230: When Your Infidelity Situation Takes Over Your Life

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  So much of the so-called advice out there for people who are cheating is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is not what I provide.  I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation – no matter what you’re doing.  When you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  To get started, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

A few episodes back, I talked about how it might be helpful to think carefully about what you want out of your love life/sex life/romantic life/relationship life in order to better consider what you want to do about your infidelity situation.

In that episode, I mentioned that if you’ve been super focused on your infidelity situation for a significant amount of time, it can also be really useful to step back and think about what’s important to you in your life overall.  For the sake of thinking differently – and hopefully more clearly – about what you want to do about your infidelity situation specifically.  But also, more broadly, for the sake of doing what you can to live the way you want to live, or at least, to live more of the way you want to live.

Infidelity situations have a way of eating up a lot of time and energy and focus.  And as I said, a couple of episodes back, it can be kind of delicious to get totally sucked into the drama of an infidelity situation for a while – whether it’s good drama, or torturous drama!  Having that kind of experience in your life can be really enlivening, and you may value feeling alive in that way.  So if you’re so completely consumed by your infidelity situation that you can barely tie your shoes in the morning and you love that, that’s great, I love that for you.

But there may come a time when you are – still – totally consumed by your infidelity situation, and you don’t love that anymore. 

Here’s the thing.  Sometimes I talk to people who have been in their infidelity situation for a while – and “a while” might range from a number of months to a number of years – and they are totally consumed by their infidelity situation and they don’t like that and they know it.  And, sometimes I talk to people who have been in their infidelity situation for more than a few months, or even more than a few years, and they are totally consumed by their infidelity situation and they are miserable and they don’t see a connection between their misery and their intense focus on their infidelity situation.

So let me make something really clear: being super fixated on your infidelity situation for more than a little while can really drive you crazy.  Being super fixated on your infidelity situation for more than a little while can make you pretty miserable.  And, getting super fixated on your infidelity situation is a common thing, and it’s a very human thing. 

So if you have gotten really fixated on your infidelity situation and your world has shrunk to the scope of your focus on your infidelity situation and you’re starting to lose your mind or maybe you’ve already more or less lost it, it’s okay.  You haven’t done anything wrong.  I’m not scolding you, and you don’t need to scold yourself.

However, I do want to gently but firmly let you know that STAYING really fixated on your infidelity situation isn’t going to get you anything great.  And just to be clear, there’s a difference between being fixated on your infidelity situation and actually doing something about your infidelity situation.  Sometimes we forget that.  Sometimes we think that fixating on something actually WILL create change, but if you’ve been trying that for a while and it isn’t working, it might be time for a new strategy.

And what I want to suggest today is that stepping back from your infidelity situation and taking stock of your whole life can be really good medicine for the fixated folks.  It can be really helpful to clarify what you want your life to look like overall, for two reasons.  One, so that you can use that understanding of what you want your life as a whole to look like to inform your approach to and your decisions about your infidelity situation.  And two, so that you can engage with the other parts of your life – as in, the parts of your life beyond your infidelity situation – in a more conscious, deliberate way, whether your infidelity situation continues in its current fashion or not.

What I see, over and over, is that when people are excessively focused on their infidelity situations for a while, their lives start to shrink.  Just to be clear, there aren’t any objective standards for what it means to focus excessively on your infidelity situation.  So what I mean when I say that is, the person is focused on their infidelity situation to a degree that’s causing them suffering.  And when a person’s life has started to shrink, their infidelity situation starts to seem EVEN MORE significant, and therefore more worthy of focus or fixation.  And so a vicious cycle takes hold: a person becomes fixated on their infidelity situation, they disconnect from other important things in their lives, their infidelity situation starts to seem like the primary thing that matters in their lives, or the ONLY thing that matters in their lives, and thus, other things in their lives which once might have been quite important to them matter less.  And this leads to perception or perceptual distortion and an impoverishment of the person’s life experience. 

And if this happens for a little while, it’s not the end of the world.  I know some people will tell you otherwise, but I don’t think that it’s the end of the world to have our lives get totally out of balance for a while.  It can be very instructive.  But when our lives are totally out of whack for a long time, and we can’t see straight anymore, from this place we start making decisions that make our lives even worse, and it’s a bit of a bummer.

Because we have this amazing opportunity to actually ENJOY the experience of being alive!  We have this very interesting, very precious opportunity to relish our days, and be present with life as we’re living it, whether we’re doing things that we consider exciting, or doing things we consider mundane.  We have the opportunity to experience the joy of engaging with what’s in front of us, AND to intentionally seek out things that we wish to experience and explore. 

It’s hard to do either of these things when we are excessively focused on one thing – especially if that one thing seems like a problem.

So what I want to invite you to do today is take a step back from your infidelity situation and think about what’s important to you in life, beyond your infidelity situation.

There are many ways you could go about taking inventory of what’s important to you in your life, and if you have a means of taking a life inventory that you love, use that, by all means.  What I’m going to suggest is that you ask yourself, and answer, three simple yet powerful questions.

First: what is it important for you to BE in life? Second: what is it important for you to DO in life? Third: what is it important for you HAVE in life?

A lot of times, we may focus primarily – or even only – on the last question, the question of what we want to have in life.  And this way of thinking may be partially responsible for getting us so fixated on our infidelity situation in the first place!  We may get really stuck on thinking that we need to HAVE a particular person, or a particular relationship with a person – or we may get stuck on thinking we have to have some other outcome.  But the point – and the problem – is that we get stuck on HAVING something.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to want to have certain things.  But so often, what we have is influenced to a great extent by who we are, who we are being on a regular basis, and by what we are doing on a regular basis.  And what we’re doing is in great part an extension of who we are being.  So if you’re tempted to focus on what it’s important to you to have, fine – but give just as much attention if not more attention to the questions of what it’s important to you to BE and DO in your life right now.

And yes, I just said, “in your life right now.”  Sometimes when I work with clients to clarify what they want to be, do, and have, they use the past as their frame of reference.  They say, “Well it used to be important to me to be this…” or “It used to be really important to me to do that…”  And sometimes this is the case because they simply don’t know what’s truly important to them in the present!  And if that’s the case, that’s okay – getting clear on that is, after all, the whole point of asking yourself these questions and actually answering them.  But the past doesn’t need to be your frame of reference, and it may not serve as a very useful one.  If you don’t think you know what’s important to you now, that’s okay – keep asking the questions.  If you stay attuned to the present, answers will emerge.

On the other side of that coin, sometimes people tell me, “Well, I know what’s important to me now, but how will I know if the same things will be important to me in five years, or ten, or twenty?”  And my response to that is, does wondering about that actually help you in any discernable way?  And in response to THAT, people usually say something like, “Well, I have to know what’s important to me in the future in order for me to know what’s important to me in the present.”

And to that I say, no you don’t.  You really don’t.  And believing otherwise will likely lead you to squander the present in all sorts of ways that make it harder for you to create the future that you are so worried about trying to foresee! 

If you REALLY want to think about what was important to you in the past and what might be important to you in the future, fine.  Do it.  But don’t use that as a way of clarifying what’s important to you right now.

When it comes to the first question I asked, the question of what – or who – it is important for you to be right now, there are many possible types of answers.  You might want to fulfill a particular role or duty in a certain way, for instance, “I want to be a good community member.”  Or, “I want to be an empowering, inspiring boss.”  Or, “I want to be a respectful, compassionate parent to my kids.”  Or, I want to be a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  And these kinds of answers are great! 

But you don’t have to think in terms of roles you want to fulfill in particular ways: you can also think of qualities you want to embody as you move through the world, no matter what role or roles you’re occupying.

So for example, lately I’ve been thinking about how I want to be assertive and calm when I am being treated in a manner I do not like.  I’m pretty good at being assertive and scathing when I’m being treated in a manner I don’t like, but I don’t always want to be scathing!  Sometimes I want to be assertive and calm.  And recently I flew, with my spouse, and our two dogs, and what for us was a significant amount of luggage from San Jose, Costa Rica, to LAX.  And, usually the airline representatives at the counter of my airline of choice in Costa Rica are lovely.  Usually they are the epitome of courtesy and professionalism.  But not on this day.  We got this woman “helping” us – and that was “helping” in quotation marks – who was barking orders and questions at us, and asking us to do multiple things at once, and there was absolutely NO WAY we could have responded to all of her questions at once and simultaneously done all of the things she was asking us to do.  I was genuinely shocked by her directives and questions.  Given all the pins and badges she had on, it seemed that she might have worked for the airline for a long time, and I have a hard time imagining that any passengers she’s helped in the past had been able to simultaneously do all of the things she was asking us to do.  In my opinion, she was being rude and abrasive and unreasonable, and I wasn’t delighted by this. 

So, under the rubric of wanting to be assertive and calm, I gave her a few moments to potentially slow down her requests and change her tone with us before I said anything.  But after she kept doing what she was doing for a few minutes I finally said to her, “Listen.  We are doing the best we can here, but we can only do one thing at a time, and I expect you to be a lot more patient with us.  What would you like us to do first?”  I didn’t have smoke coming out of my ears when I said it, I didn’t say it with anger, I just said it calmly and very, very assertively.

And I felt good about myself for that.  Her behavior was such that I honestly wouldn’t have felt all that bad if I’d said something scathing to her. 

But I felt so much better about my non-scathing response.  I felt so much better about who I was being, and how I was being when I was calm and assertive with her.  And, guess what, as soon as I issued my calm and assertive response to her behavior, her behavior changed a lot.  She slowed down, and started asking us to do one thing at a time, instead of multiple things at a time.  She started being a lot more reasonable, and a lot more polite, and that was nice.  But the real win was me choosing how I wanted to behave, even when someone else was behaving in a manner that I didn’t care for, and actually doing a pretty good job of behaving in that way.

And you get to do this too.  How do you want to be in the world?  How do you want to behave in the world, or engage with the world?  In situations that you like, and in situations that you dislike?  What qualities do you want to embody?  You get to decide, and then you get to practice being the way you want to be.  Which is a pretty cool thing, really! 

Deciding who you want to be can go in many other different directions, too.  Maybe you want to identify yourself in particular ways.  I am queer, I am straight, I am gay, I am pansexual, I am asexual.  I am a Democrat, I am a Republican, I am a Libertarian, I am a Socialist.  I am African.  I am Congolese.  I am deaf.  I am hearing.  I am neurodivergent.  I have particular needs and particular talents.  I am religious, and my religious affiliation is ___ (fill in the blank).  I’m just throwing out some options here.  They may be identities you really want to embody, and with them, labels that you really want to claim for yourself.  And if so, why not claim them now?  If you want to fly a flag of some sort – or a few flags – fly them!  Why wait?

So, the question of who do you want to be, or what is it important to you to be can be approached from many different angles.  If endless possibilities thrill you, then let yourself explore the infinite options.  But if you’re just trying to come up with a coherent sense of who you are right now, keep it simple.  Maybe just stick to thinking about the options I’ve offered here.

Next, the question of what it’s important to you to DO is very closely related to the question of what it’s important to you to be.  Our actions are an extension of our state of being.  So in my example about my lovely experience with the airline employee back in San Jose, I described my state of being to you, but I also described my actions.  From a place of feeling assertive and calm, I spoke to the airline agent in a particular way.  And I also refrained from speaking to this person in particular ways!

So if you start thinking about who you want to be and what you want to do, and it starts to seem like you’re responding to the same question, that’s okay.  To extent, these questions are very closely linked. If you want to be a compassionate parent to your children, that probably means you want to do certain things with them and for them, and not do certain things with them and for them.  And you get to define what those things are.  If you want to be an inspiring and empowering boss, you get to decide the actions you will take in the service of these ways of being. 

You may also want to identify some specific things you want to DO in life that may not seem directly linked with a particular state of being.  Maybe you want to go river rafting for the first time.  Maybe you want to go river rafting all the time. Maybe you want to do more volunteer work.  Maybe you want to change careers.  Maybe you want to go back to school.  Maybe you want to start painting again.  Maybe you want to start painting for the first time.  Maybe you want to spend more time with your family.  Maybe you want to spend more time with your friends.  Maybe you want to make new friends.  Maybe you want to travel to a particular location.  Maybe you want to travel to as many parts of the world as you can!  Maybe you want to spend more time on your couch watching TV.  Again, these are just examples.

The point is that you get to decide how you want to spend your time.  You get to decide what you want to actually DO with your life.  You’ve got a lot of options, and you get to choose.  The point isn’t that you ought to learn how to speak Arabic or play the piano or volunteer at your local homeless shelter or make perfect gougères.  Or do ALL of those things.  If you want to, you can spend your days fixated on your infidelity situation and tune everything else out.  But… you might not want to do that, or at least, you might want to seriously consider the possibility that you might not want to do that.  Because it’s a big world out there!  There are so many interesting things happening that you might wish to participate in.  There are so many rewarding and wonderful ways in which you might want to use your precious time.

And what I see a lot of people who have been fixated on their infidelity situation doing is withdrawing from the world.  Maybe not completely.  Maybe they aren’t completely secluding themselves, only to emerge from their home when it’s absolutely essential for them to do so.  But some people DO do something pretty close to that.  Some people put their lives on hold almost completely as they wait for their infidelity situation to turn out in a particular way.

For some people, their withdrawal from the world is less extreme, but it still matters.  Although plenty of people go through the motions of doing the many things they need to do in life while they are also fixated on their infidelity situation, they’re not fully present as they do those things.  And over time, that can start to matter.  Maybe a lot.  For example, being a checked-out parent for a few weeks is one thing.  Being a checked-out parent for months is another thing.  And I’m not saying this to encourage any ideas about perfectionism in parenting.  Rather, I’m saying this to point out that checking out of relationships or activities that are important to you may start to matter to YOU after a while – and potentially to other people who you care about.  I don’t know too many people who have made tremendous strides in their career while they’re totally fixated on their infidelity situation.  If you’re trying to get big things done in your life, it sure is helpful to eliminate unnecessary distractions. 

So one of the things that I sometimes encourage people to do if they’re super fixated on their infidelity situation and have been for a while is to find something they are deeply interested in doing and go DO IT.  Regularly.  It doesn’t matter much to me if it’s a new thing that you’re starting to do for the first time, or a thing you’ve done before and are returning to.  The point is to get excited about something that has as little to do with your infidelity situation as possible.

And a lot of times when I give people that recommendation, they say, I don’t even know I’m interested in at this point.  I just want my infidelity situation to work out in a particular way.  Until that happens, my life is just kind of on hold.  I hear this the most from people who are the other person and are waiting for their affair partner to leave their marriage, but I hear it from people who are playing a different role in their infidelity situation, too.

If you really don’t know what you’re interested in, here is my advice: go find a way to be helpful to someone other than yourself.  Maybe you have a neighbor who needs help with yard work or groceries or child care.  Go help them out for a couple hours a week.  Maybe you know someone who could benefit from your professional expertise, but could never afford your fees.  Maybe it’s a great time to do a little pro bono work.  Maybe you just want to look up volunteer opportunities in your area.

Helping other people can be really good medicine when we have gotten too caught up in our own drama and stayed too caught up in our own drama for too long.  Sometimes – and I assure you, I’m saying this as lovingly as such a thing can be said – sometimes we just need to get our heads out of our own asses.

AND, yes, it is also true that sometimes we just don’t have the bandwidth to be helpful to others.  Sometimes we’re just too depleted!  And there’s nothing wrong with that – but if that’s the case for you, the question is, how can you fill you own cup?  And the answer is NOT by waiting for your infidelity situation to magically turn out the way you want it to.

Finally, there’s the question of what it’s important to you to HAVE in life.  This is a great question to think about within the context of infidelity situations for many reasons.  For one, we sometimes think about what we want to have as if it should just kind of come to us.  We sometimes think that if we want something, we’re just entitled to get it.  Without us having to do much of anything to facilitate that.  And sometimes that does happen – we just get what we want, without having to put any effort into getting it – and that can be lovely. 

But it’s also really important to consider that sometimes, in order to get what we want, we may have to put a fair amount of time and energy into going after it, or creating it – AND it’s important to remember that in order to get what we want the most, we may have to say no to things that aren’t quite what we want. 

And this could have very literal, direct implications for your infidelity situation.  Let’s say you know you want to be in a committed, monogamous, non-affair relationship.  But for a while now, you’ve been involved with someone who is married.  And you may LOVE this person.  You may be convinced that if the two of you could be together in a non-affair relationship, everything would be great.  And you might turn out to be absolutely right!  But if you’ve been waiting for your affair partner to leave their marriage for what you consider to be a while and they aren’t showing any signs of leaving, you may need to think about what it’s more important to you to have: an affair relationship with someone you love, or the opportunity to form a relationship with someone who is fully available to be with you.

Thinking about what you want to have in life might have other implications for your infidelity situation, too.  Let’s say you love snakes.  You love snakes, and you’ve always wanted to have snakes as pets, and set up a whole snake paradise in your home.  For one thing, you could get started on that – you could go after this thing that you want to have, even if your infidelity situation is still unfolding.  You do not have to put your desires to be, do, and have certain things on hold just because your infidelity situation is not yet resolved.  Because remember: your life is happening NOW!  You just might want to attend to things that are important to you NOW!  Your infidelity situation can still run its course as you pursue your other priorities. 

The other interesting thing that can happen is when we start to focus more on being who we want to be, and doing what we want to do, and going after what we want to have, we may find that our orientation to our infidelity situation shifts in significant ways.  We might start to see that we aren’t as attached to a particular outcome as we thought we were.

Let’s say you get your snake collection started and you’re super excited about it – and your affair partner isn’t.  Even if there was a time when you could think of nothing but your desire to be with them, your renewed attention to your own interests may have shifted your priorities a little bit.  Maybe you’re starting to see that you can create a pretty cool life for yourself without your affair partner – who remains very married, anyway.  Or maybe your affair partner finds your snake collection ridiculous, and you decide that you don’t have time for someone who has the energy to denigrate your interests but doesn’t have the time to get their divorce underway.

So again, here are the three questions I’m urging you to consider:

What is it important to you to be?  What is it important to you to do?  What is it important to you to have?

Think about these questions beyond the scope of your infidelity situation so that you may start to shift some of your focus back to living your life in a way that’s truly right for you – and perhaps, thinking differently about how you want to navigate your infidelity situation.

The cool thing about taking responsibility for defining how we want to live and doing our best to live in accordance with our desires and priorities is that we get to enjoy our lives and find meaning in our lives – whether we’re in any particular relationship or not.

The point of what I’ve offered you to think about today is not that you shouldn’t care about your infidelity situation, or have any desires for particular outcomes within it.  Rather, it’s to help you think about your life more broadly and expansively, and to help you put your infidelity situation into different perspective.

So explore the questions I’ve posed.  And if you want my help dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, let’s work together.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach!  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  Either way, we will help you clarify what you want, and what you’re going to do about it.  The whole point of dealing with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about is to live a life that you feel great about!  So let’s get to work.  Head on over to my website, mariemurphyphd.com to schedule an introductory coaching session or to enroll in my course today.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.