Affairs are filled with weirdness. You feel emotions and think thoughts that are totally ‘not you’. This weirdness is one of the reasons why you may wonder if you are loosing your mind. When your world goes topsy-turvy as happens with an affair, you will react. When you are having to deal with a crazy situation that does not follow the rules, your emotions and thoughts will react accordingly. When you have to cope with a weird situation, it is normal to have weird reactions.
This reality became clear to me years ago in Baytown, Texas when a psychologist I was under explained to me that many of the people we were not working with were not crazy. They were normal people dealing with crazy situations. When you are a healthy person faced with a crazy situation, you cope the only way you know. When the situation is crazy, that is all you know. That revelation has helped me understand many weird and crazy situations.
One of the weird parts of affairs concerns the shame factor. Although the cheater is the one who you would expect to feel shame, there are times when they do not. Instead of hiding their shameful behavior, they wear it like a merit badge, proclaiming to the world “Look at what I did!”
When they take pride in what should be shameful, it puts you in a weird place. You may find yourself feeling the shame instead of them. You may find yourself having to hide getting help, when the cheater should be the one hiding what they did. Is that weird enough for you. Such a twist is bizarre.
The longer you stay in the bizarre world of the weird, the more unreal things become. The more the weird will become routine in your life. If you are in a bizarre world, get out now. It is not going to get more normal without major interventions.
As part of getting out, realize that it is okay for you to get help. Give yourself permission to get the help you need. Give yourself permission to have morals, to have a sense of right and wrong. The affair is wrong. It is a rude disrespect of the marriage. It is a violation of the promises they made to you. The affair is a trashing of their respect for you. You need to wake up to that.
Rather than owning the misplaced shame as ‘your problem’, realize that they are the one who should be feeling shame, not you. They are the one who did wrong, not you.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
