A habit merits the term “addiction” when it costs you more than it’s worth; when you try to stop it, but find you can only put it “on pause” for a short while; and when you find your thinking (especially your judgment) is distorted by the high priority you place on repeating the habit. Another criterion is perhaps less important because it’s outside you, but it can be very important indeed: when multiple neutral or friendly people tell you they think you have a problem—especially if they haven’t spoken to each other about it beforehand. 

In an excellent book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2010), Gabor Mate argued that addictions have their roots in early trauma. He tells the story of the thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war in Vietnam, which at that time was part of the “golden triangle,” a geographical area that produced a large share of the world’s heroin supply. U.S. troops coped with horrific levels of combat trauma, including guilt/moral-injury; anxiety, uncertainty, and fear; bereavement and loss; the shock of seeing so much injury and death; and the various physical wounds, ruined health, lost limbs, and so on. Many became habitual heroin users. But when they came home, it turned out that for the most part, the soldiers who remained stuck in heroin addiction were those who had suffered childhood trauma, long before the war. The others were able to drop the habit, though heroin is perhaps the most addictive substance on Earth. 

Not every addict has a trauma background. But most do, and when you meet one who apparently does not, you can’t be certain they have (or have shared) a full knowledge of their own relevant personal history. While many different kinds of trauma can happen to a kid, the CDC lists a few of the big ones in its online material about Adverse Childhood Experiences (or “ACEs”):

Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect.

Witnessing violence in the home or community.

Having a family member attempt or die by suicide.

Substance use problems.

Mental health problems.

Instability due to parental separation.

Instability due to household members being in jail or prison.

They add “not having enough food to eat, experiencing homelessness or unstable housing, or experiencing discrimination.”

This painful picture of deep human suffering should not be taken as a portrait of an “average addict,” since there’s no such entity. And what amounts to trauma is not actually the stuff that happens to somebody, but how it’s experienced. The mystery of resilience has to do with the kid’s temperament, circumstances, culture, and especially the interpersonal supports that did or did not keep the situation from being even worse. There are people who endured every ACE listed here, who have never been addicted to anything. And there are others who had only one or two of these to deal with, and in adolescence or adulthood became dependent on one or more substances or behavioral habits that cost them dearly. 

The difference is not a moral one, and there is no rational calculus about who had it worse, or who went on to put up the best fight against addiction or depression or anxiety. These pseudo-questions involve impossible apples-and-oranges comparisons and fictitious quantifications of how bad different childhoods were. The feelings are most important; the facts matter, too; but the measurements of them are largely illusory. The reality of trauma has to do with what happened inside the child: what the bad stuff meant to him or her. If parents are neglectful or abusive, a kid will infer that young person in the mirror is deeply flawed, and deserved the bad experiences. But if the same kid also has a benevolent art teacher, a well grounded mentor, a kind and wholesome uncle who is reliable and interested, sane and warm—the kid may be protected from drawing that toxic conclusion about the self, and grow up less susceptible to addiction, to cults, to swindles, to sadomasochistic attachments, and so on.

The trauma theory of addiction is the profound claim that we mammals, we primates, we human beings, have universal evolutionary needs for nurturance and protection, and when these go unmet, or are met with harm mixed in, addiction often results. The person seeks out whatever will soothe away the pain of neglect and/or abuse from long ago. Usually, it’s pain from very long ago: infancy is the first love relationship we ever have, the mother-baby dyad that sets the emotional foundation for the whole lifespan. Even if things don’t go relatively wrong until later in childhood, it’s the inner baby part-of-self within the older kid that’s most overwhelmed. Freud taught that each of us is all the ages he or she has ever been, so the baby who craves a substitute for the warm and milky breast is actually still active inside the active addict, running the show—which is why the addicted adult can be found making such poor decisions. A brilliant, short book by Abraham Twersky, Addictive Thinking (1997), spells out what that kind of cognitive distortion can sound, look, and feel like. 

But acute or chronic trauma need not be the only reason for addiction, and often there is a very useful significance to the person’s particular “drug of no choice,” as it’s sometimes called in twelve step culture. For example, with or without the expectable ACEs, people who have uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings, capable of evoking erotic participation from others. Boys who were repeatedly rejected by the girls they hoped to kiss—and that’s most boys, who mature more slowly than girls tend to do—can grow up with a lot to prove. Many spend their late teens, twenties, and even their thirties struggling to establish that they are not icky “involuntary celibates” who will never find a mate (even if the guy himself is now the only person who sees him that way). If they can do this without deception, and without heaps of gender-based resentment, and without excessive risks to physical and mental health, they may manage to accumulate enough sexual experience to falsify their own worry about it. They can be fortunate enough to realize one day that they have indeed established what they were so desperate to establish. Now they are free to let go of the pattern that looked like, or really was, “sex addiction.”

Shopping addiction can be like that, too. I’ve said “people with uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings.” Well, people with uncontrolled habits of excessive consumerism may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed successful participants in the world of consumption, including the spells cast by advertising. Ads comprise a powerful technology of conscious and unconscious persuasion that links people’s self-esteem to their capacity to get hold of whatever product or service is being defined as beautiful, validating, and necessary. If I succumb to this, my identity will be bound up with my ownership of the bag, the boots, the car, the designer version of whatever I’ve been convinced I need.

Insofar as this is true of somebody in particular, that person’s sobriety will have a lot to do with identity: achieve an internal locus of value, and you can also build up an internal locus of control that defeats the addiction. When a person suddenly comes into a sum of money, a lot can be learned by watching how they spend it: the speed of the spending, but more importantly, the buying choices they make. If you are making large purchases of “designer stuff,” you might be an erudite connoisseur of fine handbags and their nuanced history since the year 1588. But it’s more likely you are buying an Hermes bag for $9,850 because that is what the surrounding culture told you was important, valuable, and above all, validating for the identity of the buyer. It is, ultimately… a bag.

A designer purse like that “says” plenty, but just what it says depends on the wisdom of the beholder. The message can range from “look, I am successful, you would be fortunate to share sex, love, friendship, or business with me” to “look, I cannot think for myself, and remain profoundly naive about the available better uses to which money can be put.” Those uses include appropriately limited altruism, where you get good feelings by helping others who need help; buying experiences (especially travel, but also course-taking, conference-going, skill-building, etc.) rather than things; connecting to the past and to the globe by acquiring works of art that speak to you; funding ambitious projects that you find fascinating and beneficial to the communities of which you count yourself a part; and so on.

I know brilliant, beautiful, accomplished people who collect high-end designer handbags. I see it as an expression of their aesthetic enjoyment of these exquisite objects. I also see it as a mechanism of compensation for early experiences of having to do without the goods that other kids had. If your peers in elementary school and middle school and high school all wore flashy stuff and drove expensive bikes, while you wore hand-me-downs and walked to school without wheels, you might well benefit from disproving the worry that they are blessed and deserving while you are deprived and unworthy. And the collectors I’m thinking of are at least as psychologically sophisticated as I am; they know all about their own formerly unconscious motivations for spending “real money” on glam and bling. But they do it anyway, and apparently it serves them well. Rather than judging anybody for buying or selling luxury goods, I am commenting on some of the common underlying dynamics that contribute to habitual choices which can come to feel quite unfree.

And that’s the issue with therapy for troublesome habits: is the habit a free and informed choice? Is it an addiction, or would we get better results framing it as a mere habit that needs tending? The more it costs you—in money, time, opportunity, relationships, access, etc.—to continue with the habit, the easier it is to decide that you must stop. The less it costs you, the more reluctant you or I will be to use the term “addiction,” or recommend 12-step programs, or insist that only abstinence will constitute recovery. Mild addictions to substances or behaviors can be addressed with a commitment to “harm reduction.” Someone who drinks a few times a week but does not lie about it, nor have blackouts, nor have a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality change when they’re intoxicated, is probably a person who can reduce drinking by, say, 65% without too much struggle. But if it turns out to be a big struggle, then the language of addiction might be very useful for getting hold of the habit and changing it.

If you’re dealing with repeated behaviors that you suspect are costing you too much in money, time, peace of mind, or otherwise, consider booking a session with me. We can join forces to help you figure out your relationship to the habit in question, and find the best ways to change for the better—guided by your values and goals.

Email me through the contact form on this website, or call 917-873-0292.

What’s “hoarding”? Well, the DSM-V includes hoarding in its section on obsessive compulsive disorders. There’s OCD, which is a pattern of behavior and inner experience, and there’s OCPD (Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder), which includes that pattern, but also extends to deep-seated and pervasive concerns with order, regularity, and tight control. You exert unnecessary and excessive control over variables you can actually affect, like neatness or punctuality, but your opportunities to do so are often subject to other variables beyond your reach, like the weather, traffic, or other people’s actions. This brings plenty of episodes of frustration, when highly charged efforts at maintaining order get interfered with by unpleasant surprises from outside. The irony is that someone suffering from OCD or OCPD is exercising what can look like a heightened personal mastery over their immediate environment, but it’s actually a type of helplessness: they cannot control their relentless need for control.  

OCD tends to start in childhood, but like most personality disorders, OCPD usually (not always) shows up a bit later, in adolescence or early adulthood. Hoarders typically don’t have OCPD. They don’t care much about order; their environments tend to be chaotic, and they often hold onto broken or incomplete items without repairing or maintaining what they insist might someday come in handy. Their problem is classified next to OCD because it’s a maladaptive behavior pattern they can’t regulate, with a thinking style that’s distorted to legitimize it. Of course, this fits addiction, too (so does disordered eating), and compulsivity is part of addiction—especially behavioral addictions that aren’t drug use, like shopping, sex, or gambling. Psychological diagnosis and “nosology” (the part of our science that divides human troubles into discreet categories) are not entirely scientific, and plenty of books (here’s a favorite) rightly criticize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the limitations of its ever-changing categories (a more nuanced and humane approach has produced the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, or PDM, by Vittorio Lingiardi and Nancy McWilliams). We do need some way of talking about what ails people; imprecision is inevitable; and imprecise terms are far better than none.  

Like many ailments, hoarding occurs on a spectrum of severity. It can be a light nuisance, a serious problem that impinges on one’s life-possibilities, or a severe mental affliction with potentially dire implications for physical health. Like some other conditions, it’s a distorted version of some natural and necessary mental functions. In the deeply ancient world, long before civilization, people generally kept almost nothing, or only what they could carry. When the Paleolithic (“Old Stone Age”) became the Neolithic (“New Stone Age”), the first settlements were established where people lived for an entire season, or even year-round, storing food and artifacts. Evolutionary psychology of this sort can easily jump to mistaken conclusions, but it seems likely that somewhere along the line it became adaptive to try and hang onto stuff that might be useful later on. A temperament that disposed people to a more retentive attitude became partly heritable—despite the fact that it could also cause trouble, like plenty of other genetic traits. Even if OCD were entirely DNA-based, which it isn’t, activating it would still require a releasement mechanism in the form of a lived experience. Such mechanisms are usually traumas of one kind or another, having to do with some kind of scarcity: food insecurity, inadequate love and affection, episodes of being robbed or cheated—all these can make someone err “on the safe side” by keeping too much stuff.  

Obsessions are a cognitive thing, with affective (i.e., emotional) dimensions, manifest as intrusive repetitive thoughts, preoccupation with certain themes or figures, or recurring words that take up too much mental space for no good reason. Compulsions are behavioral; often they’re involuntary rituals, involving repetitive counting, arranging objects in spatial patterns, or “checking” again and again that one really did lock the door or turn off the stove, far beyond the point where you’ve already secured that important information. There’s usually some misery in it, along with efforts to conceal the problem. Hoarders rarely have people over to visit, because shame is usually involved—unless the person is oblivious to other people’s judgments, or to their own disorder, two features of more severe presentations. If you suspect you may be hoarding, it’s likely a good thing that you’ve got the perspicacity to be concerned.  

It’s a lot easier to deal with hoarding when it’s got other meanings to it besides the traumatic, maladaptive ones. If you’re a collector—of art, musical instruments, rare handmade tools, antiquities, autographs—you may manage to sublimate the underlying anxiety into a life-enhancing fascination with some aspect of culture that speaks to you. A “philatelist” collects stamps, a “numismatist,” coins. Book collectors may be captive to their enormous holdings, and being only human, they don’t have the necessary centuries to read every book they own—but come on, it’s the cumulative wisdom of the world on those shelves, not, say, a hundred pairs of shoes (ok, I’m a bit of a bibliomaniac myself). Then again, hearing a balanced, articulate shoe collector hold forth about his or her favorite specimens might be interesting enough to earn a guest’s instant respect. There’s something cool about a passion that builds expertise and a refined capacity to appreciate the larger meaning, history, and design of what appeals to you, however esoteric it might be. But there are limits. 

When there’s no unifying theme to the possessions, when they’re not in good shape, when their owner can’t find anything, and the space is cluttered to the point that the room is hard to cross without knocking things over, when dust is a major issue, when acquiring and retaining things has crowded-out self care, sociality, and financial prudence—and above all, when there is no joy in having all this stuff, well, that’s obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder.  

Aristotle recommended “the golden mean,” the sweet spot between the extremes: “nothing in excess.” It may seem odd that people who endure opposite insults like “neat freak” and “slob” will find their problems listed on the same pages, but remember the horseshoe metaphor? The extremes have more in common with each other, than with the center. Dante put the Spendthrifts and the Misers in the same circle of the Inferno, where they taunted each other forever, shouting “Why hoard?” and “Why squander?” That’s also the soundtrack of the hoarding experience whenever it’s time to try and escape it: the first question is your exasperation at all the junk you’re living with, but as soon as you pick up any single item of it and try to throw it away, the second question kicks in.  

Let’s linger on that a moment. You’ve just picked up one of your hoarded objects… an extra audio speaker, a bundle of obsolete cords, a chipped tureen, the wrong-sized pair of old new shoes you never got around to listing on eBay. You’re holding it in your hands. The pleasure of keeping it is only a very brief moment of relief at not having to part with it. But the pleasure of removing it lasts, because you keep noticing the cleared space you freed-up by releasing it. Suppose you hang onto a belt sander for eight years because you might have a carpentry project one day. Then you get fed up, or you’re given an ultimatum by a lover or a landlord, and finally manage to fetch $40 for it on Craigslist. A week later, your favorite aunt Facetimes you out of the blue, about the wooden stairs at her place—how they keep giving her splinters, and they need “a coat of varnish or something.” Waves of self-reproach come flooding in from your inner tyrant: How could I let myself give up that sanding machine, after keeping it for eight years! Now I need it! I knew this would happen. The people who urged me to get rid of it were wrong! Now I’ll have to spend a hundred dollars to buy another one! 

Persuasive as that mighty voice may seem, it doesn’t know the whole truth. And the part it does know, isn’t helping you. Sure, you could buy a new sander, but you’ve just learned that the need for this tool arises about once per decade. And for under $40 per day, you could rent one and be rid of it when the job is finished. Look around the living room, the garage, the storage unit. Of all the objects you see, what percentage of them have suddenly come in handy the way the belt sander just did? Wrapping paper will get reactivated on holidays, and candles are a good hedge for a possible blackout. But the extra speakers, the orphaned USB cables, the chipped tureen? Almost no foreseeable scenario will turn their lost importance back on again, and what you see when you look at them is stagnation, anxiety, and reluctance to govern your own affairs without excessive fear of being caught without a tureen, just in case a soccer team drops by with five gallons of soup in a bucket. Giving up that belt sander was a victory. It turned out you could’ve saved some money by keeping it, after all. But there would have been value in getting rid of it years ago, to enjoy the freedom of choice, and the decluttered living space, its absence would afford you.  There are hidden costs to hanging onto things you don’t need now, even if there’s a chance (and there’s always a chance) you might need them in the future.

Suppose you do throw out some usable item, and some years go by. Then the phone call comes, announcing a sudden occasion to make use of what you sold, or gave away, or threw out so long ago. Suppose there’s no option to rent a new one, and no cheap replacement waiting for you on some website or a thrift shop. If you want to do the project, you’ve got to spend $50 that you could’ve kept if you’d only continued hoarding the thing. Well, consider the $50 a small fee you pay for those years of being unencumbered by the thing.  

We know some of the neural correlates of Hoarding Disorder, and there are medications that can be useful components of treatment. While there’s currently no 100% effective psychopharma for it, HD often occurs with depression, so any successful treatment for that mood issue can alleviate HD, sometimes significantly.  

If you believe you may have a milder degree of trouble with hoarding, it may help to watch some of the documentaries and reality TV shows that have been made about cases much worse than what you’re contending with. That can make unpleasant viewing, but it can jolt you into firmer resolve to make some changes.  

An excellent psychodynamic treatment approach for OCD in general is George Weinberg’s book, Invisible Masters.  

Some cultural resources that may help anybody who needs them include Swedish “death cleaning,” which builds on the truism that “you can’t take it with you,” and Japanese housekeeping, which emphasizes an elegant minimalism.  

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Licensed in NY, NJ, TX, and CA. www.drjameyhecht.com

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Infidelity is always happening somewhere, and it always involves at least three people; a cheater (let’s call that person Delta), a cheated-on (call this one Epsilon), and a third person, who comes from outside. Couple’s therapy rarely includes that one, so we’ll only discuss those two genderless Greek-lettered persons. The concept of infidelity only has meaning in the context of an attempt at a monogamous commitment, so the world of polyamory and other alternative arrangements is respectfully set aside for the purposes of this discussion.

Most people have either cheated or been cheated on, at least once in their romantic lives; many have been in each position at one time or another. The pains of guilt or betrayal are extreme when we’re young and naive, full of huge feelings without the wisdom of experience. Disillusion can be embittering. But if we endure infidelity early in life, we get to enjoy plenty of future decades with those lessons already installed. Big mistakes and betrayals are always possible, but people who have learned from experience can successfully make such crises extremely unlikely. Cheating on your boo in high school can put a guilty wretch in your mirror, and getting jilted in eleventh grade hurts plenty—but it’s much worse when it happens ten years into a marriage, especially if the couple has to tell their kids about it.

Cheating is: a mistake. Like most mistakes, it does not have to define you. It might forever define you in the eyes of the one you betray, but if you stop cheating, you can reinvent yourself—with or without that injured partner, by yourself, or with someone new. You may be Delta this time around, but you need never be in that awful role again. You can use the ordeal as a schoolhouse whose central lesson is that the price of cheating is extremely high, whether you get caught or not, so that almost no circumstances make cheating a good enough option to be worth it. You may be Epsilon (cheated on) this time, but you can turn this disaster to good account by distilling from it the knowledge necessary to avoid any future repetitions and Never. Be. Cheated. On. Again. Since this lesson is a bit more subtle and complicated than Delta’s lesson, let’s discuss it further.

Most cheaters aren’t sociopaths; some are. Other personality disorders, in particular narcissistic and borderline pathologies, can resemble sociopathy in this striking capacity for deception. Persons thus afflicted can lie well, all the time, to anybody, uninhibited by conscience or principle, with a skill that makes their deceptions very hard to detect. They lack the inner psychic structure that would otherwise generate inconvenient compassion for those they deceive. The missing psychic structure leaves plenty of room for a frictionless compartmentalization that gives them remarkably little trouble. They can smoothly escalate from withholding important information to outright lying. Unlike ordinary liars, sociopaths don’t just blunder forward in hasty improvisations, hoping for the best. They actively manipulate their partners, implementing strategic webs of bad data and false signals whose exquisite architecture is their own delicious secret. Some even lead truly double lives, with whole families that don’t know about each other’s existence. But these people are quite rare, with antisocial personality disorder (the current term for sociopathy) occurring in 2% to 4% of the general population. If you find yourself with such a person, your task is to end the relationship; to discover why you chose such a person; to develop criteria for screening out similar people in the future; and to heal from any underlying masochism that might have influenced your choice. Again, it’s very rare that the problem is a genuine sociopathy, so let’s set those cases aside at this point and consider infidelity dynamics that are much more common.

Most people who cheat have, by the time they bring their sexual and/or emotional needs outside the relationship, already sulked for months or years before they become sufficiently despairing about the relationship to go ahead and ruin it. They start by sending signals that they’re unhappy, the biggest of which is emotional withdrawal. If Delta’s signals of unhappiness don’t get through, it’s generally because Epsilon is too busy idealizing the relationship to consider Delta’s new and troublesome information. Idealization isn’t always a happy state. Its main feature is avoidance of reality, either by pretending that the relationship is rosy and trouble-free (“other people have to work at marriage, but lucky us, we don’t”), or by pretending that the relationship may be troubled, but is somehow uniquely indestructible.

The error—Epsilon’s blindness to Delta’s unhappiness signals—is of course a distorted perception, a misapprehension of the other person’s state of mind. But it is also (and perhaps more profoundly) rooted in an identity issue: one says to oneself, “I am someone who has married well, would never get cheated on, will never become divorced—that bad stuff only happens to other people.” Such self-deception is only human, but it is hubristic. Your partner is not an angel, and neither are you. This fact need not, must not, ruin anything—except the idealization, which began as a valuable element of falling in love, but must sooner or later be outgrown, replaced by a deeper, more mellow form of enduring esteem.

The lesson that will protect you from being cheated on in the future is: signals of unhappiness must be taken seriously, without procrastination, even if it makes you feel less lucky, or successful, or safe, than you are used to feeling. Have the necessary conversations about how each of you is doing, what hurts, what’s boring, what’s missing—what aspects of the relationship are giving each of you trouble of various kinds. If you’re too scared to have those conversations, or if they aren’t going well, get the help you need. Couple’s therapy can do ten times more good for your relationship before infidelity than it can do after it. Idealization blocks you off from the possibility of seeking couple’s therapy. But once you get started, it can facilitate a warm, good-faith, emotionally connected critique that is more humane and wholesome than the idealization.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.