Affairs change you. They change your marriage, they change you, they change the cheater, they change the lover. Affairs change everyone they touch. Affairs also change your brain.
Although it’s not talked about much, after an affair, your brain is not the same as it was before the affair. Since the cheater has no broken bones and perhaps no bruises, they assume that they have not been ‘changed’ by the affair and they are mistaken.
Let us take a simplified look at how the affair changes the cheater’s brain, starting at the neural pathways.
On a basic level, each new relationship, including affairs, create new neural pathways. When a neural pathway is created, a new connection is made in your brain. Depending on the intensity of the relationship, there may be a few or a few hundred new neural pathways created.
In dealing with a new person, you learn new ways of doing things. Each of these new learnings has new neural pathway that goes with them. When a large number of neural pathways are created, your behavior changes.
You may dismiss this phenomena as merely learning ‘new’ things or a new person. Inside your brain, those new neural pathways are changing your behaviors. Each time you engage in the new behavior, those new neural pathways are activated, and reinforced.
When enough neural pathways are created, it begins changing your thinking.
Yes, an affair changes your thinking. It changes the way you think about others, it changes how you think about yourself, and about your spouse.
The new way of thinking is the effect of changes that have occurred in your brain. The affair changed your brain, and initially you assume it was only you changing your mind. What you term as ‘changing your mind’ is actually a re-wiring of your brain.
Let me break it down simply. When you have an affair, it changes your sexual behavior, it changes what you consider ‘pleasurable’.
It changes your decision making.
It changes your impulse control.
It changes your ability to delay gratification. Once those things are changed, you are not the same person.
Think about it. If I gave you a pill that altered your thinking, reduced your impulse control and ability to delay gratification, and you had no choice in the matter you’d be concerned. All of that happens with an affair.
When enough of your thinking is modified by the new neural connections, the very structures of your brain change as well. Recall that the structures of your brain are merely the areas where massive amounts of connections are located.
When you change enough neural connections, you change the very structure of your brain. Besides changing the structures, over time your brain will change in how it processes all the information it comes in contact with.
On meeting new people, instead of seeing them for who they are, those affair altered pathways process the new person in terms of ‘affair potential’ and you begin sizing up and fantasizing how they would be in bed. You may even already be formulating ways of seducing them.
The bad thing is that this changed way of processing information is the way you process all your relationships. The check and balance of considering the reward and punishment will initially hold the changes in control. Over time, the ability to control the urges weaken.
You may even consider that the enjoyment of engaging in an affair greater than the consequences (punishment) that may happen.
This will give you a basic understanding of how affairs change the brain.
Before taking off, one more thing: with the major changes that happen in your brain, you’ll need interventions designed for dealing with the changes in your brain.
This means that traditional marriage counseling will not likely resolve many of the issues you’re facing. This is why the Affair Recovery Workshop includes tools and techniques from brain research in order to help you brain return to previous functioning.
Real changes have taken place and that means that your recovery needs tools to handle those changes.
Best Regards,
Jeff
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