Daniela Zambrana - Blog

INFIDELITY Part 10 - Redefining Marriage / Relationships and Monogamy Reading time: 6 minutes

24/11/2021

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Redefining marriage / relationships
We used to marry till death do us part, today we marry till love dies. Marriage used to be a place where we had financial security, today it is a place where we seek emotional security. That is a fundamental change! And divorce has also changed: We need to be able to leave in order to choose to stay.

There is a great dilemma in love relationships today: it seems that there is a crisis of desire when romance enters a relationship. Desire as ownership, desire as an expression of our individuality, our free choice, our preferences, our identity.

INFIDELITY Part 9 - How do we reconcile infidelity? Redefining ourselves Reading time: 8 minutes

1/11/2021

How to deal with infidelity?

The inviolable of the romantic ideal is monogamy.
And the idea that monogamy is negotiable in the partnership is for many the sign that something is missing in the relationship.

The discussion of fidelity is not to be confused with an open relationship. Because the core of infidelity is secrecy. But the essence of an open relationship is that what we experience with other partners is not a secret. Secrecy is based on a structure of agreed rules (either open or not open).
When we cross established rules and boundaries, we discover that what is behind the boundary crossing in an affair is an expression of a search for more of ourselves, a search for parts of ourselves that we have hidden or repressed in our relationship for too long.

The real reason we are looking for something new is not to run away from our partner, but to run away from the person we have become. In fact, we don't want to find someone else, we want to find another "me." The "I" that we have repressed, that we dared not express in our relationship.

INFIDELITY Part 8 – The Core Energetics Approach of Being in a Relationship: Be willing to say "YES" to any experience and not trying to create an illusory safety - Reading time: 7 minutes

1/10/2021

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In the last article we talked about our expectations that our partners must meet in order for us to feel safe, and when they don't, we tend to look for new partners, always looking for someone who will fulfill our dream of "the one".

But since this puts us in a vicious cycle of unfulfilled desires, we have to trust that our partner, even if we don't always trust them, will still want to be with us. It's paradoxical:

"In order for you to trust me, I have to become aware that there will be times when you cannot trust me. I have to become aware that there will be times when I will be guided by my shadow and I will (unconsciously) create situations where neither I nor you can trust me. And I need to let you know that, so I know you will trust me."

It's not too complicated, it's paradoxical.

INFIDELITY Part 6 – The Core Energetics Approach of Being in a Relationship: The essence of infidelity is Boundary-transgression - Reading time: 4 minutes

1/8/2021

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It’s not about sex, not even a love story, it goes beyond... it’s about feeling alive. The meaning behind the words feeling alive actually goes beyond just sex… it’s about trespassing one’s own limitations, the boundaries of the life that one has lived, the constraints of the marriage that one is in, the mortality knocking on the door. The essence of infidelity is transgression.

It’s actually about breaking rules, including ones’ own rules, internal and external. And that power of transgression actually leads people to feel alive, free, bold, and autonomous.
When you have an affair, when you cheat, you do something that is just for you, and you know that you’re not taking care of anybody else, not being a good citizen, a good wife/husband and not being responsible.

It is about acting out outside the relationship what we do not dare to live inside the relationship, because of fear of losing the love, the stability, the financial security, etc..

INFIDELITY Part 5 – Why do we cheat? - Reading time: 6 minutes

1/7/2021

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There are countless reasons why people are unfaithful.

If you ask a person for their reason of their escapades, they may say “Well, I feel lonely when my partner is not there”, “I want to solve a sex problem”, “I want to have more communication, more intimacy or just more sex”, “I’d like to get high on all the secrecy involved in an affair”, “I’d like to get caught and patch up my marriage”, “It’s an excuse to leave my spouse”, “I’d like to supplement my marriage”, “I want to feel special, desired, more attractive or better understood” or just – pathetically – “ I don’t know”. A few seek revenge. Some are just bored. Or they crave drama, excitement or danger...

INFIDELITY Part 4 - The Birth of Romantic Love. Definition of Infidelity - Reading time: 5 minutes

1/6/2021

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Let’s explore the birth of romantic love from an historical perspective and the dilemmas that aroused in the last 150 years. Love relationships in the western 21st Century - What changed in the last century?

Every country in the world knows that there is such a thing as romantic love, but in the most cultures and throughout history, that is not an emotion that was celebrated especially in conjunction with marriage.

In ancient India falling in love was considered as dangerous, antisocial and a challenge to the family. In ancient China, the traditional word for love, meant an “illness, a socially disapproved relationship”. In the European tradition, most of our conventions about romantic love are inherited from the originators of courtly love in southern France. But their idea of love was something that could not possibly exist within marriage.

Until the 18th Century the word “Love” was used much more often for neighbours, “keen” (to wail in grief for a dead person) and God, than it was used for spouses. It was not until the late 18th century that what we now think about the essence of love in marriage became respectable to encourage people to make their own choices....

INFIDELITY Part 3 - Epigenetics - Cheating Is in Our Genes Reading - Reading time: 5 minutes

1/5/2021

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You will not be surprised, adultery is top of the list of all the reasons that marriages end in divorce. In addition, not just in our culture: a study of 160 different societies came to the same conclusion. Intriguingly, the reason for divorce was more likely to be the wife’s adultery than the husband’s. A fact that affords a deepening of the sociocultural and psychoanalytic of women’s role and their sense of worth.

Digging deeper, scientists have examined the impact of religion and social class on rates of adultery. Religion, it turned out, made no difference at all — no matter what people professed to believe, it failed to stop some of flirting and transgressing boundaries....

Adultery, it seems, is an innate part of human behavior. That means that it probably has some biological predisposition… What happens in these cases where our new brain (neocortex) is unable to stop the desires of the old brain (reptilian brain and limbic brain, see Newsletter 1) even where people are beheaded or stoned for it?...

INFIDELITY Part 2 - Development of childhood wounds and trauma as a master key in mate selection - Reading time: 5 minutes

1/4/2021

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Development of childhood wounds and trauma are the master key in mate selection. In this stage, it is important to define trauma. Trauma is, from the body psychotherapy approach, every experience where we were not able to manage the flow of energy, the arising feelings. We experienced fear, danger, we suppressed the feelings and therefore our bodies, our muscles contracted, we stopped breathing for a few seconds and the energy stopped flowing organically. This muscular contraction eventually becomes a "shell" that will protect us in the future from feeling those dangerous or uncomfortable emotions again. This is how our behavioural patterns are formed: first they served us to survive, but in adulthood they become defensive patterns and limit our ability to experience life energy in all its fullness. From the body and the way we learn to deal with the energy within us, a person's character is formed.

No parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond perfectly to all of the needs of the baby/child. There is no way to evade this childhood traumas. We all grew up knowing the anguish of unmet needs and these needs to follow us into our marriage...

INFIDELITY – Part 1: Anthropology, Neuroscience and the Unconscious Mind - 5 minutes

5/3/2021

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The underlying cause of unhappiness in a relationship is not rooted in the other. It is rooted in ourselves, in the inability to love ourselves unconditionally and be true to our truth, to who we are. This is the true search we have to embark on, not the search for someone else to give us what our partner does not give us.

I hope these blogs will help you to open up your consciousness to see adultery as a challenge in life, which does not have to be a destructive force but a source of learning potential and be able to seal with yourself and your partner the difficult issues that come with a mature and deep connection.

I will use the term "marriage" or "relationship" to describe an "intimate committed relationship", regardless of its contractual nature or the gender of the parties involved (homosexual/heterosexual/bisexual/transgender).

I will start my first blog on the topic by presenting some of the most common theories in regards to mate selection. I will narrow down the focus to one main theory, which has the common denominator with the Core Energetics Approach (Wilhelm Reich’s Character Formation) and other body-oriented concepts.

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