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Are you Suffering from an Affair?

Is your partner having an affair?
See Signs of Affairs and Recovering from Affairs

Although this may be a difficult period, we can help you save your sanity.
Don't waste time - our telephone coaching can help you!

1. Are you considering or have started divorce?
2. Are you separated and have little contact with your spouse?
3. Is your partnership is in trouble and you want a better relationship?
4. Do you often argue about sex, money, parenting, free time, religion etc?
5. Do you and your spouse live together but you feel emotionally disconnected?

Do you want to rebuild a committed happy marriage?
Or do you want to end an unhappy partnership peacefully?
Or do you just want to make a decision?

Who has Affairs? ... People like you!

• People in mid-life crisis
• People with opportunity and time
• People who want to fulfill a transference
• People who want to punish a partner or past partner
• People with unmet physical desires or emotional needs
• People who want to diminish the intensity or intimacy of a partnership

Are you trying to get over an affair? Coaching or counseling that does not resolve cross-generational entanglements, transferences, identity loss and emotional incest is unlikely to provide you with long-term solutions. Our relationship coaching can help you dissolve partnership and marriage problems.

Perhaps you feel emotionally hurt by your partner's romantic, intimate or sexual affairs. Or perhaps you suffer guilt following your own acts of betrayal. Yet the casualties of adultery are not only betrayed spouses - the casualties include the children who will later be found in depressed corners of society.

What Price is a Free Lunch?

Some people flirt with everybody because they don't know other ways to relate. Some people use internet chat to feel an emotional intimacy that they lack with their life-partners. Some people take training in hypnosis, NLP and seduction, to increase casual sex. But few lunches are really free, and the costs are higher than those people expect.

There ain't no such things as family secrets! Your children will feel and respond to your or your partner's romantic or sexual affairs, usually in proportion to the length of time and emotional intimacy of your affairs, even if they are never told. Someone you love will pay for your free lunch. One possible result is childhood ADD and ADHD. Another is chronic psychosomatic symptoms.

Infidelity is a dark shadow of partnership. Affairs can provide excitement for the bored, adventure for the restless and pride for the egotistic. Affairs also provide heartache, guilt, disappointment, shattered dreams and damaged lives - especially for the children of parents who have affairs.

Mother-Son Bonds . Fathers & Daughters . Emotional Incest . Psychosomatic

Types of Affairs

Probably you or your partner could have affairs. Happy partnerships do not eliminate infidelity - and may even motivate you (if you are entangled with a parent or past-partner) to reduce the emotional intensity of your partnership. But affairs rarely mature into long-term committed relationships.

If you are having an affair, you are probably focusing on your own needs. You may forget or ignore the needs of your life partner, affair partner and any children. You may avoid considering the consequences of your affair on your affair-partner. After all, no-one else will know ... right? See Signs of Affairs

• Business sex (trading sex for money, promotion or favors; including prostitution) may have the least emotional consequences and the highest risk of venereal disease
• Brief sexual affairs and one-night-stands rarely become love affairs or long-term friendships
• In-love affairs can be powerful and life-altering with overwhelming emotions - and they often end in severe suffering and stress for one or both affair partners
• Love affairs can become long friendships, although unpleasant feelings of guilt may cause you to eventually separate from or distance yourself from your affair partner

Men & Affairs

Men often tell us that they want casual sex for the pleasure of sex. Men may admit or boast that they pretend to be in love to have sex with women. (Many women have told us that men pretend to be in love as a preliminary for sex.)

Younger men usually seek sexual affairs rather than love affairs. Their primary motivations are physical pleasure, to succeed, to impress friends and to gain sexual experience. Older men are more likely to have affairs with women who understand, accept and appreciate them. They may also want to gratify sexual desires that they would not ask of a decent woman. (See Emotional Blackmail)

Men who are emotionally bonded to their mothers (see emotional incest) are likely to have affairs to avoid or to sabotage any committed partnership. They are also likely to boast to their male friends about the number and variety of their sexual adventures. (See Little Prince).

Women & Affairs

The longer a woman is married, the more likely she will have an affair. Women choose sexual affairs for pleasure and for experience. An affair may provide a woman with missing emotional intimacy. A woman may have affairs to create a reserve source of intimacy, especially if she feels bored, disappointed or uncertain about her partnership or marriage.

We find that women are more likely to satisfy missing emotional needs in a partnership by mentally reliving past romantic affairs, or by preoccupation with the love lives of other people (gossip and soap operas etc).

We also note that women who are emotionally bonded to their fathers (see emotional incest) seem much more likely to have affairs and partnerships with immature older men (see Little Princess).

Affairs page divide here ...

Reasons for Intimate or Sexual Affairs

Do you claim that an affair merely fulfills your needs, and helps you avoid feeling lonely or bored? Do you imply, "I want to feel good regardless of the consequences of my choices on my partner or family - or on my affair-partner's partner or family".

You may justify affairs with: "I want ...

1. to feel alive
2. excitement and adventure
3. to rescue or help someone
4. to seduce or to be seduced
5. to avoid the reality of my aging
6. to fulfill an impulse or compulsion
7. to feel desirable or sexually potent
8. new or unusual sexual experiences
9. to distract myself from important problems
10. to enjoy love, intimacy, and companionship
11. to defy my social, religious or parental rules
12. to enjoy sensual pleasure and sexual release

Attacking, criticizing or defending these justifications will not improve relationships nor resolve partnership needs. Our systemic coaching can help restore peace, balance ... and love.

But we were so much in love...

The experience of romantic love may seem to replace any need to develop physical, emotional and spiritual partnership skills. However, sooner or later, lovers will confront their responsibilities and transferences. Then they can either create deeper bonds, or stagnate, or separate.

Predictable Partnership . Enjoying Partnership . Consequences of Abortion

Affairs & Divorce

1. Affairs endanger marriage, although some people say that affairs helps them survive marriage.

2. Divorce is more common among people who have affairs.

3. Women who have multiple affairs, especially if her affairs start early in a marriage, have the highest divorce rates.

4. For a woman, if a male partner has a homosexual affair with another man - there may seem absolutely no alternative to separation.

5. For a man, if a female partner has a lesbian affair with another woman - this may not be perceived as betrayal. He may even want to join them.

Affairs & Recovery

Romantic or sexual affairs can control emotions resulting from suppressed or unmet needs. A first step to recovery is relationship diagnosis. Our telephone coaching offers help if you:

1. avoid communicating your agendas, values and needs (partnership skills)
2. obsess about some other person (entanglements)
3. carry guilt or depression from previous relationships (entanglements)
4. experience ongoing conflict (complex conflict)
5. express your lost "sense of self" (lost identity)
6. identify with someone else (identification)
7. identify with two people (identity conflict)
8. express toxic or resourceless "I am ..." beliefs (relationship bonds)
9. express trauma and overwhelming emotions (trauma)
10. follow toxic role models or post-hypnotic suggestion (mentor damage)

One or both partners may use complaints and excuses to justify deception and betrayal.

Coaching after Affairs

Romantic affairs have strong emotional consequences, which may be delayed until an affair is over.

• Blame: Following exposure, the partners may energetically and uselessly argue about topics such as "Who really caused this?" or "Why did you make me do it!"
• Denial: Many people who choose sexual affairs will deny and lie about their actions if the truth may bring immediate unpleasant consequences.
• Grief: The suffering of betrayal, broken dreams and shattered love may be overwhelming to the betrayed person. Suicide attempts may follow a romantic affair.
• Guilt: The betraying partner, the betrayed partner and the "third person" carry burdens of guilt. This guilt may be immediate or delayed. Hidden guilt can manifest as anxiety, depression, hypochondria and psychosomatic disease.

Following a partnership crisis, it may seem impossible for the partners to avoid overwhelming emotions and childish behavior. our telephone coaching can make space for and referee desperately needed discussions and clarification. We offer:

• Individual coaching with both partners to clarify entanglements and bonds
• Couple coaching with both partners to identify and resolve transferences
• Couple coaching with both partners to make decisions and plan the future

Couple Coaching Flowchart & Testimonial

Healing Partnership after Affairs

Romantic affairs rarely last more than two years. Short-term solutions that attempt to fix and forget the surface symptoms of affairs may not resolve or even expose the underlying entanglements. Our systemic solutions can heal entanglements and emotional bonds, and dissolve relationship damage.

Effective and joyous partnership results from partners know and respect each other's values and needs; and by cooperating to fulfill those needs. Our relationship coaching can provide partnership skills and coaches people to end relationship damage and deal with affairs. You are not alone.

Predictable Partnership . Enjoy Partnership . Evaluate Partnership . Partnership Breakdown

Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2009 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Solutions were primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers. We train people to resolve emotional blocks and improve relationships. This information is for your general knowledge only. Please consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing any medical treatment. Link to our pages, but get Martyn's written permission to post or publish his work.