CHEATING SPOUSE (Why It Happens And How To Stop It)

when you have a spouse that is cheating it can be completely overwhelming because you don't even know the questions that ask where to start your heart is hurting you're scared there's so many emotions that go into that two of the main questions that we here at marriage help are when people find out that they have a spouse who's cheating on them is they want to know why it's happening and they want to know how they can stop it my name is Kimberly Holmes I'm the CEO at Merritt Ober and I'm joined today by dr. Joe beam the founder and chairman of marriage helper and as we open this show today we're gonna spend a couple of minutes talking about this topic specifically because it's one that we get so much we get so many questions about it of how can I stop my spouse from cheating but more than that how can I know why it happened so that we can keep it from happening again you see if you want to start with that first part of why is this happening why is my spouse cheating there's actually two reasons that we see at marriage helper that someone would have an affair one is that there might be a sexual drive for it and the other is that there might be an emotional drive for it now let me explain what that means there are different ways that Affairs can start sometimes they know someone at work sometimes they go to a nightclub and they get involved in the wrong kind of situation and when we look at how affair start we can see which kind of affair it kind of is so to say one that's primarily sexual driven where someone's looking to fulfill that physiological need they're just wanting sex primarily and that's what the affair ends up being mostly about and then that second one is the emotional one now this one it typically starts as a friendship maybe the two people work together they see each other at church I mean however it might be they start first by forming a relationship a friendship of some kind and from that the person the married person may be your spouse if you're in this situation begins to open up to the person feels feelings about this other person that's listening to them that's treating them with this respect and friendship that they haven't felt in a while and begin to open up even more and over time it evolved into what we would call marriage helper an emotional affair now the specific situations of why all of these things happen I mean you could go really in depth for many of those and we don't have the time right now to navigate and explain how all of those situations can happen but if we're gonna sum it up it would be those two instances that quote/unquote lead in to an affair now me just telling you that I don't know that it's gonna make you feel any better maybe it would but sometimes people hear that and especially if they know that their spouse is in an emotional affair it can make them feel even worse by saying well I could have done something to prevent this why didn't I do something to prevent this if I was a better husband if I was a better wife then maybe my spouse wouldn't have felt the pull and the drive and the need to have an extramarital relationship that apart from me and what we know at mayor topper is no one is perfect number one there's no perfect wife there's no perfect husband and while you can look back and think of a hundred things that you wish that you would have could have should have done differently today none of that matters because today you can change what you're doing going forward even if you can't change what you did going back now there's definitely value in knowing the things that you've done in the past and what you should change but you shouldn't beat yourself up about it because that's going to inhibit you from being able to move forward and what we know dr. beam Jo at marriage helper is the best thing that we can do when we're trying to move forward when our spouse is having an affair well let's maybe put it this way first what is the worst thing we can do when we find out our spouse is having an affair that we see that you have seen with your many years of experience that most people first do when they find out their spouses I mean having an affair well that's that's too broad a question so let me try to answer it this way if I may when people focus on trying to save the marriage like this is what I'm focused on if so I'm gonna do almost inevitably they wind up in the wrong things because they wanna pleading and whining and begging or confronting or thinking that somehow can manipulate you out of this or I can punish you enough that you'll stop this and so we say that the worst thing you can do if you save your marriage from the fairies to focus on trying to stop the affair or is it a different way to focus on trying to save the marriage now as you heard Kimberly understand I'm gonna use a little different words here from there the first motivation for an affair is not necessarily sexual it manifests itself sexually but the motivation might be that somebody wants to violate the rules a motivation might be that somebody's saying I want to punish my spouse for whatever he or she did and so it manifests itself sexually but it's not always motivated by sex in the second one to modify the phrases a little bit if I may we call a relational affair in a relational affair can have two different mentions one is the emotional where that they don't actually get physical with each other and the other is where it's they do get physical with each other but it's really about the relationship and so as Kimberly was explaining if indeed it's primarily if you can get to the touch out of both of us I can talk to Kimberly I'd appreciate that thank you and so primarily it has to do with either it's motivated by something that is actually comes out as sex and go into it comes primarily a sexual thing no matter what is motivated by or the other is motivated by the relationship and if indeed you try to stop it if that's won't come your motive that's not gonna work so what is the right thing to do if it's not trying to stop that then what's the right thing to do to stop it well first of all I just want everyone to hear what you said and let it sink in before we get to that next part if your motivation if the what do you call it the focus illusion wrong in this would not be opposed Lou you know if the but if your focus of this is I'm going to stop and if that is your motivation your intention behind it then think about this first I can and understand something every action you take every response you give to your spouse if that's what you're primarily thinking of then it's going to be leaning towards that way and the reason it's not going to work because you might be thinking well how is it a bad thing to want to save my marriage how is it a bad thing to focus on wanting to stop the affair because if that's your intention you're going to appear desperate you're not just going to appear desperate you're going to be desperate because you're going to try and take control of a situation that you have absolutely no control up it's gonna affect the way that you speak to your spouse it's going to affect the way that you see the circumstances around you everything is going to be affected that's why we're saying if you make that your intention your motivation if that's what you guide everything around it's not going to work because what you have to realize is that the only thing that you can control is yourself you can't control what your spouse is doing you can't control the fact that there's an affair going on you have no control over whether or not it continues or stops you don't the only person that you have any control over is yourself so that is why what we teach at marriage helper is if in this type of situation the best thing that you can do is focus on you not because you have the ability to change the situation but because you only have the ability to change yourself and that's why we teach the importance of the pi's focusing on being the best that you can be in four areas of your life we call them the four areas of Attraction there's physical intellectual emotional and spiritual we have a ton more about that you can go to our YouTube channel youtube.com slash marriage helper and you can find more videos we released one just a couple of weeks ago on the pi's where I go a little bit more in detail on each area of that and how you can apply each of those in your life but the bottom line of it is this you might be sitting there thinking how is my spouse gonna know that I'm changing why does this matter to me right now here's why you do the pies first and foremost for you because it changes your focus when your focus becomes on being the best that you can be then physically intellectually emotionally spiritually you're taking care of yourself the chaos in the high emotions and the stress and the worries that come with just focusing on your spouse being in an affair will start to diminish you'll begin to feel like you can start to take control back of your own emotions and your own life because you're focusing on these things that you need to be focusing on the areas of the pi's Joe we got an email from one of our clients overseas one of our international clients there's a ton people joining us even on this show today our marriage help our live show in Germany and all across the world and so we got an email from an international client over the weekend saying she found this on YouTube she watched your videos of how to choose between a lover and a spouse and a difference between love and limerence and from that she said I realized what I needed to do even though my husband was involved in an affair was I needed to work on my pies and she said she did that and it's made an amazing change you have a person whose husband is still involved with someone else but she's seeing amazing change because she is working on her pies and she's eternally grateful for what she's learned and it's amazing yes if I can summarize quickly because we've kind of gotten more into this than we needed to which is this if there's an affair that's occurring it's gonna either be because of the fact that it's gonna manifest itself primarily sexually no matter what motive is driving it or it's gonna manifest itself in either emotions or sexually but being driven by the affected looking for the relationship a different relationship than they have with you and so the best thing you can do is not focus on trying to change them Kimberly said that marriage well but that you focus on you becoming the best that you can be and you're saying but I need to stop what they're doing the best thing you can do is focus on the only thing you can do we should become the best that you can be and so hopefully we've made those points and you heard that and then becomes summary [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Marriage Helper

Views: 14,662

Rating: 4.8670697 out of 5

Keywords: love, hate, husband, wife, marriage, divorce, limerence, affair, cheating, spouse, advice, separation, marriage helper, marriage advice, marriage tips, marriage counseling, marriage coaching, save my marriage, dr joe beam, kimberly holmes, fix my marriage, marriage help, stop divorce

Id: zs3ySvQH5Eo

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020