I Cheated. Does This Make Me A Bad Person

“Once a cheat, always a cheat.” As a therapist who specializes in sex therapy and affair recovery I have probably heard this more times than you can count. I have heard it asked as a desperate question from a betrayed client or more often it might surprise you that I hear it from the betrayer.

You probably got to this page by googling something similar. In the late hours of the night you are lying awake wondering “am I a bad person or am I in a relationship with a bad person.”

If there was one thing I could get my clients to understand it is this- no matter what you do…it is not what has happened but what happens next. Most of us would love to live in a world where our actions (and everyone around us) always reflect who we are and what matters to us. This world is a fantasy. A fantasy that often dies with an affair. We must grieve it and stare in the face of something more accurate. Our actions are not who we are. They are what we have done.

Who you are is decided by what you do about what you have done.

If you are the betrayer this may feel like good news for you. If you are the betrayed you may be getting pretty mad at me right about now.

Let me clarify- we all have accountability for our actions and choices. I just want to separate the action from the person. You can do a bad thing without being a bad person.

I yell at my kids sometimes. This is not the person I want to be. Going on a shame spiral of “I am a bad mom, the worst, the kids would be better off without me” actually does not help me change. Shame can actually keep you stuck in a downward spiral of values misaligned behavior but that is a different topic for a different day. The point is my aspiration is to be a “good” mom- and I would define this by being present, patient, loving, and definitely not yelling. I fall short of my aspiration at least 2 times a day.

So you have fallen short of your aspiration for being a partner. Maybe this is because you never really stopped to figure out what your aspirations were. If this is the case check out my relationship values workbook. Maybe you just don’t know how to put your aspirations into action in your life. If this is the case check out my relationship I Cheated Now What? Worksheet. I am slowly building a library of downloadable content to help people recover from this struggle. I know therapy is not accessible to all so I hope these products help you on your journey.

Above all else. I would say- As a therapist who works with people recovering from affairs in Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Lousiana- I would not wake up and put my feet on the ground any morning of any day if I believed people could not change their behavior. It is literally the business I am in. The changing behavior business. I have watched couples rebuild a relationship after an affair that is 100 times better than the relationship they had before. I have also watched people heal and walk away from relationships that no longer served them. There are no wrong answers about what to do next only paths left unexplored- which will only lead to more actions that are not in line with who you are.