Scientist Gottman said in his book “The Science of Trust” that a relationship with strangers is mathematically impossible. When we are involved in a relationship, we create a “shared reality”. We exchange information transparently with each other. But cheating breaks this shared reality into two parts – public reality and secret reality. Imagine two pilots sitting in the cockpit. One has all the radar data, weather reports, fuel levels – all the true information. The other has only half the information, because the first pilot is secretly hiding some warning signals. Now the two are flying the plane looking at two different “reality maps” – one thinks the sky is clear, the other knows there is a storm ahead. The greater this discrepancy, the worse the plane makes decisions – in the end, like relationships, the plane crashes abnormally.
Many people think that strangers’ relationships happen suddenly, but in fact, strangers’ relationships do not happen suddenly. Gottman analyzed twenty years of experimental evidence in his lab to show that a condition is created when thousands of micro-deceptions from a partner accumulate together, when the relationship system loses its predictability. A powerful reason behind infidelity is humiliation and humiliation, it is called the sulfuric acid of relationship breakdown.
Small insults, neglect and neglect accumulate day after day until there comes a time when the shared reality breaks down. When your partner hurts you with small acts of neglect and silence, your brain's amygdala encodes it as a microthreat. That's when the most terrible game comes. Your partner then starts communicating with an alternative person, receiving a small amount of validation from them, their microstress is relieved and their dopamine boost is massive. The dopamine they get from them, relieves the stress they get from you.
When a man contacts an alternative man on behalf of his partner, that man naturally praises him highly. He gets micro threats from you and high praise from the alternative man. He starts talking to the alternative man regularly to get rid of the stress hormone cortisol. And this is how the neurological seeds of cheating are sown. When the shared reality breaks down, the two go into two different universes.
One thinks, we are fine - just a little distance away. The other thinks I am fighting alone, no one understands me. Thus their universes start to separate. They can no longer connect with each other. From micro cheating, your partner disconnects from you, an emotional vacuum is created, he creates a secret life and ultimately it transforms into a relationship with someone else. You can no longer predict this relationship. Because the already-ready system is mathematically unstable. And random triggers like texts, attention, and validation from different men and women are enough to cause the relationship to collapse. Your partner wants relief from stress hormones and the competitive partner wants his body. But he never imagines for a moment that the same micro-threat that is driving him to another relationship today will drive him to another relationship again.
Once your partner is involved in an extramarital affair, you can never recover him. It is not a mood or ego of his. It is a neurobiological resistance of his. If your partner is cheated on by you, no matter how much you assure him of safety and security, he will not return to a safe relationship. His vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system are hyperactive. His brain is stuck in constant danger mode, his heart rate jumps to 160 bpm. Even if you try to repair the relationship, his brain won't let go. Once the amygdala of the brain accepts you as a "High Threat", it won't let go easily.
If you talk to him in a safe mood, his brain will cross-check it like this: "This signal doesn't match previous betrayal history.". When you tell him that everything can be fixed if you want, he won't listen to you. Because his prefrontal cortex has become weak due to getting microstress from you, he no longer has the ability to make decisions. No matter how much you ask him to come back, he won't be able to make logical sense of your words, your statement is neurologically ridiculous.
Gottman calls this psychological flooding. In this situation, the probability of failure of repair measures is more than 90%. If the brain once labels someone as "unsafe", to make them "safe" again, forgiveness, words, love—nothing is enough. This is not a game of willpower; it is an automatic survival mechanism of the nervous system. If he comes back to you, he has to come back through neurobiological changes, not emotions, 90% of people cannot achieve this.
But sadly, the scientist Gottman does not call extramarital sex immoral behavior. There is no religion, ethics or character judgment here. He says extramarital sex is a “personal emotional regulation problem”. A person gets involved in extramarital sex because of his trauma background. But how do you feel when your partner is extramarital sex?
To answer this question, imagine that a relationship is an ecosystem. Just as a tree survives when everything is in balance—water, light, nutrients—in an ecosystem, a relationship survives on the attention, empathy, intimacy, self-control, sensitivity, and trust of both parties. These are the nutrients of a relationship. Alienation is the act of taking nutrients from this ecosystem and giving them to another ecosystem. It is not a personality problem, but an imbalance in the environment. When your lover gives intimacy to someone else instead of giving you intimacy, it creates a direct neurological wound in your brain. It directly hits your safety system. And then you start feeling like __ I am not enough. My place has been taken away. I have been thrown away. He no longer feels safe. I am alone now. He is taking your affection, empathy, and sex away from you and giving them to someone else. Your brain sees it as deprivation, its attachment panic develops, its body goes into fight or flight and freeze mode. The memory cortex of the human brain, the hippocampus, shrinks from the trauma of alienation.
Suppose there is only one person in your life whose shoulder you rest your head on. Your nervous system has registered him as a “safe person”. One day you see him using his shoulder for someone else. And he didn’t tell you. This is not your moral outrage – this is a blow to your safety system. Your inner brain just says – “I am not safe now.” As long as this wound does not heal, the relationship does not work, it is called an “attachment wound”. Alienation is not a character flaw. It breaks our sense of security, it is not a moral issue, it is a neurological injury.
Lihan Prime
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