Loss of security
We all need oxygen to breath, water to drink and food to eat. We also need shelter and the avoidance of extreme temperatures. We need all of these to ensure our very survival and if we don’t get them, we will literally die. Once we are having these needs met, there are other level of need that all humans require, in order to not only survive, but to thrive. We all need to feel secure. This sense of security can come from different aspects of our life. We need physical security, emotional security and financial security, for example. Most of us get an incredible sense of security from being being in a relationship and when we discover that the person with whom we relied on for that sense of security has had an affair, it feels quite literally like being pushed out of an aeroplane without a parachute. Our relationships can become the basis of our emotional security, our financial security and our physical security and to face losing all three forms of security in one go can feel devastating.
Fear of being alone
Human beings need love and connection. We obtain our sense of belonging from being a part of a family, or a member of a community, or being in a team, club or gang. We also get a sense of being wanted by being in an intimate relationship. One of our biggest fears is that we will end up alone, but there is a greater fear beneath this. If we are alone, we then conclude that we are not worthy of being a part of a family or of having friends or of being wanted. We erroneously imagine that the reason we are alone is because we are not worth loving, we don’t actually matter to anyone or that we are not good enough. We take our partners affair as a rejection of us and the fear of being alone and we use the evidence of their affair as absolute proof that we must be worthless, useless or unloveable.
Pain of Betrayal
Every single human being has the capacity to learn the difference between right and wrong. At deep psychological, emotional and spiritual levels, we already know what is right and wrong because right feels good and wrong doesn’t. We then learn by experience how to feel good about ourselves by doing the right thing. For example, in every disaster situation, crisis or accident, people demonstrate an unending ability to help and care for others by coming to the aid of those afflicted, injured or in danger. We are born with the ability to discern what is fair. We are all born as inherently good people – not one baby has ever been born evil. When our spouse strays, we inherently know that it is wrong, it in unfair and it doesn’t feel good.
