When my wife gets into her car, she wants it to go. She’s not as interested as I am in how it goes and what all is involved in making the car operate.
Not everyone is interested in what happens inside the car and its engine. They’re only interested in it doing what it’s supposed to do.
Likewise, when it comes to affairs some of you are only interested in making things work. Understanding what happens in the cheater’s brain during the affair is not your stated top priority.
You may ask “What were you thinking?” in a rhetorical manner. You say you want to know, but not in terms of the technical specifics.
Others do want to know and understand what happens in the cheater’s brain. Today, I’ll give you a 10,000 foot overview of what happens.
First, the affair changes your brain. What changes are the pathways and connections inside your brain. The hormones that are released during an affair also change the way your brain works. The parts that act on impulse speed up, while the areas that put the brakes on behavior are impaired.
Your frontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibition (e.g. putting the brakes on), is reduced in brain activity. This means that you’re not as likely to think before you act. The part of your brain that’s responsible for judgment and impulse control is also impaired.
Whether or not you intended the changes to happen, they did. When you make changes like that, it changes how you think and eventually how you behave.
You may be able to act the same due to your memory. This hides some of the changes. Since cheaters function based on what they see, they assume nothing has changed for them, since they can’t see what happened in their brain.
Eventually, the truth will come out though. How you think and consider things in your brain takes new directions. Those new pathways formed by the affair start making an impact.
Besides changes in the brain pathways, and reduced impulse control, there are also changes in the chemicals working in your brain. This amounts to a change in how it works and the ability of your brain to work. The longer the affair goes on, the more changes occur.
Undoing those changes requires effort. Those changes don’t correct and fix themselves. You may think that you’re back to normal, but that’s far from the truth. Your spouse knows you’re different. You may be the only one who continues believing you’re still the same.
You can modify and redirect many of those changes. You can reprogram the functioning of your brain, in order to prevent affair situations from happening again.
In my video on “Overcoming Affair Relapse”, I share techniques designed for making changes in how you think and do things. As long as you ignore the programming that happened with the affair, you’re vulnerable to that programming being activated again.
Take the step toward changing that programming today by downloading the video.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
