TrueLife - Dr. Talal H. Alsaleem - Unfaithful & Unrepentant!

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/🎙️🎙️🎙️ Dr. Talal H. AlsaleemAloha, everyone! Today, we have the rare opportunity to dive into the complex, often hidden world of infidelity and healing with one of the most respected voices in the field, Dr. Talal H. Alsaleem. An award-winning marriage counselor and the author of Infidelity: The Best Worst Thing that Could Happen to Your Marriage, Dr. Alsaleem has dedicated his career to exploring the deep undercurrents that lead to affairs and their long-lasting impact.What makes his approach revolutionary is not just his expertise in diagnosing the root causes, but his creation of the Systematic Affair Recovery Therapy (SART)™, a groundbreaking method that has helped countless couples navigate the devastating aftermath of betrayal. Dr. Alsaleem doesn’t offer false hope—his work is about raw honesty, guiding couples through difficult truths so they can heal in ways that are meaningful and authentic, whether the path leads to reconciliation or a fresh start.His powerful research, encapsulated in works like Unfaithful and Unrepentant: Affairs Beyond the Hope of Repair, goes beyond conventional therapy and forces us to confront the deeper, sometimes irreparable wounds that affairs can cause. Whether you’re a clinician or someone touched by the trauma of infidelity, Dr. Alsaleem’s insights offer not only tools for recovery but profound clarity on the choices we make after trust is shattered.Get ready for a conversation that will challenge your assumptions and equip you with the knowledge to see beyond the surface of infidelity—into the transformative possibilities it presents. Welcome, Dr. Talal H. Alsaleem!https://www.talalalsaleem.com/author/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. Everybody is having a wonderful day. I hope that the sun is shining. I hope that the birds are singing. and that the wind is at your back.

I have with me today an incredible show with an incredible guest. I think you're all going to enjoy it. So today we have the rare opportunity to dive into the complex, often hidden world of infidelity and healing with one of the most respected voices in the field. Dr. Talal H. Alasim, an award-winning marriage counselor and the author of infidelity, the best worst thing that could happen to your marriage. Dr. Al-Salim has dedicated his career to exploring the deep undercurrents that lead to affairs and their long-lasting impact. What makes his approach revolutionary is not just his expertise in diagnosing the root causes, but his creation of the systematic affair recovery therapy.

SART, a groundbreaking method that has helped countless couples navigate the devastating aftermath of betrayal. Dr. Al-Salem doesn't offer false hope. His work is about raw honesty, guiding couples to help. difficult truths so they can heal in ways that are meaningful and authentic, whether the path leads to reconciliation or a fresh start. His powerful research encapsulated in works like unfaithful and unrepentant. Affairs beyond the hope of repair goes beyond conventional therapy and forces us to confront the deeper, sometimes irreparable wounds that affairs can cause. Whether you're a clinician or someone touched by the trauma of infidelity, recovery, but profound

clarity on the choices we make after trusted chatter. Get ready for a conversation that will challenge your assumptions and equip you with the knowledge to see beyond the surface of infidelity into the transformative possibilities it presents. Dr. Talal, thank you for being here today. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah.

What an interesting time we live in. And before we got started on the show, I was telling you just what an incredible topic this is. Like this particular topic of infidelity touches so many people from partners in a marriage to partners in a relationship to children. And how did you end up in this position? Is this something that affected you when you were growing up? Or what was it that kind of brought you to this world? Great question.

I always, you know, when I do my training, the first thing that I do is I ask the therapist to kind of just show me a show of hands of how many people here have been impacted by infidelity directly or indirectly. I think, unfortunately, infidelity is one of the first thing. these things that we all have either experience in our relationship or in the relationship of others that folks that we care about, family members, parents, siblings and things along those lines. What brought me to the field in general and infideling in particular is really my passion about this topic and my skill set in working with couples. So way back in the day when I was a younger clinician many moons ago, I promised myself to try to get a well-rounded clinical experience.

I wanted to work with as many populations and as many different levels of care because I wanted to learn more about myself as a clinician, my strength, my weaknesses, and which population I was going to be working with. And with each place that you work with, in which each population, you get the wonderful opportunity

to get a new training method to add to your clinical tool bet. So at the end of that journey, I realized that I'm really passionate about working with couples, which is funny because most couples don't like working with couples because it's challenging. But I love the speed and the passion and the impact that you make. Because when you help a couple get unstuck, then only you're helping them, you're helping the future generations as well and what kind of models that they're going to show to their kids. So when I had my private practice working exclusively with couples,

I realized that the majority of my couples, at least over 50% of them, are not just coming for a tune-up. They're coming in because of a crisis. And most of the time, this crisis is related to current affair that was discovered or an affair that was discovered many years ago and they haven't been able to recover from it. So when I start looking at this clinical toolbox that I accumulated throughout the years to figure out which treatment methods that I can use for my clients, I realize that none of these methods are actually useful for healing infidelity. Most of them are generalized method. There were just, made for a guarded variety relationship issues.

So I found myself boring intervention from this model and that model of doing this patchwork of intervention, but still wasn't effective. So I, as they say, need is the mother of invention. I had this vantage point of working with couples, primarily for dealing in fidelity. So I started jotting down my observation and began to see where people actually get stuck. And that created the pathway for the systematic of A recovery therapy that I have created, tailor-made for infidelity, specifically for folks who are trying to recover from affairs. And the rest is history.

And, you know, as you know, infidelity is really a fascinating field. There's so much unknown. And I really like to kind of discover things that can help people improve their life. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you did. And I'm really curious. I got a bunch of questions lined up. And the first one that kind of comes to mind is, as you've got to be a lot of.

been in this field for so long, is there different trends in different socioeconomic backgrounds and different groups and different age groups? Or is there some sort of eriotony thread that runs through all of them? What are some trends that you've seen? Does it affect different groups differently? Or is it kind of something that's the same throughout? Sure, that's a great question. So before we answer that, we have to take a look at etiology and our misconceptions about what causes infidelity. If you ask the average person what causes infidelity, most people think that infidelity happen because of a relationship deficit or that people are not happy with their partner. Now, granted, one of the leading causes of infidelity is relationship to satisfaction,

but that's not the only theological reason that causes infidelity. We all have seen the couples where we, you know, look at their story and we don't get it, scratch our head. We say, okay, they seem to have the perfect partner, their partners meeting all their needs, they're compatible, yet the person is unfaithful. Sometimes infidelity has nothing to do with a relationship. It has to do with an individual issue that, unfaithful partner is dealing with, such as mental health issues that has not been treated or

diagnosed. Classic example of that would be folks with personality disorder, somebody who is narcissistic, somebody with antisocial personality disorder, people who struggle with the addictions of any kinds. But a third ideological reason that causes infidelity is exactly what you talked about, the environmental factors. So believe it or not, things associated to our socioeconomic status, place of residence, the type of job we have could actually increase or decrease or chances of are engaging in infidelity. When I started delving into infidelity and the causes of it, I wanted to take a multidisciplinary approach. I didn't want to look at it just from the psychological lens. I tried to look at it from cross-cultural anthropological lens as well as from

evolutionary biology lens as well as from a sociological perspective. And when you look at the causes of fidelity from psychological perspective, we have to emphasize the roles of socioeconomics. So we'll use, for example, things like power dynamics. In all relationships, as much as we like to think that they are egalitarian and both partners have equal rights and responsibility, that is not always the case. Sometimes you have a relationship with power disparity, where you have one person who have more power than their other partner. Why is this the case? Sometimes it's belief system,

And let's say you live in a culture where simply being a male gives you automatically more power. So when you have a power disparity in the relationship, it create what they call a top dog and underdog dynamic. The top dog is the person with more power. That person is going to give themselves more rights in their relationship simply because they can. They're also going to be somebody who is less likely to be vulnerable because that's going to be challenging their power position in the relationship. The person who is the underdog is going to be somebody who is. is often feeling that they're not good enough. That doesn't, that contribution does not matter.

And if you look at it from that angle, both of them can have good motivation to engage in affairs because of the disparity in the power dynamic. If we take a look at place of residence, research shows that, you know, people who live in smaller cities and smaller communities have less prevalence rates of infidelity. Why is this the case?

Well, when you live in a small city, there is less access, for opportunities that will cause you to be anonymous, right? Smaller communities, everybody knows everyone. So if you're going to be unfaithful, your chances are being discovered is going to be higher. If you compare it to bigger cities, you have a higher level adenity. So there is so many environmental factors that causes infidelity that we often

won't think about and we often ignore when it comes to treatment. And that's why oftentimes using generalized methods doesn't really prevent relapse. Yeah, it's a very complex question to think about all the factors that could lead to it. And I would imagine that it's a case-by-case event. Sometimes when I look at Twitter or X or if you just look at

the bombardment of media that hits kids and adults every day, you know, we know that advertisers use sex and fear to sell. It's like we're bombarded by housewives and Andrew Tate and all the Saudi sheiks with their harems and like,

how big of a role is culture playing to be infidelity on some level. It seems like it's calling us. Major, major, major role. So my third book that I'm working on is called Deconstructing Infidelity, The Causes on the Myth. And in that book, I dedicate a full part about the environmental factors and what happens in pop culture and around us and how to what extent that influence would be doing our relationships. But unfortunately, so thinking this way, cultural norms and the type of cultural norms that we get exposed to does shape or view about relationship and the value of fidelity. So if you're exposed to cultural norms that sees infidelity as something that's a positive thing or something

that's not frowned upon, or again, we'll use the example of toxic masculinity. If you're in a culture where being unfaithful seen as a cool thing because you're the guy who's sleep with all these women, most likely you're going to engage in those behaviors because your cultural norms does not discourage you from doing that. And sometimes those cultural norms are in the micro level and the micro level of your family of origin. So when I work with my clients before we even talk about the infidelity, I gather a lot of information about their family of origin, their past relationship, because sometimes the seeds of infidelity were planted a long time ago. If you look at the macro level of culture, unfortunately right now, any place you look, right, even an advertisement for

a cheeseburger, right, is going to be selling you, you know, things are not related to things related to sex and sexuality. But it's also common when you see it in almost every TV show that you watch, there's always going to be something about infidelity. And oftentimes, people associate infidelity with power and influence because it, in a sense, there is some of that aspect to it, right? If somebody is cavalier about those behaviors, they must think that they can do it, get away with it.

And you know, and are okay with with the consequences. responses of that behavior. So yeah, cultural norm significantly impact that. Another aspect of this is development of technology, right? We used to live in a day and age where it maybe was a little bit more challenging for people to engage in fidelity, right? Nowadays, it's at your fingertips. There are many abs. They're designed specifically for people to hide their behavior or website. They're designed for people who want to engage in affairs, not just any kind of relationship. All of these factors increases folks' ability to not fight their impulses as much. Yeah, it's really well said.

I've read in a few articles that have brought up this idea of monogamy. And sometimes, you know, you can find some really well-written articles that say things like, is monogamy something made up by humans? Like, is monogamy something that we should be doing? You know, what's your take on that idea? Like, is this something that's natural? Is it non- unnatural? Or what do you think?

As long as, you know, you gave me a good opportunity to stand on my soap box. So here's what I feel about it. I think it's great that we are thinking about a relationship in different ways, that there is no one model that we can say is the most successful models, because that would be ridiculous. What I have a problem with is the things to swing in the opposite direction, where we're seeing that binogamy is not attainable, and it's impossible to achieve.

I believe binogamy is not. for everyone some people can do it and happy and satisfied with it and for some people that's not the right fit for them so i don't think i'm not in the camp work thing that we're not wired for monogamy and i can debunk the evolutionary biology perspective right because people who use this they usually go for a evolutionary model and they use the idea of you know uh the different reproductive strategies so it goes something like this females have limited number of eggs males have unlimited the number of sperm, therefore dictate what kind of main strategies that they have. Because of that, you know, the males would opt for more interactions, more frequency,

and females would tend to lean toward quality of interaction because of the long gestation period and also, you know, wanting to be more selective about their mates. I think that work, if we're living in a, you know, caveman society, maybe you can make that argument if we're, you know, simple primate, we are way, way advanced beyond that. Men and women are, you know, interacting differently. Our idea of what it means to be male and female is changing. So we cannot use such archaic arguments. And I think sometimes people use that as a cop-out, right?

Wouldn't be nice if you read a book that says, oh, some therapist says monogamy is not attainable, so it's okay for me to cheat. Right? So that's a problem that I have with that is sometimes this knowledge is being abused. Yeah. It reminds me of the R versus K strategy too, like the rat versus the wolf where, you know, some particular, if people would go on an evolutionary model, some reproductive strategies are to have as many kids as possible. And other strategies are, I'm going to have one or two kids and raise them up to be the best possible. At some point in time, I feel like it comes to education.

And I know when I got married, I had friends that sat down with professionals and talked about what a relationship is, what love is, what faithfulness is. And a lot of people don't have that. I didn't have it growing up. But when I look back at that and I look at their marriages and I'm like, oh, that was a really cool strategy. It was a really cool tool to sit down with a third party and say, hey, what are we getting into here? What does it mean to be married? You know, and it's, I think it comes to education on some level. What do you think about that?

I think you're spot on. So one of, so if we look at the causes of infidelity under the relationship factors, a common one I see with couples is the last. lack of relationship maturity. Relationship maturity is what you described. Is having the skill set and the knowledge to know if you're ready for a relationship, to know how to start a relationship, and how to maintain it, and grow and adapt with it. So how do people get relationship maturity? There's two main sources. One is what's being modeled to you in your family of origin. And I would say majority of people, unfortunately, not lucky in that department. Most people, they don't have a good model in their

household that tend to be the minority. The second source of gaining relationship maturity is the type of adult relationship people are engaged in prior to the current relationship that they're coming to see you for. So if you have somebody who grew up in a household where infidelity was a commonplace or maybe communication or conflict resolution was not modeled, right? They're already going to be starting a relationship with a disadvantage. Or somebody might have been in a few relationship that we're awful and bad and taught them some bad lessons. They can carry some of these bad lessons for their new relationship. So you're spot on about the lack of education.

I think something as simple as what is infidelity. That is so basic. If you ask most people, what does that mean? A lot of people are going to struggle and come up with a congruent answer that that works for everybody. Yeah. I feel like we're kind of touching on generational patterns. You know, when you look at a family that may come from a broken home, do you see patterns there?

Is it easier for a child that comes from a set of divorced parents to follow in those same patterns? That's a great question. I've seen family origin actually have impact in both directions, right? So you say if you come from a broken home, you know, that doesn't mean that, you know, that everybody who is coming from that place is going to be doomed in terms of their success. It's certainly going to play an impact and how they handled, how they saw a confidence. being handled in that household but also seen household where you know where the adult clients report oh my my child was great okay tell me how great was your childhood well my parents never fought at all right so it could err on the other side of i think it's good that you know a healthy couple you

should not be exposing your kids so you're a drama right if you haven't conflict having closed doors but that doesn't mean you show them a fake version of a relationship right because a healthy relationship is not a perfect relationship. Conflict is normal part of life, right? And sometimes people err on that side of, you know, it seems like everything looks good on paper, right? The parents are happy and cute and all that stuff, but you have kids who grow up with no skill set, or that they're frustrated when they're, you know, God forbid their partner have a different opinion. And for them, it's like they had a completely different set of reality of what relationship should look like. So it can go both ways. Yeah. There's

I labeled this particular podcast, the nature of trust. And for me that I've been dying to ask you is that, you know, trust, once broken, can be incredibly difficult to repair. Is trust something that can ever fully be restored or does infidelity permanently alter the very definition of trust in a relationship? Great question. Let's see. I think, I think based on how we define trust. So trust within that context of infidelity, we call. is how do I know this won't happen again?

That's the million dollar question that the betrayed have. And sometimes unfaithful. And to me, it's cause and effect. Infidelity doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you take the time and effort to really do an autopsy of the affair, you will be able to come up of all the reason why it happened. So the all the way for people to rebuild trust after discovering infidelity is by being able to understand the type of infidelity that took place. the reason why it happened and seeing concrete evidence of those reasons being resolved, right?

Anything is short of that is wishful faith thinking that's anything of the short of that is like, you know, not the real kind of forgiveness, not the real kind of rebuilding trust. So if you see the unfaithful and the betrayed redeem themselves from the shortcomings that have led to the infidelity, right? Then you can say we can rebuild trust. Now, isn't going to be the same, right? That's again. So sometimes couples feel like, okay, we can never have the same relationship that we had prior to this. You know, have we have not known though about the affair, you know, our life would be completely different.

But we have to take a look at this is that the relationship that people had prior to the affair, chances are, wasn't the healthiest relationship, right? Because even if the affair happened because of individual issues on faithful is dealing with versus a relationship deficit, that wasn't 100% relationship. Having that fair happen actually allow people to take a look at these things that they ignored or they think they didn't know existed. So you can make an argument that if they do the work, they will end up with the better, healthier relationships than they had before. Because now they're building a relationship on truth, on transparency, and a full disclosure about what they're up against. So I think you can actually make the relationship even better than it was prior to the discovery of. affair. Now that's not going to be the case for everyone because sometimes the infidelity is a signal that this relationship shouldn't have been there in the first place, which bring up my other soapbox about

what should be the purpose of couples counseling. I don't think the purpose of couples counseling is to repair a relationship. Am I an advocate for people reviewing the relationship? Of course I am. I mean, who doesn't want people to repair their relationship? But we have to accept that not all relationships should survive. Some relationships shouldn't have started the first place. The purpose of counseling, couples counseling in general and the purpose of infidelity recovery in particular is to help people get unstuck and you do that by giving them the information that they need to make that choice and i also don't think it's the therapist job to choose for them right it's not my relationship my job is to give you the information that you need to make an informed decision about which direction

that you're going to go and if you're going to go rebuilding the relationship then my job is to give you the you know the the tools to not only identify the factors that led to infidelity but but concrete ways of how to make sure that you don't find yourself in that situation again. Wow. Like that particular insight is something you almost never hear. Is this idea that infidelity could lead to an evolution of growth that you might not have ever had unless you face that particular instance. Like that's mind blowing to me. It also brings up a lot of complexity and it makes me think about, you know, a lot of how different

difficult it is to have this sort of issue of trust. Like, you know what? This person cheated on me, but I have my kids. I'm going to stay together because I think it's the right thing to do. But in reality, you're just ignoring the gaping hole in your relationship and refusing to see it on something. It's really complex, right? It is. And that's when, you know, even when I get my consultation calls to clients and ask them about what do they hope to accomplish, right? There are a lot of people say, well, you know, we're calling you because we want to repair the relationship. I say that's fine. That's nice.

I'm not going to give them the way of that. If that is going to be in your guys' trajectory, we will get there, right? I'm not going to, you know, go against it or for it. But you have to enter that process with both options that this could actually work and this could actually could mean that we go our separate ways. And really, trauma is the catalyst for change, right? And the change and the growth can be for the relationship. and it being better or for people to individually heal because not everybody is going to be able and willing to do what it takes to be able trust.

It's just as simple as that. And I think, you know, there is a part of us where, you know, even I think clinicians are guilty of this where you think that, you know, your success rate is by, you know, how many people regret their relationship that. That's a false, that's a false metric. And also that's ignoring the fact that, you know, sometimes counseling can be that catalyst also to tell people that, hey, there's a big compatibility issue that's not going to go away. Or if you're going to stay just for the sake of the kids.

And the way I sell this from my client about the kids piece is that, you know, your job as a parent is to showcase what healthy relationship for your kids so that they can be successful adults. So if you're in this dead, devoid of trust marriage, what kind of message that you're sending for them? Yeah, they don't have to have split schedules, but like you're not really preparing them to to have a healthy relationship in adulthood. That cannot be a reason. That can be a secondary reason, but they cannot be a primary reason for a building their relationship. And that's one of the milestones that I actually help my clients go through is to assess their motivation. If you want to rebuild, why do you want to rebuild? And then it's even more tricky.

A lot of times people think that this is the decision that the betrayed, you know, have to think about should I stay, should I leave? well, no, both people have to ask themselves that question. And sometimes the one who's on the fence is not the unfaithful, not the betrayed, which create a whole different dynamics in the therapy environment. Do you see the relationship model as like a three-piece model, like you have the husband, the wife, and then the relationship? And if so, is the relationship greater than the individuals? I truly believe that relationships that we form,

or significant other, it takes a life of its own and it becomes its own organism. And I always, you know, have the analogy if it's a, you know, a plant that the two of you created together, how you treat it, how you water it, how you nurture it is going to either help it grow or not. So, so I see them like interlinked. I see, I see the relationship as the crowning achievement of the contribution of both people. Think of it as that this is, this is the child of this relationship. What kind of child do you have and what does that say about the effort that you're putting in your readiness to have this child in the world. Does that make sense? Oh, it makes perfect sense. It's a beautiful way to describe it, and I'm going to write it

down so that I can start thinking about it in that way. Thank you for that. You know, it's, I don't think you can talk about betrayal without talking about forgiveness, and there's a really big psychology around forgiveness. I can, I've spoken to people, and I've been impacted by infidelity where, you know, something happens in a relationship and the person will never forgive them, or the person wants to go out and then cheat and then they'll forgive them. But maybe you could speak to this idea of forgiveness in the idea of infidelity. Sure. I guess to start off, you know, what does forgiveness mean to you?

If I ask you to define forgiveness, what would you say? Forgiveness for me is the idea that you understand the reason why a transgression was made and you can have enough empathy to understand why that was made. forget it but you can say listen if i was in that situation i'm not sure what i would have done i could understand why they did that and forgiveness for me would be to have empathy to understand it and then realize that i am no longer going to harbor angry feelings because those angry feelings only hurt me excellent you have like all the main components of that aspect and the reason i ask because i want to do a juxtaposition you know when oftentimes when people think of forgiveness

and from the betrayed and unfaithful perspective. A lot of things that I have to detangle is similar to what you said. One, forgiveness doesn't, if I forgive you, it does not mean that I'm actually going to be in the relationship with you. I could forgive you and still not want to be in a relationship with you. That's why. Forgiveness doesn't also mean forgetting because you can never forget something as awful as infidelity happened to you. The best that you can hope for is that that memory will become a distant thing in your rearview mirror, right?

is you're driving, you know, the further you drive and you're going to recovery, the further is going to be away. The less negative impact is going to have when you're alive. But also forgiveness is something that you cannot just wave a magic wand and say you are forgiven. I see it as an act of redemption and not in the spiritual sense, even though I'm using spiritual language, because that's the closest word that kind of convey that aspect for me in order for somebody to earn forgiveness for themselves, from themselves and from their partner, because there's also two components, right? You have to demonstrate that you have resolved the shortcomings that led you to be in this situation. If you're not able to do that, then in my book you have not, you know, redeem yourself

from the shortcoming. So it is tied to what you do after you find out that whole thing and consistently with your action that you became a different individual or better individual other than that. So to me, that's a metric for forgiveness. and it's something that you have to earn from your partner if you're the unfaithful, but also that's something that you have to be willing to give to yourself at some point of time. Yeah, it's really well said, the idea of redemption in earning it. Sometimes when I think about infidelity, especially in a world today that's just, you know, we spoke about the media or sometimes we can see on some level there's like this porn addiction out.

They're like, porn is everywhere. Is that, do you see that like maybe porn or is there is infidelity? Is there a difference between infidelity and emotional betrayal? So I guess, first of all, we'll have to start with defining infidelity, right? And please remind me to bring up the porn if I forget about that part. Yeah. So the first puzzle that I have to, I had to solve when I went on this journey of trying to understand infidelity is to come up with an operational definition for infidelity that works for all my clients

who come from different backgrounds, different religious group, different cultural belief system, and different type of relationships. And when I, when I began looking at the literature, I realized that even researchers cannot agree on what is the operational definition of infidelity. And that's crazy to me because everything that we think and we know about infidelity, we have to redo again, right? Because the data is viewed based on how you define it, right? So here's my definition of infidelity.

that I came up with. And the context I will provide to explain that definition. I really believe that all relationships should operate as a business partnership, meaning that we need to know what kind of partnership is this, how many partners we have in this relationship? Is it one? Is it two?

Is it 20? What are the emotional and physical needs that we're expecting our partners to fulfill? And to what extent the fulfillment of those needs is exclusive to the partners that we have this relationship contract. So the moment a person in the relationship outsource the fulfillment of any of those needs, big or small, to somebody else outside of this relationship contract, without consent, I am breaching my contract of exclusivity. And that breach of contract of exclusivity,

bigger small becomes the threshold for infidelity. And this is really crucial for couples and clinicians to be on the same page on because trust and believe when your client's showing up to your office, they need a ruling. Is what happened in fidelity or something else? And your job, you have to weigh in to say, is this infidelity or not? Because if it's infidelity and you called it something else, they said that, oh, this is just inappropriate for behavior, then you minimize the big problem, right? And you can make the argument for the opposite direction.

So defining infidelity in that sense means that infidelity is just simply sexual acts. that you conduct in person, it's also emotional needs that you and your partner have expected to have exclusivity in that department. And it's a lot difficult for people to wrap their mind about emotional exclusivity because we are used to having other people fulfill our emotional needs, right? Like you know, you have friends, you have family members.

They've fulfilled some for emotional needs. So the parameters of exclusivity is going to be a lot harder to pinpoint in that aspect. And the reason what I found with that definition being helpful is that one, it gives me a moral buffer between me and my client. So they're asking Tal to weigh in, is this infidelity or not? And Talal says, yes, it is. It's not because this is Talal belief system. This is not because Talal personal view on what's right or wrong.

This is based on your unique relationship contract as a couple. And this is a good way to nail down faithful on that aspect and have them actually be able to admit that what they did in. fidelity because most of the time people either explicitly or implicitly know what was supposed to be exclusive for them. And it makes it easier to actually help a couple begin to understand what kind of problem that we are working on. Now, if we take this, you know, take a look at it and we ask me about pornography. So port addiction can lead to infidelity in two main ways. There are others, but I'm going to share the main ways that I have seen through research. as well as to work with clients.

So the first way is the sexual script that we operate on. If you look at the majority of the pornography material that's being made, it does not portray monogamous exclusive sex. Oftentimes it's group sex, pizza delivery guy, all these things, right? It's a lot of infidelity narrative too, which means that as the viewer, you begin to be interacting with these sexual scripts. You can begin to have these fantasies, right? So it does impact your view about sexuality,

what you find exciting, because you're bombarded by sexual situations that are not replicating in real life or monogamy or exclusivity. If you take a look at the other factor is the comparing contrast. So everything that happens in the porn world, there's not real world, everything's airbrushed, the attributes that people have.

They're not what you see often. in real life. So when people interact with this material, they begin to compare and contrast their attributes, their partner attributes, as well as the quality of the sexual interaction with what they see in the porn. And what people forget, that this is not real, that this is a fantasy, right? And oftentimes, people become dissatisfied with themselves or their partner because of what they're viewing. And that might cause them to seek similar interaction that they see in the porn outside of the relationship or want to be with somebody who looks like the people that they see in the pornography. Not only that, but also sometimes people utilize masturbation and pornography

as the main way for fulfilling sexual needs. It is not supposed to be the main way for fulfilling sexual needs. It's supposed to be a secondary, right, when your partner is not available. But if you have a partner who is ready and willing and you don't have sex with them, you'd rather watch pornography, that tells them there's something, you know, that may need to without this relationship, why are you not utilizing the outlet that the primary is supposed to be for the relationship and your goal for the secondary outlet? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's interesting to see that as a symptom of the sickness that is plaguing us on some level.

It's great. We got a comment that comes in from the great Hank Foley, and he says, correlate active religious practice of various types with the co-occurrence of infidelity. My own observation has been that the more fundamental the belief set amongst Christians, perhaps paradoxically, the more likely infidelity will occur at any time during the marriage. Does the square W, does that square with your experience? Also, I'm sure you've dealt with couples for whom the only infidelity is typically that of the male. Let me see in terms of what does this mean.

So I guess I'm figuring around with a specific way to interpret this before I give my answer. Is it really more along the lines of being prepared that this is something that's going to happen in your relationship makes it easier for it not to happen? I think so. Okay. So I guess one way I can answer this from talking about the impact of spirituality and religiosity, maybe that will help address this piece. Yeah. Research shows that people who have spiritual belief system that discourage infidelity or frown upon infidelity tend to have lower prevalence rates of infidelity because part of their moral compass, it is really important for them and there is a buy-in that I should not be doing this. There is some aspect to that.

Flipside of this too, oftentimes a lot of these spiritual belief systems tend to have a very rigid view. on sexuality and sexual exploration. So can create a different problem by creating unrealistic expectations. So a classic example that I see often enough with folks who grew up in a belief system with a very strong moral compass, with maybe emphasis on discouraging sexual exploration

prior to getting married. I've seen a lot of people where the lack of exploration was a major cause for infidelity because they didn't figure out who they are, right? Maybe they didn't. discover an orientation that they should have been aware of and they didn't get to explore that. And now they escalated their commitment to somebody. They got married, have kids.

And later on, they're struggling with this thing they did not explore. So I can see backfiring in that aspect. But bringing it back to the questions about the pornography and leading to, you know, that's a leading cause for males to come in treatment. I think pornography, watching pornography itself can also be the threshold of infidelity in some relationship. Now, I personally, as a clinician, I don't have a moral view about pornography for or against. There are a lot of research that shows specific type of pornography viewing with certain parameters can actually be a healthy tool for couples when it comes to intimacy. But that's not for everybody.

I would say the majority of people, the pornography viewing is. really more on the negative aspect versus the positive aspect. So sometimes, let's say if you have a couple where the relationship contract, there was an expectation of exclusivity as the partner. I'm not okay with you getting arousal and sexual satisfaction from somebody else, even if that somebody else is a video or a magazine, right? If that's my relationship contract and I'm watching pornography, then I'm already breaching that threshold if this was the type of relationship of exclusivity that I signed up for. But also, when people start dysfunction, right?

Let's say that pornography was a form of infidelity. And I know that this was, you know, if I know that this was a form of fidelity in my marriage and I did it anyway, eventually this function is going to increase. So nobody wakes up when, you know, one morning to say, I'm going to jump at the deep end of infidelity, to the deep end pool of the fidelity. A lot of times to start with poor boundaries, blurring those boundaries and it escalate, right? Because whatever we started to fulfill a need, it's not going to be enough and we need to amp it up. So it becomes a slippery slope. You know,

there is no such thing as a small active individual or big active infidelity. Eventually, it will get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not going to go away on itself. And if it does, it's not for the right reason. It's because something happened, you know, fizzled out because maybe somebody had to move or go to a different location. Do you think, in your opinion, Does the number of sexual partners you have before getting into a relationship affect infidelity? Is there a higher rate of people who have more partners before marriage or have less partners before marriage? Or is that just anecdotal? I think it plays a part, but not always the reason there is because numbers of partners doesn't mean that the person had adequate experience.

What I look for is adequate, healthy experience. And I don't think that's something you can quantify by number because you could have somebody who have multiple sex partners in the theme of those relationships that they were never fulfilled, right? Maybe the other partners were getting the fulfillment. Now you have a person who just now learned that, you know, the best thing that they can offer to the world is their body when in reality that's, you know, you can argue they have a number of experiences. But the number of experiences did not really teach them who they are and what they should look for. I think really the quality of those previous experiences versus the quantity is what I would invest in. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about, I have written down here, the infidelity as a death and a rebirth.

You have helped many couples navigate the wreckage left behind by affairs. Do you see infidelity as a kind of death and rebirth of a relationship? And for couples that successfully rebuild after an affair is the new relationship. ever truly the same or does it become something else entirely? It is absolutely a death and rebirth for the relationship. And I would say even it's a death and rebirth for the individual too, because a lot of times, believe it or not, the unfaithful partner is shocked and appalled about what they were capable of, right?

Because a lot of times we have this assumption that people who are unfaithful or cheating, they're just immoral people, they don't have moral compass. that is that that is not the case now granted those people exist but that's not the majority of unfaithful partners a lot of these folks are good decent human beings right like you know that you caught them in a very awful awful awful her in this chapter in their life that chapter does not mean that they're lacking morals but being able to again if people decide to rebuild for the right reason and they actually address the individual relational and environmental factors that led to infidelity, it's going to give them a better relationship than they ever had before. And there are many couples where, you know, if you see videos from them in the early phase with treatment in the middle and in the late phase, you know, you see that transition. And for both of them, the betrayed and I'm not faithful to report that, you know, I didn't, I couldn't, I can't believe that, you know, we ended up with a better relationship we had before because

it seemed like an outlandish thing that, you know, something is awful. infidelity could lead to something greater. But I always give the analogy of heart attacks, right? So most of us know that you need to eat well and exercise to get better, right? But not everybody's going to actually take the time and effort to do that. Unless somebody can get a scary diagnosis, hey, you have a heart attack. You're going to die if you don't eat and eat well and exercise. Now some people still double down to say, you know what, I live this way, I may as well

just going to go, right? the majority of people, this would be like, okay, this is a serious wake of coal. If I really want to live, I need to eat better, I need to exercise. The same thing with infidelity. I would say most people, they usually know there's something broken in the relationship or there is something individually within them that they haven't fixed, but they don't take care of it. Whether it's they don't have the time, they don't have the resources, or maybe they think it's not severe enough for it to deal with it. When infidelity happen, it is like a heart attack for the relationship. Now is the time for you to actually decide, are you going to do your best or you're going to continue the same thing that you're doing. So if you get this golden opportunity, like, look, here's what's broken. Here's how you need to fix it. And you rise up to the occasion, you're going to be the best version of yourself in that relationship. So to me, that's the silver lining of infidelity. But also, let's say that you actually opt for not being in the relationship. Now you're free from this burden that you've been tied to all these years. And now you actually have the time to live the healthy life and maybe find the healthy relationship that you deserve

of just continuing to do the same thing. Yeah, it makes sense. It's interesting that we say faithful or faithless, you know, and I can't help, and Hank brings up another good point here about the idea of, like, fundamentalist or even tight religious structures seem to sometimes, you know, prohibit sex. Like if we look back at, you know, we can see it in literature or we can see it in some sort of cults sometimes or fundamentalist Christians or different Jews.

or Muslims or Sikhs, they have these different containers of religion. How do you think that these rigid containers play a part in infidelity? Or do they? So let me take a look at it from, I'll answer it from one aspect that was actually important for me, and maybe this will help me with that other one. One thing that you will notice, because this one I did my research with the cross-cultural aspect and would do other religions and societies, how they handle an infidelity. And I would say the majority of societies, right, they have some religious taboo or discouragement of infidelity to the point of severe, severe punishment.

Yeah. Right. And to me, that's an indication of what, that infidelity, it's a problem that doesn't just impact the people in the committed relationship. It impact them and impact their kids, impact their family and society. It's the devastating impact when infidelity is discovered, it ruined. in so many different lives. Even in the most classic easy, let's, you know, just, you know, a husband and a wife from both sides, they both shoot them with their partner and now think about their families and friends

and this ripple impact that just impact everybody else. So I think there's one aspect of that in terms of why there are some religious taboos against infidelity. I think because people intrinsically knew some betrayal can cause a rip in society. Not even not even if you're thinking about, you know, lineage lines and inheritance and all that. So I think there is a utility aspect from that part. But I think also the crimes that happens, the crimes of passion that happens. Yeah.

Heck, there are some countries where even murder motivated by, you know, discovery affair where you get a lighter sentences. I mean, it's that's, it's a society went to that level to discourage people from engaging in it. Now, I do think, you know, spiritual belief system can. be a container for a positive aspect of teaching, the value of being honest with yourself, the value of integrity, the value of treat others of how you want to be treated, or can discourage people. But I feel like it all has to do with your relationship with your belief system. If it's a belief system that you have an internal buy-in and it does not conflict with who you are, then it can be a positive thing and can be a protective factor against infidelity.

But it's a belief system that's been thrusted upon you. And I think most people, there are a lot of people where you're just born into the faith, right? Where you just do it because this is what your family done versus that you chose that faith. I think that makes a difference because I think if fidelity in a relationship is a value for you, if it's an intrinsic value, then you're going to comply regardless of who's watching and it's not watching. But if you're just doing it because that's what you're supposed to do, your compliance. don't be sketchy, right? Your compliance is going to be. Yeah. Not only that, but let's say that your religious belief system goes against who you are as an individual. Let's say that you're a

person who is not heterosexual, right? You identify as bio-o-osexual and you're part of belief system where that's a no-go and you end up being in a heterosexual relationship and despite your best effort, you're not going to be fulfilled and your partner is not going to be fulfilled. In those situation, people have to really choose what's, you know, what's congruent with who they are versus what being told who they should be. Yeah, it's such an interesting concept to think about our relationship to sex. You know, it's this incredible emotional driver that has to do with power and desire and encouragement and lust. And like, do you, do you, is this something that you think the human condition will ever outgrow?

Is this something that is in us for the long haul? Like, do you ever forecast a time? Like, sometimes when you read books, you'll see like Brave New World where they write about changing the attitude towards sex, you know, or free love in the 60s and 70s. Like, do you think we're moving towards a more different model of sex in the human condition? I'm trying to figure out if I should answer this as a pessimist or an old.

I'll go with genuine because I, for me, you know, authentic is always a win. I don't, you know, and maybe this is occupational hazard where you maybe, you know, change your perspective about the world of humanity. I'll take ownership of that, you know, capacity for change. I do think people are capable of change. I think what I worry about is our ego as humans to, that will get in the way of making those change. I think in order for us to transcend our human limitations, we have to be willing to take a real hard look about who we are and what we can and cannot do right now.

If we're able to accept that, then it will pave a pathway for us to actually be better. But I think most of the times, there's a big gap between our biological evolution and cultural evolution. If you ask me, that's what I put my money on, right? You know, despite, you know, how intelligent we think we are and how we have, you know, tamed the planet and all of these things. Yeah. There is, we still have a lot of wired in primate traits that we struggle with.

And sometimes the disconnect is between our, you know, biological nature and our cultural intellectual evolution. I think there is a gap between the two that we haven't been able to reconcile yet. But I think if we're able to accept that everybody's capable of doing. doing something as awful as infidelity, right? Maybe you'll temper, you know, maybe you'll temper some of that eubris, right? About that, you know, just because things are going great and you have things function on different aspects, that does not mean you're in you to it, right? Maybe that you will force us to not be an autopilot our relationship and our exploration

of our self. Because I really feel in order for people not to be in this situation, first of all, you have to be consistently learning about who you are and the chance. changes that goes within you, right? If you're aware of those changes and how you allow as a person, and if you realize that the way you're evolving might not be congruent with the relationship that you're in and the parameters of exclusivity, you can have that conversation on your partner, right? Hey, look, you know, I used to be this and now on that, right? What do we do about this? Can we still be together? Can we still be in this relationship contract? This is there room for us

to grow in the same direction. The answer is yes, great. We can continue and grow and adapt. The answer is no, at least we can separate versus, you know, trying to close those lines of fidelity end up with heartaches and hurt for everyone. Yeah, I heard an interesting quote yesterday that said sexual energy is creative energy. And I'm wondering to get your thoughts on that. It seems to me that when you, you know, when we start looking at like the creative process, it's a lot of that same energy. Do you think that maybe we'd be a more creative society if we had, like less sex? I think it really has to do with our individual relationship what sex mean to us, right?

I think it really goes to the narrative that we told about to ourselves. What is the role of sex? What value does it bring to me? What cost does it take out of our life? I think, at least on the biological level, we can say there is a, you know, a biological imperative aspect related to procreation that kind of drive the machine. There is the excitement, arousals at all. these things yeah but i but i think also you know we're a stage in our human evolution where we

put all these non-physical biological things about sex now we see it as a sign of desire we see it as a sign of wealth see it a sign of power yeah and it's interesting because i feel like all of these things that we assign to sex they're subjective and they change right i mean even even something like if you look in different cultures where you know the in order for you to be the priest or the priestess you have to be somebody who's you know never that's like so as a purity thing so it's so i think i'm not saying these things doesn't have validity i think these things are the values we assign to sex it's a reflection of what's what type of humans we have living in that world at that time it's a snapshot of how we see our place in the

world but i think it's ever-changing which maybe that actually painted pathway for hope about you know can we can we see it differently i think depends on what stories we tell ourselves about what sex and what is supposed to be. You know, I mean, you could also make an argument. You can do a dystopian sci-fi future where sex seems like, oh, people, I think a lot of movies actually played with that. I say, oh, all the primates have actual sex. We don't do that anymore.

We don't feel, you know, intellectual telepathy. Yeah. You know, Hank brings up a good point. And I'm curious, as someone who has written multiple books on it and has a deep insight about it, is the incidence of, of infidelity different in the United States that it is throughout the rest of the world? I would say that, so here's the thing. When you look at the literature, you're going to find some data that's not data that's good enough from my perspective

because of how they're operating, what operation definition that they should think. And we also have to keep in mind that also the cross-cultural is limited because in some cultures, you can't even admit that you have infidelity. It's shameful. So that's going to skew that. I can tell you for a fact based on the relationship between the cultural norms and infidelity, of course, it's going to be played a different factor because the United States' this own unique, you can make that argument about every country, but I think maybe you can say maybe United States

has tend to have the advantage of influencing bigger part of the world. There are a lot of people who want to emulate the American way and influence by it. So I think you might see some of that trickle effect in those other cultures. But I think the beliefs and the way people live and what's expected socially acceptable or not is going to play a factor. I'll give you, I'll give you something smaller to that occupation. Like I said, you're familiar with a website called Ashley Madison? Yeah. Okay.

So for the viewers who don't know what Ashley Madison is a website for people who want to have affairs. I think in 2014 there was the data breach to the web. site that gave the researchers a golden opportunity to figure out what type of people actually end up having affairs, right? And they, when they were looking, when they're analyzing the data, they found that there are a certain type of jobs where infidelity seems to be more prevalent, those jobs, people in the military, people who are first responders, people who are in sales. Why would I bring this up? Because there are some

occupational environment where cheating is not frowned upon we're actually seeing that this is what everybody does i work with people from different walks of life uh common thing that i see with CEOs and executive a lot of time when i said like like why did you think it was okay to do this he said well it's a perk this is this is what you get when you get to that level like you know everybody who's a you know a captain of industry has a mistress or like that's that's just the norm right So if you look at this from a global society, if you live in a culture where almost everybody that, you know, cheated or cheated on, you see it on TV everywhere, guess what social messaging that you're going to get that this is probably not a big deal. Like this is something that's a common place. It's just like a, you know, a guarded variety. So I do think to some extent that makes it easier for people to not think so much about the consequences. Or they think, well, if it gets discovered, you know, our neighbor cheated or our best friend so-and-so cheated and they seem to be okay. So I do think so much. sometimes it play a factor in normalizing those kind of behaviors and minimizing the fear about consequences. Yeah, it's a great point. It's just, can it ever be like preemptive? Do you think that the people,

are you able to preempt it on some level? Like maybe people were having feelings about it and they come to you or do you see that as a strategy on some level? What you, to explain in a different way. When you say preemptive, meaning like the, the know, that they would actually try to seek help before they cross those lines? Yeah, exactly. You know, I have yet to receive a call where somebody says, hey, I'm strongly with infidelity, right? Oftentimes, the closest that I get to that is a call to say, hey, I've been cheating

on my partner, right? It's bugging me, right? I want to work on it, but I don't want to tell my partner. And that brings up another thing about the infidelity recovery. you cannot do infidelity recovery successfully with one person. It just does not work. Right. So, and then my conversation with that person, if you really want to heal, right,

you're going to have to be willing to tell your partner. Why do I have to tell them? You know, this is just going to hurt them. You know, I can take this to the grave. Logistically, I truly believe whether this is, you know, a divine intervention or just way off the world looks. I don't know how that part works. But one thing that I have learned is that the truth always come to the surface, like,

harmically, and it comes out in very weird, bizarre ways. Common example. Years ago, you and I never thought that there will be a world where this 23 and me and DNA testing, that wasn't even something on that I, at least when I was born on, I didn't think that we're going to have the technology where we're just going to do this, right? So I would say at least three times a year or maybe four times a year, I get a call from somebody who says, you know, guess what? We've been married for 20, 30 years, and one of our kids did a DNA test and found out that

this person is not my kid. So, like, you have all this relationship where people thought, you know, I could take this to my grave, not knowing that one day there will be technology where one of their kids for Christmas trying to find out their roots and now they destroy the whole family, right? So truth, always find a way to the surface. So if you really want to repair the relationship or be better, it's start by, owning up to that or you know that I mean just the whole idea of STIs right you know and the risk that you can give to someone so I I think really you know I it's and it's unfortunate to

to see all the missed opportunities that people had because when we do the autopsy for the affair and why this happened it is tragic to see like I could have done this I could have done that here's all this different exit on the freeway that I missed and really that's why my advice to people If you're not happy with yourself, you're not happy with your relationship. What you need to do is pause and figure out, hey, what are we doing? And is this something can be fixed? If you do that, you're going to be more successful in having a chance to maintain what you have, assuming it's maintainable.

But I'd rather that the relationship end versus, you know, and after cheating. That's more devastating. Yeah, it is. Dr. Talal, I walk you right up to this hour right here. How are you doing on time? I am good. We can go as much as it. you need. Okay. Infidelity as a mirror of the self, like you kind of touched on that a little bit.

Like the idea that maybe this infidelity that's happening may not be a direct reflection of the inadequacies of the relationship. Maybe it's a direct reflection of the inadequacies you feel about yourself. Maybe you can dig into that a little bit. Absolutely. So we'll use the type of unfaithful who, let's say, where this happened because of the narcissistic personality disorder. So why would the narcissist, what is the correlation between narcissism and infidelity? Somebody who's a narcissist, they're going to be needing constant attention. And they might be somebody who have a partner who's giving them attention that they need at home, but it's never going to be enough from one person.

They need it from multiple sources. So it doesn't matter what relationship they're in. It doesn't matter how great their partner is treating them. it's not a one person's job they're going to be seeking that no matter what relationship that they're in and i mean that's a reflection of of that person's uh symptoms and their need to actually address it what makes it more challenging uh do you hear about the term egosentonic egotistonic no i don't know those okay so so there's two types of mental healthy symptoms two categories if we're looking at it probably egosentonic

and ego tonic. Meaning what of them means that, you know, some mental health condition, people are aware that there's something wrong that they need to fix, right? They know that there's something is broken. And there's the other one where like, no, they're a-okay. They have no clinical distress. They're problems that the world is not on the same page. There are certain types of personality disorders, such as narcissistic personal disorders and antisocial person disorder. They're the type of mental health issues where the person is A-OK with who they are. They have no clinical distress whatsoever their problem is that the world is not going on that same page right so if you're a narcissist it's going to be a struggle for you to actually want to change that because

you're happy with who you are you're not happy they got other people are not playing the roles that you expect them to play which makes it challenging and resistant for treatment but but but or sometimes um give an example um and that that's that's what i love so much about my discoveries in those field um we all know uh that trauma or sexual trauma can impact somebody in a negative way. But this was one of my, you know, light bulb moments to see how often sexual trauma expose, you know, when somebody is supposed to it as a child to what's a huge correlation of infidelity in an adult relationship. And if you think about it, it makes sense.

And on the stories often that I hear, the gist of it's something along the lines of somebody got sexually abused as a child, they never got the proper treatment or maybe when they tried to disclose they didn't get the support they were blamed by the parents right that change how they changed their view of sexuality right they might have end up being more promiscuous because that's one of the negative trajectory of sexual abuse was not being treated well so now this person grow up with an idea that all they offer to the world is their body right but i'm only good for that because his historically, this is what I have been used for. So classic example that I see often and often again, you have, you know, an unfaithful female partner who, let's say that she's experiencing an emotional deficit in her relationship. Their sex life is great from the physical aspect, but there is no emotional intimacy, right? So she might not be interested in having an affair for the sex part. She might be interested in having an affair with somebody who says, you're good enough, I like

you yeah right they're interested in an emotional aspect but the other person who you're engaging in your fear they have their own motivation they might they might not want the emotional aspect they might want you just for the sex part right so in order for me to get that emotional feedback that I need from you that's lack of my relationship I have to give you what you want even though I'm not interested in the sex part so now I have to cross the emotional and the sexual lens of fidelity just to give this emotional need being fulfilled for me So something as, you know, sexual trauma that has been, you know, that happened in the past could set the stage for infidelity in the current relationship or amplify some of the relationship deficit that could cause an fidelity. So really like, you know, that when you look at the individual factors, and that's why spending a lot of times in the story of the affair, the type of reason happened, is instrumental for people to decide, do we want to work on the relationship or not.

because from the betrayed perspective, they might say, okay, you know, if this happened because of an individual issue, this has nothing to do with me, this is a you problem. Maybe it's less soft of low to the ego. We'll give you the help you need. Maybe this won't happen again. For other betrayed partners, say, well, I have no control whether or not you're going to fix that issue. If this was a relationship deficit, maybe I'll have more wriggle room because I can do my part to be happy, you know, to make you happy for your needs. So it's interesting how that also is based on people worldview. That's what's fixable and what's not fixable.

Yeah. Is difference between someone who cheats one time and someone who cheats multiple times, is one relationship more repairable versus the other? So there is this myth that once a cheater or always a cheater. Right, right. Yeah. And I'm going to say those people exist. So I'm not saying those people don't exist,

but they're not the majority. I would say that Bill was a cheater. Or as a cheater, oftentimes tend to be the folks with personality disorders because they're resistance to change. The specific details of the infidelity and the unique circumstances does play a factor, but there is no hard-en-roll, you know,

that you can apply to everybody, right? It's unique for that each couple, right? And I would say the common theme is what, almost every betrayed wish the story was different, right? And it's interesting because I have the vantage point to see all the different stories from different levels of infidelity. I've seen people struggle when there was just a one-night stand influenced by alcohol versus somebody who repeatedly slept with, you know, 20 or 30 people multiple times. I think at the end of the day, it is subjective. Now, granted, the frequency of the numbers, right, it's going to.

affect how the the trade conceptualized the possibility for hope. Because if you've been cheating for the last five years, at least three or four times a month, and you're telling me all of a sudden I'm going to give that up, I'm going to struggle with like, how are you going to give up this habit that you had for five years? Yeah. Right.

So it does play that impact and play an impact in terms of the potential risk and consequences that they bring to home, right? Did they get somebody pregnant? Did they bring an SDI? Are they going to lose their business because they slept with somebody at but they're not supposed to so i think those can be a factor in terms of the impact on the negative

impact that's being brought to the relationship and how the betrayed conceptualize the chances for healing but as a clinician i i think you cannot say just because it happened this many times that this person is uh doomed for failure now also we have to factor in did this person because somebody might say okay well you're a cheater you cheated on your past three relationships right Well, cheating in every relationship is going to be different for a different reason. Now, sometimes there is a common theme, but also we have to look at it within that context. Yeah, it's interesting to think about the ideas of patterns. And one of the patterns that I see sometimes in people that I speak with or sometimes the articles that I've read is like language patterns.

And I'm wondering, as someone who has been in this field for so long, are you able to begin to see signs in couples language patterns, the words they use, the phrases they use, the intent they have in their language. Can you see it in those language patterns when you see people? What is it that I see in the language patterns? What specifically you're asking? Yes. What is specifically you ask me if I see reflected in the couple's language pattern? So like let's say a couple comes and are there patterns in their language between each other

that usually signify the reasons for the cheating, you know, before they even admit to it. Like, let's say you see a couple that may be seeking health. Can you see like, oh, I can kind of understand the untold language that's happening here by the different words they use or the body language? Predicting before that knowledge being discovered. Excellent. Yeah.

Yes, with lots of caveats, right? Because I don't want people to say, well, I see this. in my partner's being. That's my disclaimer. Because you see that does not mean your partners cheating on me. So the signs that I worry about, is this person going to cheat or not, right? And also even like in a measurement of how do I know my relationship healthy as to why, right?

How do I know that I'm in the same zone and treating my partner in a respectful way? So I don't have to worry about obstacles in my life. Really, the first thing that you look at is the type of intimacy people have in the relationship. And when I say intimacy, I'm not just saying sex. So I see there's three types of intimacy. There is emotional intimacy. There is physical non-sexual intimacy. And there is physical sexual intimacy.

Right. So that's the trifecta. When there are signs that the intimacy is. lacking and intimacy is lacking for a long time, that's a big concern because we all have needs for being connected. We all have the needs for us to feel intimate in our relationship. Men or women, I mean, this is outside of how we socialize that. This is, you know, guys don't need that. No, everybody needs that or else why we're in a relationship. So when when I see that intimacy is lacking, when I see that people build separate lives, right? Like, you know, they, they, it's

almost like the only thing that tying is as co-parents, but everything else, I have my friend, you have your friend, I have my activity, your activity, and we hardly spend time with one another, that's a red flag. When I see people fight for this right of transparency and hide behind autonomy and privacy, so here's our conceptualize this. And it's not the popular view, but I'm not here to make friends. I think when you're in a healthy relationship, if you feel that there is a part of you that for your eyes only, right,

and that you don't want your partner to see, that's a problem because that either means that you're doing something that goes against what we're expecting this relationship or you don't you trust your partner to be vulnerable with that information. Both of these are devastating for a relationship. shit, right? So I feel like, you know, if I don't have anything to hide, you want to see my phone,

you want to have my emails, have at it, go nuts. I'm not doing anything I'm not supposed to. But I expect at a minimum, right? I give the analogy that we live in this big house and we have all these rooms with doors. The doors are closed. I'm not going to put a lock on them. If you want to see what's in this room, ask me, hey, well, can I see with this room? And I will open the door for you and you can go see whatever you want. To me, that's a healthy level of navigating this transparency. So that's what I'm saying, on when you have somebody who is very protective of that transparency, like, no, you can't see my phone. My phone is always in my pocket, right? I'm getting angry, right?

That's, I have to ask a question. Like, what's going on? Are you talking negatively about me? Are you talking to somebody else? You're not supposed to. So these are some of the signs that I look for. In terms of language, that one, oftentimes people who have those traits, I mean, you see them, either they have a destructive pattern of communication where it's always, you know, conflicting.

like nitpicking, you know, just fighting about things that they shouldn't fight about, right? Or that they're just cold and just kind of detached, right? It's kind of aloof. It's not always going to be people who are in their language explosive. Sometimes they can just be very detached and aloof, no explosions. So these are the things that I look for. But again, those things can all just be also signs of other relationship problems that needs to be addressed, not always invidality.

Yeah, we've covered a lot of. about the particular individuals in the relationship about the partners. But there's a whole other aspect when I think about children that come from parents who have cheated on each other. There's like a lot of long-term guilt or anger or unprocessed emotions sometimes. And that can carry on through a lifetime, maybe sometimes keeping grandkids from grandparents on some level. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit.

That's a pretty big one, right? So actually, one of the courses that I teach on my platform, as children, the invisible victims of affairs, because I would say that's the most ignored facet in research as well as in clinical application because most therapists, they're just focusing on the couple or the individual and nobody's thinking about the kids. And when I say kids, I'm not just only saying children. I'm also thinking adult kids are being impacted. So here's how we have to wrap my mind around it.

There is two different kind of negative impact when kids are being exposed to current and infidelity. There's the short term and there's the long term. Short term impact, you're going to have the kids being triangulated, right? They're going to be in the middle of this. And the kids are not all going to be siding with the same parent, right? So which means that you might have also disruption in the sibling system, right? You might have, you know, one kid who side with the betrayed and one kid side with the unfaithful.

And now these kids are going to be finding each other because. why do you sign why do you side with the bad guy right they're going to be triangulated they're oftentimes being the middle person you tell them i said this you tell them i said that oftentimes because the parents are preoccupied with the impact of the trauma so they rob the ball a lot of things so you might find the kids being parentified they having to take care of their other siblings they have to cook some meals or have to take care of you know uh what are we going to do who's going to pay the bill because mom or dad are depressed and drinking and haven't slept all night, right?

So they end up being parentified. It might impact whatever it's going on for them at that time because, I mean, you remember growing up in the best circumstance is not an easy process. There's a lot of confusion trying to figure out growing up on its own. Now you have to do that within the context of what goes around you. The long-term impact is that it affects how people view relationships,

right? Because if you have your parents on a pedestal, they could do no wrong and those people are guilty of doing something as awful. Why would I have that expectation of myself? Right? My parents are cheaters. Then why would what would make me not a cheater, right? These are the people who are supposed to be better than me.

This one supposed to be the adults. So it might either shape me to be somebody who doesn't have value for fidelity because, you know, everybody does it or it might cause me to be very rigid because I saw the devastation that I had in my family of origin so now I'm not going to trust people which ironically could cause some people to cheat on me in the future right because if I enter a relationship protecting my heart always thinking that people don't cheat on me even though there is no reason for them to do so and this is my baggage guess what's going to happen that relationship going to be unhappy and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so and that's what I'm saying like when I work with my couples before we talk about

that fidelity spend a lot of time on family of origin And I'm always finding some factors that started there. At a minimum is that lacking relationship maturity and not having healthy model. A lot of times it's exposure to parental infidelity. And that's what really shaped their view about fidelity in their adult relationships. So it's something that we all have to be mindful of is that when we're making those decisions, we're impacting everybody. We're not just impacting our partners. And even the ones who actually end up splitting, right?

And now they have to co-parent with the filter of lack of trust. Like, co-parenting is hard on the best circumstances. Now you're going to have to do it with this layer of mistrust. Yeah. And it seems like there's a betrayal factor if indeed the parents get remarried. Like now you have this new person into the game. Like, hey, you're not my dad. You're not my mom.

You know? And like you have to compete for love from one of your parents who's now giving their affection to a stranger on. some level. Yep. And that again, that impacts, you know, the parents' ability. Are they going to be able to have healthy relationship? What are the kids, they're going to feel abandoned and betrayed by the fact that this happening? Now we have to be paying for that consequences. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But also, like I said, sometimes it can, there can be a silver lightning, right? It is by showcasing that relationships are hard and you don't quit right away. And that's

why i always say in the spring of the other piece of i always discourage people from uh sharing and oversharing the discovery of that fidelity so and and sometimes i give this phone calls before people actually you know made that mistake but a lot of times people already like you know told so many people and the problem that i have with this is what whatever decision people have to make about the future of their relationship is going to be the most important decision in their life and that decision cannot be motivated by external influences because, you know, a lot of people say, well, I want to tell my family and friends because I need to vent. Well, that's what the therapist is for. That's not for your family and friends in this situation. Well, why is that? Why can't I vent to

my friends and family? Because you go in to solicit their bias, right? And everybody have their own bias and that bias might force you to stay in a relationship that you should leave or force you to leave a relationship that you stay in. Not only that, but let's say that you decide to rebuild the relationship, what's going to happen to this perception that these people end up with? Whatever process that you went through as a couple to decide that we're going to rebuild on the relationship, those people are not privy to. They're just going to be stuck with, hey, this person is a cheater, this person is X, Y, and Z,

and now you have to worry about repairing that, right? And then you're going to be adding more triggers for yourself and complicating your recovery journey. Yeah, that's an aspect. I would say most people that I know that have been in that situation, that's the first person they go to is their family and friends. Yeah. It's interesting. So the new book that you have out jam-packed with full of incredible information,

was there something in particular in this book that was really calling to you, that you really wanted the message to get out? I guess if people read this book, what message does this book send to people? What do you want people to learn when they pick up your new book and read it? So I have two books. So I have infidelity, the best person that could happen to your marriage. And in this book, what readers should expect is the milestones of recovery that people need to go through in order for them to better understand the weapon, the why assess the damage and figure out was the best way to heal. So it was designed to break down the systematic recovery therapy model for the average reader.

Now it's not a replacement for therapy. you think of it as, you know, giving the information about how recovery works. The second book is unfaithful and unrepentant. Affairs Beyond the Hope of Affair. It's this one here. So this book was written to for the therapist and the betrayed partners who felt that despite their best effort, repairing their relationship was the right thing to do. But despite the effort, they're still stuck.

So this is not because the therapist is not doing a good job. This is not because the betrayed is not doing a good job. This is because there are a specific type of unfaithful partners makes it near impossible to heal by rebuilding their relationship. So this book, you know, describe the nine archives on unfaithful partners that pretty much sabotaged every aspect of the healing journey and the clients and the betrayed ability to actually navigate those milestones of recovery. So it's really more of a cautionary tale, right? Like if you're wondering, should I rebuild, should I rebuild? And if you see that there is this pieces of traits that your unfaithful partners bring to the table, this is a good indication of what you're up against and why that might make

healing the relationship by rebuilding as not a good idea. So it's really more of here's when infidelity. Here's when repairing the relationship is not attainable. If you want to know what that looks like, that's the book for you to read. It's interesting. Last week I was speaking with Dr. Abby Moreno, who is an FBI profiler. And we, on some level, I can't help but hear this idea of when we were talking.

She says, George, I really have to get into the minds of them of these people to figure out their motivations and stuff like that. I would imagine the same is for you when you're writing these books. Like, how do you deal with that? It seems like it could be very intense and difficult at times. It is, but it's very rewarding for me. And I think, you know, for me, seeing patterns as I've always kind of been a broad-blance kind of guy. So I really always like to do a wide zoom in human behavior.

And really being able to, I feel like I've been fortunate enough to see, to work with many cases of infidelity more than the average clinician or any clinician that I know. And the more people that you work with, you see the variety, but also you begin to start seeing the overarching themes, right? But also, you have to temper it with, at least for me, because if I make the mistake that I know everything and I'm always going to, you might have a, you might pigeonhole your clients and just preconceived notions. I am always prepared to find something new or different about this infidelity case that I'm working on. And sometimes I see

some of the same patterns, sometimes a new factor is a lot that I didn't think of, that just, you know, add more to my understanding of etiology. But also, here's the same. So that's part of it from a, you know, that's the selfish part as a professional as a growth for me. But what's useful for the client is that oftentimes the betrayed and the unfaithful, they really genuinely want to know why this happened. Right. And here's the crazy part about the infidelity. Infidelity in itself is an irrational behavior. So no matter how much time you spend on it, you will never find a logical reason why infidelity happen, right?

Such reason does not exist. The best that you can find is the circumstances and the sequence of events that led to the infidelity. So part of your job is actually held the unfaithful partner unpack their thinking process. Because when the unfaithful betrayed doing this at home, the betrayed asked them, why did you do this? Well, I don't know. I was selfish. I'm a bad person. Well, that's nice.

That might be true, but like give me more details, right? That doesn't give me anything, right? because there is no pill that you can take just for selfishness. So part of the autopsy for the relationship, sometimes it does feel like interrogation. And a lot of therapists are gun-shy about this, right? Because we're all trained for therapeutic neutrality. I feel like what you're doing in Fidelity Recovery,

there's no much room for it. There is a person who betrayed and there is a person who got betrayed. You cannot sugarcoat that. Like therapeutic neutrality in that aspect does not change it. you could do more damage in that aspect. That doesn't mean your job is to make Don Faithful feel bad and rub their nose in it. Your job is to actually shield them from the natural consequences they should experience. So I'm A-OK with, you know, orchestrating the circumstances I've been to make sure that to discover,

does not unfaithful have the appropriate feelings or not? Because if non-faithful, understand the damage that they have caused, and they don't feel guilty or bad about it or no remorse, that's a problem, right? Why would you want to rebuild with somebody who doesn't get the damage or gets the damage and they're okay with it? So part of also my job is to listen to the story and play devil's advocate and challenge what's being said to see

if it's logical or illogical. Because oftentimes there are some evidence. There are texts, there's emails, there's pictures. So you compare. the story of the infidelity, right, with what was discovered, with all this context that you have gathered prior to tackling the story. Because remember, before I talk about that infidelity, I get your history of family of origin. I get the history of the past relationship that you're in and successes and failure. I get the history of your current relationship. How did we

start and how we got here? Once I look at this infidelity story, you can actually see all these pieces and how much of them fit in this past history that you have curated. And, And it goes back to being able to challenge the unfaithful of really, what were you thinking? Because a lot of times why wasn't thinking? No, you were thinking it just happened too fast. And nobody asked you the questions to actually outline your reasoning behind it. But there was always a motivation. There's always a thought and feeling associated with less action.

And that can be extremely useful for the couples because now you give them the clarity. You help them understand this is how we got here. Now what do you want to do about it? Do you want to fix it? Is it fixable? And if you're going to fix it, guess what? We're going to have a new relationship contract that is ironclad because now everybody know what all the factors that have influenced us to act poorly in the past.

And we can be mindful of not repeating those mistakes. Yeah. It brings up another question. When you said that in the beginning, you do some research and you ask both couples, like, what is your family history like. Do you ever see like maybe one person is subconsciously seeking someone who will sabotage them? Sometimes with alcoholics or abuse, there's the enabler. Like they'll hide the keys. They won't tell anybody, but they don't really do anything about it. Like they've seen the signs. They know what's happening. But on some level, they're enabling them. Do you see that in infidelity too?

Is maybe someone subconsciously seeking someone who will cheat on them? Are they enabling them by being quiet or how do you does that make sense sure some aspects of it i don't think somebody would purposely say you know what i'm going to go with this person because i know they will hurt me in all of these things and it's going to happen right because you know that doesn't matter how much this function a person have on the individual level nobody unless you're a masochist and that's in a pathological sense and that you want somebody to drive you that way right but but i think the closest thing would be is really more along the lines of it goes with so part of relationship your maturity the way I describe it, it also has to do with knowing, are you ready to be in a

relationship? What kind of relationship you think you deserve? Right. So, so if, you know, I think one version of this, if that, you know, if your family of origin and childhood experiences helped you be somebody with low self-worth and soul of self-esteem, you might think that this is the best you can do, right? Like this is, you know, yeah, I know I know I want better, but this is the best I can do. You know, they're not all bad. Yeah, they cheat on me every once in a while, but look all the other things that they are treating me, right? So I can see some aspect of it in that, in that situation. I can see sabotage in terms of, you know, I don't think that I'm good enough for you, right? But you're not letting me off the hook, right? Maybe I can blow up my relationship that way. I've seen

that happen, right? Like I'm, this is that, this is, because this is a bell that can't, you cannot unwritten. So I've seen some aspect of it manifest that way. Hank says, do you have or do you ever recommend that some of your people attend the 12-step sex addiction groups? So part of what I recommend for people, once we do the autopsy of the reason why it happened, if there is an individual factor that requires specialty services, I strongly recommend them to do that, whether it's substance abuse treatment, whether it's sex addiction treatment. But I'm always very mindful with the sex addiction because here is the thing. I don't know if you probably already know this.

So the DSM-5 is the manual that clinician used to diagnose mental health conditions. So in our clinician Bible, so to speak, sex addiction is not a diagnosis. So even clinician cannot agree if sex addiction should be an actual pathological condition. Why is that? Because we're finding out that like the range of sexual, human sexual behavior and expression, it's wide. We cannot say this is too much or too little. So it's hard for even clinician to concretely say it's a

diagnosed from condition. But put down on the back burner, I have seen people struggle with that. Even though this doesn't exist in the DSM5, you know, struggling with hypersexuality in a negative way does exist. So even if we don't want to call it addiction, right? Here's my problem. Sometimes the unfaithful and the betrayed give each other an easy way out right because if you say you know what i can't help it i'm an

addict maybe that will soften up the blow that you know what get you the help you need it's addiction it's a disease there there it's not it's not too bad of a thing now granted any kind of mental health condition should have i mean we should take that in consideration but i also firm believer if i know i have a problem it is my responsibility to go seek help so me having a problem problem does not negate my responsibility to address it, be aware of it, and communicate about it. So what I have seen are at times where people just finding these labels to soften up the blow when it doesn't actually fit because addiction, right, have a very specific way manifest. Sometimes it's not addiction and people just saying addiction because it makes it easier for,

it makes it easier to swallow. And I feel like sometimes that distract people from doing the real work. what's going to happen if you're not really a sex addict? You're going to go to one of these programs. You're going to sit there. You're going to just check a box, right? And fast forward and you're going to say, you know what? These people are not like me.

Well, they're not like you because you're not an addict, right? And then the treatment fizzle out, and we're treating something that's not the real reason, but we thought it was a reason because it makes everybody feels better about it. Does that make sense? Yeah, you're treating the symptom instead of the actual disease or the actual root cause of why you're doing what you're doing. Yeah, or sometimes you're actually putting the wrong label that this is not really your dysfunction. Just because you had a sex of just because you had a sexual affair that does not make you a sexual sex addict.

Right. Yeah. And people say also like when when when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail too, right? So also how we're doing our assessment too, right? Because I mean, like we get ourselves. I mean, even therapy is is a business, right? and not all businesses are going to be focused on doing the right thing versus the wrong thing. So I'm an advocate for doing specialty services as long as people are actually doing a thorough assessment

and this is something that people that they need, right, versus that this is just something they hang on to just to make the story somewhat palpable and convince their partner to let them up the hook. Would you be, what do you think about like in a perfect world? I know there's no such thing, but would it be possible? And if it was possible, might it make a difference to have relationship maturity as a class for kids maybe in middle school or something like that? If I was king of the world, that would be the first thing that I would do. Because it blows my mind, right? Yeah.

Something as important as a relationship, one of the most impactful thing in our life, one of the causes of a lot of our distress, something that we don't put any formal training or, I mean, it's amazing because I think a lot of these issues would have been prevented. And I think, you know, when I think about like, well, why does this happen? Because maybe we think that we have an actual outlet for that through spirituality, right, you know, faith and all these things. And I think that helps in a little bit, but it doesn't really give you that concrete thing. And also, not everybody's going to be able to have access to that or the right access to that. But what I envision, like even if the fund is there to do that,

I would imagine there would be some kind of debate about do you teach sex education or not. So we will be running in that potential wall. Yeah. I think that it would go a long way if people just change sex education to relationship education. Because you're right. Not a whole lot of people have the stability or have a mentor or have a support group that can say, look, this might be happening in your life. Here's some things that you can apply to your life

to make sure they don't happen again. Here's a way you might be feeling. Here's a way you could feel about it. Like providing those options for someone who is beginning to mature as an adult and getting to see relationships with a new lens can be life changing. It can be that which they need to break that cycle on some level, I think.

Well, sure. Because thinking about like, you know, where you learn about your relationship, right? You said, you know, your home, your family and friends, what you see on TV, what you hear in songs. about relationship and I can tell you the majority of these outlets they're not the solid Atlas to how healthy relationship supposed to work just think think about any love song the majority of love songs they're bad relationship lessons yeah that's a great point to think

about and then we're back you know when I think about culture I always think of the first four letters that make up culture it's a cult on some level and it's just bombarding you with these horrible ideas of like depending on which not all music but a lot of music is is just about heartache. And I can understand it's a place where you can create, but when you're playing that all the time and you're surrounded by it, it's sort of paving a path for you, path to destruction on some level.

Well, sure. It shapes how you see the world in your place in it. And that's really huge. What are some, if you could leave us with a few nuggets of advice or encouragement for people that, you know, maybe are finding themselves inadequate in a relationship or beginning to have questions about a relationship.

Like maybe you could just leave us with some, some really upbeat ideas about relationships, the purpose of them, and how you find your way to be uplifted when you talk about all of this. Perfect. So I'll leave you and the folks listening with the tool. Nice. Well, I really encourage people to encourage my clients to have a business meeting for the relationship. Because remember, we said healthy relationship should operate like a business partnership.

And if you are in a successful enterprise, what are you going to have? You don't have meetings. What is the purpose of those meetings? Well, those meetings are your therapy session without the therapist present. Once a week, carve out a time for yourself to actually figure out where we are the purpose of that meeting. is really to say, here's what's working. Thank you so much for doing this. I like that.

Keep doing more of this. And here's the things that I have concern about. Can we talk about what happened? Can we talk how this impact me? Can we talk about resolutions? Because I really think if people get in the habit of on regular basis, they're evaluating where they are, they're going to be really quick at identifying deficit and fixing them

before they go south. More importantly, if consistently you're telling your partners, things that you appreciate and like and they're authentic and genuine and not love service, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't you want to go back to that company, right? Where everybody says, hey, you know what? It's a week. Thank you so much for doing all this.

I'm impressed with that. Right. So I cannot emphasize that value of that. Now, business meaning is not a date night. That's separate. Date night is fun, right? This is we're talking about, you know, this logistic. And also, I think it's important for couples to have a metric of what they expect from their

partner. Like in regular life, you have a job description. right you know if you're doing a good job as a boyfriend husband and wife right so you need the same thing and how do you do that by taking the time to tell your partner here's the needs that i expect you to meet and do i agree on meeting those needs and are those needs healthy and realistic and compatible because really like one of the main reason like if you ask me why do people come to couples counseling in general not infidelity that people are unhappy because they have expectations not being met. Simple as that, right? And there's a reason why those expectations are not being met.

Sometimes it's just the fact that people never talked about them. Sometimes people don't even know what those needs are, right? Because if I as an individual don't know what makes me have in the relationship, I could be with the best partner ever, but they don't know what I don't know, right? So I think being able to get into that habit of not being on autopilot and consistently evaluating where you're at and how you're growing and changing. is going to be the best safeguard that you would have against infidelity, and it's going to be the best way for you to make sure that you're happy and fulfilled and your partner is happy and fulfilled.

So that's really what I encourage. My wish for the world is for people to actually go in that direction of not being an autopilot and their individual growth and their growth as a couple. That's great advice, and it's a great tool. And I'm thankful for your time today. I feel like we got to cover a lot of really interesting topics and areas that may not normally get a lot of light shit on them. And for anybody within the sound of my voice, if you're listening to this live or if you're hearing the podcast for the first time tomorrow, a year from

now or two years from now, go down to the show notes, click on the links and check out Dr. Talal's books. They're packed with really good information that's practical and it can help you. And I would also encourage you to reach out to him if you're curious about anything that we had in this show and it'll all be done in the show notes out there. And Dr. Toll, hang on briefly afterwards. But to everybody who spent time with us today, I want to say thank you for your time. and I hope you enjoy your day. And that's all we got. Ladies and gentlemen, Aloha.