The cycle of cheating (a broad theory boldly based on two or three cases)

Just above the molecular (“neuroscience”) substrate of our neuroses, I like to delve as deep as possible into the causes of a feeling, thought or behavior. I believe, for example, that psychotherapy cops out terribly if it fails to seek the childhood roots of a woman’s attraction to abusive men, or of a substance addiction; or the separation-individuation stage basis of a Borderline Personality. Without addressing causes, we are just bouncing off the changing kaleidoscope of symptoms.

One dynamic chain I’ve given scant attention to is what connects a child’s living with a cheating parent to his or her identical behavior many years later. The simple explanation – “that’s what he has learned” – is utterly meaningless. There will have to be factors of lack of love, betrayal, repression, depression, emotional immaturity, parent’s selfishness, that create the intergenerational energy. Here is one theory scenario supported by my work:

*  The boy’s parents are married, but father cheats with one or more one-night stands or paramours.

*  His mother knows, or doesn’t know but maybe suspects, hates or condones it, but lives with it for at least awhile.

*  Father uses his son as his tool of machination: drops him off at his aunt’s, then goes to see his affair person.

*  The boy does not feel loved by his self-centered father, or by his mother who either clings to him, falls into herself from depression, or dislikes him for being a miniature man.

*  The boy comes to lose love for his parents: It is too painful to need and bond with a family that isn’t there.

*  He does not respect them.

*  He will be love-starved, but he will see his father’s drug of choice – sex. He may become a hardcore masturbator.

*  Either –

        **  In his adulthood, he will not know how to give or receive love, but will seek the love he needed as a child. Marriage cannot give him that – the present cannot make up for the past. It cannot give him the unconditionally loving mother, and he will have serial affairs, always seeking . . . something.

        **  Or, if he retains a capacity for love and feels love for his wife, it will be a dangerous emotion: The present will never make up for the past. Experiencing love will sooner or later crack open his defensive wall against the loss of it in his childhood home. It will “remind” him of his broken child’s heart and he will run from that pain by running to other women.

There are more ingredients – principle and idiosyncratic – which specialists will know better than I do, that link the Child of Alcoholics to his later alcohol addiction (or to his marrying an alcoholic*), the child of a cheater to his future cheating or to marrying a cheater. I suppose there must be an element of modeling, but more as a kind of gravitational force pulling to the familiar, a familiar that becomes a child’s identity comfort and security. There could be the infecting of one’s psychic DNA that George Howe Colt described in his book on Suicide.** A father kills himself, and his son is weakened forever. Twenty years on, when life becomes burdensome, he may unavoidably feel: “If dad couldn’t take it, how can I?”

That phenomenon itself may have a deeper base, a powerful dynamic I’ve seen in homes where a child must, barring rescue or an “enlightened witness,”*** bond to a parent’s dysfunction. It is this: To be stronger than a parent is to leave that parent behind. Many children, and adult children, cannot do this as it brings the fearful, desolate feeling of mutual abandonment. The son cheats, and he is with his father.

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* Mentioned in – https://www.amazon.com/Will-Never-Happen-Children-Alcoholics/dp/0345345940#reader_0345345940.

** https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Suicide-George-Howe-Colt/dp/0671509969.

*** Alice Miller – https://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-essential-role-of-an-enlightened-witness-in-society-2/.