What Being Cheated On Does to You Psychologically, According to Experts
· Vice
Friends always say the same couple of things after they find out you’ve been cheated on. You deserve better, and you’ll come out of this stronger. The second one makes you want to smother them with the throw pillow it’s probably stitched on, but annoyingly, they might be right.
Being cheated on can completely shatter your sense of trust, and that’s not something that you can just magically restore. “The erosion of trust, which is often the aftermath of cheating, can be very hard to fully heal,” relationship expert Natalia Rachel told Body+Soul. In one study, about half of the 246 participants scored above the cutoff for probable PTSD after discovering a partner had cheated.
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Some people in the same study also reported posttraumatic growth, basically positive changes that came after the betrayal. Researchers found that the people who had generally trusted others before the affair had more of their worldview to rebuild afterward, and that rebuilding was associated with greater growth. People who already expected to get burned were more likely to see the affair as confirmation that they were right all along.
The Strange Way Betrayal Can Make You Better at Relationships
Therapy can help with some of the all-or-nothing thinking that comes with this betrayal. Cognitive processing therapy, a common trauma treatment, works on beliefs like everyone cheats and tries to pull them back toward something more accurate: this person cheated, and that doesn’t mean everyone will. Psychology Today notes that this kind of reframing takes time, and trust is much harder to rebuild once your brain has decided how this story ends.
Breakups, in general, also seem to change people in smaller, more practical ways. Psychologists Ty Tashiro and Patricia Frazier found that personal growth after a breakup was common, but it usually looked more like getting better at admitting when you were wrong than becoming a brand-new person. People who blamed the breakup entirely on who they were were less likely to report that kind of growth.
Getting cheated on can change you. Sometimes that change is useful. Sometimes it just means you recognize bullsh*t a little faster the next time around.
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