In the report I sent out last year on “How Affairs Hack Your Brain”, I addressed the ’emotional brain’. For the sake of simplicity, you have a thinking brain and an emotional brain. Assuming you have one and not the other leads to many problems.
Healing from the affair requires you deal with issues in your thinking brain AND your emotional brain. Healing one without the other creates imbalances.
In dealing with an affair, it’s important considering both of these. It could be that your talks with the cheater are failing due to you attempting accessing the wrong brain.
What’s called the emotional brain are the parts that trigger your emotions and basic drives. This part of your brain is strong and can overpower your thinking brain.
The longer the cheater has been giving into this part of their brain, the stronger it grows. Over time, it’s trained to react without any thinking.
Giving into your emotional brain increases its strength and speed. The more you do it, the faster it becomes. When its strength and speed are increased, stopping it or changing it feels like an impossible task.
This is where having others help you comes in. There are times when your brain needs the help of other brains in restoring balance and stability.
Obtaining help can be as simple as asking advice, or involve the other person being strong for you in dealing with disciplining your emotional brain.
The emotional brain seeks gratification. It doesn’t consider consequences or impact of your choices beyond the immediate response.
There are ways of helping your emotional brain slow down and the thinking brain work with it. Some of these involve obtaining help from other brains.
This added help you obtain from other brains is referred to as co-regulation. That other brain helps you start regulating yours. There are times you need the energy, insight and thinking of another brain in helping you make it past obstacles.
There’s probably been times others have helped you regain your thinking. It may have been a coach, pastor or counselor. When you slowed down, you saw that there are other options. This is co-regulation in action. You need that in changing the patterns in your thinking and the thinking of the cheater.
By joining the “Restored Lifestyle” membership site, you can find other helpful questions and interventions in helping your emotional brain make changes. As you go through recovery, you’ll need others in helping you co-regulate your reactions and thinking.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
