What If Your Affair Wasn’t Just About Your Marriage or Your Affair Partner?
Updated: Oct 7
Through my research and conversations with women about why they have had affairs, some of the answers I have heard are:
“My marriage felt so platonic. My affair partner made me feel like a woman.”
“My spouse was always working. I was always alone.”
“I had to take care of everything at home. My affair partner took care of me.”
As a therapist, I find that these answers provide a trailhead into issues that go much deeper than a relationship that feels platonic or a spouse who works too much.
When a client tells me, “My affair partner took care of me,” I’m interested not only in what her affair partner did, but in who she got to be with them. Was this one of the few places she allowed herself to stop taking care of everyone else? When she says, “They made me feel like a woman,” I wonder what happened to the sensual, sexual, or playful parts of herself before the affair, and how she became so disconnected from them.
For many of the women I work with, the affair became a place where parts of themselves that had been pushed aside for years could finally emerge.
What is disconnection from yourself?
Many of the women I work with in my practice have spent years being nice, agreeable, responsible, high-achieving, keeping the peace, and getting things done.
Often this begins during childhood, when you learn to adapt by emphasizing certain parts of yourself and suppressing others. Parts of you learn that people like you when you’re helpful, other people‘s feelings come first, achievement earns approval, and being difficult leads to disconnection.
When you’re constantly thinking about what others want or what you need to do, you may consistently prioritize those things over what you truly want. You may become disconnected from your needs, your body, or your sexuality. You may ignore or lose touch with the parts of yourself that help you rest, give your true opinion, speak up when you don’t like something, or rely on others to take care of things. Over time, you may become so accustomed to suppressing these parts that you barely notice you're doing it.
How does being disconnected from yourself impact your marriage?
When you keep the disagreeable, honest, or messy parts of yourself hidden, your spouse has no way of knowing what you truly want or how you feel.
If you have parts that go along with things to keep the peace, your spouse may have no idea that a joke they made hurt your feelings, because you smiled and said nothing. They have no way of knowing that last Thursday you wanted to go out for sushi because, instead of telling them what you wanted, you asked where they wanted to go.
When you suppress parts of yourself, your spouse may not have the opportunity to truly know you, take care of you, or respond to your needs.
Over time, you may feel increasingly resentful or lonely in your marriage. Of course, expressing your needs doesn't guarantee that your spouse will respond to them. Sometimes becoming more connected to yourself means giving your spouse the opportunity to know and respond to what you actually want. Other times, it means recognizing how long you've been tolerating a relationship that isn't working for you.
An Affair: The Messy Solution
Suppressing parts of yourself doesn't necessarily make them disappear. Sometimes they emerge in unexpected, messy ways. My colleague Dr. Anne McKay, who specializes in couples and relationship therapy, described this to me as “toothpaste leaking out of the sides of the toothpaste tube.” This image has stuck with me ever since.
If you had an affair, it may have become the space where the suppressed parts of you could finally exist. Maybe you gained access to parts of yourself that you had never experienced before, or hadn’t experienced for years.
Who did you get to be with your affair partner that you didn't get to be anywhere else?
I’ve heard women say that their affair made them feel alive. This may be because they were able to connect to excited, sensual, or vulnerable parts of themselves. During sex with their affair partner, they may have felt present in their bodies in a way they hadn’t experienced before. They may have opened up about their emotions and fears in a deeper way. They were experiencing themselves differently.
Maybe this was true for you too. Maybe in the affair, you didn’t have to be the nice, strong, or responsible one. You could stop being a giver and start being a receiver, stop being the caretaker and allow someone to take care of you, and stop feeling like the manager and let someone else manage things.
It can be incredibly difficult to end an affair when it's the only way you're accessing important parts of yourself. It can be even more difficult when you attribute what you're experiencing to your affair partner. You may believe you're able to be vulnerable because your affair partner is such a good listener. You may think, “I can only talk like this with them,” or “No one has ever made me feel this way.”
Your affair partner may genuinely have qualities that helped you feel safe, desired, or understood. But some of what you experienced with them wasn't something they gave you. It was something they helped you access in yourself.
You don’t have to continue an affair to be connected to those parts of yourself. Your affair partner may have been a good listener, but it wasn’t just about them. A part of you was ready to be open and vulnerable.
How Can I Take Accountability for the Affair?
Just because you had reasons for your affair does not excuse it. While parts of you may have been longing to come out, you still chose to have an affair.
For many women, accountability includes both addressing the harm caused by the affair and understanding what made them vulnerable to having one in the first place. For the women I work with, an important part of understanding the affair is exploring the parts of themselves they connected with through it, and learning to give those parts space in the rest of their lives.
How IFS Helps.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a type of therapy that focuses on getting to know different parts of yourself. In IFS therapy, we explore the parts of you, including the ones that perform, manage, please others, endure, and hide anger. We begin to understand how these parts protected you. We connect with the suppressed parts of you, including parts that may carry desire, needs, sexuality, and vulnerability. We work toward creating more balance and harmony between all parts.
Doing this work can help you:
Say no
Express hurt feelings instead of pretending everything is fine
Ask for what you want sexually
Tolerate other people’s disappointment
Stop doing everything for everyone
Ask to be cared for
Rest
Make choices because you want them
Leave a relationship that isn't right for you
Conclusion
Ending an affair does not have to mean giving up the parts of yourself you found through it. Therapy can help you reclaim desire, playfulness, sexuality, vulnerability, and aliveness without secrecy or betrayal.
You do not have to return to the woman you were before the affair. You can understand what was missing from her life and learn how to make room for it now. You don't just learn how to stop having an affair. You also learn how to stop abandoning parts of yourself.
About the author: Amy Crawford, LPC, LCPC, is a Certified IFS Therapist. She works with clients navigating anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and grief after infidelity and divorce. Amy has a 100% virtual practice and works with clients located across Virginia, Maryland, and Florida.
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