Paranoid About Your Partner Cheating
Paranoid your partner is cheating? You see that text and you wonder “who is that?” or your partner comes home late and you wonder “where were you?”
Fear your partner will cheat often comes from one's past experience - either they’ve been cheated on by a past (or present) partner or perhaps from their childhood where they have the experience of being abandoned. Such adverse relational experiences changes ones attachment style to become more anxiously attached. An anxious attachment often leads to clingy behaviours - there is an underlying belief that “if I keep my partner close, they will never leave me”, when in fact, in healthy relationships, it is the opposite. In healthy relationships there is a balance between separateness and togetherness, “the less free I am to leave you, the less I’ll stay, the more free I am to leave you, the more I’ll stay.” Healthy relationships are high engagement, low/balanced attachment.
Being cheated on by your partner naturally leads to feelings of paranoia. Infidelity is a relational trauma. It’s a trauma because, usually we think of the past as concrete, it’s been set in time, reliable. The discovery of an affair shatters this, suddenly, what we knew to be true we can no longer trust. It threatens our existential and psychological existence. People experience symptoms such as - nightmares, intrusive thoughts/images, sudden mood swings, explosive or numb emotions, rumination and hypervigilance - symptoms akin to PTSD.
Infidelity hypervigilance looks different to PTSD. In PTSD, when there's a loud noise you jump because it reminds you of the war - the gunshots or bombs going off. With infidelity, hypervigilance is when your partner comes home late, you’re immediately suspicious and think “where have you been?” or you see your partner receive a text and you think “who’s that texting you?”. We are looking for threats. As humans, we are relational creatures, so when our relationship is threatened we are threatened too.
These are symptoms of trauma, and they are out of that persons control, and they are a residual effect of the trauma. Often those impacted, don’t want to have those symptoms because it's exhausting, no one intentionally wants to feel paranoid, and if they could choose, they would prefer not to.
Paranoia is a close relative to anxiety. And anxiety and play don’t mix. This is what leads partners to leave. There’s no fun in the relationship and no freedom to be oneself - partners lose their sense of individuality and feel like they are being “suffocated”, and they leave these types of relationships because it’s the way they can regain their sense of self.
A paranoid partner has the tendency to believe that trust is built by being and staying within a safe place and never venturing away. But trust is also built by being able to take risk by loosening one’s grip and realising you were able to overcome that risk and vulnerability, thus building a sense of safety and trust. There is no relationship without risk. Partners need to decide on their risk tolerance for their relationship. What amount of risk can help the relationship to grow, yet feel safe and secure at the same time.
