On Attachment

#208: Anxious Attachment & the Fear of Infidelity

• Stephanie Rigg • Season 1 • Episode 208

Share episode

Fear of infidelity can be one of the most overwhelming and destabilising experiences for someone with anxious attachment. Even when there’s no evidence a partner is being unfaithful, the possibility alone can trigger deep anxiety, hypervigilance, and constant worry.

In this episode, we explore why anxiously attached people often fear cheating so much, even in the absence of proof. We’ll look at the core wounds and nervous system patterns that fuel this fear, the role of past relationship and childhood experiences, and how certain dynamics—especially with avoidant partners—can make these fears even more intense.

We’ll also unpack the ways fear of cheating can show up in a relationship, the problems with trying to “prevent” it through control or monitoring, and practical steps to move towards a more secure, trusting dynamic.

If this is something you’ve struggled with, this conversation will help you understand what’s happening beneath the surface and give you tools to respond in a way that’s calmer, clearer, and more grounded.

You’ll learn:

  • The connection between anxious attachment and fear of infidelity
  • How past betrayal or early life experiences can amplify the fear
  • Why anxious-avoidant relationships can trigger cheating anxiety
  • How hypervigilance and reassurance-seeking can harm trust
  • Tools for building self-trust and relationship security

🔥 Save 40% on my Healing Anxious Attachment course for 72 hours only! 🔥

Highlighted Links

Additional Resources

Speaker 3:

You are listening to on Attachment A place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships, and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge, and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I, I'm your host relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Speaker:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about the fear of infidelity amongst anxiously attached people. So if you are someone with anxious attachment, as I know many of you are and you're listening to this, the fear of your partner cheating on you, or if you're not in a relationship, the idea of being cheated on is probably immensely painful and distressing. Now, of course, that's gonna be true for anyone. No one likes the idea of being cheated on, but for anxiously attached people, it's on another level. In most cases. There is intense fear and anxiety and as we'll talk about today. That makes a lot of sense. Having regard to. The core fears and wounds and beliefs at the heart of anxious attachment around not being enough, around it being our job to make people love us and keep them close and prevent disconnection, our fears around abandonment and rejection, all of these things can go into a bit of a melting pot and mean that the fear of someone cheating on us, the idea of someone cheating on us feels so immensely painful and panic inducing to our nervous system such that it can drive all sorts of behaviors like hypervigilance and snooping and excessive reassurance, seeking all of those sorts of things, which as we'll come to, can actually create more disconnection in our relationships because you know, it can really infuse our relationships with a lot of insecurity. So in today's episode, I'm gonna be talking about why this is so common, what sits underneath it and what you might wanna focus on if this is something that you struggle with, how you can support yourself and how you can maybe tackle it as a couple in a relationship in order to not be so viscerally afraid of infidelity all the time. So that's what I'm gonna be sharing about today and I do hope that it offers some comfort and reassurance that you are far from alone. This is something that I am answering questions on literally all the time in my healing anxious attachment course and community. It's really no exaggeration to say that this is amongst the, the top things up there with, you know, jealousy and obviously jealousy and fear of cheating go hand in hand to some degree. It's really up there in terms of the common struggles of anxious attaches in relationships. So you are not alone. And there are certainly things that you can do to alleviate some of these fears. So it's not soul encompassing. And I should say that this is certainly something that I used to struggle with a lot and thankfully is not really something that I pay any attention to. Now, it is not a, a fear that I carry with me in the way that I used to at all. So rest assured there is hope. Okay. Before we get into today's episode, if you are someone with anxious attachment patterns and you are looking to become more secure within yourself to get better at knowing how to support yourself through those moments of spiral. To not act out in self-destructive ways. I really, really encourage you to check out some of my free resources. My anxious Attachment starter kit, which has a video where I talk about my own journey with anxious attachment as a workbook and a guided meditation my free training on how to heal anxious attachment, where I talk about my three part framework around nervous system regulation. Beliefs and secure relationship skills. I've really gone to a lot of effort to create meaningful and helpful free resources so that I can extend that to as many people as possible. So definitely worth checking out if it's something that you are learning about and working with and you wanna understand what the path to secure attachment looks like for someone with anxious attachment patterns. All of those are a really wonderful starting point for you, and that is all linked in the show notes. Okay, so let's talk about this. The fear of infidelity, the fear of being cheated on. So. Maybe we start by talking about why this fear is so intense for anxiously attached people. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, the core fears and core wounds of anxious attaches are around abandonment, rejection, and unworthiness. So people always leave me, people don't want me. I'm not good enough, I'm worthy enough. And I think. Probably for women more than men, there is a strong focus on not being attractive enough. I think there's an element of societal conditioning there for sure. But I know anecdotally, having supported many thousands of people through this, that a really common one I hear from women who are struggling with anxious attachment is insecurity around physical appearance and not feeling beautiful, sexy, desirable enough in order to keep their partners attention and feeling like it's incumbent upon them to make themselves more beautiful or to guard against other attractive women to stop anything bad from happening to prevent their partner from, from going elsewhere, but almost making it their fault. Like, if I were more beautiful, that wouldn't happen or that wouldn't be a risk factor. So all of these. Fears are really, really common among anxious attaches. And I think that it naturally flows from the low self-worth, from the fear of being left, from the sense of, you know, I always am more invested in the relationship than the other person. And it feels like their love and attention he's so hard earned and hard won that I'm always striving and working for that that, you know, it could go away at a moment's notice and. If you've listened to other episodes of mine where I talk about the origins of anxious attachment, that makes sense because inconsistency is so central to anxious attachment. This idea that love is sometimes there, sometimes not, and we never know when it's going to be taken away. And so being hypervigilant and hypersensitive to potential threats to the relationship And naturally sexual and romantic betrayal feels very much the top rung of the ladder in terms of extenuating circumstances for abandonment or rejection to take place. I think, you know, if someone breaks up with you just because their feelings have changed, that's no doubt immensely painful. But if they have been cheating on you. Having an affair going elsewhere, then that feels like much more of a blow to your self-esteem because of that comparative element. Because they found something in someone else that you lack, or at least that's the story that you're likely to tell yourself. And I think the other extenuating factor there factor for anxiously attached people in particular is the sense of secrecy, something was happening behind my back that I was unaware of. And if we think about anxiety and the nervous system, anxiety is all about information and control. And this sense of if I can gather all the information, then I can protect myself. And so the idea of secrecy and things happening behind my back that I was unaware of and particularly things that are so painful, that feels so intolerable to someone with anxious attachment. Now, I think it's really important, I probably should have said this at the outset, to distinguish between fears around cheating that are based in past experience, and particularly if in the current relationship, sometimes people will say to me, you know, I've got such an intense fear of betrayal, or I'm so paranoid about my partner cheating on me, and then they proceed to tell me about all of the other times their partner has cheated on them, or that there have been really serious breaches of trust. But they're still sort of making it a them problem that they're struggling to trust their partner. And I think that that's a very different set of circumstances to, if you just have a generalized abstract sense of fear around infidelity, that is not grounded in someone's behavior. If your fear of infidelity is in response to infidelity, then that's a repair problem in my mind, more than it is. Just a, you know, a paranoia problem. That's a known breach of trust with a very natural consequence. And even if you've had infidelity in past relationships, it makes a lot of sense that in your current relationship, that fear would be more present than had you not had that experience in the past. Because again, let's remember that our nervous system is all about predicting and protecting. So if you've had a very traumatic experience of being cheated on in a relationship, then it makes perfect sense that your system would be warning you about the possibility of that happening again. And you know, especially if you didn't see it coming before or you were blindsided by it. Then hypervigilance is a very natural response to that because your nervous system is saying, you better be on the lookout because remember what happened last time and how it happened without us knowing. So let's make sure we don't get caught off guard again. I just wanted to mention that both to validate that if you've had those past experiences, it makes sense that you are naturally more sensitive to the possibility of that or the fear of that happening again. But also to differentiate that and, do, I suppose, caution you against being overly hard on yourself if that has been present in your current or past relationships and that it's not just a sensitivity problem, that there may be actual repair that needs to take place in order for you to feel more comfortable about that. I wanted to now talk about why anxious avoidant kind of dynamics can exacerbate this fear that anxiously attached people have around cheating. So I think there are a few features of common anxious avoidant dynamics that can inadvertently fuel this fear that anxiously attach people have. So one of those is around privacy and secrecy. Now, for anxiously attached people, privacy often feels like secrecy. There can be this sense of if you have nothing to hide, then I should be able to read through your phone and I should be able to read through your journal and all of the things, because if you have nothing to hide, what's the problem? Right? Anxiously attach people because anxiety loves information and doesn't like. Anything being withheld, there can be this sense of privacy being very threatening and privacy can feel like secrecy. So the anxiously attached person is likely to have a strong preference for total transparency, whereas the avoidant person is likely to very much value privacy as a matter of principle. So even if they're not hiding anything, they're unlikely to want you to go through their phone from a principled stance of that's my business and it's not yours. And you know, they're quite staunchly protective of their boundaries and their space and their separateness, and that's likely to feel very intrusive to them. But naturally, if they are saying, no, you can't look through my phone for the anxiously attached person who thinks if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn't be a problem. The meaning making that they're likely to engage in from that is, well, they're definitely hiding something from me. So I think that that different way of relating to privacy versus secrecy versus transparency in anxious avoidant relationships can absolutely heighten the fears that would already, that might already exist in the anxiously attached person around. Infidelity, cheating, betrayal, breaches of trust. And I think from that place, the anxiously attached person is much more likely to engage in snooping or, you know, opportunistically going through a partner's phone if they leave it lying around or something like that. Because the phone now represents like the holder of all of the secrets. It's the vault that I'm unable to access. And the allure of that is so tempting for someone who is so terrified of secrets, but also desperately wants all the information. I think one of the other big pieces around the fear of cheating, fear of infidelity that can be fueled by anxious avoidant dynamics is the tendency of avoidant partners to pull away sexually as a relationship becomes more serious. And I've spoken about this many times before. I have a YouTube video on why avoidant partners withdraw sexually. So definitely go check that out if you want a more in depth discussion on this specific point. But for the purposes of this discussion, I'll just say that naturally if things were really sexually intense and fiery and connected at the start of a relationship, and then without explanation, without discussion, someone starts to pull away and lose interest in sex it's very easy for the anxious partner to make meaning from that and to assume that if they're not getting their needs met here, where are they getting them met? Why have they lost interest in me? And, you know, their loss of interest in you as a sexual partner might feel like a precursor to the relationship ending or, you know, to them seeking out sexual gratification elsewhere. So whether that's happening or not, it makes sense that you would have fear around it and insecurity around it if what was once a vibrant sexual relationship suddenly shifts and there's no explanation or acknowledgement or discussion of why that is happening. So how this fear will often show up in relationships. I've sort of already touched on this a bit, but some of the behaviors you're likely to see are excessive monitoring, snooping being very hypervigilant to tiny changes in shift or tone maybe in social settings, being very wary of. So-called competitors people who you see as being a threat to the relationship. Asking a lot of questions, kind of interrogating almost how do you know her? How long have you been friends and does she have a partner? And all of these questions that again, if you've got an avoidant partner, are likely to be met with almost defensiveness because they're likely to sound accusatory because they're almost laced with this subtext of, I don't trust you. And that's likely to be quite triggering whether your partner's avoidant or not. Particularly if there isn't any breach of trust. Someone who feels like they're being accused of having done something wrong can have quite a defensive response to that. Some of the other pieces, again, I've already mentioned, like going through someone's phone, snooping, going through their belongings, looking for clues, looking for evidence you know, checking their social media, who they're following, who's following them. Have there been any notable changes? Noticing any differences in their communications. So are they. Calling or texting less frequently or is there a change in tone? All of these things are used as instant proof that something really is going on. I've joked many times, and it's sort of not funny, but I almost can't help but laugh because even my brain still does this from time to time, is if an anxiously attached person can't reach their partner. You know, if they've called them and they've just gone up to the shops or gone to the gym or something and they can't reach them, often the catastrophic nature of an anxiously brain is that either they're cheating on me or they've been in a terrible accident, right? Like those feel like the only two scenarios that could explain them not picking up the phone. So all of those sorts of very catastrophic interpretations, everything's worst case and everything's confirmation that they are indeed cheating on you. Again, around the intimacy thing, the tendency to over interpret changes in intimacy or affection sexual frequency, sexual tone, you know, even if they're less engaged during sex. Those sorts of things can all feed into the paranoia and the story of, they're definitely cheating on me, or something bad is going to happen in that respect. And certainly protest behaviors that are, you know, designed to elicit reassurance. So, you know, poking at a partner trying to push them and saying like, you don't love me or You don't pay attention to me, or you don't even find me attractive, or anyone else would see that, like, that kind of style of communication that is coming from a really stressed place but is trying to elicit that reassurance. And, you know, getting a partner to tell you that there's nothing going on really unequivocally and give you that. But sometimes the way that we go about getting it can actually push someone further away. And that is obviously really disconcerting because if you are saying to someone You don't even love me, or you don't even care, or you're attracted to her, or whatever it might be if someone doesn't immediately tell you what you wanna hear in response to that, very persuasively and unequivocally then again that can be used to confirm the fear that something's going on, even if it isn't. But just because we haven't really gone about the communication piece in a very mature or self-responsible way. And so we can almost self-sabotage in the way that we go about trying to get that reassurance and then it all backfires because it actually does push someone away. Now, having spent a lot of time talking about why all of this makes so much sense. I do also wanna acknowledge that this. Desire to prevent cheating from happening. While it makes so much sense in the context of anxiety and our nervous system and all of the ways in which we try and protect ourselves, the hard truth is, and for some people this is really liberating. For others, it's totally terrifying. If someone's gonna cheat on you, you generally can't stop them. Right. Snooping and trying to control them and interrogating them and all of those things, like if someone is going to breach trust, if someone is going to cheat no amount of control and surveillance and monitoring is really gonna stop them if they are really set on doing that. And frankly, like you wouldn't want to engage in that level of monitoring and surveillance to try and prevent someone from cheating. Because if the only reason they're not cheating on you is because you are watching them like a hawk, that's not a sustainable or secure way of being in relationships. And while it might feel like, well, that's my only option because I'm so scared, sometimes we have to take a step back and go, okay if my obsessive monitoring and surveillance of my partner, my obsessive attempts at control and grip are the only things holding this together, and that's the basis upon which I am able to trust. That's not actually trust at all. Right? Trust and control are like opposite ends of a seesaw. And so the less we trust. The more we try and control. And so I think when we are leaning so heavily on control in our relationships, we have to stop and ask ourselves like, is this how I wanna be in relationship? Is control the glue that I want to be using to hold things together here? Or do I need to maybe choose trust and let go of control? Not withstanding that that is going to be hugely uncomfortable and that there are gonna be parts of you that are going to tell you, you know, check their phone, ask them for reassurance, do all of the things. Sometimes we do really need to lead with choice and action rather than being led by feelings. If our feelings are shaped by insecure patterns that we're trying to shift away from. And again, I know I mentioned it earlier, but I'm not talking here about whether have been known breaches of trust. I think just telling ourselves that we should trust in spite of that is not the medicine in that situation there. We need proper repair so that we can rebuild trust gradually. Okay so I'm gonna leave it there. What I will say is some other episodes I've done on jealousy, on self abandonment, on the fear of abandonment. These things are also really useful context for this discussion we've had today. And as I spoke about in my somewhat recent episode on jealousy, really the core of it and what certainly helped me to shift these patterns is building self-worth. Because I think that fear of someone cheating on you is so much more acute when it would be confirmation of your worst fears that you are unlovable or undesirable or not valuable. So if you aren't harboring those fears, you are much less likely to look for this very painful evidence and confirmation of that elsewhere. We become a bit more trusting of our value and the fact that our partner loves us and so less. On the lookout for signs that everything's gonna implode in the most painful way possible. So the broader work of building self-worth is absolutely relevant here as well. Okay. Guys, I really hope that this has been helpful. I know it's a really hard one, but know that you are not alone. And I hope that you've connected some dots and built some awareness through the discussion today. Or if nothing else, you know that it makes sense that you struggle with this, and as I said, far from alone, it's one of the most common things that I am supporting people with. Okay, guys, thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you again next time.