I’ve been doing some reading recently on something called Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) and Cognitive Attentional Syndrome (CAS). I don’t remember seeing it discussed much here, so I thought I’d throw it out there because it describes something I’ve struggled with for years.
I’m not a psychologist, and I’m certainly not suggesting every betrayed spouse has CAS. Betrayal gives us legitimate things to think about, investigate and make decisions about. Especially after D-day, getting information and establishing what actually happened can be necessary.
But I think there’s a point where investigation can turn into something else.
What is CAS?
CAS stands for Cognitive Attentional Syndrome. It’s a concept from Metacognitive Therapy, developed largely by psychologist Adrian Wells.
In simple terms, CAS involves getting caught in extended patterns of:
* rumination
* worry
* threat monitoring
* checking
* attempts to control or suppress thoughts
* repeatedly analyzing something in an attempt to obtain certainty
What caught my attention is how closely this can resemble what happens inside the mind of a betrayed spouse.
The betrayal loop
Here’s an example.
A thought appears:
Why did my spouse choose the AP?
That’s a completely reasonable question.
So I analyze it.
Maybe it was attention.
Maybe validation.
Maybe sex.
Maybe excitement.
Maybe escape.
Maybe something was missing in the marriage.
Maybe the AP had something I didn’t.
I come up with an answer that makes sense.
For a little while I feel better.
Then my brain says:
Yeah, but if that’s true, why did she say ______?
Now I’m analyzing that.
That leads to another memory.
Wait. What about the hotel?
So I reconstruct the hotel.
Then:
What exactly happened there?
Then:
Was what I was told accurate?
Then:
What about the texts?
Then:
Was the sex actually better than she says?
Then:
If it wasn’t, why did she keep going back?
Then eventually I’m right back where I started:
Why him?
The loop looks something like this:
TRIGGER
↓
QUESTION
"Why did this happen?"
↓
ANALYSIS
"I need to understand this."
↓
MEMORY SEARCH
Old conversations, texts, timelines, locations, inconsistencies, details.
↓
THREAT MONITORING
"Is there something I’ve missed?"
↓
TEMPORARY ANSWER
"Okay. That explanation makes sense."
↓
TEMPORARY RELIEF
↓
NEW DOUBT
"But what about…?"
↓
MORE ANALYSIS
↓
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
And around we go.
The strange thing is that every individual question can be legitimate.
That’s what makes the loop so difficult to recognize.
It doesn’t feel like rumination while you’re doing it.
It feels like problem solving.
The search for certainty
I think this is particularly relevant to betrayal because betrayal destroys certainty.
Before D-day many of us believed:
My spouse wouldn’t do that.
Then we discovered that something we considered impossible had actually happened.
So the brain learns a pretty powerful lesson:
You missed something important once. Don’t miss it again.
That can lead to monitoring.
Rechecking.
Reconstructing timelines.
Watching behaviour.
Comparing old statements with new statements.
Trying to reconcile contradictions.
And underneath all of it can be a belief something like:
If I think about this long enough, eventually I’ll understand it completely and then I’ll be safe.
But complete certainty about an affair may be impossible.
Unless we were standing in the room, there will always be another question that can be asked.
Where MCT gets interesting
Metacognitive Therapy takes a somewhat different approach from trying to answer every thought.
Instead of concentrating primarily on:
Is this thought true?
it also asks:
What am I doing with this thought?
That’s a pretty profound distinction for me.
The thought:
Why did she choose him?
isn’t necessarily the problem.
Spending the next three hours attempting to finally solve "why him?" may be the problem.
And here’s the part that really hit me:
I don’t have to solve a thought before I’m allowed to stop thinking about it.
That’s very different from saying:
"Get over it."
"Forget about it."
"Stop thinking about the affair."
"Forgive and move on."
I don’t find any of those particularly useful.
The event happened.
Consequences resulted from it.
Decisions were made because of it and decisions are still being made because of it.
MCT isn’t asking me to pretend otherwise.
It’s asking whether continuing to process the same question is producing useful information.
A practical test I’ve started thinking about
When I catch myself analyzing the affair, I can ask:
Am I learning something new, or am I trying to obtain certainty?
That’s becoming an important distinction for me.
If genuinely new information appears, thinking about it may be useful.
If I’m taking the same evidence I’ve had for twelve years and rearranging it for the 500th time hoping this arrangement will finally make me feel certain, that’s probably something different.
Detached mindfulness
Another MCT concept is called detached mindfulness.
Despite the name, it isn’t about meditating the thought away.
It’s basically learning to notice a thought without automatically climbing aboard it.
For example:
Why did she want that guy?
Instead of immediately beginning the investigation:
"There’s the why-him thought again."
And leave it there.
Don’t suppress it.
Don’t argue with it.
Don’t prove it wrong.
Don’t even necessarily answer it.
Let the thought exist while putting attention back onto whatever I was doing.
That’s extremely difficult when your brain has spent years treating these thoughts as problems requiring immediate investigation.
But apparently that’s part of the point.
Something else I found interesting
Research into post-traumatic stress has found associations between rumination, threat-focused processing and persistent PTSD symptoms, and Metacognitive Therapy has actually been studied as a treatment for PTSD.
I’m NOT saying infidelity automatically equals PTSD or that every BS should run out and get MCT.
I’m saying the psychological mechanism seems very relevant to some of the experiences described on this site.
We frequently talk here about:
* mind movies
* triggers
* obsessive questioning
* checking
* needing to know every detail
* revisiting timelines
* "why?"
* questions producing more questions
* being years out and suddenly falling back into the rabbit hole
CAS provides an interesting framework for understanding why that can happen.
And here’s the part I find most important for betrayed spouses.
There was a time when investigating protected us.
Something wasn’t right.
We investigated.
We discovered reality.
That means our brains have very good evidence that investigation works.
The problem is recognizing when the investigation is finished.
There may be a point where the same protective system that originally helped us uncover the truth starts repeatedly searching an old crime scene for evidence that isn’t there.
That doesn’t mean the crime didn’t happen.
It doesn’t mean what happened wasn’t devastating.
It doesn’t mean the WS is automatically trustworthy.
It doesn’t mean boundaries should disappear.
It just means:
There may eventually be a difference between protecting myself from another betrayal and repeatedly investigating the betrayal that already happened.
I’ve been here a long time and I’m still figuring that distinction out.
But CAS/MCT has given me a name for a mental process I’ve been describing for years without knowing there was actually a psychological model for it.
I’m curious whether any of the other long-term BSs here recognize themselves in that loop.
