How Being Cheated on In The Past Affects Your Relationships Today

If you’ve been cheated on by a previous partner in another relationship, it may significantly alter your perception of your current or future relationships. If you’re between relationships, or just not dating or wanting a relationship now, it might prevent you from getting into one or finding the one for you.

Past Baggage Weighs You Down

It’s common to have experienced being cheated on, and if this has happened to you, it’s normal to have a lot of different emotions and experiences as a result. To start, you should know that it’s not your fault, because if your relationship partner had taken responsibility for themselves, they could have figured out other ways to deal with the relationship rather than taking that route. Cheating is hurtful, and it leaves negative imprints on both parties that linger for years. It can negatively affect getting into new relationships, and make it so that we enter those relationships with walls and barriers to further intimacy and vulnerability.

Working Through The Past

We can learn to let go of the past, and work through it. I’m not sure that simple forgiveness is the key, because many times, there is so much latent hurt, anger, pain, grief and other experiences that we need to work through and then let go. simply saying that you’ve learned to forgive someone may in fact be true, but more times than not, we carry these emotions and pain with us buried and out of view for sometime. We may not even realize that we’re doing it, until our new relationship creates a situation in which we’re forced to confront those wounds of the past.

Dealing with the grief, anger, rejection and hurt that inevitably comes from being cheated on is so important, because it frees you up to engage with your new relationship and partner in a fresh and available way. If you’ve been cheated on, you’ll need emotional closure by getting with a good relationship counselor and unpacking those things so that you can work towards the closure that you need.

It’s probably hard to find the closure that you would have needed with your ex, because in many cases, the relationship is now over, and they’re not willing to admit or take the responsibility that you might need, even if you reach out and ask for that closure from them. They may have well moved on, and not know (or care) about the level of damage that they caused you. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take responsibility for your feelings to work through them, and even if that’s happened to you and you’ve been victimized by your exes’ behavior, they’re your feelings to work through now.

You Can’t Be Fully Available if You’re Stuck in the Past

If you’re still holding onto wounds or pain from being cheated on, it’s probably that you’re not fully available to your new partner or relationship as you might think. Those emotions - when blocked - keep us unconsciously pushing away our new relationship partner in ways we might not see at first.

In the honeymoon stage of a relationship, feelings are generally passionate and positive, and it won’t tend to create an environment where we’re our true, authentic selves, because we’re honeymooning and showing our best selves to our significant others. As relationships become more emotionally intimate and vulnerable, the more difficult aspects of our self - get brought to the forefront, which can appear as they get triggered by actions taken by our partner. They may say, do or act in certain ways that might trigger certain feelings or responses.

If you’re been cheated on in the past, your partner may be engaging in behaviors that trigger or scrape at those old wounds from being cheated on. They may be real behaviors, like not calling or texting, meeting or communicating with other members of the opposite sex and not telling you, or being fishy about their schedule or who they talked with. Those are all very real things, and may legitimately trigger your fear or panic that your new partner is cheating on you.

Also, you might get irrationally triggered in a way where your partner isn’t actually doing or saying problematic things, but it’s that you feel so scared and on edge all of the time that you make up or fantasize about things that your partner isn’t actually doing, but that you perceive them to be doing. This is irrational fear, and working with a therapist and talking out your fears to your partner is key, especially if you think that they can’t hear them. Talking them out dispels those fears, and allows you to check them out in the safety of a relationship, so that you don’t have to act on them and do something you might regret later.

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