In the previous post on “How Affairs Effect Your Brain“, I addressed the topic of new neural pathways . Affairs change more than just neural pathways (or neuroplasticity). Another area changed by affairs is that of hormones. Today’s post addresses some of the brain science involved.
Your brain communicates to your body through the nervous system and through the chemical message system of hormones. In some of the previous posts, I referred to this system and its effects as “chemical bonding“.
I use that term based on how most of you recognize that chemicals alter people’s behaviors. You may have seen how your spouse’s behavior changes with the chemicals they have been exposed to or ingested. If your spouse takes hormones or steroids you’ve seen such a change first hand.
When a cheater has an affair, chemical changes occur. Those chemical changes impact your brain and alter its functioning. Your brain is changed by what happened.
Those chemicals change how messages are transmitted, the speed at which they are transmitted along with your ability to process information.
First you’re exposed to the hormones produced by the lover. The lover is exposed to your hormones. On top of this, there are the hormones that each party produced within themselves.
This amounts to a double, if not triple dosage of mood changing chemicals released into your bloodstream. Hormones have chemicals as part of their make-up that directly impact behavior along with altering the nervous system.
When you take several types of psychoactive hormones (or other psychoactive chemical) there is a phenomena known as the synergistic effect. This phenomena multiplies the impact of the chemicals released.
These chemicals are the channels by which the brain communicates with your body. When you change the chemicals, you change the message and change the body’s response.
As part of the way that hormones alter the nervous system, they change the nervous system that is already in place. Your nervous system has built-in receptors for the hormone chemicals.
The built in receptors make you and your spouse vulnerable to changes in your nervous systems driven by these chemicals. When there is an affair it changes you, your mood and the way you think.
Those ‘built-in’ receptors make you more susceptible to the effects of the hormones.
When everything is rocking along in your marriage, the routine interactions of the hormones and nervous system allow for you and your spouse to continue being aroused by each other, enjoying each other and preferring each other.
The hormones allow for a self-adjusting system. This is how you can love someone as a teenager, continue loving them through middle life and on into old age.
You likely were not turned on by mature members of the opposite gender when you were a teen nor turned on by teens in your old age. The self-adjusting system allows your emotions, thinking and preferences to change.
When an affair happens, it is not just sexual recreation. Any affair produces chemical changes and exposes you to changes. You are exposed to new hormonal cocktails.
Those hormonal cocktails blend with the chemicals in your body or they bring radical changes. Whether the change is mild or major, there will be changes.
Part of the changes that occur inside of you, include amplifying nervous system activity, or slowing parts of it down. The hormonal chemicals often act like acid or glue in either breaking down or bonding the nervous system in new configurations.
Whether there is breaking down, bonding or amplifying depends on the hormone involved. Since the hormones are part of the communication system between the brain and the body, the effect of the hormones is throughout your body, including your brain. The hormones modify how the nerves in the brain, and in some cases whole structures of the brain operate.
All this happens, even though you tell yourself or your spouse tells you that they are still the same person. They may have the same appearance, but the wiring and chemical make-up has been altered.
One study even found some evidence that women carry the DNA of everyone they have slept with. The jury is still out on whether people carry the DNA of partners even though the evidence is strong.
What’s clear is that you experience chemical and hormonal changes. Affairs change you down to a cellular level.
This means that cheaters have more to clean up than just outward behaviors.
The GOOD news is that in the Affair Recovery Workshop, I include interventions from brain science that helps you move past the rewiring of your brain. There is a reason why affairs are hard to get over, and part of it is that your brain has been rewired.
Best Regards,
Jeff
