Long before cheating or infidelity happens to a marriage, the seeds have been planted. Cheating on a spouse often is the accumulation of negative experiences and discontent, both within one’s relationship or marriage, and within oneself.

Many unhappy partners mentally or emotionally start to check out of their intimate relationships before their cheating behavior starts. As many extramarital relationships start slowly or innocently enough, they are the culmination of a gradual erosion of emotional or sexual commitments to one’s partner. The love or passion starts to wane in a relationship or marriage, and sometimes no one sees it. It just happens over the course of time, and major needs start to go unmet for a partner.

For a lot of guys, be mental, sexual, or emotional withdrawal from their primary relationship is the first sign of problems. Many men that I talk with stopped feeling like they are winning in their relationship or marriage. They stopped feeling loved or validated by their wife or girlfriend, and at one point decided to stop trying. Maybe they feel inferior or not good enough for their wife or girlfriend, and, for a lot of men, no matter how much effort or attention they put into their wives or their marriages, they’re constantly plagued with that sense of “not being good enough.” As long as that “not good enough” experience resides in a partner, there are sure to be marital problems that arise.

Men who fall victim to cheating, or even thinking about cheating, may not be getting some of those needs met in their relationship. Conversely, their wives and girlfriends may be saying the same thing. It may be the wives and girlfriends who stopped receiving affection, caring, love, and support from their husbands and boyfriends, and so they, in turn, stopped giving back. This ‘freeze out’ effect–where both partners have cut off basic needs from the other –  leads to inevitable relationship decline and suffering without the right tools to diagnose and fix what’s ailing the relationship.

Here are some tips to help if you’re considering cheating on your partner:

1. Ask yourself if there are any needs that are going unmet in your relationship or marriage. If yes, how do you deal with not getting your needs met – whether they be sexual, emotional, physical, or the like?
2. Ask yourself: Do I have a habit of withdrawing emotionally from my relationship? Am I thinking of cheating as a way to cope with a difficult situation in my marriage?
3. And ask yourself: What are my reasons for cheating? What do I really need from another partner?
4. One more “ask yourself”: Am I doing it for the sex? What else reasons of my doing it for?
5. Consider your values: is immediate sex or affection from another woman more important to you now then are other things in your life? This is not a good/bad question of judgment, but rather asking you to weigh your values versus your potential behaviors. We tend to see the benefits of the impulsive or short-term decisions and act on them, instead of considering our values through the lens of longer-term decisions.
6. Consider getting individual therapy: you may not want to discuss this very personal issue with your wife or girlfriend. You may not be ready to yet. Talking with a professional counselor who can be a confidential, third-party source for you, maybe an option to help you work through some of the feelings and thoughts of cheating that are keeping you stuck.
7. Try not to put yourself in situations that will attract the potential for cheating. If you’re cruising dating sites, or being overly flirtatious with coworkers, you’re emanating sexual energy in a way that’s bringing that on yourself. If you have leaky sexual energy, get help for that before that leaky sexual energy turns into behaviors that you might regret.

If we look closely enough, we find that a lot of our behavior we can trace back to messages that we received growing up from our families of origin, or, more specifically, from our parents. As small children, our parents are our original models, and we learn about how the world works from them.

A lot of those messages we need to incorporate into our worldview for survival. Unfortunately, many of those messages are outdated, and continue to run like tapes in our brain. Those outdated tapes may continue to play on loop, and our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts are a product of those repeating messages. The relationships that we get into as adults are, in some part, formed from those outdated tapes. We learn plenty of good things from our parents about relationships; we also learn plenty of things that just don’t help us.

Challenging your family of origin messages, or those negative tapes, is the first step towards awareness and waking up to the fact that those tapes or messages can be changed.

Specifically, a lot of our ways of thinking about critical issues come from our parents: money, sex, intimacy, gender roles, professional images, how we fight in relationships, and all types of negative behaviors. We incorporate those messages into our experiences, and have varying degrees of awareness about them.

For men, a lot of the messages about stuffing your emotions, the message that “real men don’t cry”, and about learning how to withdraw, come from having learned those behaviors from a parent growing up, often times from a guys dad. When we get conscious of those  messages, we try to fight them, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes don’t. We often live in overcompensation mode, where we’ll “work harder, be better, be kinder, make more money,” and everything against what a parent did originally.

We have to challenge your family of origin messages to be able to grow up on our own. As long as we carry within us negative family of origin messages that are outdated, we stay stuck in the past and don’t consider alternative ways of being, and lose out on the chance to grow through those messages.

If we’re wanting to develop more confidence and better self-esteem, we have to deal with those early messages that communicated to us that we’re not good enough. If we want to develop healthier lifestyle choices, it may be that we have to face some ways of being that we’ve taken for granted, and have learned from our parents over the years. If we want to learn how to be a better money manager, it may benefit us to take a look at the internalized family tapes that play around money and the problems that result.

Challenging your family of origin messages is difficult. Many times, men stay complacent and don’t really challenge the status quo, where those tapes lie. If we can learn to become aware of some of those negative messages that play, we weaken certain challenge them and incorporate new messages that really will work for us. Change is difficult, and sometimes submitting to those early messages is just more convenient. The promise of being set free through shedding those messages is a promise you can’t afford not to make.

On Monday, our post was about how men can do things to feel more supported by their wife or girlfriend. In today’s post, we’ll look at the reverse trend: guys who are unsupportive of their wives or girlfriends.

Women complain that they, too, don’t feel supported by their guy, and there’s a difference in what women want from men. A big difference.

While men generally feel like they’re being supportive, it’s the kind of support that they offer that might be falling short for some women. I hear all the time, “If my guy knew, really knew, how to support me, I wouldn’t be on his case so much. He should be able to do it on his own, without me telling him to do what I want him to do.”

Men generally want to make their wives and girlfriends happy. Sometimes, they simply don’t know what that looks like. They have the desire to support, and are eager to please, but men can’t read women’s minds. I know a lot of guys say that they really don’t know what their women want, and this can be true in some circumstances. Men need specific directions to act. We need operating manuals, or step-by-step directions, and in the realm of the emotional, men are often first-time navigators.

Meeting the emotional needs of women is something that is difficult for the majority of men. Read: most men. Guys want to support their wives and girlfriends emotionally, yet lack the tools, and sometimes the patience, to understand. Instead, men resort to doing, which is different from being (or being present/listening deeply). Men know how to do; women know how to be – this is an often difficult bridge for guys to cross. Men want to solve problems for women, as they’re so good at in many other capacities in their lives, yet in the relationship realm, they fall short.

Understanding that ‘to do’ is being supportive for many men, and empathizing with your guy about his determination to please you, to support you, is how he knows how to do it for now. It doesn’t mean that he can’t be attuned to support your emotional needs. Men are emotional beings, too, and can learn the way of their emotions, but it takes time and patience. Especially from those they fully support.

Phoenix Men’s Counseling is just the help for you. Specializing in working with men, Jason Fierstein, MA, LPC, is a relationship counselor in close proximity to Tempe, AZ. Located at the Chinese Cultural Center, in East Phoenix near Sky Harbor Airport, counseling services for individuals and couples seeking help in their marriages or relationships can find the help they’ve been looking for.

Our relationship counseling services specialize in clarifying the often fuzzy reasons why you continue to fight over trivial things: how many times can you really fight about not taking the trash out (for the umpteenth time)? It’s not really about that, now is it? Looking at the underlying issues, there’s often unexpressed anger, resentment or hurt that stifles normal marital interactions. You’re left fighting about the stupid and trivial things.

Let us help. Contact us today for more information on our marriage and relationship counseling services. You want to fight for your relationship, and for the man or woman that you love. Call us today, or book an appointment online.