Love and romance may be in the air at this time of year, but relational therapeutic coach Alex Croxford looks at a rarely spoken-of aspect of relationships: why some women cheat. It’s often, she says, due to childhood shame and shutdown
Words: Alex Croxford | Images: Shutterstock and bry penney for image of alex.
Recently, I found my A-level art piece: a self-portrait I did at age 17. My head resting in my hand, a deep sadness in my eyes, wearing a T-shirt with the word “Sinner” emblazoned across my chest. I honestly don’t remember what I was feeling back then. I don’t even remember choosing that word. But looking at it, 25 years later, it stopped me in my tracks.
What’s strange is that, back then, I wouldn’t have thought I was a bad person. But looking at the painting now, shame oozes out of me, clearly a belief stored deep in my unconscious mind. A belief I know now to have formed while I was very young.
The truth is, when a child believes she’s bad, she will often also create a story that she doesn’t matter, and learns to survive by making herself smaller, more acceptable, and more accommodating, so as to be loved. She learns that it is most important to keep everyone else happy, and begins to keep her feelings to herself. Perfection and achievement become the most important things to her.
People often miss that you don’t need to have experienced a traumatic childhood for these beliefs and feelings to take root. You don’t need violence or chaos. Shame is absorbed when your feelings are dismissed because a parent is tired, or when you’re told you’re overreacting. When you learn that your emotions are inconvenient. When you’re praised for being “good” and doing well at school or in sports, and told off for telling the truth. When you grow up in a home where emotions are shut down or expressed so intensely that you have to be constantly on the lookout for what’s next.
These may seem like small moments, but they shape a child’s sense of self. You learn something is wrong with you. So, you adapt. You start to become smaller, better, even more perfect. You decide it’s safer not to ask for anything; it’s best if you just cope on your own.
Mask of perfection
The truth is, these ways of being don’t disappear with age – you carry them into adulthood. You try to prove you matter by working hard, by putting everyone else’s feelings first, by getting the promotion or the house or the big wedding. You become the reliable one, the easy-breezy one, the one who puts her head down and doesn’t complain.
In my work with hundreds of women who’ve betrayed a partner in some way, I see these same patterns again and again. And, understandably, they come to me shocked. ‘How could I, the one who everyone sees as so together and perfect, do this to a man I love?’
But betrayal isn’t the real issue, it’s a symptom of years of self-betrayal – living a life split between who you really are and who you think you need to be to be loved.
This disconnect from yourself has a huge impact on your adult relationships. You long for deeper connection, but for that to happen, you must let yourself be seen. Seen in your raw, human messiness. You must be willing to be vulnerable and to feel your feelings. And when you’ve been wearing a mask of perfection for decades, being seen like that feels dangerous. You’re terrified that if you show the parts of yourself you’ve been suppressing since childhood, you’ll be rejected. So, you don’t. You keep choosing the role of the safe, together one, the one with no needs. But your system can’t tolerate that disconnect forever. When you hide your wants and needs for too long, your nervous system shuts down in subtle ways. You might feel numb, lonely or flat. Depressed even.
And that’s often the point when the betrayal happens. Even though it might seem like it comes from nowhere, it doesn’t. It builds up over years of self-abandonment. Years of swallowing your emotions, biting your tongue, pretending you’re fine. Years of believing your needs don’t matter.
Every single woman I work with tells me she felt alive in the affair. She felt wanted, noticed, seen. And here’s the crazy thing: it’s not because she wanted a new partner (it’s never really about them), but because an old part of her, the part she left in childhood, suddenly wakes up and says, ‘Enough. I can’t be hidden anymore.’
We talk about affairs as moral failures, but we rarely talk about the childhood shame that creates them. It explains why you may have found yourself in a situation you never expected. And afterwards, the shame, guilt and self-blame become overwhelming. But I remember one of my mentors saying to me, ‘Alex, this shame you’re feeling isn’t from the affair. This is frozen in your system from your childhood.’ And at the time, nearly seven years ago, it felt unbelievable. But now, I know it to be true.
Reconnecting to yourself
Healing doesn’t happen from understanding what went wrong in your relationship. Deep healing only begins when you meet the part of yourself you abandoned long before the affair. As you reconnect to your emotional world – the one you shut down as a young child – and begin to tell the truth about how you’re feeling and what you need, you start to show up in life like you matter, even when it feels unfamiliar.
When you do this, not only does your relationship with yourself change, but so does your relationship with others. Relationships begin to feel deeper, more connected. You are able to receive love because you know that you are worthy of it. You begin to feel safe in your body. You can trust your intuition. You can make decisions for yourself, not to please everyone else.
The pain of being the one to cheat is unbearable, but it is also an opportunity to see what it is trying to teach you. After my affair, my whole life crumbled to the floor: friendships, marriage, my home. But now I can see, not only in myself but in my clients, that the pain of the affair is a portal. And if you are willing to step through that portal and begin to meet yourself in a whole new way, it can be the beginning of your becoming.
To find out more about Alex’s one-to-one and group work, visit alexcroxford.com
