When it comes to dealing with affairs, passivity is NOT your friend. If anything, passivity is an affair’s best friend. When you are passive, it allows things to spin out of control.
You may have used passivity to avoid conflicts or unpleasant situations in the past. Although it may have worked before, when you are faced with an affair, passivity puts gasoline on a volatile situation. Whether it is you or the cheater who is passive, when it is part of the equation, the situation just got worse.
When the cheater is passive, the affair dynamics may turn into a tug of war between you and the lover. When you are passive when faced with an affair, important choices are made for you.
If you are passive by nature or were raised in a family where you learned to be passive, an affair will put you way outside of your comfort zone. Being taken out of your comfort zone will bring stress with it.
In the situation where you have an affair and your are passive, you will find yourself having to confront early childhood issues in addition to the affair. This means that there are surface issues related to the affair and the other deeper issues that happened in your life long before the affair. When you have this ‘layering’ of issues, you may find yourself ‘overreacting’ to issues.
What others do not understand is that you are not overreacting. The strong reactions stem from you dealing with layered issues that are brought to the surface with the affair. During such times, you may have distressing dreams since the struggles you are dealing with go so deep.
When the affair forces you to have to confront your passivity and the affair at the same time. You will find yourself having to take risks that you normally would not take. It is not just a matter that it is uncomfortable, it is more than that. When you are passive, you have different neuro-chemicals in your body and brain. It is not just that you have a passive personality, you are literally wired to be that way. By the time you are an adult, it is not merely a preferred coping style or quirk, it is what you are programmed for. In moving past what you are facing, you will have to literally become a ‘new person’.
Not only will you be faced with new risks, you will have to make choices. You will also have to take action rather than waiting for others to make choices that you respond to. If you are always waiting for the choices of others, you will find your life becoming a series of reactions. When your life becomes a series of reacting to the choices of others, it is easy to feel more victim-like.
Facing an affair has enough traumatizing impact without adding more victimization. With passivity you will have an extra-strength dose of victimization poured generously over your whole situation. When that happens, you may feel overwhelmed and powerless. You will have to fight off the urge inside of you to just ‘tune out’, give up and hopelessly sink down into the mess.
Passivity will make surviving the affair more challenging. You will not be able to stay passive and hold onto your marriage. If you are passive, you will find yourself changing in ways you never imagined.
There is hope.
In the “Affair Recovery Workshop“, with the unique ‘Recovery Process’ approach, you can know what changes are needed and ways of making those changes. You no longer have to guess and second guess what to say or what to talk about or what needs to be brought up, along with when to do it. You can know these things and more. You can have that added confidence you needed to change your way of doing things, and change you as well.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
