When I first started out as a psychologist three decades ago, few clients were entering therapy with a self-diagnosis. They knew something about their life wasn’t working, or they were emotionally distressed in some way, but I rarely, if ever, heard, “I have an avoidant attachment style I’d like to overcome,” or “My partner said I’m a covert narcissist and I read up on it and it sounds about right. Do you work with covert narcissists?” Today, this sort of pre-therapy framing is more commonplace.
There are clear benefits to educating yourself about what might be getting in the way of living a fulfilling and rewarding life. There is an abundance of good information available online and, unfortunately, there is also plenty of ill-informed advice. The oversimplified, black-and-white proclamations about what is “wrong” with us and what we should do about it can impart an easy, false sense of certainty while diluting the complexity of human life. It can feel intolerable to exist in a state of uncertainty, so anything that promises the relief of clarity is highly appealing.
With this trend, increasing numbers of unfaithful partners and spouses are learning about compartmentalization, and the concept is resonating with many of them. For some, it offers a pathway toward understanding how they could have lived a secretive life that involved betraying their loved ones. On numerous occasions, I’ve had a client who, when asked by the betrayed partner how they could have cheated and lied so readily, reply, “I compartmentalized and didn’t think about it. . .I’m sorry.”
Unpacking compartmentalization
But compartmentalization has its limits in what it can tell us about the unfaithful partner’s behavior. Compartmentalization is real, and I believe it can be a very important part of understanding how someone is able to maintain a secret life while remaining emotionally engaged with their partner (and family). But on its own, the concept is insufficient. Too often, it is treated as a complete explanation when it is actually a single part of a complex psychological process.
Saying “I compartmentalized” tells us something important: the unfaithful partner was somehow able to keep their secretive world mentally separate enough that they could move back and forth between two disparate realities. But this leaves important psychological questions unanswered, questions the unfaithful partner must grapple with in order to fully understand how they were able to so readily injure their loved ones.
Compartmentalization didn’t start with infidelity
In exploring the role of compartmentalization in infidelity, a deeper understanding must occur of how compartmentalization became part of your psychological repertoire long before the infidelity—starting with an exploration of how, as a psychological defense, it once helped you get through painful, frightening, or overwhelming periods of your life.
What may have once been an effective or even necessary means of coping with earlier painful and traumatic experiences can later be recruited for a very different purpose, allowing you to separate parts of yourself and your life in ways that become deeply destructive to yourself and to the people you love.
Children are quick to avoid painful experiences. They become overwhelmed, shut down and will often do everything in their power not to talk about, or mentally revisit, what has frightened or hurt them. With more troubling and traumatic experiences, the child who doesn’t receive the support needed to make sense of what has occurred may increasingly rely on dissociation and compartmentalization to manage their internal life. This can be adaptive, allowing them to pay attention and function at school or play with their friends while putting away the painful reality of an abusive, frightening or absent parent, for example.
But the child isn’t only learning how to compartmentalize painful feelings and memories. They may also begin to compartmentalize different experiences of themselves. The frightened, ashamed, helpless child who exists in one setting may feel very different from the playful child who laughs with friends at school, or the highly competent child who gets good grades and appears to handle typical crises in stride. These aren’t literally different people living inside the child. Rather, these are different ways of being that include differing motives, patterns of thinking and feeling, varying behaviors. In psychoanalytic literature, these have been called self-states. We all have different self-states.
For the traumatized child/teenager, however, over time, these self-states can become increasingly disconnected from one another. What the child feels, believes and even remembers about themselves in one state may become difficult to access when they are in another. These inaccessible self-states continue to have a significant impact on one’s mental wellbeing.
Looking more closely at what compartmentalization leaves out
If we stop at the explanation that the unfaithful partner “put the affair in a separate compartment,” we miss some of the most important psychological questions. The compartments themselves tell us something, but we also need to understand what changes internally that allows someone to move between these very different realities. There are four areas that deserve particular attention.
1) Knowing versus emotionally knowing
Someone who is unfaithful doesn’t literally forget they are in a committed relationship when they enter the secretive world of betrayal. They know they have a partner/spouse waiting for them at home (and perhaps children too). If they reflected for a moment they also know that what they are doing will cause enormous pain if it’s discovered. So when someone says, “I just didn’t think about my partner when I was with the other person,” we need to get more curious about what “not thinking about” actually means.
There is an important difference between knowing something intellectually and remaining emotionally connected to what you know. The unfaithful partner may know that “I have a wife who loves and trusts me,” while at particular moments of acting out becomes less emotionally connected to everything this knowledge ordinarily carries with it. Their partner hasn’t disappeared from their mind, but their felt sense of their partner as a living, vulnerable, vitally important person—someone who shares a history with them, who trusts them and who can be deeply injured by what they are doing—may temporarily recede. The intellectual knowledge remains available while its emotional weight has drained away.
This is important because now we are talking about something more complicated than putting information into a mental box. We are asking how a person can remain cognitively aware of one reality while becoming emotionally disconnected from important parts of that same reality. This is what needs to be explored in the infidelity recovery process:
Did other forms of dissociation numb out the affective component of what was occurring?
Was the unfaithful partner pulled into a childhood trauma re-enactment in the acting out dynamics—a re-enactment that has self-destructive components to it?
These are just a few questions that should be explored.
2) What happens to empathy?
I have worked with unfaithful partners who will say after discovery, “At some level I must have known this would destroy them if they ever found out.” The betrayed partner understandably hears this and is stunned: “Then how could you keep doing it?! If you knew how devastating this would be, shouldn’t that knowledge have stopped you?”
But knowing that someone would be devastated and emotionally experiencing their potential devastation are not necessarily the same thing.
Empathy requires us, at least momentarily, to step outside our own immediate experiences (our own desires, wants and struggles) and enter the subjective world of another person. If the unfaithful partner was able to remain emotionally connected to their partner’s presence and could vividly imagine the pain their actions could cause, that empathic awareness might have created a powerful internal obstacle to continuing the betrayal. Yet clearly, for many, this empathic step doesn’t occur.
As one unfaithful partner said, “It’s like part of me chose not to consider my husband so I could carry out the affair. That was the most pivotal decision in this whole chain of events during this period.” That decision point prevents the acting out spouse/partner from emotionally knowing what their actions would do to the person they love.
Said differently, empathy is lost when the betrayed partner’s inner world is less (if at all) accessible while the unfaithful partner’s experience of desire, excitement, resentment, sexual gratification, validation or escapism are allowed to dominate.
I don’t think there is one answer to why empathy can become diminished in these moments. For some people, entitlement may play a significant role. For others, resentment allows them to justify what they are doing. Intense excitement and and even fear (during trauma re-enactments) can narrow attention around what they want in the moment. And for others, dissociation and the compartmentalization of different self-states may make the betrayed partner’s emotional reality harder to access.
These distinctions are important. Saying someone “lacked empathy” can become almost as unsatisfying as saying they “compartmentalized.” The more useful question is what happened to their capacity for empathy in those moments? And what allowed them to repeatedly move away from empathy when it did break through?
3) Who do I become during infidelity?
We also need to consider that the two compartments may not simply contain two different relationships. One contains the marriage/committed relationship and the other contains the affair. There may also be two very different experiences of the self: the self-with-my-partner and the self-with-my-affair-partner.
This becomes particularly important for someone who already has a history of separating different self-states. Someone who experiences themselves at home as inadequate, responsible for everyone, aging rapidly, sexually undesirable, criticized or burdened may experience themselves very differently within the secretive world. There they may feel desirable, sexually emboldened, interesting, carefree, rebellious, younger.
In the secretive acting out world, they may become deeply drawn to the person they turn into—a version of themselves that has become difficult to find in the rest of their life. This doesn’t excuse the betrayal, nor does it mean an affair partner somehow created this version of the unfaithful partner. But this shift in self-states may help us understand some of the psychological pull.
This is where an already established capacity for compartmentalizing self-states can become particularly destructive. Rather than having to hold the contradictions together (“I feel old and I also want to feel vital”; “I love my wife and I resent her at times”; “I am a responsible parent and I also long to be free of responsibility sometimes”; “I feel inadequate and desperately want to feel desirable”), the person ends up living these experiences separately. One version of the self exists at home and another comes alive within a hidden, fragmented world that exists underground.
The problem is no longer simply that two realities are being kept apart. Parts of the person’s own identity are being kept apart as well.
4) Pay attention to the doorway between the compartments
We tend to focus on the compartments themselves, but I think we should also pay attention to the doorway between them. What happens psychologically when someone moves from one world into the other? A person leaves home, drives twenty minutes and meets an affair partner. An hour later, they drive home and have dinner with their family. Those transitions are remarkable when we really stop and think about them. Something has to happen internally that allows the person to move between such contradictory experiences.
- What changes while crossing that doorway?
- Does their attention narrow?
- Does their partner begin to feel more distant in their mind as the affair encounter approaches?
- Does excitement drown out anxiety and guilt?
- Does a different version of the self become more dominant?
- And then what happens on the drive home? Does the affair suddenly begin to feel unreal or far away?
- Does guilt return as the world of the family becomes psychologically present once more?
- Does the wayward partner rehearse the necessary lies about their whereabouts during the drive home? Do they emotionally numb themselves? Or do they simply shift back into the role of spouse and parent with surprisingly little internal conflict?
The concept of liminality may also help us think about this doorway. Liminality describes an in-between or threshold state, where someone has psychologically moved away from one reality or way of being but hasn’t fully arrived in another. For the unfaithful partner, these transitions may create a kind of liminal psychological space where the boundaries between the committed self and the secretive self become less fixed, and where certain feelings, responsibilities and parts of the self can temporarily recede while others become more dominant. I wrote about the role of liminality and infidelity in my article Trauma and the Affair-Secrecy Mindset.
Looking closely at these transitions may also help us understand the possible role of dissociation, derealization and depersonalization.
Dissociation involves some degree of disconnection from experiences that would ordinarily be linked — our thoughts, feelings, memories, sense of self or what is happening around us. Dissociation is a protective defense of the mind, especially for those who’ve survived childhood abuse. At the milder end, most of us have experienced something like this: driving somewhere familiar and realizing we have little memory of parts of the journey we just made, or becoming so absorbed in something that the world around us seems to disappear. Under greater emotional stress, however, this distancing can become more pronounced and can serve as a way of moving away from feelings or experiences that are difficult to tolerate.
Derealization and depersonalization describe more particular kinds of this distancing. With derealization, the world around us can feel strangely distant, unreal, dreamlike or somehow lacking its usual emotional reality. With depersonalization, the distance that springs up is actually distance from ourselves; a person may feel detached from their own body, feelings, actions or even the familiar sense of who they are. These experiences don’t necessarily mean that someone loses touch with reality. A person can know perfectly well where they are, who they are partnered with, and what they are doing while at the same time feeling strangely disconnected from the emotional reality of these things.
This is where dissociative processes may add something important to our understanding of compartmentalization. Compartmentalization describes how contradictory parts of a person’s life and self can remain psychologically separated. Dissociation, derealization and depersonalization may help us understand, for some people, what the experience of that separation actually feels like and how emotional distance from one reality can be created or maintained while another reality becomes more psychologically dominant.
This doesn’t mean that every person who has a secretive life is dissociating, experiencing derealization or becoming depersonalized. Some people may knowingly push thoughts of their spouse/partner aside, others may rely heavily on rationalization or entitlement, and for others the thrill and danger of the affair may simply dominate their attention. But when an unfaithful partner describes one life becoming strangely distant or unreal while inhabiting another, these concepts give us a more precise way of exploring what may have been occurring, rather than simply ending the inquiry with, “I compartmentalized.”
“I compartmentalized” is the beginning, not the end
When an unfaithful partner says, “I compartmentalized,” I don’t think we should dismiss this. For many people it accurately describes something important about how they were able to enter and maintain a secretive life while continuing to function as a spouse/partner and/or parent. But this realization should be the beginning of deeper exploration, not the end of it.
The questions that follow are much harder to answer but need exploration:
- When did you first learn to separate painful or conflicting parts of your emotional life? What were you needing to manage internally during these times?
- What happened to your emotional connection to your partner while you were acting out?
- What happened to your empathy?
- When guilt, love, fear or an awareness of the consequences broke through the compartment, what did you do internally that allowed you to continue the infidelity?
- What version of yourself became available in the secretive world that perhaps feels unavailable elsewhere? Are there healthier versions of these inaccessible self-states that you can integrate into your life?
These questions matter because recovery from infidelity requires more than finding a psychological term that explains the past. The unfaithful partner needs to understand their own mind well enough to recognize the conditions that made secrecy and betrayal possible. This may involve confronting old defenses that once served an important purpose, understanding the different self-states that emerged within the affair, and developing a greater capacity to remain emotionally connected to difficult feelings rather than psychologically moving away from them.
The goal isn’t simply to get rid of compartmentalization; we all need the ability to temporarily set things aside in order to function. The deeper work is learning to recognize when putting something away has turned into psychologically abandoning ourselves, our core values and our loved ones.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience supporting individuals and couples as they navigate betrayal trauma and other emotional challenges. He offers teletherapy to clients throughout the United States. To work with Dr. Nicastro and join his waiting list, please email him at Rich@RichardNicastro.com.
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Bromberg, P. M. (2009). Multiple self-states, the relational mind, and dissociation: A psychoanalytic perspective. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O’Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 637–652). Routledge.
Chefetz, R. A. (2015). Intensive psychotherapy for persistent dissociative processes: The fear of feeling real. W. W. Norton & Company.
Howell, E. F. (2005). The dissociative mind. Analytic Press.
