What Is An Emotional Affair?
What Is Emotional Infidelity?
What is emotional Cheating?
What is considered Cheating?
An emotional affair is when a person gives and receives intimacy, emotional support, and companionship from someone else other than their intimate partner.
While having an emotional affair, our clients report that they feel more emotionally intimate, at ease, relaxed and happy with the other person than with their partner. Many of our clients also report increased physical desire to be with the other person, coupled with a reduction in their physical desire towards their partner.
An emotional affair described another way, is when your partner feels like you do not have time and energy for them, when you are expending time and energy with someone else in an emotionally intimate way.
Even if no sex or physical intimacy is present, this type of emotional affair can be equally damaging – and at times more damaging- than full blown sexual affairs. Partners of people involved in emotional affairs typically report feeling betrayed, fooled, lied to, hurt and undesirable both emotionally and physically.
“Affairs are one of the most taboo subjects in our culture,” says Janis Abrahms Spring, author of “After the Affair” (HarperCollins, 1997) and a supervisor at Yale University. They are “so extraordinarily traumatizing,” she says. “And yet we talk about them only when we are making jokes.”
The vast majority of our clients who we have seen for emotional affairs issues report two striking facts. The first is that they were never looking for an affair. The second is that even when it was going on, they did not think of their emotional affair as an affair.
The overwhelming majority of our clients that we interviewed about this reported that something was fundamentally broken in their intimate partnership that they could not fix or did not know how to broach it.
They found solace and empathy from another person, started talking and sharing with them, and that was the beginning of an emotional attachment that lead to the emotional affair.
As the emotional bond with that other person strengthened, they felt progressively less able to find the strength to face the challenges in their relationship with their partner (and less reason to).
Interestingly enough, the strength of the emotional bond created with the other person was also highly correlated with the likely hood that an emotional affair would turn into a sexual affair.
How Emotional Affairs Start?
If the frequency at which we see couples for emotional affairs in Naya Clinics is any indication, emotional affairs are possibly reaching epidemic levels.
We live in a time that obliges us to keep running. We walk, eat, talk, type, work fast. Also, we tend to fall in love quickly too. But, sometimes, we don’t even realize it.
Our life style is also increasingly keeping us in what seems like constant contact with other people. From our phones and gaming consoles being gateways to meet and socialize with new people all the time, to the time we spend with colleagues at work, exercising with other people at the gym, or out on the town with friends meeting random strangers around every corner, we are bombarded with seemingly endless opportunities to meet and engage with new people.
Some of these people are inevitably interesting, attractive, and sometimes both! What starts as a harmless friendship with somebody one meets in the gym, can very quickly transform into an emotional affair if the conditions are ripe for it.
It is important to remember that emotional affairs fly under the radar, and sometimes we’re not aware it’s happening until it’s too late.
It can start with a text that makes you smile; with a compliment you want to get. Many times, it starts with friendship which, eventually, you want to evolve into something more. You need to feel loved and you, subconsciously, form a bond between yourself and another person.
Everything sounds idyllic, right?
Yes, but what happens when you are already in a relationship? Is it friendship or an emotional affair?
About the Author
Sam Nabil is a licensed professional counselor , and the founder of Naya Clinics. Sam pioneered Positive Existential Therapy (PET) an innovative and avant garde counseling approach that he developed in his practice to effectively deal with client challenges that were no longer responding to outdated counseling techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy. Sam contends that P.E.T. is reinventing therapy for relevance in the 21st century.
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