Facing an affair by your spouse is tough enough, yet when the affairs keep happening, some major changes are needed. Those changes include changes with your marriage, yourself and your situation.
Hopefully, you resolved whatever was behind the first affair. If all you did was forgive it and moved on, then you’ve got some more in-depth work to do. Forgiving and moving on does not resolve whatever issues contributed to the affair.
Many time those unresolved issues return in the form of an affair relapse. The relapse could be the remnants of the original affair that were never resolved. With affairs, decisions have to be made that end some relationships once and for all. There is no room for compromise in some areas.
Forgiving and moving on is akin to putting a band-aid on the problem when it needed major surgery. The wounds likely didn’t heal correctly and need further attention.
Multiple affairs raise many concerns. Since multiple relationships are often seen in many psychological disorders along with sexual addictions, these have to be explored. If it’s psychological, it could be that medications or therapy could help matters depending on what kind of disorder you’re dealing with.
If you’re dealing with a sexual addiction, you need recovery and need it quick. Yesterday is not too soon type of quick. The addiction will need attention before you can get to the underlying issues behind the addiction.
There are also some neurological conditions that contribute to lack of sexual self-control. A neurologist or neuropsychologist can help you in addressing this type of concern. With neurological conditions, there is something wrong in the brain’s hardware. It’s not about the programming, its about the hardware being defective in some way.
For the sake of this post, let’s assume that you’ve ruled out psychological issues, neurological issues and sexual addictions. If the affairs are continuing, other changes are needed.
In many cases, with multiple affairs, each spouse is contributing to the dysfunctional pattern going on. Since we have ruled some of the other conditions out, the assumption is made that there are issues keeping the patterns going.
It will require the two of you working together in addressing these kinds of issues. If the two of you are still struggling over communication and trust issues, it will limit your progress in areas like this. This is another reason for my not addressing ‘what kind of affair’ until the two of you are working together (I explain this in further detail in the Affair Recovery Workshop).
When the two of you spar in the guessing game of what kind of affair is going on, you likely don’t have the level of communication and trust necessary for this kind of problem solving yet.
In many cases, multiple affairs stem from strong family patterns of relationships. In such cases, the affair may not be about you at all. It could be that the cheater is blindly carrying on some twisted family tradition. If that’s the case, the two of you will need to jointly explore and address any family patterns contributing to the situation.
Best Regards,
Jeff
