Alienation is a neurobiological murder—breaking your brain’s ‘safe zone’!

Scientist Gottman said in his book “The Science of Trust” that a relationship in which alienation exists is mathematically impossible. When we are involved in a relationship, we create a “shared reality”. We exchange information transparently with each other. But cheating breaks this shared reality into two parts – public reality and secret reality. Imagine two pilots sitting in the cockpit. One has all the radar data, weather reports, fuel levels – all the true information. The other has only half the information, because the first pilot is secretly hiding some warning signals. Now the two are flying the plane looking at two different “reality maps” – one thinks the sky is clear, the other knows there is a storm ahead. The greater this discrepancy, the worse the plane makes decisions – in the end, like the relationship, the plane crashes abnormally.

Many people think that extramarital affairs are accidental, but in fact, extramarital affairs are not accidental. Gottman analyzed twenty years of experimental evidence in his lab and showed that a condition is created when thousands of micro-deceptions from a partner accumulate, when the relationship system loses its predictability. A powerful reason behind extramarital affairs is humiliation and belittling, which is called the sulfuric acid of relationship breakdown.

Small insults, neglect, and neglect accumulate day after day, and there comes a time when the shared reality breaks down. When your partner hurts you with small acts of neglect and silence, your brain's amygdala encodes it as a microthreat. That's when the most terrible game comes. Your partner starts communicating with an alternative person at this time, and with a small amount of validation from them, their microstress is relieved, and dopamine is greatly boosted. The dopamine they get from them relieves the stress they get from you.

When a man contacts an alternative man on behalf of his partner, that man naturally gives him high praise. He gets micro threats from you and high praise from the alternative man. He starts talking to the alternative man regularly to relieve himself of the stress hormone cortisol. And thus the neurological seeds of cheating are sown. When the shared reality breaks down, the two go into two separate universes.

One thinks we are fine, just a little distance. The other thinks I am fighting alone, no one understands me. This is how their universes become separate. They can no longer connect with each other. Micro-cheating disconnects your partner from you, creates an emotional vacuum, creates a secret life, and ultimately transforms it into a relationship with someone else. You can no longer predict this relationship. Because the already-established system is mathematically unstable. And random triggers like texts, attention, and validation from different men and women are enough to cause the relationship to collapse. Your partner wants relief from stress hormones, and the competing partner wants his body. But he never imagines for a moment that the same micro-threat that is driving him towards another relationship today will drive him towards another relationship again.

Once your partner is in an affair, you can never get him back. It’s not a mood or ego of his. It’s a neurobiological resistance. If your partner is cheated on by you, no matter how much you assure him of safety and security, he will never return to a safe relationship. His vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system are hyperactive. His brain is stuck in constant danger mode, and his heart rate jumps up to 160 bpm. Even if you try to repair the relationship, his brain won’t agree. Once the amygdala of the brain accepts you as a “High Threat”, it doesn’t let go easily.

If you talk to him in a safe mood, his brain cross-checks it like this: “This signal doesn’t match previous betrayal history.” When you tell him that everything can be fixed if you want, he won’t listen to you. Because his prefrontal cortex has become weak due to the microstress he has received from you, he is no longer able to make decisions. No matter how much you ask him to come back, he will not be able to make logical sense of your words; your words are neurologically ridiculous.

Gottman calls this psychological flooding. In this situation, the probability of failure of repair measures is more than 90%. If the brain once labels someone as “unsafe, to make them “safe” again, forgiveness, words, love—nothing is enough. This is not a game of willpower; it is an automatic survival mechanism of the nervous system. If he comes back to you, he will have to come back through neurobiological changes, not emotions, 90% of people cannot achieve this.

But the sad truth is that scientist Gottman does not call alienation immoral behavior. There is no religion, ethics, or character judgment here. He says alienation is a “personal emotional regulation problem. A person gets involved in an extramarital relationship because of their traumatic background. But how do you feel when your partner cheats?

To answer this question, imagine that a relationship is an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, water, light, nutrients—a tree survives when everything is in balance. Similarly, a relationship survives on the attention, empathy, intimacy, self-control, sensitivity, and trust of both parties. These are the nutrients of a relationship. Extramarital sex is taking nutrients from this ecosystem and giving them to another ecosystem. It is not a personality problem; it is an imbalance in the environment. When your lover gives intimacy to someone else instead of giving you intimacy, it creates a direct neurological wound in your brain. It directly hits your safety system. And then you start feeling __ I am not enough. My place has been taken away. I have been abandoned. He does not feel safe anymore. I am alone now. He takes away your affection, sympathy, and sex and gives it to someone else. Your brain sees it as deprivation, his attachment panic develops, and his body goes into fight or flight or freeze mode. The memory cortex of the human brain, the hippocampus, shrinks from the trauma of alienation.

Suppose there is only one person in your life whose shoulder you rest your head on. Your nervous system has registered him as a “safe person. One day, you see him using his shoulder for someone else. And he didn’t tell you. This is not your moral outrage – this is a blow to your safety system. Your inner brain just says, “I am not safe now.” As long as this wound does not heal, the relationship does not work; it is called an “attachment wound. Alienation is not a character flaw. It breaks our sense of security; it is not a moral issue; it is a neurological injury.