Do you wonder why your attempts at shaming and guilt tripping the cheater fail? It seems that the more guilt and shame you pour on them, the more pride and narcissism they develop.
Your observations on this aren’t mistaken. At those times you end up feeding a monster in ways you never imagined.
There’s a reason for your efforts failing. The reason lies inside their brain. This is because the sensations of pride, shame and guilt all include the same parts of the brain ( The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula and nucleus acumbens).
When the same parts of the brain and circuitry are involved, activation of one can easily switch over to the other. You’re not losing your mind, it’s a matter that the cheater’s brain works against you.
This is also another reason why affair recovery isn’t over until the cheater changes their ways of thinking. Until their brain and thinking change, the threat remains.
Ending the affair is only one step in the recovery process.
Although I refer to it as affair recovery, technically, it’s really a matter of recovering their brain and how it thinks. It amounts to a rewiring of their brain.
When the cheater’s brain focuses on infidelity, greater amounts of its problem solving and computing are shifted over to the affair, until they finally have one.
The affair is the product of all the effort they put into it. They need to change their ways and their thinking. This is one reason why taking an approach that changes their thinking is important rather than focusing on surface symptoms related to the affair.
In the downloadable Affair Recovery Workshop, I share techniques with you focused on starting the much needed changes in your marriage. You need new ways of doing things rather than merely readjusting your old ways of doing things.
I understand that you want things like the way it was. The problem is that the old ways contained some unhealthy habits that now become an obstacle to recovering from what happened.
Are you open to changing how the two of you do things? Are you tired enough of your efforts at shaming and guilt tripping not working to do things differently. If so, download the workshop and start changing your marriage.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
