Childhood Trauma or past relationship cheating can lead to affair trauma.

I also notice that it is often traumatised people cheat, they have had their view of themselves, the world challenged in the past. It’s also behind many addictive behaviours. Addiction is an attempt to regulate oneself, to get rid of an unpleasant feeling and replace it with a pleasant one, to regulate the nervous system. Secondary behaviors that follow addiction are lying, cheating, betraying everything and everybody. Then, this is followed by shame. We can recognize that even addiction as a set of adaptations, it’s a way to cope

Trauma also changes our nervous system. When we’re traumatized, we’re in fight or flight mode, or we’re in freeze mode and we dissociate. Any of these may be associated with a stomach upset or breathing problems.

Trauma changes the nervous system so that we will act as though we are in a defensive mode, even when there is no danger. So that’s an automatic reaction.

Trauma can also distort our relationships, and cause us to seek relationships with people who either rescue us from ourselves. You might be very upset with them when they don’t rescue you, and will look for someone else to rescue you or take care of you. You might seek a relationship unwillingly where you reenact all the trauma that you’ve already experienced because that’s what you now think is normal. So you’ll attract somebody or be interested in somebody who reminds you of one of the people in your life, one of your parents perhaps, or another important figure in your childhood that traumatized you because that’s what you know.

Vicarious trauma means that the person was traumatized by what happened to somebody else. Gabor says there is no such thing as vicarious trauma. When these people hear or witness the stories of their parents for example, the trauma that actually happened to them is activated. So it’s a personal wound that is activated when we witness or hear the story of trauma in somebody else.

So for all these reasons you may be finding it so difficult to cope with the affair.

We all have been wounded and we all have the capacity to heal. To do this we must understand what has happened to ourselves. That is why so many people who come for marriage affair recovery support, both end up doing my individual breakthrough program. The individual breakthrough program is not about going over the past, it is about reconnecting to what is present in the person’s body when they are dealing with an affair, what feelings are their, by reconnecting to the body people can release and learn from is, so they can reconnect with themselves and their present environment.