affairs – Page 12

How to Keep a “Financial 9/11” From Interfering In Your Relationships

I’m calling the meltdown on Wall Street “financial 9/11.” With the stock markets plummeting more than they have in roughly two decades, with the bailout being denied, with banks being bought, people foreclosing, it’s easy to see how difficult times have become.

And this difficulty is spreading from out from Wall Street and Washington and trickling right down to the homes of many middle class Americans.

The One Thing People Fight Most About

Money is one of the things people fight about the most, and with families throughout the nation feeling the pinch of high gas prices, rising food costs, possible job loss, less discretionary income and much more, fights about finances are likely to increase. And, while it’s naive to think that a financial crisis won’t take a toll on a a relationship, you don’t have to let it control your life.

It’s always a good time to talk about family finances but with things fluctuating the way they are right now, it’s IMPERATIVE to talk about money with your significant other. This is specially if the responsibility for budgeting, investing and financial decisions typically fall on one person.

Both people need to know what’s going on, need to be able to give input and need to feel like can voice their concerns. If the burden is falling on one person, the added stress of an unstable market can lead to poor decision making, including financial infidelity, where one person is making decisions, purchases or withdrawals behind the other’s back as a way of mitigating the added stress they’re feeling.

They can also turn to other addictive behaviors including overeating, resort to taking sleeping pills to help them fall asleep when their mind is racing, or even turn to a sexual affair. Couples need to remind themselves that they’re in it together, and they need to focus on the importance of being honest and working as a team.

Don’t Panic!

The important thing is not to panic. Aside from working through finances as a couple, you should also take times to do other things with each other. Watch your favorite TV show (which is free entertainment!), cook dinner together, exercise together. You want to keep your relationship and your passion for each other strong through this period as there will be lots of other distractions that will be needing your attention.

Talk About Money

Now is a good time to use “Smart Heart Dialogue,” which I’ve mentioned in my book, Financial Infidelity. Smart Heart Dialogue helps you share your financial history with someone you’re becoming intimate with.

Many of these conversations can be triggered by a transition in a relationship like the financial transitions many couples find themselves in right now! Use that transition to be open and honest in finding out what you can about the other person’s view of money.

This type of dialogue would likely work well in Washington to a). have mitigated this crisis in the first place and b). help politicians come to an agreement in terms of what’s to be done next. When talking in terms of Smart Heart Dialogue, I have some sample questions, one of them being:

“I overspent while we were on vacation, can you lend me some money?”

The explanation I give seems especially fitting for the government’s current situation:

*The person asking for a loan may not take money and budgeting as seriously as you do. Or maybe you overspent too. Whatever the case, you need to evaluate how you deal with money, leisure activities and “spur of the moment” purchases.

The Brain/Credit Card Connection and Your Relationship

By drbonnieeakerweil

You are likely carrying around an emotional connection, and therefore, baggage, you didn’t even know you had. It’s a connection between your brain and your credit card debt; between your thoughts and feelings and why and how you spend money. It helps explain your views on money and debt and why you react to these things in certain ways.

Knowing about these connections and your money patterns won’t excuse you from financial problems you might face, but you can help nip these problems, and any repercussions they might have, in the bud.

I call these brain/money connections the Biochemical Craving for Connection.” It starts when stress causes thrill-seeking behavior. The stress can be linked as far back as childhood but can also be due to recent pain or emotional distress.

The thrill-seeking behavior can be in the form of financial or sexual conquests and infidelities.

You’re looking for ways to self-medicate and to help calm stress levels down. At the same time, these indiscretions give you another kind of high and the cycle starts: Give into sexual or financial pressure to help relieve stress, feel a “high” for a moment, then return to stressful feelings about the situation. Eventually, the only thing that can help your problem is the problem itself!

Areas in the Brain That Communicate With Each Other

There are several areas in the brain that communicate with each other to influence emotion. When it comes to dealing with extreme behaviors such as addiction, infidelity and poor decision making, these areas may be involved:

*The limbic system is made up of several structures that work together to control emotion, hormonal secretions, moods and pain/pleasure reflexes.

*The hippocampus is a structure within the limbic system and plays a role in emotion. If this area is damaged, it can reduce your ability to distinguish safe and dangerous situation, leading you to seek out situations that may FEEL safe, but in reality, aren’t. Things like sexual affairs or financial infidelity.

*The ventral striatum and the nucleus accumbens help process satisfaction and happiness. These areas are also associated with assessing risk reward and gratification. When these areas aren’t functioning properly, people may get involved with addictive behaviors leading to things like gambling, affairs, etc., in order to stimulate pleasure responses.

For people struggling with things like debt and/or financial infidelity, it’s helpful to figure out if these areas of the brain are coming into play. It’s also helpful to figure out what types of stressors may have triggered the Biochemical Craving for Connection in the first place so you can deal with the root cause.

Is There Life After Cheating? Can You Survive An Affair?

By melody

No matter how long you’ve been in a relationship, an affair can completely turn your world upside down. Whether you were the cheater or the one who was cheated on, when the affair comes out into the open, it seems like life will never be the same.

Can a relationship survive an affair? What can you and your partner do to work past the affair and become a positive, healthy couple again?

Can a relationship really survive an affair? What’s the secret?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZTa4CwDxfk[/youtube]

The Causes Of Affairs

Too often, people view affairs as the problem. In reality, affairs are really not the problem at all. For example, having a runny nose and itchy, watery eyes are not a problem. They’re a symptom of the bigger issue of allergies.

Similarly, affairs are only a symptom of a problem in the relationship. If there are no allergies, there won’t be itchy, watery eyes and runny noses. If there are no problems in a relationship, there won’t be any affairs.

This can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially if you’re feeling victimized, but to begin working past an affair you have to own up to the causes of the affair.

The causes of the affair were unlikely to be “because your partner is a horrible person.”The more likely causes of the affair were that there was a problem between you and your partner to begin with.

Once you learn to accept that and own up to it, you and your partner can begin working through the affair.

Stop Feeling Victimized.

If you are the one who was cheated on, it’s normal to feel upset, hurt, betrayed and even victimized. Some people, however, stay in that state of mind for too long following the affair because they’re comfortable in the position of being the victim. Who wants to be the bad guy anyway?

It can be extremely difficult to own up to the contribution to relationship problems, and it’s a lot easier to sit back and feel like the other person did you wrong. You’ll never move past an affair if you continue to let yourself feel victimized. Take some time to think through how both partners contributed to the affair and what the possible problems in your relationships might be.

Solve Your Relationship Problems.

If you’re able to get to the point where you and your partner can both own up to your contributions to the affair, you’re ready to move on and start building your relationship back up. Counseling is a great way to work out your relationship problems and it’s very important that you do. If you ignore the underlying problems that caused the affair, the symptoms will continue to present themselves.

Enter into couples counseling or marriage counseling so you and your partner can begin to work through the deep seated problems that were behind the affair in the first place. It’s important to go into counseling together rather than individual counseling, because you stand a much better chance of solving your problems as a couple if you go through counseling as a couple.

With time and effort from both partners, you can begin to work through the affair and learn to trust each other again. When you begin to realize that both parties contribute to an affair, not just the cheater, your relationship has a much better chance of surviving the affair.

8 Ways You May be Betraying Your Lover

By scottstephenpetullo

Infidelity comes in many different forms besides having a sexual relationship with someone other than your lover, assuming you’ve agreed to a monogamous relationship with that person.

We’re often asked how romantic betrayal relates to spiritual tenets such as karma and personal destiny. In two words, a lot. Our long-term empirical research firmly indicates that everything you do and say will return to you, and usually not in the same lifetime.

The Big Picture

When looking at the big picture in relation to your love life, it’s important to realize that key circumstances and events, “good” and “bad,” happen because that’s the way your soul (not your personality) planned them before birth so you can learn your lessons and grow spiritually.

However, you do have free will to make the most of every situation. You can also limit your future life karma by treating others as you want to be treated now. Below we list five ways you may be betraying your lover, possibly even without realizing you’re doing so.

1. Emotional Cheating

You have an emotionally intimate relationship with someone other than your spouse. You’re not sleeping with this other person, but still you have an intimate connection that you explore and nurture. If this sort of relationship isn’t acceptable with your spouse, then you are betraying them.

2. Fantasizing Outside the Relationship

You’re regularly fantasizing about someone else, even while in bed with your partner. If you and your partner have an agreement that it’s okay to do so, then fine, but beyond that, it’s a form of betrayal.

3. Disregarding Personal Health

You stop maintaining your health, take up unhealthy habits that cause your looks to deteriorate and, or otherwise are not making the most of your appearance and looking your best for your partner.

4. Decreasing Sexual Frequency

You limit the amount of sex between you and your significant other. Worse, you start to offer sex to your partner only under certain conditions, perhaps in exchange for something such as giving you more of his or her disposable income.

5. Cutting Off Your Partner

You cut off your lover emotionally or intellectually, or otherwise limit or sever vital human contact. Sure, relationships go through certain stages where you may change the way you relate, but to intentionally starve him or her of the type of emotional or mental contact you had prior is a form of betrayal.

6. Financial Irresponsibility

You are not financially responsible, spend more than you both make or have, and risk his or her good credit standing. Telling your lover he or she should be making more money isn’t an excuse for spending too much.

7. Just Pretending

You pretend you are in lust and love but you aren’t. Nobody likes to be with someone who really isn’t into them, but pretends to be.

8. Loving Someone Else

You are in love with someone else and, or you simply don’t love your partner anymore, yet you remain with them and pretend everything is great because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. This is actually selfish because you are keeping them from being with someone more compatible.

In a karmic sense, all of this behavior is ultimately betrayal and just as negative as fooling around behind your lover’s back. In fact, altering your behavior in any way, to your lover’s detriment, after a commitment has been made, is cheating. What to do if you are on the receiving end, you ask? We don’t recommend retaliating with similar behavior, since it will incur negative karma.

But if you’ve done all you can do to help your relationship, and your partner refuses to do their part, it is your right to sever the connection and leave if the betrayal or betrayals push the union beyond repair. You won’t incur any negative karma if you leave as peacefully and fairly as you can.

Is There Really an Infidelity Gene and What Does it Mean For Your Relationship?

By drbonnieeakerweil

A new gene discovered by scientists is being called the “infidelity gene,” but what does that actually mean, and is the name truly rooted in the scientific discovery?

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have found a link between a specific gene and the way men bond to their partners. The same gene has been previously studied in voles, where it has been linked to monogamous behavior in males, but this is the first time that a specific gene variant has been associated with male bonding.

The Genetic Link and How it Affects Relationships

The effect of this variation is relatively small, and it cannot be used to predict with any real accuracy how someone will behave in a future relationship.

Hasse Walum, postgraduate student at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and his team found that men who carry one or two copies of a variant of a particular gene linked to hormone receptors, allele 334, often behave differently in relationships than men who lack this gene variant.

According to the study, the incidence of allele 334 was statistically linked to how strong a bond a man felt he had with his partner. Men who had two copies of allele 334 were also twice as likely to have had a marital or relational crisis in the past year than those who lacked the gene variant.

There was also a connection between the men’s gene variant and how happy their partners were with their relationship.

“Women married to men who carry one or two copies of allele 334 were, on average, less satisfied with their relationship than women married to men who didn’t carry this allele”, says Hasse Walum.

It’s Not All About Genetics

A related study was carried out several years ago, in which researchers focused on women who were twins and found that if one of a pair of twins had a history of infidelity, the chances her sister would also stray were about 55%. It found the tendency for both twins to be either faithful or unfaithful was strongest in identical pairs who have identical genes.

The executors of the study stressed that genes alone did not determine whether somebody was likely to be unfaithful. Much could be boiled down to social factors as well.

I’ve found similar things throughout my years as a therapist and believe that certain people ARE genetically predisposed to have a more difficult time being faithful. I call it the bio-chemical craving for connection.

Where Infidelity Comes From

It usually stems from three things: stress, loss or separation and leads to thrill-seeking behavior to avoid an emptiness I believe is passed down from generation to generation.

I do work with a doctor who can balance brain chemicals to allow the adulterer to bond with their partner, and not need to seek out those thrill-seeking behaviors,which I talk about in my book, Adultery, the Forgivable Sin.

Of course there are other factors at work here. For example, if you grew up in a home where one of your parents was unfaithful, or if you move in circles where discreet infidelity is somewhat accepted. But some people must fight against infidelity like others fight against alcoholism or anger.

This doesn’t mean they get a free pass. The key is to acknowledge this about yourself and keep fighting AGAINST however you have to whether it’s through therapy, support groups or counseling.

To learn more about Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, check out her latest book Financial Infidelity.