So it’s at that point that I think about affairs as having a purpose. The purpose of affairs has to do with feeling discomfort or disconnection, alone, frustrated … or pain inside the relationship, but the person unwilling to talk to their partner and work with their partner to change that. Instead the affair emerges as an easy way to compensate for that pain.

Now if you or I were wounded in the early stage of your life, i.e., attachment adaptations, we would become more detached and generally be more of an avoider. It would be logical to mean that I or you wouldn’t be very available for a relationship, right? Unfortunately that’s not true. The yearning for connection is so strong in all of us that even when we have that avoidance or detach adaptation we still seek connection.

So if I’m in pain it’s pretty easy to go outside and find somebody who will connect to me and that makes it easy because it has a time limited experience. So this is one idea about how it is so easy for some people to go out of their relationship and have an affair even when it doesn’t logically make sense. But that the affair itself as an “exit” is a signal that something is trying to happen but given it’s so unconscious it needs help to get that into consciousness and that I think is where I as the therapist come into the equation.

If I can help a couple back off … I’m talking about back off from having to deal with the affair right NOW … back off. If the partner backs off a bit from how much pain s/he in then we can try to begin to understand what motivated this person to have the affair, i.e., to exit his/her relationship.

What were their needs that weren’t being met is the essential question. Often I get the cheating partner wanting me to take the power to close the exit because they know the relationship cannot return to any kind of connection unless that exit is closed.

My challenge always is that since I didn’t open the exit I can’t close it. So as the therapist, my question always is, “How do we make it inviting or safe enough for the partner to make a decision to come back inside the relationship and begin to work on their issues, work on their connection with their partner?”

Did this article help you? Email comments to: imagopaula@gmail.com