Seeking Integrity’s Chief Clinical Officer, Dr. Robert Weiss, created the following digital-age definition of infidelity for his highly regarded book Out of the Doghouse.
Infidelity (cheating) is the breaking of trust that occurs when you keep intimate, meaningful secrets from your primary romantic partner.
Interestingly, this definition of cheating does not talk about affairs, porn, strip clubs, hookup apps, or any other specific sexual or romantic act. Instead, it focuses on what matters most to a betrayed partner: the loss of relationship trust. For betrayed partners, it’s not any specific sexual or romantic act that causes the most pain. Instead, it’s the lying, secrets, manipulation, and the fact that they can no longer trust a single thing their cheating partner says or does.
Many people believe that a person who cheats once will cheat repeatedly, and that a person who cheats repeatedly will never choose to stop. Happily, this is not the case. With proper guidance, even chronic cheaters can stop engaging in infidelity and re-earn relationship trust.
At Seeking Integrity, we believe that intimate relationships are the most meaningful aspect of life. Thus, our goal is always to keep couples and families together. And we have seen this happen with countless couples. In fact, almost all the couples we work with stay together, and many say that after treatment they feel closer and more emotionally intimate than ever.
Broken trust can be repaired. The painful wounds of betrayal can be healed.
To assist chronic cheaters, Seeking Integrity offers 14, 21, and 28-day residential treatment designed to help cheaters understand:
To these ends, Seeking Integrity includes betrayed partners in the treatment process. Unlike other programs, we have a family therapist solely dedicated to the inclusion and involvement of the addict’s loved ones. More importantly, we use a prodependent lens with family members, an approach that provides support, insight, education, and hope rather than the blame and shame that betrayed partners experience elsewhere.