Emotional Betrayal: Identifying the 7 Stages of Emotional Affairs

Source: AnchorLightTherapy

Now, let’s look at some emotional cheating examples that include the following:

• The work spouse: A special and initial spiritual relationship that has certain privileges like validation and flattery. This has expanded dependence and concentration on working spouses and can even be familiar throughout the office and in their respective wedlocks.
• The gaming buddy: Generally, a part of a bigger group at the initial stages, the gaming buddies can become increasingly demanding of each other’s emotional attention and time. They become the preference over time and may start to outweigh their spouses when it comes to time and attention.
• The best friend: The best friend may have been around much longer than the primary relationship but it can be platonic in most cases. Nevertheless, the best friend is a gradual challenge when it comes to prioritizing your spouse. In most cases, the best friend knows the person better than their spouse. 

How to Get Over an Emotional Affair?

Well, you must know that an emotional betrayal starts when a healthy and non-toxic support becomes an unhealthy and toxic one.

If you start depending on outside relationships in order to satisfy your emotional needs, then you must know that it can overstep your relational boundaries. 

Well, if you are not able to understand this even now, then with these emotional cheating examples, you will be able to know emotional betrayal in the best way possible.

Source: AnchorLightTherapy

• A person with whom you loved to spend time once turns into an unusual person whom you are not excited to see every day.
• An online group of friends started to focus heavily on just one member of the group.

In order to get rid of this problem, make sure to remember your commitments with your partner, prioritize them and feel do they need to change or not, start identifying the emotional needs that you expected but were not fulfilled in your relationship.

Once you and your partner identified their emotional needs, you must find a resolution for the same and start emphasizing on the communication which should be healthy and not aggressive. 

For instance, you can say “I felt ignored by you” instead of “You ignored me.” With this, you will be able to establish good communication habits for your relationship. This way, you can get rid of emotional betrayal and start living a healthy life as per your choice.

7 Stages of Emotional Affairs

Emotional betrayal may look different based on the relationship and there are some popular signs of emotional affairs and their advancement. They can start out innocently but may evolve into a dynamic that traverses the line into cheating or infidelity.

Source: Woman’sDay

Let’s understand all 7 stages of emotional betrayal in an easy and comprehensive way:

1. “Innocent” Friendship

This is the initial stage of emotional cheating where it looks just like any other friendship. This friendship may get sparked with your colleague, a gaming buddy, or anyone else. You can even connect with your old friend.

At first, they usually make the other person feel that they are special and important in your life but you will never know when you have come to the second stage of emotional betrayal.

2. Crossing the Line

In this stage, you will start sharing your deep thoughts and darkest secrets about your life with your friend.

They start diving into each other’s emotional experiences that the person will never trust their spouse with.

In this sense, the feeling of getting better understood by this friend satisfies a specific need for validation and attention.

3. Cribbing

Complaining to each other about partners is called cribbing is so common nowadays. You must know that an emotional experience continues to become a relationship that satisfies one’s unmet needs.

In this stage of emotional infidelity, this relationship will not sufficiently feel nice but become about what they are not able to get at their homes.

4. Fixation

You will agree that attraction is much more of a driving force than any other thing. You will notice those parts in your friend’s personality that your partner is missing.

This way, you will get more physically attracted to your friend. Thus, you will start dressing up for your friend and wonder how your friend will perceive you.

5. Making Decisions Together for Each Other

In this stage, your affair will become more important than your primary relationship. This affair will play a crucial role in most of your decisions in everyday life.

Even if you do simple things with your partner, let’s suppose a meal time, it can be interrupted to spend time with your friend.

6. Disillusionment With Your Life At Home

Here, when you live at your home with your spouse, it will make you feel depressed and you will feel like there is nothing as good as spending time with your friend.

In this stage, the emotional affair will consume a lot of your energy and the potential to care about other relationships will be limited and restrained.

7. Separation

Separation is the last stage in this emotional fidelity where the desire to leave the partner will overtake your desire to stay with them.

Here, you will want to get out of your relationship and will focus on all the reasons that will justify your separation from your partner.

With all the above talk, you would have understood that there are 7 stages of emotional affairs that can happen to anyone if their unmet needs start connecting with each other. 

However, the best solution to get rid of this problem is to communicate about this with your partner in a healthy way and try to sort things in order to bring peace to your life and mind.