My first reaction to a reader’s question, “Can an affair lead to mental health issues?” was making a mental comparison to a car wreck and asking whether or not a car wreck can cause you physical problems.
An affair is an emotional car wreck. It’s a sudden change to your life and marriage. Your sense of identify, belonging and worth are on the line.
News of the affair brings a sudden change. Think in terms of your identity, value, and worth coming to a sudden and abrupt halt without warning or preparation time.
The sudden stop bends everything out of shape.
An affair shakes you to your core. It leaves you questioning many things about yourself. An affair crumples everything in its path, and brings your marriage to a screeching halt.
After an affair, you find yourself asking questions like, Are you attractive enough? Are you sexual enough? Are you too fat? Are you to trusting? Are you too paranoid? You can torment yourself to no end with such questions.
No matter how you answer them, it damages you. When you batter yourself with such questions long enough, it starts impinging on your mental health.
Affairs involve such basic issues as bonding, loyalty, and identity. When one (an affair) occurs, it brings up any previous issues in your life related to bonding and loyalty and identity.
Issues you assumed were gone with your childhood come back, since the affair resonates in a way that triggers past pain. When those issues come back, so do memories associated with them.
Mental health issues such as depressed moods, rages, sleeplessness, confusion, obsessive thinking, compulsive acts, nervousness, fearfulness, self-doubt, shame, guilt, desires to hurt yourself or others are all possible in the aftermath of an affair. Some of these issues are temporary and some are more long term.
Affairs make any problem or symptom worse than it was. There may also be digestive problems, increased headaches, heart palpitations and increased sweating.
At first you assume these are unrelated to the affair. A close examination shows affairs impacting every major system in your body. They impact your circulatory, pulmonary, digestive and other systems. The changes to those systems trigger chemical stress responses in your body.
Whether or not you want to admit to the stress, the cortisol secreted takes its toll on you and your body.
Besides impacting your health, they change your mental focus. The stress they bring also brings a vulnerability for mental health symptoms to present or resurface.
So yes, affairs lead to mental health issues. Whether or not they were there before the affair is another issue. What is clear is that the affair makes the symptoms and problems worse.
Affairs don’t improve your mental health or the mental health of your spouse. It does just the opposite. It makes symptoms even worse.
Symptoms are a way your body lets you know that something is wrong. With affairs, or even suspected affairs, your body may know something is wrong before you are consciously aware of the affair.
Your mind may accept or understand the affair, while your body does not. When the two are not working together, there are often mental or physical health symptoms.
Those headaches, sleeplessness, nervous stomach, rashes and forgetfulness may be indications of unresolved issues going back to the affair.
Many couples don’t fully resolve the issues related to their affair. They either force a solution or only halfway resolve the issues underlying the affair.
The resolve the issues enough to reduce the pain rather than resolve the issues leading to the affair.
In such cases, they go around with health concerns a that have their origins with the affair or were aggravated by the affair. They are only half healed going back to their halfway resolution of affair issues. This is one reason why you will want to fully resolve the issues concerning the affair.
In my mind a more intriguing question to consider is why affairs lead to mental health issues in some people, and not in others? With some cheaters and their spouses, the affair is viewed as being akin to recreational sex.
There are many ways of ‘excusing’ affairs, from ‘men will be men’ to ‘it goes with the territory’ as if it were an expected part of their lifestyle to polygamists.
Many polygamists view affairs as ‘normal’. They view it as ‘natural’, claiming humans were never intended to be monogamous.
Some cheaters engage in affair after affair like a chain smoking fiend, yet show no remorse.
Those who don’t experience mental health reactions often have different views on marriage than the group that does experience such reactions. When you have a different definition of marriage, your definition of an affair is different as well.
When marriage is a big part of your life and your view marriage as a one man-one woman exclusive committed relationship, you will have different reactions. Each group has a different view and definition of what marriage is.
One of the concerns I have is ‘What’s going to happen as courts and politicians start tinkering with and changing the definition of marriage?’ Each ruling starts changing the definition of ‘family’. This also changes the meaning of an ‘affair’ since they are interconnected.
There will be reactions. Anytime that definitions of something as foundational as marriage is changed, there are repercussions. Like a tidal wave, each change sends ripples out disrupting every life it touches.
With marriage, these people are making major changes, that will have a major ripple effect, more akin to a tidal wave as it rips through the social fabric of society, impacting each marriage it has contact with, including yours.
If you find yourself struggling with the effects of an affair, you may be experiencing ‘Affair Trauma’. You can move past those problems. The video “Overcoming Affair Trauma” guides you in learning ways of self-soothing and moving yourself beyond the trauma.
Best Regards,
Jeff
