Is an emotional affair an addiction?

A reader queried “Is an emotional affair an addiction?” This is a great question to consider in terms of how it impacts you if you or your spouse are dealing with an emotional affair.

First you need to consider what an emotional affair is. The term emotional affair is when you have all the intimacy and closeness of a physical affair without the relationship being consummated. That closeness often copies the kind of closeness you see in physical involvements.

With the emotional affair, you have the bonding and attachment of the heart to another person outside of your marriage relationship. They are giving what belongs to you to someone else.

In previous generations, the kind of situations where emotional affairs happened were often referred to as ‘affairs of the heart’.

Some cheaters deny having an affair based solely on the relationship being consummated. Being that they are carnally minded, they view affairs only in terms of carnal realities. Since no ‘physical’ consummation happened, there was no affair in their mind.  Even though you know that they are giving emotional energy and attention to someone else that belongs to you, they are unable to view what the relationship as an affair.

Some of these cheaters may have brinkmanship in terms of seeing how close to the edge they can get before what they are doing has physical consummation. What they do not realize is that since their focus is on the carnal, they do not see the bonding and attachments happening on an emotional level.

In terms of emotional affairs and addictions, you will also need consideration of what the nature of an addition is. With relationships, addictions start in the brain. This is why many of the tactics I advocate in the Affair Recovery Workshop are based on intervening with brain function. When you can disrupt or short circuit some of the brain action, you can change things.

With an emotional affair, the cheater seeks the stimulation or excitation of parts of their brain. Just being with the person or fantasizing about them puts the cheater’s brain into ‘high gear’. In terms of brain dynamics, the relationship flips the on switch in many parts of their brain. Once turned on, those areas which have been activated party hearty. When the neurons in your brain party hearty, they often start turning on or spreading their excitement to other parts of the brain.

Like human parties, some of the neurons join the party by releasing chemicals into your body. Like a BYOB party, each neuron starts bringing and releasing its own chemicals to ‘keep the party going’. The stimulated brain wants ‘all the lights turned on’.  They release such neuron stimulating chemicals as phenylethylamine (PEA), dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin, oxytocin, and norepinephrine.

When the emotional cheater is not with their ‘love object’, their brain goes into low gear. They may feel depleted or depressed without the stimulation of the love object. When they are down like this, they want to get the party going again, and use relationships to make it happen.

If this sounds like addiction to you, you are correct. When you examine the brain chemistry behind an emotional affair, you are dealing with many of the same chemicals that you find with a gambling addiction. Both involve getting on emotional roller coasters with all the drama that goes with that. It is interesting to note that gambling addictions are about loosing. With emotional affairs, you find that some are about loosing and some about winning. In either case, the ‘addict’ is craving the emotional action and drama of the relationship, whether it be good or bad.

Since the emotional affair addict is about the ‘action’ they often are in and out of relationships. They like the drama more than stability. For them, stability is often equated with boredom or routine.

In each addiction, they are not ingesting chemicals, they are making their own. An emotional affair can easily become an addiction when the pattern continues either in a positive or negative direction.

Besides emotional affairs and their associated addictions, there are also romance addicts as well. These people are very much into fantasies as much as a porn addict, yet since it is romance based rather than pornography based, they are not seen in the same negative light. In terms of brain stimulation, there is little difference between the two.

This brings up a question to consider. That is “Can a person a person have an affair without ever actually meeting the person?” Yes, they can. The love object can be a celebrity, literary figure or even fantasy figure. Your spouse may be having an affair with some wild-eyed musician they have never met. If they are giving their love, attention, and admiration which belong to you, to someone else,  there are problems. When they have ‘bonded’ or attached themselves to that person, you are dealing with situation that needs help.

Getting them out of a romantic or emotional affair requires some of the same interventions as those needed in recovering from a physically consummated affair. The big difference, is that denial may keep you from seeing the danger or taking action. The cheater in such affairs may also not see the nature of their relationship as an affair. Just because they do not see the affair dynamics does not mean that ‘no affair’ is going on.

If you are faced with an emotional affair, it poses a threat to your marriage. Just because it has not been consummated does not mean that there is no affair or no threat to your marriage.

If you need help, I encourage you to seek it out with resources or those familiar in dealing with emotional affairs.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

 

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