A reader wanted help information on coping with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) after infidelity.
Since they didn’t provide me with many details, my remarks will have to be of a general nature.
With affairs, someone’s going to get hurt. Choices have consequences. You may not have made the choice, yet find yourself having to deal with the consequences.
I often liken an affair to an exploding bomb. The force of the blast radiates out in all directions. It’s indiscriminate in its damage or who it damages. Everyone in its path is impacted.
Some damage happens to good people and some to bad people. What is clear is that everyone suffers from an affair. Your family suffers, the families of those involved suffer, your church suffers, your school suffers, your extended family suffers and your neighborhood suffers.
In previous posts I addressed the myth surrounding affairs that it is something between two consenting adults. Although the act of adultery involves two consenting adults, the consequences or blast radius impacts more than just those two. The blast impacts everyone in the blast zone and those helping them.
You’ll find that the consequences of affairs aren’t fair or uniform. The only thing fair is that the word ‘affair’ hides it inside of it.
One family hurts more than others. One party carries more pain than the others. Since boundaries have been violated and promises broken, there is fallout. You can’t unleash such a destructive force without consequences.
The fallout from an affair comes in many forms.
You’ll find that some of the parties handle the stress better than others. This doesn’t mean they’re in less pain, or are better people, they just handle stress better.
You also have to remind yourself that just because someone handles the stress well, doesn’t mean that they’re not hurting, nor does it mean that they’re not experiencing consequences of what happened.
Consequences, like pain isn’t fair. Consequences are also not equal. Consequences of an affair are NOT the same thing as the ability to cope with the affair. Confusing them leads you astray in making making erroneous assumptions.
First, you discover that not everyone who is involved with infidelity develops PTSD. Although the parties involved may not have any signs of PTSD, that doesn’t mean that the indirect parties are not suffering from the effects of PTSD.
With all the drama going on with the parents, the children are often not being nurtured or taken care of the way that they are used to. They experience emotional abandonment. The anxiety and fear they experience bring long-term consequences.
When you devote large amounts of emotional energy to the affair and dealing with it, there’s not much left over for your children and their needs. This includes the children of the cheater and the children of the lover.
If you’re a person that didn’t have many emotional energy resources, an affair drains you to the point where there’s nothing left over for anybody.
When you’re totally drained of emotional energy, you’ll. It’s not a matter of if, you WILL crater. Although adrenaline may keep you going for a while, eventually, you will collapse in one way or another. You can’t outrun or hide the effects of the affair.
There’s also the damage done to trust within the families and extended families. Like a ripple effect, the damage from the trust weakens if not destroys the trust in relationships.
Some of you may be able to handle the loss of trust. You can take it in stride, while others may find their world falling apart with the loss of trust. If your spouse was the only person in your life that you ever trusted the loss of trust in them would be a major problem.
You also have to consider the risk of STD’s (Sexually Transmitted Diseases). Current statistics on STD’s indicate that you or your spouse will likely have one in your lifetime. The more sleeping around, the higher the risk. When there are 19.7 million new cases each year, it is a staggering thing to consider. (That is 19, 700,000 New Cases each year).
Consider that math. Presently 100 million women in the US have an STD of one form or another. There are approximately 158 million women in the US. When 100 million of 158 million have infections, you have to ask yourself “Do you feel lucky?”
The odds are 63% that the woman involved in the affair has a STD. That means there is a 6 out of 10 chance you’ll be infected in one way or another.
I mention the STD’s since having poor health while trying to deal with a stressful situation is overwhelming. Your ability to deal with stress is directly related to your health status.
Since some of those diseases can be transmitted to others, the cheater may be putting your family at risk now and into the future.
What is clear is that you will have to continue dealing with the affair long after it is over. As I said in my book, “The affair is not over when its over“. The cheater may have stopped seeing the lover, but the effects of what they did lasts a long time. The stress has no expiration date.
With stressful incidents that have no closure, you can focus on them in a negative way and find yourself having to deal with them all over again. It is re-injuring the wound.
Although your mind may tell you that the affair was years ago, your body and heart still feel the pain as if the affair happened yesterday.
Pain and the stress it brings are not time specific. Such experiences are not anchored in time.
You have the choice of allowing the pain to continue or doing something about it. I encourage you to take action now in dealing with and managing your stress, order the video, “Dealing With Affair Trauma” . The video guides you in dealing with and overcoming the impact of trauma. Cumulative stress is dangerous for your health and your relationships.
Best Regards,
Jeff
