Since it’s midweek, I want to issue a challenge to you. Not the picking a fight kind of challenge, but instead the kind of challenge that puts your thinking in a bind and leads you to new discoveries. One of the habits that keeps you in the pain of affair trauma is when heuristics go wrong.
In the early 90’s I worked as a professor at San Jacinto College. One of the lectures that I considered most boring was the one dealing with heuristics. Initially, I found them boring. For that reason, I made the decision that I needed a new way of looking at them to make the topic interesting for the students and myself.
Heuristics is a term used for several practices. The term refers to the mental shortcuts we take in dealing with everyday situations. By taking shortcuts, we avoid having to really think through things. This is also where stereotypes and prejudicial ideas come from as well. Rather than dealing with the situation, and getting to know someone you take the mental short cut.
The whole area of profiling amounts to using heuristic short cuts. Those short cuts allow profilers to quickly assess the situation. Those assessments set the stage for further decision making.
The problem with heuristics is that while these short cuts allow you to sort through situations quickly, they also keep you from thinking through what is really going on, and what you’re really reacting to. A true heuristic is when you gain some new understanding or insights, not when the short cuts keep you from such insights.
I mention this with affairs because betrayed spouses make judgments, and decisions about the lover without thinking things through. Those quick judgments and mental shortcut assessments also keep you mentally and emotionally stuck.
It’s easy coming to judgments like he’s scum, she’s a skank or she’s a low-life or a host of other names, descriptors or assessments.
The challenge is that I want you to specifically identify what you’re reacting to and what that triggers in you.
For example, take the statement “Anyone who sleeps with someone’s husband knowing he is married is lower than low. To be that desperate must have no respect for themselves and be insecure.” The statement is true, yet many shortcuts have been taken.
If you considered, ‘What is it about a woman that sleeps with another woman’s husband that bothers me so much?’ Rather than just dismissing it as ‘lower than low’, what does it say about her priorities in life? What do her actions tell you in terms of her respect for boundaries?
If she doesn’t respect the boundaries of marriage, what does that say about the kind of rules she lives by? If she sleeps with other’s so easily, what’s to keep her from moving on to another relationship? What is it about that that is a threat to you?
It’s easy saying she’s desperate and has no respect. It’s harder taking a look at how her actions threaten you, what it says about a spouse that is drawn to such a person. What needs are being met by your spouse when they are drawn to someone like that?
These are hard questions. I know that, yet in considering them, you will gain some new insights and ways of looking at your situation. They become a true heuristic in that they lead to some new insights and knowledge.
If you’re struggling with being stuck either mentally or emotionally, the video on healing affair trauma will help you move past being stuck and toward healing. Those same heuristic short cuts that allow you to size up people and situations may be keeping you from understanding the big picture.
Best Regards,
Jeff
