SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi...I keep coming back to the feeling that I did not really know my husband at all and that is something I am finding hard to process.

I cannot quite understand how someone can live a double life like that and still come home and carry on as normal - not just in day to day life but through birthdays, holidays, children being born, moving house, special occasions and all the moments that felt real and meaningful to me.

What I struggle with most is how someone can compartmentalise to that extent and keep going as if nothing is wrong and find myself wondering how their morals can seem so separate from the life they are living with their partner and family. I also struggle to understand how someone can do that and not seem weighed down by guilt at least not let it show and that disconnect is one of the hardest parts for me to make sense of.

For those who have been through something similar how did you begin to process that in your own mind? I am not looking for graphic detail, just your perspective. Thank you

I think here you can get a good insight from reformed wayward partners, because they can give you the other side perspective on how a person can allow themselves to become that, and the story and lies you have to tell yourself in the first place to be able to follow that self sabotaging path.

What I can give you is the general understanding of what issues are at the root and how they influence the behavior of a wayward.

Most commonly is this:
- low self worth

Followed closely by its relatives:
- people pleasing
- perfectionism
- avoidance
- emotional unavailability

The soothing mechanism for this issues is this:
- external validation

People with this character flaws feel a bottomless void that cannot be filled by normal human attachment. No measure of love or validation from a healthy partner can, because the moment it gets real and serious the fears connected to the flaws trigger and whatever you pour in, no matter how much, gets lost in their spiral.

You understand that this is not a stable or sustainable way to be a fulfilled adult individual.

But there’s something that works in soothing this internal desert, dopamine.

Dopamine makes you feel happy chemically and overrides temporarily whatever pain you’re feeling as a baseline.

Stupid example but often people have experienced it in their youth, when you are having a down period and everything looks bleak but then you meet someone that you fall in love with or just even have a crush for and you initiate something. And then all is rainbows and sunshine for a while. That’s how dopamine and happy chemicals work on us.

Now healthy and mature relationships provide us with an almost unlimited supply of happy chemicals, but is not a high like in flings, it’s steady.

So when you are dysfunctional and you fall back in your love self worth and rest spiral, it kind of loses its grip because it’s a baseline and not an high (so they got it but don’t feel it anymore and become a plateau, realigning with their sad unresolved issues and gradually all is bleak again).

Coping with this: let’s get a new dopamine high. External validation works like a charm for that.

You can’t give that anymore, because you already give it all, it feels good but they need that rush.

Hey this guy / girl over there has zero problem in messing with people in relationships! Obviously they are searching for excitement like me, giving no fucks how wrong, evil or sordid it is, all they want is a feel good high. And I do too. Let’s indulge.

Feel good overrides the void for a while, but shame might still drag them down.
To get the most of it you want to get the most validation from any source you can tap into.

So there’s the adultery providing the high, and there is you providing the baseline.

If I can compartmentalize both in little untouching boxes, I can get the best of both worlds, and the clandestine nature also keeps me busy in making sure they never touch, so I distract myself from going back there into the bleakness of my unresolved issues (bonus: I don’t even need to address those issue, to face my ghosts, as long as it goes on they are quieted. Win win).

It is messed up, but it is more or less what seems to be going on in who leads this double life. Similar to when you dive in work or things that keeps you so busy that you have no time to think about something haunting you.

A coping mechanism, just very self destructive.

And mind, it is all me, me, me, me, me…. Notice that nobody else matter anything in this picture.
Is the epythome of selfishness, you don’t matter, family and children don’t matter, friends don’t matter, even the affair partner doesn’t matter, is just a pig with similar issues happy to roll in the mud and call it a dream.

Perhaps because it is a drugged dream, from our own chemicals, but still very much one.

Feel good overrides the void for a while, but shame might still drag them down.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this, I think the part I am still struggling to understand is less the "why" and more how it could sit alongside a whole shared life without it showing, even after decades of building a life together.

It’s called dissociation, is coping by telling yourself such lies that the things you do know are horribly wrong (but you keep doing) seem to belong to another person.

Then when they switch to the other box the normal life belongs to another person, so in the end, what they are doing in this box it doesn’t feel as bad anymore and they can enjoy it.

Dysfunctional coping, not healthy integration.

You are blaming your self for choosing them and not noticing.
Don’t because it’s not your fault.

You chose them for the good part of their being. Likely they share your same values and align with you on a lot of things.

There was good in this person and that’s what attracted you.

And is not that the good disappeared most likely, is all still there.
What happened is that at some point the unresolved issues outweighed the good and they resorted to the coping mechanisms of validation dopamine.

And from them it spiraled, into dissociation after a while.

When I say the good is still there I am not excusing the actions and behavior, I am pretty unforgiving about betrayal, there is little to no mercy in me for that.

I say so because if the good wasn’t there then they wouldn’t need to dissociate, they would embrace the sordid garbage and ride the wave with pride.

But those people are very easy to spot, and you would have notice immediately (and called the garbage disposal)

There’s different kinds of waywards, everyone needs to betray themself first, before they betray you (us) and they cope with that in these ways.

Your wayward cope is dissociating and compartmentalization

Your wayward cope is dissociating and compartmentalization

Thank you for taking the time to explain this further and can see what you are saying about dissociation and compartmentalisation - it does help to give some kind of framework for understanding it and think I am still trying to sit with the gap between that and how it could exist alongside a whole shared life without it showing and probably something I need to take time to process - thank you again for your patience in explaining it.

Compartmentalization is a skill. Most of us use it in healthy ways in our day-to-day lives, switching roles to be different people in different circumstances. The BraveSirRobin in the boardroom has a different personality than the BSR playing on the rug with her kids and dog. Sometimes compartmentalization is more serious, even essential for preserving mental health, like the police officer or soldier or EMT who sees traumatic things every day that they can't allow to spill over into their home life. Those who can't maintain boundaries with those thoughts will suffer terribly.

People who are really, really good at compartmentalizing -- and I'm one of them -- can divide these roles in a far more granular and ultimately unhealthy way. During my affair, I practically severed BSR the long term girlfriend from BSR the AP. AP BSR was confident, secure, fascinating. She wasn't stressed like GF BSR about where her life was going. AP BSR never looked ahead more than a few weeks. She spent her time in front of a dressing room mirror that only showed the flattering angles.

I understand why you're blown away, because you thought you knew the authentic version of your husband. My BH thought the same. The reality is that no one saw the authentic BSR, not even me, because she was an assortment of different actors who never appeared on stage at the same time. I was a stranger to myself. It wasn't until I started the post-affair work that I laid out all the different versions of BSR on the table and saw, side by side, their fundamental incompatibility.