High-Achieving Men are More Likely to Lead a Double Life

Men have somewhat been accepted in society as being “players” and cheaters. But to live a total double life, to be a completely different man than whom your family and wife have grown to love is simply deplorable; and studies show that more successful the man, the more common the double life becomes. Elizabeth Saunders, pictured above, was in shock once she found out who her husband really was after he was shot and killed by police. Find out his double life after the jump!

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[DM] – For nearly three weeks last autumn, Elizabeth Saunders spent each day at the inquest into her husband’s death bracing herself to hear painful truths about the man she loved, but whose troubled life had never been fully known to her. Mark Saunders, 32, was the high-flying young barrister shot dead by police marksmen in May 2008, following a five-hour siege at the couple’s £2 million flat in Chelsea, West London. On the surface, it had seemed that he had everything; a brilliant career, a wife who was as successful as he was, and the respect of colleagues and clients.

But, according to evidence given to the inquest by his therapist, he was someone very different – a man with a bushel of shameful secrets, who had to don a mask in order to be able to function in his daily life. His loving, supportive wife, eight years his senior, was aware of his heavy drinking (dating back to his schooldays), of struggles with depression, of self-destructive alcohol binges that threatened to derail his career. But as she sat in court, yet more secrets emerged: unknown to Elizabeth, he had also been using cocaine and phoning prostitutes.

This was not the only case in which a bewildered wife was forced to confront her husband’s secret life. As eminent scientist Professor Charles Butler MBE was jailed last March for fraudulently claiming almost £150,000 in expenses from the NHS, his wife of 38 years wept as it emerged that this pillar of the community, with five grown-up children, had used the cash to pay for a sordid parallel life of sex parties and drugs.

For the distraught wives of men like these, it must feel like the ultimate betrayal: not only have they been deceived, but the entire edifice of their lives has turned out to have been built on murky secrets. Today, every imaginable peccadillo can be accessed from laptop or mobile phone, and so it has never been easier to conduct a life behind smokescreens. Elizabeth Saunders is a fiercely intelligent divorce lawyer described by her colleagues as an ‘absolute superstar’. Married for less than two years, she was devotedly protective of her fragile husband, whom she reassured constantly by text as he battled his demons, but found that there were places in his damaged psyche where even she was not able to penetrate.

When successful men present a façade to the world, the person they try hardest to convince is the woman closest to them. And their secret life may be an unconscious act of aggression towards a wife who appears to be keeping them bound to a life that demands high-octane performances.

‘From the woman’s perspective, when these things come out, it can feel absolutely devastating, particularly when there has not been any obvious clue,’ says Susanna Abse, director of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. ‘This sense of being blind to what’s going on can be very disturbing. It’s terrible to have to hide bits of yourself from your partner, and terrible for the partner to be kept out.’

But what drives a high-achieving man to jeopardise it all by keeping shameful secrets? Typically, those secrets involve an addiction – to sex, gambling, drink, drugs. According to Christine Northam, a counsellor working for Relate, ‘If he felt that it was acceptable, he wouldn’t make it a secret. But there is part of him that needs to keep something to himself, and not only because there is an element of shame about it. It might be that in childhood he was deprived of something that was important to him and now there is a longing inside that he doesn’t really understand. And therefore the secret is a way of having something for himself. It fills up the emotional hole and compensates for the loss or trauma or sadness he experienced as a child.

‘I see men who are running big businesses, who in material terms are very successful,’ Northam adds. ‘But when people are under huge amounts of pressure, even though they may seem able to tolerate it well, sometimes they comfort themselves with a secret life – whether it’s having affairs, visiting call girls, taking drugs or drinking too much. It’s a way of coping with the pressure and comforting yourself because there’s an emptiness inside you.’

So perhaps it’s no wonder that occupational psychologist David Sharpley says, ‘Often, the question high-achieving men find hardest to answer is, “Tell me about your relationship with your father.”’

Certainly Mark Saunders’s troubles began early. He started drinking at just 13, was a heavy drinker through his student years at Oxford and by his late 20s was a belligerent binge-drinker, even as he carved out a successful career in the highly pressurised field of big-money divorces – a textbook example, seemingly, of a man whose secrets formed his inner support system, while outwardly he conformed to society’s highest expectations.

‘The world, his whole family, including himself, set a very high standard for him to attain,’ explains Susanna Abse. ‘And there’s a very strong super-ego [the conscience that develops from a child’s relationship with his parents] that doesn’t allow him much slack.

‘But there’s another part of him, split off and hidden and secret, where he might manage feelings that he can’t show to the outside world. Difficult feelings that from quite early on in childhood have been repudiated because parents haven’t wanted to know about them – maybe they can’t cope with them. So he gets the message that anxiety, anger and distress are unacceptable – “Get back to your homework, perform, meet our expectations”. And these feelings go underground.’

It’s a scenario that can launch a man on to a self-destructive spiral where that anger can only be assuaged by addictive behaviour that, of necessity, has to be secret. Abse recalls working with a family who had high academic expectations of their seemingly perfect son. ‘The mother had breast cancer through most of the boy’s childhood. Lots of parents are ambitious for their children, but his mother’s fragility, her life being at risk, made it almost impossible for this young man to rebel when he was always trying to please and placate her. But during his university years he developed a gambling habit, and a serious problem with drugs. Fortunately, he got help. But if you follow that trajectory ten or 15 years down the line, by which time discovery is shameful, it might be too late.’

That, of course, is the paradox: secrets bolster the ego and make men feel powerful and able to handle negative emotions and stress…until they start to feel even more stress about their secret shame being exposed to the world.

When destructive secrets threaten a relationship, perhaps it’s less painful to blame buried anguish from the past than to face the harsher truth that some men lead secret lives just because they can, because they feel entitled. Maybe they even feel that the rules that apply to ordinary mortals don’t apply to them. ‘Some men want to shake things up. They don’t like sameness, they need to take unnecessary risks, and if their wife finds out…they probably want something like that to happen,’ says Felix Economakis, a psychologist specialising in addiction and stress management. ‘And then there are people who are just a bit greedy. It’s a calculated risk and they take it. It’s letting your hair down because you’ve had a tough week, and hang the consequences.’

Our highly sexualised society, where illicit pleasures are readily available, is a breeding ground where secrets can flourish. ‘Some people eat chocolate, some men go to escort agencies. [Sex] is a bit like ordering a pizza: you can have it sent over. It’s accessible,’ says Economakis.

‘But if it’s some kind of spiral of self-destruction, that’s more of a trap. Some of these men are stressed up to their necks. They have very little leeway. They come home, they barely eat, they barely sleep. They’re trying to survive, and in survival mode, you become very selfish and brutal in your behaviour. I’m working with an accountant at the moment and he comes home and treats his wife like a chattel. It isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sort of stress with lawyers and accountants. I think it’s toxic. Be prepared for burnout, because that is exactly what will happen. They lose empathy, they think their stress is all-important, and everybody else gets it easier. And for what? Status, more money? These people have already got money.

‘Men and women react to extreme stress differently. Women need to vent, but a typical male response is that the only way to protect yourself is through aloof detachment.’

Aloof detachment – in other words, that aching void that demands to be filled with assuaging secrets. Christine Northam suggests, ‘Maybe a wife will log on to her husband’s computer and find that he has been visiting porn sites for a long time. It’s doing anything that your partner doesn’t know about. It’s keeping something of
yourself back. It means that you’re not available to be very intimately committed. One person thinks they have an honest, open, trusting relationship, and once the secret is out, they feel betrayed. They were in love with somebody they didn’t know the truth about. They’ve lost the relationship they thought they had. That’s why it’s so destructive and devastating when the secrets are discovered.’