Childhood Trauma, Affair-Prone Adult 

“My wife keeps asking me: ‘Why did you cheat? If you love me the way you say you do, how could you have done this to me?’ I wish I had an answer, but the truth is, I really don’t know. It kills me that my not knowing keeps her pain alive.” ~Mason, married for sixteen years

The betrayed partner/spouse wants answers. Answers that will put their pain to rest; answers that will pave the way for a future rebuilt on trust and emotional safety. Without this, uncertainty remains. And the threat of future betrayals remains all too real. 

Reducing the betrayal to a “terrible mistake” often does not offer any long-term solace to the betrayed because it gives no insight into the conscious and unconscious mind of the person who cheated. In short, the betrayed is saying, “If you do not know why you did this, how can you say you won’t make the same mistake again?”

In pulling back the psychological layers in an attempt to understand what made someone vulnerable to betraying their partner, it’s important to note that there is rarely a single cause-and-effect discovery that accounts for the act(s) of betrayal. Several factors are frequently at play, none of which “caused” the betrayal. These factors, when taken together, can be understood in making someone vulnerable to destructive acting-out; in other words, making them “affair-prone.”

The role of childhood trauma in becoming affair-prone

Childhood abuse (sexual, physical and/or psychological trauma) has a dramatic impact on the development of the self (how you view and experience yourself) and can lead to a wide range of mental health issues. Entrenched negative views of the self and/or a distrust of others (struggles with being emotionally vulnerable and intimate) are common outcomes that follow children into adulthood.  

The subjective experience of trauma involves:

“. . .a marginally bearable sense of helplessness, a realization that one’s own will and wishes become irrelevant to the course of events, leaving either a view of the self that is damaged; contaminated by humiliation, pain and fear that the event imposed; or a fragmented sense of self” (David Spiegel, 1990).

If you were a victim of childhood trauma, those early, overwhelming experiences may have caused you to dissociate (disconnect) from your inner life in order to navigate and manage the troubling and tumultuous feelings you faced. Unbeknownst to you, avoidance and dissociative disconnection may have become the norm, a way of being that is never called into question. As an adult, you may not be able to identify and effectively express your feelings. This can take the form of a pervasive estrangement from certain emotions; chronically feeling bored, numb or empty; or the tendency to be overwhelmed and flooded by the intensity of your feelings. 

(For a comprehensive look at childhood abuse and the way it impacts adults, see Browne & Finkelhor, 1986; Follette & Vechiu 2017; Pearlman, 2001).

If childhood trauma can have a profound, negative impact on how one copes and relates to themselves and others, it seems likely that some individuals with traumatic attachment wounds may have a heightened vulnerability to secretive acting-out. Understanding the role of childhood attachment wounds can help untangle the complicated knot of why someone may have been unfaithful. 

Cheating as a means to avoid re-experiencing childhood trauma

Our psychological defenses are there to help protect us from overwhelming pain. When a child is the victim of abuse, innate dissociative defenses attempt to mute the debilitating fear that arises. The child can be so overwhelmed and disoriented with fear that the trauma experience gets encoded in the brain differently than non-traumatic events (Van Der Kolk, 2014). As a result, memory coherence is lost. Additionally, the ability to encapsulate the experience in words is compromised, making it difficult to describe and make sense of what had occurred.  

This lack of memory coherence leads to fragmented, unprocessed memories (“I remember my father’s angry face and nothing else”; “I get nauseous and get a lump in my throat, and then I go blank”). These memory fragments exist in their raw form. It can be confusing and overwhelming to recall these trauma-based fragments — it can feel as though you are re-experiencing parts of the original trauma.

These feelings of danger may cause you to allocate a significant amount of mental and emotional energy to keep these memories boxed up and out of your awareness. 

At some point, these confusing memories can be triggered and enter (or begin to enter) awareness. This can be highly distressing and disorienting, and in an effort to manage what is occurring, some form of acting out may result. 

These acting-out behaviors (including compulsive porn use, sexual acting out, excessive alcohol or drug use, creating and managing a secretive life) can distract you from these traumatic intrusions. The acting out can also serve to numb your feelings connected to the intrusive, painful memories. I have worked with numerous clients who began to remember long-buried aspects of their childhood trauma after they stopped engaging in the acting-out behaviors that involved infidelity and other forms of self-medicating acting out. In these cases, it became apparent that the secretive world where acting out took place was helping to keep these memories at bay.

Cheating as a way to break through numbness and emptiness

By its very nature, trauma is overwhelming: during traumatic experiences, the human capacity to cope cannot manage the enormity of what is occurring. In order to psychologically survive, the individual must do something with the emotional extremes trauma provokes. Dissociation (the mind’s innate protective mechanism) helps to mitigate the anxiety, terror, rage and helplessness that traumatic events cause. Dissociation doesn’t completely remove inner turmoil, but it helps to mute and compartmentalize it enough so that life can generally be managed.

While dissociation can assist the adult survivor of childhood abuse in detaching from and compartmentalizing (segregating away) the intense feelings and memories associated with traumatic experiences, this protective survival strategy ends up casting an ever-widening net that numbs the individual’s emotional life. Many feelings not associated with the original trauma may get swept away by this dissociative net. 

The removal or dampening of emotions comes at a cost. An adult living in this emotional landscape can feel flat or empty. They might have lost access to the self-enhancing energy of emotions that instill vitality and a sense of purpose to their lives. They may now feel propelled to find ways to undo this emotional deadening.

Transgressive, secretive acting out can inadvertently be used to create intense emotional experiences strong enough to break through the dissociative veil.

Acting out in these ways isn’t necessarily about chasing a “feel good” moment. It’s about the removal of what now has become unbearable (an inner emptiness). In fact, many unfaithful partners/spouses in therapy report feeling uncomfortable or highly anxious during the transgressive acts. In short, they report that it is better to feel something (anxiety about one’s transgressive behaviors) than to feel nothing at all (to exist in a state of emotional deadness).  

Cheating as a reenactment of childhood abuse dynamics

Unresolved childhood abuse can continue to impact your life in complex ways. While the abusive events occurred in the past, the impact can remain alive in the way it continues to shape how you relate to yourself and others. You may have learned to protect yourself by not letting others, even those you love and trust, get too close to you. 

You may have constructed barriers to letting your partner know you fully; they may only get access to certain parts of you, the parts that you find acceptable, while other aspects of your inner world remain hidden behind a wall of shame and fear. These walled off self-experiences are the fragmented, traumatized parts of you, the parts that feel deeply unworthy and broken. Direct access to these self-parts can be impossible because of the self-loathing, disgust and shame surrounding them. It may not matter to these parts of you that your partner or spouse is kind and loving and would welcome all of you into the relationship.

This self-segregation is wholly internal, the wounds and barriers so deep and impenetrable that love does not reach them. 

When the childhood traumas are cloaked in secrecy, these parts of you may have learned to seek engagement only through the repetition of secrecy. The creation of a hidden life may act as a portal where these wounded, shame-based parts of you find some form of expression. Trauma-based secrecy may get repeated throughout your life unless the childhood traumas that occurred in secrecy are understood and emotionally worked through. 

The hidden parts that continue to carry the shame, fear and self-loathing that is often internalized during victimization may hold the expectations that further abuse or misfortune of some kind is inevitable. The adult survivor of childhood abuse may not only anticipate disaster, but also may see positive experiences as temporary placeholders, merely biding time until the inevitable adversity occurs.

The traumatized parts of an adult who has been victimized as a child may be waiting for things to go wrong in some way. One way to deal with the apprehension of this type of foreboding is to take preemptive control of a dreaded future by actively bringing about what is feared. You betray rather than wait to be betrayed; you become the orchestrator of “forbidden” sexual experiences rather than passively suffering the pain of unwanted sexual and boundary violations. 

These types of repetitions are often unconscious and do little to resolve the frozen trauma within. Rather, these repetitions are often devastating to self and others and can cause emotional damage. It is unfortunate that for some, it can take the emotional wreckage of an affair to finally face the inner pain that has followed them throughout their lives.

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It’s important to clarify the role of childhood trauma (sexual, physical or emotional abuse) as one possible factor in helping to understand the unfaithful, acting-out partner. Childhood abuse doesn’t “cause” someone to cheat. Some people are vulnerable to certain forms of acting-out behavior (which may include being affair-prone) due to the ways in which they adapted to childhood wounds over the course of their lives. 

There is no one size-fits-all understanding of what drives infidelity. Each situation and person are unique. Some individuals who cheat have endured significant childhood abuse, while others have not. But the past should be considered in any attempt to understand the complexities of why someone would betray their own deeply-held values and the people they love and care about. 

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Rich Nicastro, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with over twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and couples on a wide range of emotional issues. He specializes in trauma therapy and infidelity counseling. He offers teletherapy sessions to individuals and couples throughout the United States.

Article References

Browne, A., & Finkelhor, D. Impact of Child Sexual Abuse: A review of the Research. Psychological Bulletin, 1986, Vol 99, No. 1, 66-77. 

Follette, V. M., & Vechiu, C. (2017). Adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse: Review of theoretical and empirical literature. In S. N. Gold (Ed.), APA handbook of trauma psychology: Foundations in knowledge (pp. 117–132). American Psychological Association.

Pearlman, L.A. (2001). Treatment of Persons with Complex PTSD and other Trauma-Related Disruptions of the self. In Wilson, J.P., Friedman, M.J., & Lindy, J.D. (Eds.), Treating Psychological Trauma and PTSD (pp. 205-236). Guildford. 

Spiegel, D. (1990). Trauma, dissociation, and hypnosis. In R. Kluft (Ed.), Invent-related syndromes of adult psychopathology (pp. 247-262). American Psychiatric Press. 

Van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Pengui