The Science of Anxiety

The Two Faces of Infidelity

In this business we often see checklists--catalogs of clues that a spouse might be cheating.

A quick Google search for “signs of infidelity” returns no fewer than 200,000 hits for How to spot a cheating spouse, How to tell if he’s stepping out, Ways to tell if he’s got a new lover. These lists are almost always the same: new perfume, new interest in physical appearance, secretive phone calls, mysterious expenditures, etc.

If you've ever had reason to perform that particular Google search, you know the feeling: it's that little kernel of doubt that sneaks into a marriage and destroys confidence, trust, and peace. Maybe it presents itself in small doses, meting out insecurity in infinitesimal portions. Maybe it walks into the room and screams.

Either way, those lurking unknowns and suspicions fuel a growing unease that can rapidly escalate to anxiety, stress, even a sort of mental paralysis. And the cheater experiences a form of anxiety as well—the stress that accompanies the need to lie to maintain a façade of normalcy.

Anxiety – The cuckold/cuckquean’s perspective

Anxiety is a byproduct of fear, and fear of the unknown is, perhaps, the most distressing variety. Anxiety closes down the thinking brain and activates the body-protecting lizard brain, the reacting brain. As Gregory Hartley puts it in his book, How to Spot a Liar, philanderers are, “…brokers of anxiety.” When a person thinks his spouse is cheating on him, he receives a jolt to his idea of self and his frame of reference.

We organize our idea of self by assembling input from others and various situations. Our frame of reference, our view of the outside world, is prejudiced by experience. When one suspects infidelity, both self and frame of reference are questioned. Confusion and emotion take charge…anxiety rents space in the brain. 

Anxiety – The cheater’s perspective

When people have affairs, they lie to maintain their cover. Big and small non-truths leak out in a sludge of constant mendacity. From hiding credit card receipts to sneaking off to the back porch for late-night small talk via cell phone, every aspect of a deceptive person’s life is caught up in half-truths, fabrication, and deceit. And when someone tells a lie, he places himself under stress. He lives in constant fear of discovery.

Stress and the Sympathetic Nervous System

When the mammalian body perceives a threat, the sympathetic nervous system takes over and kick-starts the body's "fight-or-flight" response. Blood is routed away from the face and skin to the muscles. Blood is diverted away from the digestive tract. The bladder no longer has the ability to contract and expel waste. The liver floods the blood stream with glucose, preparing for physical activity. Heart rate and respiration increase and nostrils flare, offering the lizard brain a heavy dose of oxygenated blood. Metabolism is heightened, sweating intensifies. Pupils dilate to collect as much data about the threat as possible. Gregory Hartley calls this, "your mind at war.”

The outward signs are always visible, if sometimes only in very minute forms. The stressed person’s hands may shake. His complexion may appear pallid. His mouth and lips dry out, a result of dramatically reduced blood flow. Mucosa shrink, leading to pale thin lips and drooping lower eyelids. The brow clinches and draws downward. Shoulders draw tight in preparation for defense. Elbows are in, close to the ribcage in a defensive posture.

Inside, the stressed person feels jittery, hypersensitive. Thanks to a lack of blood in the digestive system, the person feels a sensation of butterflies in the stomach; he may even feel nausea. With the heart racing blood away from the skin, the anxious person feels a high core temperature and cool skin, that clammy feeling. His focus becomes narrow and sense of hearing is directed at the source of the threat. He hears his own heartbeat. His mind recedes to a primitive state, and emotions work their way involuntarily to the fore. The person under stress often becomes defensive, argumentative, and emotional.

These systems turn on at the cost of rational thought, leading to what Seth Godin calls “lizard brain.” Irrationality is the rule at this point.

How to stop the cycle 

The Simple (well…maybe not so simple) Fix for Stress

The cheater

Simple answer - Do not cheat. Alternative answer – stop telling lies.

In one case last year, we were hired by a woman's attorney to document a philandering husband’s activities. We placed him under heavy surveillance--three cars and four investigators. We documented the man’s every move, dates, picnics, overnight visits, etc. Confronted with his lies, the man took an unusual tack, opting to eliminate his ongoing stress and simply carry on the affair in the open. He even brought his new girlfriend to a meeting at the attorney’s office. He thereby removed the burden of a lie, and his stress level seemed to drop. From a purely practical perspective, this wasn't a bad call.

Ending the affair is always the best solution. But coming clean about an affair can at least remove the deceit variable from the equation and, along with it, some of the accompanying stress. And it might even allow the dallier to regain access to rational thought, which just might lead to more productive discourse.

The Cuckold/Cuckquean

Simple answer – remove the unknown.

Again, anxiety is a byproduct of fear, often fear of the unknown. Do not guess. Do not assume. Know. Anxiety leads  to "lizard brain," and in that state, irrationality is the rule.

Shakepeare didn't need to understand the sympathetic nervous system to recognize it at work on the human rational mind. He sketched this lizard-brain descent from suspicion to anxiety to madness (to brilliant effect) in his 1603 play "Othello" in which a man desperately in love with his wife allows his unwarranted suspicions to prompt a series of escalating irrational acts, ending in tragedy—the old one-two punch of murder-suicide, always, unfortunately, performed in that order.

Though potentially painful, it is always best to eliminate the unknown. Once a person has the facts…once he eliminates the unknown, he can remove anxiety, and (potentially) act rationally.

Conclusion

For the cheating spouse:  Gregory Hartley says, “You will simplify your life enormously if you eliminate complete fabrication from your repertoire.” Simply put, stop lying and placing yourself under needless stress.

For the spouse who fears a partner is having an affair: get the facts. Consider hiring a competent and qualified investigator to learn the facts on your behalf. Find out what's really happening, then act rationally from a place of knowledge and power.

Here at [FIND] Investigations, we believe that our role is to help our clients contain the unknown. By gathering documented and verifiable information, we hope to help people move from a state of fear and helplessness to higher cognitive function…and rational action.

Infidelity in the Digital Age

Can social media break up a marriage? asks NPR in a recent feature on All Things Considered.

Not exactly. But sites like Facebook open a world of possibilities for connecting with people in a low-risk and socially acceptable way--people like old flames or co-workers whom you might not consider it appropriate to call at home or meet in person, especially if you, and they, are attached.

There's a casualness and anonymity to email, texting, and Facebook that make it easier to cross lines that felt a little more solid before communications went digital. "In fact," reporter Jenifer Ludden points out, "...a partner can easily carry on an affair in the same house, even the same room."

People often behave more boldly in the digital shadows, where rejection, as simple as hitting an "ignore" button or just failing to reply to a text, feels less threatening than an in-person blow-off. That's why it's so easy to launch the kind of online intimacy that can (as Ludden posits) quickly spiral into an affair. And relationships that begin online can often escalate a lot faster than the more traditional variety.

"When you don't have nonverbal communication, the likelihood of being able to disclose at a deeper level is greater, because there's less inhibition," says Bob Rosenwein of Lehigh University. "So it's going to feel like a more intimate relationship."

Extramarital Facebook flirting and romance have apparently become common enough that a New Jersey pastor has cautioned his church community to give up Facebook. JJ Sutherland's NPR News blog quotes Reverend Cedric Miller as saying he's seen a huge rise in couples among his flock who say Facebook is a main source of their marital problems. "The temptation is just too great," he says.

Sutherland also links to this Telegraph article, in which UK divorce lawyers claim that 20% of their clients cite Facebook as a reason for their divorce, often because a spouse has discovered evidence of sexual flirtation on a partner's Facebook site.

The rather sad upside of this for private investigators and family attorneys is that today's straying spouses often leave a digital fingerprint. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (again, thanks JJ Sutherland for this) reports that 81% of divorce lawyers say they've seen an increase in the number of cases using social media evidence.

We at [FIND] are seeing more of this kind of thing as well--affairs in which the main evidence is a log of text messages or Facebook posts of spouses photographed with their suspected illicit paramours, for all the world to see.

Frankly, you'd think folks would be a little smarter. But it seems that, sometimes, people may begin a digital affair in a way that feels almost innocent. It might even start with a simple, "Whatcha doin'?" text to an attractive casual acquaintance. But when the intimate contact is returned in kind, it can quickly become addictive. The next thing you know, you're stashing the phone under your pillow to intercept 2am texts from someone you barely knew 3 weeks ago.

Here's my personal philosophy on the matter: if it feels wrong, it probably is. I try not to say, type, or text anything I wouldn't be proud for my favorite guy to hear or read. That seems to work pretty darned well for us. But if you're determined to cheat, help a PI out: Facebook-flirt and "sext" as much as you please. We also appreciate any photographic evidence you can provide.  
   -KDG

Ashley Madison - in the news...again.

Came across this on twitter. A fellow PI in NYC posted it. We've been aware of Ashley Madison for some time now. Not sure what to think of the premise behind the site. Noel Biderman, founder of the site, makes some interesting arguments. Check out the interview here.

Why Men Cheat

Check out this fascinating 2009 article from Redbook about one marriage counselor's research into men's motivations for cheating and what factors make them more (or less) likely to stray. The most surprising fact? Only twelve percent of unfaithful men reported in the survey that their mistress was more physically attractive than their wife. Read the full story here...

Is Girl-on-Girl infidelity really cheating?

This is a post I got from another PI. You can check out his twitter feed here. He posted a link to this article at the sexorcist blog. I got a kick out of Michael Alvear's response to the lady's question. Read more here.

A Culture of Infidelity?

Part 1: The Question

Do some settings tolerate, if not outright encourage, infidelity?

This idea knocked on our door last year. We had a couple of infidelity cases in an affluent suburb. On more than one occasion, independent cases from different clients, the team wound up sitting in the parking lot of the same fitness center. The cases involved trainers at the gym. There was no overlap in the cases: different clients, different trainers…all unrelated, save the common denominator: the gym.

The question came to us: Are some institutions veritable Petri dishes for a culture of infidelity?

Maybe it’s a gym. It could be an office. It might even be a church. Any place people gather and share time, there’s a chance that certain behaviors may spread like contagious illnesses. Groups influence behavior. Commonly, we call it peer pressure, which doesn’t always manifest in the form of, “come on…everybody’s doing it. Don’t you want to be cool?” More often than not, it is a simple sense of acceptance, not an overt push: if the kids you’re hanging out with think nothing of passing around a bong in the afternoon, even though you don’t approve, pretty soon you’re likely to soften your attitude towards the practice. Maybe you’ll even indulge.

Six Bars

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “The Tipping Point,” examines several social epidemic studies that, he would contend, bear out the notion of social networks influencing behavior. One study by an epidemiologist named John Potterat looked into a gonorrhea outbreak in Colorado Springs in the 1990s. He traced the epidemic to a relatively small number of people, a tiny percentage of the infected population who did the bulk of the work of seeding the epidemic. Each of them infected multiple people; and the majority of them hung out at the same places.

In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs — a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

-Malcolm Gladwell, “The Tipping Point”

The gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs doesn’t seem to have anything to do with infidelity in a fitness center in Tennessee. But maybe there’s a common denominator: are those six infamous bars in Colorado Springs somehow incubators of promiscuity? Similarly, could that suburban gym we staked out be an incubator of infidelity?

There’s no question that some environments foster their own unique culture, in which certain behaviors proliferate and even thrive: the party school, the glacial bureaucracy, etc. But what about causality? Are these settings drawing like-minded people who already love to party or who tend to shy away from initiative? Or are the institutions themselves turning regular people into wild partiers and slothful bureaucrats?

Culture of Infidelity – Part 2: The Studies.

More likely, it’s a combination of the two: one part “causality” and one part “clustering.” Case in point: the famous Framingham Heart Study.

Family and Friends

Researchers James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard wanted to know whether social networks can influence health behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet. So they reconstructed data collected from around 12,000 people in the Framingham study for more than three decades. Their findings reflected a combination of clustering and causality: smokers did seek each other out in social networks (as did non-smokers). But Fowler and Christakis also determined that networks of friends or family members sometimes quit smoking in groups, a sort of cascade effect.

“There's no doubt that people are influenced by the behaviors of individuals that are not just one degree of separation from them, but two and three degrees of separation. There's a kind of cascading influence." -Nicholas Christakis for a 2008 NPR story for NPR about the dynamics of smoking in social networks.

If a few bars in Colorado Springs can become incubators for promiscuous sexual behavior, and if friends and families can affect the choices we make about eating and smoking, can we then postulate that some places might give rise to an ideal environment for infidelity?

Nashville therapist “A.J.” (who asked that her name not be used) says an environment like a gym or a workplace isn’t necessarily going to cause infidelity. But if someone is already vulnerable to cheating, certain environments can provide an ideal opportunity.

She says she’s seen a number of common dynamics that make a couple more vulnerable to infidelity. “Maybe the husband works long hours,” says A.J. “If you’re bonding at work and not with your partner…” she points out, “I mean, it’s hard enough…when couples are spending time together.

A.J. says this kind of opportunity can turn up anywhere: among co-workers who spend a lot of time together, with musicians on the road for weeks on end, or even between client and personal trainer. “It’s a perfect set-up,” she says, “whenever there’s a lot of one-on-one interaction.”

As for our original premise that the behavior of infidelity might actually spread in some environments like a contagion, it’s tough to prove. But a quote from that New York Times article about the Framingham might offer some possible conclusions:

“… Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking…. [they] hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior.”

So maybe there’s something to our idea of a culture of infidelity. If we get another case at that same gym, I’d be willing to call it a trend…

KDG/THH

Divorce - An Economic Indicator?

How’s the economy doing?

The “numbers” often obscure the picture: the stock market surges while unemployment slowly spirals upwards. As for GDP and the TED Spread…um…what?!?!?  In the end, no two economists agree on the answer to the question.

For most folks, the real question is this: How does the recession affect my day-to-day life?

We’ve heard the stories: journalists, restaurant owners and employees, pilots, automotive dealers, and factory workers who’ve lost jobs and businesses, families who’ve lost homes. More insidious effects likely lie beneath the surface—stress-induced health problems, rising crime…and according to this MSN money article from earlier this year, a decrease in divorce filings.

At first glance, it sounds like a silver lining. It's not such great news for family lawyers and investigators who specialize in divorce cases, but so what? Could it be good news for families? A case of external stress bringing couples closer, maybe?

Phoenix family-law attorney Bonnie Booden says unfortunately, no. “…Most people in the middle-income brackets are getting by on whatever income they have,” she tells MSN money, adding that many couples are choosing to stick it out for the time being because the cost of splitting a household into two is prohibitive. 

Add this little tidbit from a recent Independent article,  “Why more desperate housewives choose to play away from home,” and you get a zesty stew of marital strife—increasing infidelity among women, middle-class couples who can’t afford a divorce.

Where does this leave spouses facing a lengthy in-home separation or attorneys and PIs in the uncomfortable position of playing counselor to an unhappily married client? It's damage control time, folks.

For a little help in the "making the most of things" realm, check out the work of Dr. John Gottman, the noted relationship researcher Malcolm Gladwell famously profiles in his 2005 book Blink. (see excerpt)

Gottman has observed thousands of couples for more than three decades, and he offers the following tips for improving relationships. For best results, steer away from the "four horsemen"--his term for the communications styles he considers most disastrous to relationships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

You can read more about the four horsemen and myths of marital dysfunction here.

-KDG

1.