and so for people that have been have learned that it's not safe to be emotionally close or that deep emotional relationships are going to let them down and if your parents were not emotionally engaged if your mother was

cold if your father was angry or loud or vice versa or your parents were disappointed and had that horrible glare or you were simply left alone a lot of the time to self soothe and get through scary Feelings by yourself you might have learned she might have learned that emotional connection and safety wasn't really safe or wasn't stable and so for people who have had that kind of experience sex can become like this halfway point it gives you a feeling of that intimacy a feeling of that connection but because there's not a deeper emotional tie

there the bottom can't drop out on you you can't be hurt in the same way so sex is like a way to get the the oxytocin literally the drug of bonding to release in your brain without becoming emotionally attached or or more emotionally connected so there's a lot of different ways that these that trauma can affect our sexual behaviors in this particular case um one of the things that stands out is that this this woman's ability to segregate the two parts of her life right she's having this sexual Affair and then she's home with her

husband and our kids and how is that possible this is another impact of trauma one of the things that this is not true for every person's trauma it depends on how we survived what happened to us but for a lot of people the way they survive is they split off parts of themselves they learn to shut down their sensitive kind loving part to survive abuse to survive neglect to survive rejection they learn to not allow certain parts of themselves to be seen to avoid being bullied to avoid being abandoned to avoid being hurt or to

avoid burdening a parent who doesn't seem like they can handle it a parent who's really struggling right so we might learn to shut off a part of ourselves that expresses its needs or asks for what we want or need to be okay we might shut that down in order to make sure everyone else is okay so that we're okay right we might learn to hide our anger or to hide our sexual desire or to hide even the part of us that is soft and loving if that's not safe right and so a lot of times

when somebody's been through a traumatic experience they survive it by closing off parts of themselves and now that can come out an adulthood in a couple of different ways some people get stuck and a part of them is always closed off and they really can't access the softer parts of themselves this is true for a lot of people who have a hard time feeling emotions or connecting emotionally but in this case at this man his wife wasn't having that experience she wasn't shut off emotionally she was loving she was there she was connected with him

but she had this totally different relationship going on this almost totally different Persona in the affair right and that just tells us that part of the way she survived her trauma her child had experiences was that she split off the loving nurturing part of her self from this Daredevil risk-taker adrenaline hungry part of herself that helped her get through her adolescence right and so all that was happening for him at home was that he was engaging with one part of her and she had successfully compartmentalized the other one so that it wasn't interfering in her

family life but that other part of her was still really strong and active and so when she's in this affair that other part lights up up and I know this can sound a little strange it's not like she has multiple personalities or doesn't know who she is or what she's doing we all develop survival masks as we grow up faces that we put on roles that we play in order to get through to get through our family life to get through our school environment to make it in a world that has a lot of high

expectations for us and a very low tolerance for our very human emotions we all learn to hide our grief to hide our fear to hide our anger in different ways and when somebody's had more severe trauma in their life those masks can become a lot stronger and a lot more rigid and they can really compartmentalize certain parts of their personality apart from each other so that they can't damage each other the problem is when we have that unhealed disconnect we're prone to do things like have an affair that can damage and even ruin our marriage

or our relationships so trauma is ultimately the root of infidelity I recently learned that term emotional starvation and it's a very apt description for what happens to some people in relationships right if your partner is emotionally unavailable or even physically unavailable and you're really alone in the relationship there isn't that emotional intimacy or connection you've tried to cultivate it and it's not working you're not getting through to them that this is what you need you might feel emotionally starved in your marriage and there's a lot of Articles and videos out there that say that this

is why women cheat because the man is emotionally oblivious or he's suppressed his emotions and he's not capable of creating that deeper emotional intimacy that she needs and so she goes outside of the marriage and forms these emotional connections that then lead to physical connections but even this this is also rooted in trauma because a healthy person in a relationship where there is no emotional intimacy will do one of two things they will either take steps to fix it they will address find the root causes for it address it with their partner and get support

and healing that connection or they will leave the relationship right somebody who stays in that emotionally starved relationship and seeks the emotional connection elsewhere physical connection physical intimacy elsewhere that person person doesn't have a healthy skill set in handling conflict or problems in their relationships and that means that they grew up without that healthy role model for how to handle conflict how to navigate and resolve problems in relationships right they're carrying their survival skills right where maybe they didn't feel like they had the power to resolve issues in their relationships when they were a child

and there were problems and so they just got through it right and they sought the emotional connection wherever it was available and so now as an adult in this relationship they're not even fully aware of their adult power to change and choose how their relationships unfold so they're still acting in that childish manner of saying oh my gosh this relationship isn't okay this isn't working it's not giving me what I need so I better just get it here because I can right that's it's true for a child right a child doesn't have a choice you're

being raised by these parents you don't get to just pick up and leave so if they're not able to give you the emotional connection you need if you were emotionally starved as a child in your home you did have to get it wherever you could right but as an adult that's not true anymore now you can leave this relationship now you can sit down and communicate with this partner now you can go to coup's counseling you have other options as an adult but people still act in that same childish pattern because they're carrying that survival

skill from childhood and they've never never examined it they've never healed the underlying wound and then they've never they've never grown up emotionally so that they can handle their relationship issues and conflicts in a healthier adult fashion and really that's what trauma does trauma freezes Us in time it causes our brains to forget that we are adults that we have choices that we have resources available to us that we can ask for help that we can change our circumstances in ways that we could not when we were children and it's one of the Hallmarks of

trauma that the brain loses the ability to distinguish then from now and so when we're when we're triggered we react as though it was then as though I was still a 5-year-old kid who didn't have options as though I was still a 12-year-old girl who didn't have these choices right if you look at any instance of a woman cheating on her husband or a man cheating on his wife for that matter you can trace it back to these very childish patterns of behavior these childish survival skills that have become rigid and that have never been

upgraded the brain hasn't upgraded to realize oh wait a minute I'm not a little kid anymore I can handle these things differently and that ultimately is the role of therapy it's the role of coaching any kind of personal development self-help work it's all about helping us recognize these old patterns these things we're carrying forward from childhood experiences that don't serve us that don't help us have healthy relationships or a successful adult life so we can start to let them go and heal and so if you are dealing with a wife an ex-wife or a soon

Tobe ex-wife who is cheating then you are also going to have some childhood patterns that need to be upgraded we all do and they're going to come out for you in these really overwhelming emotions and you'll have to start noticing how are you reacting to the news of her cheating are you getting angry are you lashing out are you with drawing and hiding are you desperately trying to get her back and seeking her approval maybe you do all of those things in a different order regardless of why she cheated what her specific trauma story childhood

patterns ability to to split off different parts of her personality are regardless of all of that what's important right here and right now is your healing and I want to share the same man who asked me this question who asked me to speak to the psych ology behind what women are thinking when they make these choices he did the hard work of learning to sit with these strong overwhelming emotions and process them in a healthy way and he shared in my better Beyond divorce Community just a really um beautiful post where he talked about his

feelings and the things he was feeling around the affair and also his grief and what was beautiful about it was that he was able to peel back all these layers the shock the denial the anger the confusion and get to the grief underneath it because that's what an affair leaves us with right there's all of these other feelings but at the base of it is a sadness because this was a person that you thought was there for you and they've betrayed that trust and there's a there's a rejection there's a hurt there's a grief and

a loss there and so when he posted this really beautiful post about how he was feeling um I asked him how did it feel to write that post and I'm going to share that comment with you because I think it will give you some insight into what this healing process for you can really look like he says initially there was an overwhelming sense of sadness and grief but I noticed it was different than normal it was like my brain was trying to tell me something but I ignored it and suppressed any thoughts associated with it

but when I finally stopped resisting and turned Inward and faced these thoughts and emotions it finally revealed itself I miss her I mean I knew I missed her but I was caught up in the narrative she did this and she did that she said this and she said that it's her fault that I'm in pain but when I didn't allow that narrative to speak but I just became curious and observed everything that was going on inside me a cleansing and healing started to to occur it was like a damn broke and all the emotional buildup

I had inside of me finally started to flow out unrestrained and without any resistance or suppression from me the tears and the snot started flowing and I started typing I feel like I turned the corner somewhere inside me emotionally it was like my brain and nervous system put their arm around me and thanked me for finally being honest and truthful with them and not lying to them and being in denial I realized my marriage is in my rearview mirror but I needed to take an emotional pit stop and be truthful with myself before I could

continue along this journey in the end when it was all said and done this experience was a positive one for me as I sense a necessary cleansing and healing took place I feel like I took a couple of steps forward I do miss her but that's okay if you are in the early stages of this this moment you might not even be missing her you might just be so angry and hurt but I can tell you this man's experience mirrors what I see men going through as they heal again and again as we can get

past the denial past the shock past the anger there's grief and once you can allow yourself to face that grief and move through it that's when healing starts to occur and you can find an acceptance and a moving forward if you would like support around doing that please join me in my free Master Class how to take back control of your life after divorce in the master class I share the one emotional regulation strategy that I use with all of my clients it's the same strategy that allowed this man to finally peel back all of

those layers and confront the underlying grief so that he could begin to let this go and move move forward with his life so thank you so much to my client for asking this question thank you to you for watching I really hope that this video was helpful and gave you some insight into what's going on inside the skull of the woman who has done this to you um I hope you'll continue to seek support and help and please do come into that free master class with me it's going to give you a lot of tools

to manage the emotional reaction the emotional Fallout that is going to happen if you've had the experience of being cheated on all right thanks for watching I'll see you guys in the master class