Look, I want to make sure I understand what you’re asking, because “how to stop cheating behavior” could mean a few different things. You might be asking how to stop yourself from cheating. Or you might be asking how to get your partner to stop. Or maybe the affair has already happened and you’re trying to make sure it never happens again. Those are different conversations, and I want to be useful to you.
But here’s what I can tell you from sitting with couples in this exact situation, over and over and over again.
First, the affair is never just one thing. It is never just, “I wanted someone else.” There is always a system underneath it. A gap. A vacuum between two people that got so wide, so hollow, that one person went looking for something outside the relationship to fill it. That is not an excuse. I want to be really clear about that. But it is the truth, and if you want to actually stop the behavior, you have to understand the system that made it possible in the first place.
Here is what I know about people who cheat. Almost always, they cannot tolerate what is happening inside themselves. The loneliness, the feeling of being a disappointment, the sense that they are not enough, or that their partner is not really there for them. And instead of being able to sit with that pain and bring it to their partner, they go elsewhere. A burrito, a drink, working too much, an affair. All of it is the same move. Get away from what it feels like inside.
So the real question is not just “how do I stop the behavior.” The real question is, can this person learn to tolerate their own internal experience? Can they stop running from themselves? Because the affair was a way of running. And until they learn a different way to be with their own pain, and to bring that pain toward their partner instead of away from them, the risk stays.
Now, if you are the one who has been cheated on and you are asking how to trust that it will not happen again, I hear you. And the honest answer is, what rebuilds trust is time multiplied by consistency of behavior multiplied by transparency. And it is always going to take longer than the person who did the betraying thinks it should. Always. That is just the reality of what has been broken.
The real healing, the thing that actually changes the pattern, is when the person who betrayed can stop rushing toward “are we okay yet” and instead sit fully in the weight of what they did. Not collapse, not fall apart, but genuinely feel the terror of, “I hurt you in a way you may never recover from, and I am not going to try to rush you out of that.” That experience, when it is real and the person who was betrayed can actually feel it, that is what starts to shift things.
That is what I have seen work. Not apologies. Not promises. Not going to the gym or starting therapy as a performance of change. The actual lived experience of one person turning toward the other’s pain and staying there.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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