Tim Arrigo examines what infidelity does to you psychologically: hypervigilance, projection, constant accusations. He argues the only way out is self-examination and accountability, not repeating the pattern.
Infidelity is mental torture, and here's why. See, when you engage in infidelity, when you commit adultery and you cheat on your wife, you know what it does, brother? What it does is it signs you up for mental torture down the line, because I don't care how long ago it was, if it was a year, 2, 3, 4, 5, a decade ago, You know what somebody is truly capable of in terms of the infidelity in the relationship. And see why? Because you did it. And because you did it, you know what someone's capable of in a relationship. So what it does is it causes your mind to be constantly in a state of hypervigilance. So you're on high alert when you're on rocky ground in your marriage because you know what you did when your needs weren't being met in the marriage. You knew what you did to go and seek external validation. Validation and to try to fill that God-sized hole inside of you with the validation from somebody else, with some temporary escape. And so now you know that that's a possibility with your wife, and so you can't get out of your head. And now here come the accusations. And these accusations, see, they don't bring your wife closer. Obviously, they push your wife further and further away. Because what the accusations do is they make your, your wife feel like you don't trust her. And it's a state of what we call psychological projection. See, you're projecting the reality that you had from years ago, something that you did onto your wife in the current moment, despite the fact that there's no evidence to support it. And see, now you've realized how there is a consequence to what you do. So what's the solution? See, the solution is to figure out what was missing in the marriage in the first place that years ago made you go outside of the marriage, number one. Number two, to realize what you brought into that marriage in terms of whatever was going on inside your heart, right? Where were the wounds inside of here that caused you to have to be unfaithful and sabotage a loving marriage? See, doing that work is the real way to solve this problem. See, solving it doesn't involve going into the external environment. It actually involves going within yourself, because going within yourself is where you finally start to find the answers, the answers that you've always been searching for, because the answers are within. Brother, there's a reason why you've done what you've done. There's a reason why you engage in the behaviors that you do. There's a reason why you drive the people closest to you in your life away. And the answers to those questions that you have about why you do those things are within you. And until you finally face that reality, until you finally start to take action and invest in yourself and get brutally honest about the fact that you and I both know that you have skeletons in your closet that you haven't examined, that you haven't looked at, you're going to continue to stay in the cycle. So let me ask you right now, do you want to have a predictable cycle that brings you back into this state constantly, or you want to break free from your emotional incarceration and realize that you had the keys all along and that you determined your release date. See, anything that you're aware of, that you're conscious of, that you're not changing, anything that you're conscious of that you're not changing, you're now choosing.
