16. Infidelity: The Coldplay Affair
James Christensen: https://jamesmchristensen.com
Catherine Roebuck: https://catroebuck.com
Transcript
James: What is your advice for the spouses of the people from the Coldplay concert who were caught cheating?
Catherine: One of the most difficult parts of being cheated on for a lot of people is the public humiliation of it. That staying is humiliating. A lot of people feel pressure that the only way they can hold onto their own dignity is to kick their spouse to the curb, make them a villain, and put the entire responsibility for the breakdown of the marriage on the person that cheated.
James: I think people who get cheated on often feel guilty about still loving the person who cheated on them.
Catherine: Yeah, I agree with that.
James: They feel like they shouldn't. They feel like, "I should no longer have feelings for this person anymore. Why do I still like this person?" Very often they find themselves feeling somewhat similar after the affair as they did before the affair, which actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. But they feel like they should feel totally different.
Catherine: Well, another thing that I see happen is a kind of hysterical bonding where there's this big threat to the relationship when the affair comes out. And in that uncertainty, the betrayed partner, the person who's been cheated on, can actually feel even stronger attraction and desire for their spouse. Sometimes people end up more affectionate.
James: Yes, there's that. There are many reasons for that, but also the person who cheated often starts treating their partner a lot better than they were, and so they suddenly become more attractive. It's such an interesting situation because so many things happen at once.
Catherine: Well, I don't think it's just about them being more attractive. I think there are different aspects to that. There could be some aspect of seeing somebody else want your partner and you start to think about them in a different way. But there's also just the threat of loss involved. Typically, there's a lot of pain in a marriage where someone ends up cheating. But even so, there's this risk of loss, this threat that you're going to lose this person who, especially if you have a family together, may be an irreplaceable life partner to you.
James: So that could drive increased concern or affection or interest, just wanting to hold it together.
Catherine: Wanting to hold on to this person, wanting to hold it together. Yeah.
James: So I hear people who got cheated on a lot express distress over, "I can't respect myself for having stayed. What am I doing? Why am I here?" But to me, it actually makes a lot of sense. Here's what I tell people in this situation who are like, "Well, should I leave? Should I go?" I'm like, you're probably not in the best place to make that decision right now. So these are people where there was an affair, the affair was discovered, and they came to therapy. And I'm like, the fact that you are here means now is the time to improve your relationship. And then after you've gone a certain way down that path, then you decide to stay or go. You'll be in such a better place to stay or such a better place to go, whichever you decide. But people often say, "Oh, the affair happened. I need to leave immediately." I mean, perhaps. But I guess there's something special about the couples who come to therapy after an affair because they're coming to therapy because they don't want to end the relationship.
Catherine: Yeah. And what I think would surprise a lot of people is that, at least based on the statistics I've seen, most couples do work through infidelity. It's around 60%, but it's more than half.
James: More than half. That doesn't surprise me at all.
Catherine: Yeah. And so culturally, we kind of relate to it like this is the end of the world and there's no way that you could ever trust this person again. This breaks the marriage; it's over. The only decent option is to leave. But the reality is that the people—and it's so courageous when people face this and go to therapy—the people who do, they mostly are able to not just hold a relationship together, but to actually grow. Like, use the energy of the crisis to deal with the things that they've been ignoring or pushing away.
James: What is your advice for people who are recovering from an affair that was several years ago and they can't get over it? If I was cheated on three years ago and I can't get over it, what would you offer me?
Catherine: There might be some exceptions, but most of the time when people are really fixated on something from years ago, there's a quality to it of the problem not being resolved. So maybe it's been three years since your partner cheated on you, but they're still not open with you. And you can just track them holding information back or being misleading or lying even in small ways. And that's not resolved.
James: Okay. I call that micro-deceptions.
Catherine: Okay.
James: So the affair is the big deception. And this is exactly what I tell a person in this situation: It's not so much that you can't get over the affair, it's that you are subconsciously picking up on your partner's micro-deceptions, which are ongoing. Your brain is translating that into, "I'm not over the affair," because your brain says "deception, deception, deception." And you're like, "Oh, I must be upset about what happened three years ago." But I think I agree with you, it's usually about what's happening right now.
Catherine: Right. And so each of those small deceptions is reminding your brain, "Hey, this person still hasn't made a commitment to be open and honest." And until they do that, how are you going to trust that they wouldn't hurt you again in a big way?
James: Maybe they haven't cheated in the last three years, but they have not fundamentally changed the way they operate in the marriage.
Catherine: Right. And you have to think about what the reasons for the affair were in the first place. Are those resolved or not? Because someone who has difficulty being open and honest maybe switches from cheating to hiding money or using substances more than they're telling you. And the same core-level problem is still happening of your partner not being honest with you.
James: What do you think of the idea that infidelity is usually not the biggest problem in the relationship?
Catherine: I think it goes to symptom versus root cause. People cheat for a variety of reasons.
James: What do you think are the biggest?
Catherine: Sometimes somebody wants to end a relationship, but they aren't solid enough in themselves to be alone. And so the way they end the relationship is they go partner with someone else because they can't bridge that gap. They can't validate themselves through a divorce or a breakup, so they handle it by getting a new partner before they drop the old one. Esther Perel talks about people using infidelity as a way to connect with lost parts of themselves. They go connect with somebody that enlivens them in some way they have lost track of. They feel young and confident and interesting, and they've kind of dropped those aspects of themselves over the years and don't know how to foster them on their own. Are there other major reasons that come to mind?
James: I think it's usually about seeking validation. This free-flowing validation that happens in the early stages of a relationship usually stops in most relationships. In a very healthy relationship, there's tons of validation. In most relationships, there's not a lot of external validation flowing back and forth. So I think that it's so tempting. In any fresh relationship, that tap is going to be wide open. And it's so tempting. Before the affair starts, the validation starts flowing and you start moving closer and closer to this other person who becomes the affair partner because of the validation they're offering. They're attracted to you, they like you, and they see you as a special person. And I think that's the primary driver of affairs.
Catherine: I agree with that, and that is at play in both of the reasons that I brought up too. You're relying on the external validation from the affair partner to either represent or wake up some aspect of yourself or to get you through some life transition. I agree that's the main thing.
James: So people in a post-affair situation usually talk about rebuilding trust. How do you put that together? What does that process look like?
Catherine: I think it's more about opening your eyes, waking up. It's more about your discernment—your confidence in your own discernment and in your own ability to act on what you see. Because a lot of times in hindsight, people can say, "Yeah, I saw the signs," and there's a reason that you're tracking it and looking away. It's because you can't really handle dealing with it. There's something at stake for you. There's some reason that you would rather pretend it isn't happening or just kind of go blind to either how unhappy things are between you and your partner, or the signs that you see that they are connecting with someone else.
James: So, the way I break it up is into three kinds of trust. The most obvious is trusting your partner to be faithful, and I actually think that's the least important of the three. Because if you behave in a trustworthy way for many months, then I trust you more and more. So say you just cheated on me and now you're not cheating anymore, and I watch you not cheat for the next 12 months. After 12 months, I'm going to trust you a lot more than I did at month one. Obviously. That's the most obvious part. The other two are trust in myself that I'm going to take care of myself, because I think cheating evokes fears of abandonment. You know, if I was five years old and my mom abandoned me for some other little boy, then I was in deep trouble. I really think that's the core of why cheating is so painful—it's a fear of abandonment. So, trusting myself that I realize you get to make all of your own choices and, if you leave me for someone else, then I am going to be able to take care of myself. And because of that, this fear of abandonment is in me, but it's an emotional reality that doesn't reflect physical reality. The physical reality is I'm going to build a good life for myself if you leave me. And then the third part is trust in my ability to perceive you clearly. Which, if you have been successfully deceiving me for a long time, I really need to work on that. For me, that usually involves dealing with parental blindness and looking at what kind of deception and untrustworthiness I was exposed to as a child which desensitized me to that kind of behavior, normalized it. So that now I'm in a relationship with someone who does these things and I'm not fully aware of what deception looks like, and I don't even really know what a trustworthy person looks like. I'm not familiar with what that looks like or smells like. And so, yeah, there's some work for me to do there on honing my sense of what is trustworthy behavior.
Catherine: Yeah, I agree with that. The relationship is only going to work out long-term if your partner's trustworthy. But your well-being isn't dependent on whether your partner is trustworthy. You're in a precarious position if you link those things, and that's a lot of the impact of an affair—somebody has to disentangle those two things. Like, if I depend on my partner's integrity as the source of my well-being, I'm not going to be okay.
James: Right. So my well-being has to be my responsibility. I have to be the one who guarantees that I'm going to be okay. And in a high-trust relationship, it's so funny because we talk about these things and the reality in a really good relationship is totally different than in a normal relationship. The reality in a really good relationship is that it's okay for me to rely on my partner because my partner is so trustworthy, but that is really only built on the foundation of taking really good care of yourself.
Catherine: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, the goal isn't rugged individualism, but the goal is to be able to take care of yourself. Because of the open reality of life, anything can change at any time. And it's actually the only way you can really relax in life. You can only relax to the extent you can take care of yourself.
James: And that energy, my ability to take care of myself, allows me to invite care from the other person. If I can care for myself, then I'm not being needy. If I show up needy in a relationship, that invites withdrawal or resentment from the other person because if I'm needy, I'm trying to manipulate you into taking care of me. And people don't like to be manipulated. So I end up inviting the opposite of the behavior that I'm seeking. Now, if I show up strong and capable of caring for myself, I'm inviting you to offer me love and affection because I'm not pulling it from you. Whenever I'm dealing with a living being, the thing that I try to force that living being to do, they will intentionally try not to do it because they're fighting for their sovereignty and their freedom.
Catherine: It's making me think of a metaphor. If you have a dream career that you want to pursue, you're going to be in a much better position to go all in on it if you have some savings, if you've got the ability to take care of yourself if it doesn't pan out. It was like that for me when I jumped into coaching. I had been working in tech and I'd saved money specifically so that I could take that risk. I needed a safety net, but I had to be my own safety net. If you're going to jump in and take a big risk and you don't have any kind of safety net for yourself, how are you ever going to really relax and be present with what you're trying to do?
James: So you're always going to be really cautious if you don't have a backup plan.
Catherine: Yeah. And so there's a way that the ability to take care of yourself is actually the very thing that lets you relax or surrender into deeply being cared for, like letting in care and support from a partner. It's not really safe to rely on a partner and to deeply trust a partner if you don't deeply trust yourself as well.
James: Do you think that's because of the neediness thing?
Catherine: Well, there's something else there. There's genuine need. So it's not all about state of mind. Some of it is about, are you set up in a dynamic, in a relationship where your life is going to fall apart if your partner leaves you? On a practical level and not just on an emotional level. That's a precarious position to be in. I think it's hard to overcome that with mindset.
James: Sometimes I ask people to envision their life one year after their partner left them. Let's say your partner leaves now, fast forward one year later. What does your life look like? Have you built a thriving life for yourself? Do you have a place to live? Do you have friends? Do you have someone to love you? Have you built the life that you want? And they always say yes. And so I'm like, that's what you need to lean into because your ability to trust yourself is what carries you through the fear of abandonment.
Catherine: There were times in my life where a year would not have been enough of a ramp for that at all.
James: And I am sure that would change the way you operated within your marriage. You would've felt stuck.
Catherine: Yeah, absolutely. And so it makes it less open-hearted. You can't risk being open-hearted. You're more cautious, you're more hypervigilant. And those things are not good for a marriage. They're not really good for yourself either. It's hard on your mind and your mood to be living in a state of caution and hypervigilance all the time. But it's a realistic expectation that adults be able to take care of themselves, with rare exception.
James: It is a realistic expectation. I don't think our culture does a good job of normalizing that idea that I, as an adult, am going to take care of myself and that I'm going to be in charge of my own emotions, my own behavior, what I say, as opposed to constantly blaming it on circumstances or other people.
Catherine: And that does include taking care of yourself if your partner really hurts you. But I mean, somebody who's having an affair isn't taking good care of themselves either.
James: So coming back to the Coldplay concert, tell me what your advice would be for the people who got caught.
Catherine: When you've violated your own values, which I'm going to assume they both have, you have to find a way to look at that without going into a shame spiral. People try to deflect, they try to blame other people for what they've done. And then the other thing they do is just spiral into hating themselves. And neither of those is productive. You've got to find a way to hold your own dignity while you face what you've done and your impact. I think the more compassion you have for yourself, the more you're able to look at the dark stuff you've done and own it.
James: So one way I work on this is to say, "I am a normal person who makes normal mistakes." And I think the Coldplay couple falls within that realm of a normal person who makes normal mistakes. It's a very normal thing to do. Not recommended, but not abnormal in any way. Most relationships have infidelity; it's a part of most relationships. It's a very common occurrence. So most couples will struggle with some form of infidelity at some point. And so can I look at myself as a normal person who made a normal mistake, as a way to start down a path of growth?
Catherine: I didn't think the stats were that high, that most will.
James: Maybe not sexual infidelity. I don't know what the stats are, and I don't know how you would even know the stats. It's going to be a guess.
Catherine: Self-report.
James: Probably. But I really do think... let me think. I would say almost all couples face, if not full sexual infidelity, at least an emotional affair. I think it's almost universal that two people in a 30-year relationship are going to have some kind of emotional affair, at least on one side. But as far as a sexual affair, I guess there are quite a few relationships where there's no full adultery that happens. But I really think emotional affairs are quite common.
Catherine: Well, one of the things I think about is just how we relate to faithfulness. There are many ways to take love or sex or romance out of a marriage, and taking it to somebody else is only one of them. And we treat it like that's the only way this happens. But someone can withdraw from their partner, withhold from their partner, basically remove intimacy and desire and eroticism from the relationship. And I see that as a problem with fidelity and with the commitments that we make in a marriage as well.
James: So the idea behind marriage is, "I'm going to bring the best of myself to you for the rest of my life." Right? And that is what breaks down all the time. What I hear you talking about is, I promise to bring the best of myself to you, and now the best of myself is going to my sport, or my job, or my video games, or my friends, or whatever obsession I have at the time. Or I'm just taking the best of myself and watching TV.
Catherine: Yeah. Maybe no one's getting the best of me. You know, maybe I've just shut it down.
James: Maybe I've just turned it off. But I 100% agree with you. What matters is what am I offering to my partner? How much of the best of myself am I offering to my partner? Where the rest of that is going is not nearly as important as what is going to my partner.
Catherine: Right. And so, I mean, there are some things that are uniquely painful about being cheated on. But I do think most people and most couples have some experience of basically breaking vows. People fail to live up to their own ideals in marriage most of the time. At some point during a marriage, there will be a point where you failed at that. People have different vows, but one of the classic ones is "to have and to hold." And so if you withdraw and you withhold and you ignore and you avoid and you reject, you're not living up to that vow. And there's a lot of pain in that too, on both sides, really. Because people often have a reason that they're pulling back. They always have a reason, but there's often something that's quite difficult about being close with their partner. And they're handling it by pulling back.
James: The way I frame it for couples in this situation is, the only way out of this is to build a relationship. The only way out is to build the kind of relationship where affairs don't happen. And you don't have that relationship now. Most couples don't. Even couples where there's not active infidelity, there's a threat of infidelity because the relationship isn't strong enough to be past that.
Catherine: Yeah. Most people who cheat say that they never thought they would cheat.
James: Right.
Catherine: I believe them.
James: Well, it's so addictive. It's that validation. The way I imagine it is I start to feel validated by someone I'm attracted to. And I mean, that's powerful stuff, especially if I'm in a relationship where I'm not getting validation and now all of a sudden someone else is offering it. And it's a huge difference.
Catherine: Right? And it happens by degrees. It's subtle. It is hard to pick your line and say, "I won't go past that," and the line keeps moving. And that's just how it typically happens. I mean, there are people that I work with who are in an ongoing emotional affair, and I'll talk to them about the threat, the risk that this is going to escalate if they don't de-escalate it. But it's really hard to drop it. It is so addictive, like you said. And ultimately this comes down to, "Am I a strong enough person to do the right thing when I'm not getting what I want?" And most of us, on some level, could answer no to that. We're all susceptible to doing the wrong thing when we're not getting what we want.
James: I think that the measure of how much I care about my wife is how I treat her when I'm not doing very well. When I'm having a great day, it's pretty easy for me to treat my wife well. What about when I'm having a bad day? When I'm not getting what I want? How do I treat her? I really think if I'm building, say, an airplane or a bicycle frame, I'm going to measure its strength at the point of greatest weakness. And if I'm going to measure my own ability to care about another person, it has to be at the point of greatest weakness. That's the critical point where it matters. And so I just think we shouldn't be giving ourselves a pass on, "Well, I was having a bad day," or "You had just done something mean to me." I think that it's better to say, "To the extent that I really care about you, I'm going to handle myself and I'm going to offer you the best of me."
Catherine: Yeah. So this Coldplay couple, they're dealing with a couple of layers here because there's what's going on at home, there's their own experience of public humiliation, and that this is going to follow them around the rest of their lives.
James: It's defining them.
Catherine: And then there's their spouse's experience of public humiliation and the amount of social pressure for their spouses to leave them. And then there's also that it's professionally very embarrassing and damaging, ruinous even. So it's really a lot to navigate at once, and they're likely losing both the support they have with their spouse and the support they have with each other at the same time. And so it's a crisis that might push them to deal with themselves. Something I was thinking about is it's easy if you're cheated on to think your partner must not have cared about you. But this couple is an example. He may or may not care about his wife, but he sure cares about his job.
James: Yeah, he does.
Catherine: And he cheated with his HR. Like, he's putting the thing that he is most obsessed with at risk.
James: We do ourselves a huge disservice when we make that a black-or-white thing, like, "Do I care or not?" When I talk to people about what it looks like for them to care more about their wife, they always say, "I do care." I'm like, okay, we really need to go more into this. There is no upper limit to the capacity for human caring. So I can always learn to care more about my wife than I do, and that is the correct path. So if my instinct is to say, "But I already do care," what I'm doing is I'm turning down the invitation. I'm saying, "I am not willing right now to learn how to care more about my wife than I do." But it's really interesting how you brought that up. He definitely cared about his job. And he was willing to put that at risk for this. So it's just not a yes/no question. It's, he cared more about his affair than he cared about his job.
Catherine: A lot of people think that if their partner cheats on them, there's no way they could have cared about them or loved them. What do you think about that?
James: So I think it's an infinite spectrum. It's not a yes/no, "Do I care or do I not care?" This is something I think about all the time now: What does it look like for me to care more about my wife than I already do? And I challenge couples about this all the time. I ask that very question. Because we get so locked into, "Well, I do care." I think a lot of it is set when I'm growing up; my imaginary maximum to which a person could care about another is whatever my parents offered me. That's just the default setting. And there's always more than that. So what I've been exploring recently is, what does it look like for me to care a lot more? This man obviously cared a lot about his job. He probably cared about his wife to a certain extent. And he cared even more about this affair.
Catherine: He cared about getting validation, most likely.
James: Yeah. He knew he was taking a risk.
Catherine: Right. And he had lots of options for people he could have had an affair with, and the person he chose was like the worst possible option for his personal and professional ambitions. Yes, really ruinous to his career, his wealth, his company. You know, there's a way that it looks stupid, but the main factor in who you end up having an affair with is just proximity. And so if you're somebody who is at risk of having an affair and you work closely with someone, that's who you're going to end up having an affair with much of the time.
James: I think that's how most affairs happen. I don't think most affairs start on a Tuesday with someone saying, "You know what? I think I'm going to have an affair this year." I think what happens is I am interacting with some attractive person and I start to get vibes and validation from this person, and it progresses very gradually, and it's hard to say no to that next notch on the dial.
Catherine: Yeah, it's easy for me to imagine you've got this really exciting, thriving company. You're working late, you're working closely with each other because she's head of HR, he's the head of the company. Of course it makes sense, and the validation loop just keeps going back and forth. You know, she thinks he's smart and great, and he thinks she's smart and great. It's easy to just keep climbing that loop and to have the lines blur a little bit. You know, maybe you're out at a company dinner, but then you have a drink or two, and then suddenly it's feeling more social, or you stay later than everyone else and it becomes more flirtatious. But I do think it's helpful to look at the things people are willing to ruin for an affair other than their marriage, to give a little bit of perspective on, like, this doesn't mean that they didn't value their marriage at all. It's just, unless you have a lot of integrity, a lot of solidity in yourself, a lot of inner strength, presented with a buffet of validation, it's going to be hard to just say no.
James: Yeah. So I've moved away from framing all these things as yes/no questions like, "Do you value? Do you care?" It's just too black and white. Everybody cares to some extent.
Catherine: Yeah. I really like how you talked about that, because of course he was not loving his wife well to do this, obviously. And she was not loving her husband well, you know? So, absolutely, there's tons of room for both of these people to care more about their spouses. And actually also about each other, because the other thing about affairs is friends don't ruin each other's lives. People who love you don't wreck your marriage. If you really, really love someone and they're in a committed relationship, you don't get involved in that.
James: Oh, absolutely not. That's not love. It's really kind of a cruel thing to do. It's really selfish.
Catherine: Someone who's acting out of true love for that person is going to put distance and boundaries in place. They're going to protect their friend. They're going to protect the person that they love from the really difficult-to-resist temptation. So yeah, somebody that's willing to be your affair partner always has real limitations in their own capacity to love you or anybody. But yeah, I think that's what we're up against with any type of infidelity. And most of the ways that people take their love and affection out of a marriage is just, it's hard to care a lot about people. It's hard to care more than how much you were cared for growing up. But that's again, like the normal, reasonable expectation of adults is that they push themselves on that and they grow.
James: When we use an escape hatch out of a marriage, then we're opting out of the cycle of growth. And so for these people who are in this affair, their better option would've been to do the work of creating in their marriage the kind of love affair that they want to have, which is really difficult, but it's the only sustainable option. That's why marriage is a people-growing machine. Because if I want to have a really solid marriage, it's an incredibly difficult thing to do. It's just really hard.
Catherine: I think you also have to grow into wanting better things because if what you want is constant validation, you're not going to grow your way into constant validation.
James: No, you're not. And that is what most people want. And so you need to understand what's possible, which is much better than constant validation. But for most of us, we hold that as the gold standard. That this is what a good relationship looks like, is when you first fall in love and they're fawning over you. And that has its value, but it's just not permanent.
Catherine: Yeah. If you want to live in the honeymoon stage, there really is only one way to do it, which is you change partners every two or three years. That is the only way. You miss out on all kinds of other benefits of having someone deeply know and love you and be a witness to your life. But I have people ask me all the time how they can keep that. And they're worried about the inevitable drop-off of the honeymoon hormones, and you can't. Not with one person.
James: You can build something better, but it's different. I've likened it to this: when you first fall in love, there is a pile of dry timber and you set a match to it. And after two or three years, there is a stack of wet lumber. You can build a fire with a lot of skill and a lot of work. And that fire, honestly, a fire in a rainstorm is even more satisfying than a pile of timber that you just had a match to. But it doesn't just happen. It's possible on the other side of a lot of difficult effort.
Catherine: Yeah. And a lot of what's making it easy for people to validate each other early on is that they have distance built in, because we want autonomy and belonging in a partnership. And you've got the autonomy built in up until the relationship is secure and settled, which for most people means marriage.
James: So you were talking about how there's distance built into a relationship at the beginning, but after the relationship reaches full fusion, then there is no distance. And so now we have to create distance. How do you go about creating distance if you don't know how to do it in a healthy way?
Catherine: Right. So we all want belonging and autonomy in a relationship. And when you're dating and you live apart and you have separate finances, there's distance built in.
James: You're mysterious to each other. Yes. There's distance built in because you don't even know this other person.
Catherine: Right. But over time, you know, you merge your lives, you merge your bank accounts, you have kids together. There's so much togetherness. And then you're faced with, if I'm still going to have a self, I have to be able to do that while up close with someone that's different from me. You can't live with someone and only show them your good side. That person is going to disagree with me, criticize me, want me to change, want me to accommodate them, want me to validate things in them that I don't like. It takes a lot of strength to do that.
James: Yeah. David Schnarch called it the difference between self-validated intimacy and other-validated intimacy. So in the beginning of the relationship, it's other-validated intimacy because it's so easy for me to reveal myself because you're fawning over me. You're in love with me. You like everything I show you. As the relationship matures, I start to get a sense for what things you don't like anymore, and you start to get choosier. And so the only things left for me to reveal to you are the things that I know you may disapprove of or get upset about. And so I start hiding because I know what to hide, and that's what leads to a disconnected relationship. For me to create intimacy, I have to have self-validated intimacy where I reveal myself to you, even though I know you're not going to like it. I know you're not going to approve of what I'm showing you, but I start to show myself to you of my own volition and under my own power, so that I will take care of myself knowing that you disapprove, and I'm still going to let you see me clearly.
Catherine: Yeah. There's this difference between holding together an appealing facade and putting in the work it takes to build a habitable home with someone. You know, you can make things look good, but if you're trying to create a relationship you can live in, you're trying to create a love you can live in. And it's much more work to put that together and maintain it than it is to make something look nice from a distance, which is all you have to do when you're dating.
James: People talk about walking on eggshells, which is a similar pattern where I'm being really careful about what I say because you are so sensitive. But when a person says, "I'm walking on eggshells," they usually are blaming it on their partner. It's really both people. So yeah, their partner is using emotional intensity to control them, but the person walking on eggshells is also agreeing to it. People talk about walking on eggshells, which is where I'm censoring what I say to you to avoid your emotional response, and I'm probably blaming you for that. But it's really 50/50 because I'm agreeing to be controlled just as much as you are controlling me. Realistically, I don't have to censor myself. I can say what I really think and I can deal with your upsetness. Now, both people can play a role in ending the cycle, and it is really quite difficult if you have a highly reactive partner to go ahead and say what you need to say, even though they're going to try to shut you down. But as you do that more, as their tactics get less effective, then they're less likely to use them.
Catherine: Yeah. And people will say that what they're trying to avoid is their partner's emotional response. But it's their own emotional response to their partner's emotional response that they can't handle, primarily. Because their partner can have the same response in front of a different person who will be just fine.
James: I was talking to a client about this years ago, and the example I came up with was, I was trying to explain what you were just saying. I said, "You know, there are people who could handle your wife's reactivity and be okay with that. For example, a Buddhist monk could be here and your wife could be reactive, and this Buddhist monk would be okay." And he just got this really sad look in his eyes and he looked at me and said, "James, I'm an ordained Buddhist monk." And I was like, "Then I have nothing for you." It was like, how is this possible? I'm reaching for this example that's so extreme to the point of ridiculousness, and he's like, "Nope, that's me." And I'm like, "I guess in this case then, you win."
Catherine: Well, one of the benefits of the therapeutic process is that if you go to couples counseling, then you can see somebody else, if they're doing a good job of it, handle the things that you can't handle in your spouse and not be completely knocked off balance or get reactive themselves. And so it can give you a view of how you could talk to them when they're acting like that. And sure, sometimes people start out on good behavior in couples counseling, but they don't stay that way. If you work with someone long-term and you get close, it's pretty normal for the same behaviors that are hard to handle in any close relationship to start to come out in the therapeutic relationship. And so then you get to see, if you're working with someone who can handle it, an effective way to handle that.
James: Oh, it's so valuable. Watching my therapist work with my wife and just watching what her approach is. I'm so intensely curious. I'm like, "How is she going to handle this?" And just watching the way she chooses her words. I just watch it so closely. I'm so interested. So yeah, there has to be a certain level of conflict in the therapy room for that to happen. And so the therapist has to be courageous enough to kind of talk straight and say, "Hey, let me talk to you about what you're doing right now," and let me enter into this conflict a little bit. And then that's just a gift to the partner to say, "This is one way that you can face this person with integrity and power."
Catherine: Yeah. And so it only works if the therapist can face what your partner's doing or what you're doing with integrity, power, kindness, all those things. You know, it's this relational transmission that has to work that way. It's not enough to offer tools or "I" phrases or any of that.
James: It has to be demonstrated.
Catherine: It has to be, and you can't fake it.
James: No, you have to have gone through the fire yourself. This is what I love so much about the Crucible approach, is that Crucible training for therapists is 95% building the person of the therapist and 5% talking about technique. And that's the way it should be. It should be focused so much on the strength of the therapist.
Catherine: Yeah. So if you're working with somebody and they get reactive and worked up at you or your partner, that's a limitation in how much they're going to be able to help you. And no one is able to stay calm and regulated with every personality and every type of dysfunction. That's not a realistic expectation of anybody. But yeah, there's got to be one calm person in the room if you're going to get anywhere.
James: There has to be. Yes. It's so infinitely challenging. Well, you know what? I have a lot of compassion for this Coldplay couple. I do too. I honestly, I hope that both of them figure out their marriages. I hope that they find really good therapists and they figure things out and make things work. It's usually the best outcome when you have children with someone to try to find a way to create an amazing relationship with that person. It's just such a great blessing to offer your children. I was thinking the other day about what people want. And I think what people want is we want to be loved and we want our children to thrive. I think we want that very deeply. And so the path to that is more often than not trying to create a really solid marriage. Obviously, there are exceptions, but you got to at least give it a go.
Catherine: So something I know we both talk to people about is generational emotional wealth.
James: Yes.
Catherine: And relational wealth.
James: Yes. And this... oh, I've never called it relational wealth. Oh yeah. Okay. That's the perfect word. I love that.
Catherine: So especially with this couple, you're looking at both of the marriages involved. These are people who obviously have valued passing financial wealth onto their children. They've set their kids up with a financial legacy.
James: Almost everyone wants to provide their children at least some sort of financial assistance.
Catherine: Yeah. Everyone wants to, but these are two families that really have done it to a degree most of us could only dream of. But what we're seeing here is the gap in the legacy that they're leaving their kids is around their emotional strength, their integrity, and their relational wealth. And especially when I work with people who have really kind of won the game financially already, where they're set up, their kids are set up, maybe their grandkids are set up, it's going to be fine for the foreseeable future, I talk to them about relational wealth and emotional wealth. It's like, "Look, you have secured this part of your kids' legacy, but what are you going to do about giving your kids the best possible start relationally and emotionally? Give them a shot at having a happy family, at ever feeling secure." And if either of these couples could pull this off, of really growing their marriage in the face of this kind of crisis, they would be securing their kids' relational legacy in a major way.
James: That's a great metaphor.
Catherine: If you can survive this, what's going to take you down?
James: No, this is it. That's a pretty big one.
Catherine: This is it. And you know, I love working with people who are ambitious, high achievers because they often can relate to giving their all to their relationship. I'll talk to them about like, "Have you ever tackled a relationship problem with the same level of commitment, intensity, and dedication that you take to your work?" So these are people who will work really hard, 18-hour days, or pull an all-nighter. It's like, when's the last time you pulled an all-nighter putting your full brainpower toward trying to figure out the next step in your marriage? People do this for their jobs far more than they do for their marriage.
James: I use that technique too, which is I'll often say, "You look like the kind of person who has done several hard things in your life. And this is one more hard thing for you to do, and don't expect it to be easy, but the payoff is greater than any of the other hard things you've done."
Catherine: Yeah. So I appreciated you saying that you have a lot of compassion for this couple because that's one of the things that I think is often missing when people talk about infidelity, is to have compassion. It's a very human failing.
James: Oh, it's so understandable. It's just so normal. I think it's been helpful to me working with so many couples who are working through infidelity, that it's helped me feel more compassion for people in that situation.
Catherine: And it's not to downplay how devastating it is. It really does break hearts and break families, and that's real. The cost is huge and it takes people sometimes years to work through it, but people do work through it. And there aren't enough examples, I think, of people who openly work through it. But that's possible.
James: Alright. Should we wrap it up there?
Catherine: You too.
James: Okay. We'll talk again soon.
Catherine: Okay. Thanks, James.
James: Thanks, Catherine.
