Acting out in an affair are often signs of problems with the person's life. A push / pull dynamic can fuel the infidelity. Join sex therapist and author Laurie Watson and couples therapist Dr. Adam Mathews as they talk about the causes and how to recover from the pain of infidelity. Join us for Love and Sex 360 in beautiful Asheville, NC. November 15-17. Find out more!   Take a moment and fill out our 8-question demographic survey.   ------------------------------------------------------------------ Transcript: Laurie Watson:                  Adam, we're going to talk about extramarital affairs today, a difficult subject and something that certainly brings up a lot of pain for couples, but we want to offer some hope and some new ways to think about it. Hello again, and welcome to Foreplay – Radio Sex Therapy. I'm your host, certified sex therapist, Laurie Watson, author of Wanting Sex Again, and blogger at Psychology Today and WebMD , and I have with me Dr. Adam Mathews, my co-host, who's a couples therapist, psychotherapist, and President of NCAMFT. Foreplay is dedicated to helping couples keep it hot. Thanks for listening. Now, onto today's topic. Adam Mathews:               A tricky subject today on the podcast, affairs, extramarital affairs. It's tricky for a lot of different reasons, right? Laurie Watson:                  It is. Adam Mathews:               People classify affairs in a lot of different ways, in how you label affairs whether, because then, a lot of people, it's not just a sexual affair, it can be an emotional affair. Some people are going to define kissing somebody else as an affair. Somebody might even just describe not telling their partner about a relationship that's forming with somebody that they're attracted to as an affair, and so it's wide-ranging and it's one of the more devastating things to a relationship, right? I think it's devastating in part because of how much it breaks the trust, the core trust in the relationship. It's for most people, especially people in committed monogamous relationships, they believe that their sexual relationship is like the primary boundary that distinguishes their relationship from every other relationship that they have in life, and so that primary boundary gets violated and it gets broken, and so it's very difficult to recover from something like that, but it is recoverable. Laurie Watson:                  It is. Adam Mathews:               There are ways that you can begin to move through a healing process in an affair. Laurie Watson:                  And rebuild trust. Adam Mathews:               And rebuild that trust. Laurie Watson:                  Yeah. Adam Mathews:               Right? Laurie Watson:                  Yeah. I think that affairs happen for two reasons. One, an affair is a refuge from a relationship problem in the marriage, or in the committed partnership, but it also comes from a pain in a person's life. There's two forces often, or one or the other force that's happening. The classic midlife crises is the person who, maybe there are marital stressors, but they're facing aging, they're facing disappointments in their career. Adam Mathews:               Yeah. Laurie Watson:                  There are many internal issues that they're going through that caused them to act out and have an affair. Adam Mathews:               Yeah. Yeah. I would call this the push-pull effect, right? If there's relationship problems going on that can often be pushing them out of the relationship, where they turn to other things, or the internal that's pulling them towards something that they're wanting, that they feel like is lacking either in them internally or in the relationship, and so like recognizing that, those things, you then begin to just turn to something that you feel like is going to give you what you're lacking in that, either that safety in the relationship that you're not experiencing, the excitement, the attention, or it's going to satisfy that