There are times when I read something two of three times in order to find out what the author is really saying. This is especially true when encountering large amounts of psychobabble.
I was reminded of this on reading an article promoting a twelve year old study and book packaged as the “The Truth About Cheating”. The author, Gary Neuman, claims “47 percent of his male clients who have cheated did so because of a lack of emotional intimacy with their partner.”
On first glance, he identifies the lack of emotional intimacy as a driver for affairs. I wonder what he means by ’emotional intimacy?’
In my mind the ‘lack of emotional intimacy’ is the result of choices made earlier in the marriage. If you and your spouse aren’t close, someone has pulled away or withdrawn.
Using the phrase ‘lack of emotional intimacy”, is a way of saying needs aren’t being met and he doesn’t want to blame anyone. This kind of approach certainly makes you popular since he removed any blame or responsibility for the lack of intimacy.
So for consumers, your problem is validated, but no one is blamed or held responsible. As a consumer, you know have a name for the problem which gives you something to blame without bringing any discomfort or pain.
This approach focuses on symptoms rather than causes. The focus is on the lack of intimacy rather than how it began or what keeps the distance there. It gives you a description and diagnosis rather than an explanation of who or which choices caused the lack of intimacy.
I wonder if he considered that how hard it is developing emotional intimacy with someone who’s narcissistic or self-focused?
There’s also the saying in the addiction recovery community “Addicts don’t have relationships, they take hostages.” Trying to engage with someone whose crawled into the bottle or drugs makes having emotional intimacy next to impossible.
They aren’t available for anyone to connect with in a meaningful way. They are too self-focused to connect with.
When so many ‘experts’ proclaim, ‘you need to love yourself’, there’s plenty of gasoline being put on the narcissistic fire raging inside of them.
When your spouse is wrapped up in porn, it limits your ability to make any kind of emotional connection, let alone develop any kind of healthy intimacy. When your spouse is a sex addict, there’s no emotional connection other than joining them for one of their rides.
When they claim your marriage has a ‘lack of emotional intimacy’ it ends up putting you on a guilt trip about “not being a good spouse” rather than examining the values and poor choices being made by the cheater that created the distance between the two of you. They made the choice to cheat whether or not the two of you were as close as you used to be.
The lack of emotional intimacy is also the product of something that happened earlier, it’s an effect rather than the cause of the affair.
Sure, the intimacy will need to be addressed, yet doing it at the wrong time can mess up your recovery from the affair.
There are things that need to be addressed, doing them in the right order is important for recovery.
This is why I make it a point in the Affair Recovery Workshop for the two of you to re-connect with each other prior to looking at causes of the affair and ways of dealing with it.
Recall that withdrawing from your spouse comes before the affair. So in undoing the affair damage, re-connecting with them before examining the triggers and causes of the affair is part of the healing process.
I encourage you to click and download the workshop today as part of your affair recovery plan.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
