Cheating with a Taken Man: How Trauma Influenced My Sexual Attraction

Looking back at our doomed “relationship,” I see that it began while I was still reeling from recent trauma.

Reeling from a psychotic break in which resurfaced memories from childhood overwhelmed me.

I shut off my feelings after my psychotic break.

Though I didn’t know it, I was experiencing ‘emotional numbing.’

In other words, my psyche became cut off from its own feelings and emotions as a means of self-protection against overwhelming distress.

Despite my emotional numbing, however, I began to strongly desire to date somebody.

I first had my eye on someone else, a manager at the bar where I poured beers part-time, until Jared walked in.

Drinking Away the Pain

He, too, was reeling from recent life events.

He felt abandoned by his longterm girlfriend, whom had moved 3 hours away for a well-paying job.

Really, Jared’s issues went much deeper, though.

Like me, he was still reeling from childhood trauma that never went away.

Raised by a heavily abusive and alcoholic parents who seemingly resented his existence, he dreamed of another life.

When he met his high-school sweetheart, he knew instantly that she would be his wife and bear his children.

A few years later, they married and had two little girls.

Then, life caught up to them.

Long story short, his wife left him for another man. (Personally, I believe that his behavior drove her to cheat in the first place.)

After his dream family life exploded in his face, he spiraled.

In fact, he seems to have been spiraling in the fifteen plus years since then, constantly drunk or sleeping around or otherwise acting out.

His drinking problem — something I initially overlooked — became a warning sign I could no longer ignore.

He drank like a fish, like he’d suffocate without it.

He didn’t even seem to care much if his teenage daughters saw him in that state.

His alcoholism (as well as the fact that he literally had a girlfriend) was the reason I lost interest in maintaining our relationship.

Physically, I did leave him behind.

Emotionally, however, I stayed on.

Fantasizing to Self-Regulate Emotions

He was an unavailable man both literally and figuratively, meaning that I could indulge my desire for a lover without actually committing to him.

After I realized that the physical, real him could never fulfill my emotional needs, I began pining for him, daydreaming.

Daydreaming became a dysfunctional way for me to self-regulate my emotions. Ever time he disappointed, I retreated to the ‘other Jared,’ the idealized one in my head.

I didn’t know, at the time, that a psychologist had coined the term “limerence” , which she considered to be similar to infatuation or lovesickness, especially in its link to maladaptive daydreaming as a coping mechanism.

Looking back, I think I liked the safety of low-stakes pining for someone out of reach.

After all, as long as Jared was unattainable, I didn’t have to face the vulnerability of a real relationship, with all its messy complexities and risks of rejection and reality-checks.

It’s a pattern, a kind of emotional safe zone.

Then came the night before Thanksgiving.

Jared called me, came over and spent the night.

Then, to my horror, his girlfriend caught us.

She promptly dumped his ass, taking the house, the beer business, his truck, and both their dogs with her.

She had, after all, helped him raise his daughters since they were small, while he cheated and drank and neglected work all the while.

I, too, blamed him for his own actions.

Still, I felt deep guilt over the role I’d played in the undoing of their longterm relationship.

I also couldn’t help but feel tenderly for the immense pain he was enduring after being kicked out of his own life.

I felt genuinely surprised by the depth of my instinctive yearning to soothe his emotional boo-boos.

It felt maternal.

It physically hurt.

Care-taking as a Trauma Response

Despite my powerful instinct to heal Jared, I couldn’t help but believe that his problems required intensive professional care.

I knew enough from my own experience as a former wounded wild-child free-spirit that we all make the choice to change on our own.

Still, I felt obligated.

I couldn’t abandon somebody in this state, terrible though he was: throwing expletive-filled tantrums, demanding my time and attention, disregarding my needs and wants, and engaging in hardcore, nonstop drinking, carousing, and sleeping around.

He was a nightmare.

I was frightened — maybe even terrified — by the darkness emanating from him.

I sensed it growing larger from within, taking him over, more and more, swallowing him up into something ugly.

Care-taking as Codependency

I became deeply ashamed of his drinking.

How it changed him.

He became small and stupid and darkly angry.

A few months in of barely tolerating him, I lost my cool and told him to fuck off.

We had one final conversation and then he disappeared, as if by magic.

His sudden absence felt like utter relief, like answered prayers.

Then, as time passed, I began to worry about him, reaching out. Then, I began to feel hurt by him, by the way he refused to give me any sort of closure or apology.

Looking back, I also see clearly that part of me still wanted him around, in a sort of limited, peripheral way.

I was still indulging in fantasies.

Did Hurting Him Help Him?

The few times we did speak on the phone in the months following his sudden disappearance from my life, he told me that his life was on the up and up.

He got a new job, then started his own business. He also got himself a new girlfriend.

Months passed, with me calling him every couple weeks, demanding to know how he was doing, while internally I clung to secret delusions of some sudden, spiritual transformation in him.

In the End, His Trauma Destroyed Him

One morning I received a phone call from Jared’s new girlfriend.

She is much younger than Jared, and has a three-year-old daughter.

The night before, he’d drunkenly attacked her and her elderly stepfather, beating them viciously until police officers were able to pry him off.

She sends me the official police report, written by the officer who witnessed some of the violence. Jared is charged with misdemeanor Domestic Violence as well as a felony for Harming an Elderly Person.

She tells me is in jail, begging her to find somebody to bail him out.

I feel sick to my stomach with worry for her, and relief for myself and my own daughter.

Under the relief, though, there is shame.

I had continued to indulge our emotional connection for many years, despite knowing that he was bad news.

I think of the darkness I watched grow within him over the years and my mind taunts me, “I told you so.”

…

I wonder if, on some subconscious level, I was so attracted to Jared because he was my chance to re-enact childhood trauma and thusly “fix” it.

I would take a bad man and make him good.

If only in my mind.

Turns out, I may be onto something with this theory of mine.

There is a psychological term in trauma theory called trauma reenactment or repetition compulsion that refers to the tendency of individuals to unconsciously repeat patterns from past traumatic experiences in an attempt to resolve them.

The grim truth about this tendency, however, is that it often reinforces unprocessed emotions instead of healing them.

I see now that my subconscious re-enactment perpetuated the same power dynamics, fear and emotional pain that caused the original trauma.

Basically, I re-traumatized myself.

Now, as I move forward and seek healing, I like to believe that maybe I have finally, at least somewhat, broken that pattern.

I like to believe that if I see Jared in person again, I will feel nothing but a mixture of pity and disgust, perhaps a distant compassion.

Moving forward, I am focusing on building relationships with people I trust, instead of with people whose untrustworthiness excites me.

That sense of danger, I think, no longer excites me in the same twisted way that it once did. Instead, passionate men seem like walking red flags.

Perhaps this newfound fear is yet another hurdle to healing, or perhaps I’ve just become wiser than I was.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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