When it comes to affairs, there is often a great deal of debate about what actions constitute and affair. Discussions about that are often heated. Another area needing attention is where do you draw the line in terms of how much you are willing to put up with? Knowing this will help you know at what point you will take action. When you do not have a clear line drawn, youmay find yourself fudging and compromising your values away.

Since affairs are very messy and entangling, it is essential to set boundaries and draw lines. When you are ready to get yourself out of the swampy mess, decide where you draw the line. You need to have a clear idea of when ‘enough is enough’. You need to first tell yourself where you draw your line. Once that is established, then you will need to let your spouse know what your line is. They need to know 1. That there are limits as to what you will accept, 2. That you will not allow those limits to be violated. When there are no limits, the chaos tends to spread and engulf anything it comes in contact with.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, affairs, infidelity, relationships, setting boundaries, setting limits in relationships, Understanding Affairs

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Some spouses deny that their actions were improper. They dismiss it with, “I did nothing wrong” or “Nothing happened”.  All that such statements are communicating is that they did not get laid. Such statements are often made to minimize what they did or to calm down the resolute spouse. When such statements are made, they often leave the resolute spouse feeling like they are going crazy. Since their emotions have been dismissed or ignored altogether.

When your eyes, ears and gut say that something happeded and then your spouse says “nothing happened” it is enough to make anyone feel crazy. In such situations, the spouse is attempting to make you doubt your own experiences. You know what you saw, felt or heard and now your spouse is saying that you were imagining it. This distortion of reality is enough to make anyone ‘feel’ like they are loosing it. When a spouse dismisses events, like this, it amounts to them sending a message that the spouse’s reality and feelings are not important. Only the adulterers reality is what matters. Their reality is the only reality.

It is important that if you find yourself in such a situation that you tell yourself the truth and that you believe your truth. Do not let an adulterer take your truth from you.  Even in situations where you are jumping the gun or making assumptions, your emotions are still important. Your emotions are telling you that something is not right and needs to be addressed.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, cheating, denying adultery, infidelity, Understanding Affairs

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Like an earthquake, the emotional pain caused by infidelity shakes the very foundation of your being. The foundation of your marriage becomes uncertain. In the aftermath of an earthquake, there is the ‘fear’ that it could happen again, you just don’t trust the earth. The aftershocks leave you uncertain. Likewise pain and fears of the affair don’t stop when it is the affair is ‘over’.

Oftentimes, there are also tsunamis that hit your heart and drown you in tears and pain. Both partners ask themselves if there is hope for their marriage to survive.

Money problems, time and worries about the kids may all seem like hills compared to the mountainous problem called infidelity. You should understand that infidelity cuts through your foundation like an earthquake. Before you start running to a divorce lawyer, consider several things. You have to sort out your emotions and logically decide what you really want to do.

Get yourself some support. You cannot face this issue alone. The sense of betrayal, guilt, and confusion may rack your mental health. Without support, you can become very frail and who knows, you might break down. Your support group may be your friends or your family members as long as they are willing to listen and help you out.

Give yourself and your partner time and space. The affair is a stressful matter. Give yourself some time to think through things. When the going gets tough in a basketball game, the coach calls for a timeout. This time, however, you may also need a timeout.

Communicate. Don’t give yourself forever to settle your differences and your marital problems. After talking with your support group and spending some time for thinking, you should then communicate with your partner. You will have to make serious considerations on how to move forward in your marriage.

Divorce is not the only option available for your marriage. When you have to deal with the aftermath of the affair, you have to really communicate with each other and talk of the best move that you will do to save your marriage.

adultery, cheating, infidelity, philandering, relationships, Understanding Affairs

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Love is not all that matters in your relationship. Marriage needs commitment and hard work. Love makes everything all right. But you should be willing to do the “dirty work” and sweat it out. If you don’t, then there is a problem in your relationship.

An affair is sure to rock your marriage. Without true love, commitment and hope, you cannot mend your marriage. Yet, if you can mend your marriage and forego of the past, you love each other indeed!

Yet, there are times that the pain, the bitterness, and the hurt come back. When they do, your marriage is affected and even your well-being. If you continue in that state, your marriage might be in a very big problem.

Is it time then for marriage counseling?

When you find yourself asking this question, look at crucial aspects of your marriage and then decide if it is indeed time for marriage counseling. Just posing the questions indicates that you believe there is something worth saving.

You could not bring back the romance in your marriage. No matter what you do, you cannot seem to bring back the romance and the “magic” in your marriage. And because you cannot, you and your partner feel edgy and paranoid about the status of your marriage.

Although the affair is over, you constantly fight over the littlest thing. Sometimes, it is not the big things that lead to the disintegration of a marriage but the littlest things that add up day after day. When you constantly fight over petty things, then it means that you have some deep-set unresolved issues that have to be solved.

You keep bringing up the affair into your fights. This is perhaps the last straw for your decision. If you notice that the subject of the affair comes up every now and then, you know that you are far from okay.

When you notice these three things in your marriage, then you need to seek marriage counseling. This will help your marriage greatly.

adultery, affair, marriage counseling, Rebuilding the relationship, relationship

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I recently went to hear John Bradshaw speak. The nationally known author had plenty to say about affairs. as his talk focused on ‘rigorous honesty’.  He addressed his own affairs, and what he found to be motivating them. One of the points that I found of interest was that he mentioned his own sexual addiction existed prior to his alcoholism. I suspect as mental health people  and the recovery community begins exploring the issues behind affairs and substance abuse, they will find many cases  of sexual addiction. The sexual addiction does not make their actions more acceptable, it only provides better understanding behind their actions.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, affairs, cheating, honesty, infidelity, John Bradshaw, philandering, relationships, Sexual addiction

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Honesty, especially rigorous honesty is a challenge to achieve. Although it is a challenge, the rewards of such honesty is well worth the effort. One of the barriers that prevents couples from obtaining the healing and recovery from an affair or sexual addiction is the reluctance to have such honesty in the relationship.

In many cases people become comfortable living a lie. They even allow their spouses to believe the same lies thinking that if they are honest with them, then their spouse will leave them. The possibility of them leaving is always a risk. If the relationship is so fragile that honesty will cause them to leave, there are even more serious problems in the relationship that need attention. When you are marreid to someone, you want them to love you for who you are, not the image you project onto the wall or onto their lives. We all need genuine companionship, genuine connection with our spouses. This is not possible if you are still living a lie.

The truth may hurt, but living a lie hurts worse than the truth. There may be peace with the lie, but at what cost? What have you sacrificed to obtain a peace based on lies?

If you want such honesty, the time to begin is now. It may start with little things, but eventually you will arrive if you continue living honestly. Living one lie, will lead to more lies and even greater lies, until you find that you have lost your own self.

Honesty is worth the effort.

Regards,

Jeffrey Murrah

adultery, affairs, honesty and infidelity, infidelity, lying, Rebuilding the relationship, relationships, Sexual addiction

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Rather than wait until an affair happens, it is important that you define what behaviors and attitudes that you will not accept in your spouse. You need to define your boundaries clearly when it comes to questionable behavior. Will these boundaries keep an affair from occurring? NO the boundaries will not keep someone determined to commit adultery from doing so. What the boundaries will do is keep you from feeling so lost and adrift when trauma of an affair hits. When you know where you stand, you have some direction.

Another one of the many scars of an affair is that it puts those damaged by them morally adrift. Suddenly you may find yourself unsure of what is right, what is wrong, and which direction you need to go. Do you want them back? What can be and what can not be forgiven? Many issues that were very clear before the adultery are now muddled. This confusion is part of the natural reactions to the upheaval that just occurred. So when such times hit, do not think that you are a bad person or that you lost your faith, due to the confusion.

The preventative is to have clear boundaries. Once an affair occurs, clear boundaries are still needed, although they may be more challenging to come up with. The boundaries provide a reference point or starting point if you will.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, boundaries and relationships, cheating, infidelity, Rebuilding the relationship, rebuilding the relationship after the affair, Understanding Affairs

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

There is nothing wrong with being jealous. After all, marriage is founded on an exclusive partnership between you and your spouse. When your spouse shows interest and actively pursues another person, jealousy is a natural reaction to this violation of the trust in your exclusive partnership.

In spite of jealousy, however, affairs can and still do happen. They are disasters to your family, which if left unchecked could ruin your marriage and your family altogether.Just because there are no arguments does not mean things are settled. The issues leading up to the affair need to be addressed. Addressing these issues requires a strong love and determination for both of you to work it out.

After the affair, however, you will have to deal with jealousy. At the back of your mind, you might be asking whether or not your spouse is still seeing someone else. You might also be wondering if you have 100% of his or her affection and love.

There are two ways to deal with jealousy after the affair. One, you have to strengthen your own security in your own worth and analyze where your jealousy is coming from. Perhaps you are still harboring some bitterness over the affair. Although it takes some time for that to heal, you should consciously choose to forgive if your partner has truly changed.

You should also talk with your partner about your jealousy, especially if he or she is indeed showing some reasons for you to be jealous. When you do so, you can agree on how to ease your feelings of jealousy.

adultery, adultery and jealousy, affairs and jealousy, affiars, infidelity, rebuidling a marriage, Rebuilding the relationship

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

After my post yesterday on the effects of lying on children, further insights came to me. When change happens, there are the initial or primary effects and there are the secondary effects. The idea of primary and secondary effects is well established. These ideas also apply human behavior such as lying.

Some of the secondary effects are that when parents lie about their own behavior, it will continue spreading to where they lie about the behavior of others. This also includes their own children. You will often find such parents lying or distorting the facts about what their children do. This is easily seen when the child acts out. The parents report of what happened will either be distorted or lied about in order to make it more acceptable. What is saddening is that when parents develp a pattern of lying, they will find themselves doing so as ’second nature’. They will be able to do it without thinking. Lying will have become as natural as breathing. Children growing up in such a world will find that their misbehaviors are often ignored or treated as ’something they can’t help. The idea of children being held responsible for their misbehaviors is no longer the standard used in the home. In order to allow the affair to continue, people are expected to keep secrets and maintain loyalty to only certain members of their group. There will be an ‘insiders’ group and an ‘outsiders’ group. Being raised in such an environment is unhealthy for children.

If you are in such a situation, it is important to begin taking steps to undo what has been done. Start by being honest with yourself and your family. Set up some accountability. Set up consistent structures that will add stability to the family.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, affairs, Affairs and Children, effect of affairs on children, effect of lying on children, families and affairs, infidelity, lying

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

In the same way that milk and cookies go together, affairs and lying go together. The whole foundation of the relationship is based on lies. The parties involved lie either to themselves or their paramours about their dating status. The relationship begins on a premise of untruth or a total disregard of the truth.

When a relationship begins with a total disregard of truth and acceptance of lying, it is not surprising that the lies only become more frequent and have larger proportions. I am amazed at parents who have affairs and are then surprised when their children lie to them or disregard their parental authority. I am not surprised that the child does this, what surprises me is the hubris of the parent in expecting the child to be honest and to respect them. Children are not stupid. They see what is going on. They soon figure out that the moral system preached is vastly different than the one lived. Given the contradictory message they are given, they act accordingly. The children act in a logical manner. It is the parents that are illogical in expecting the child to live in a moral world that they themselves reject.

Sadly, many parents would rather medicate their child than address the real issue of their own irresponsibility. The having of an affair is a matter of hedonistic self-gratification. The child acting out is a natural consequence of the parents choices. At times the child reacts to the parents attitude and at other times it is their behavior. Even when parents think that they are smart enough to keep awareness of the affair from their child, the child knows something is not right. The child instictively knows the truth of what is going on. The only person deceived is the parent.

This past weekend, I saw this kind of situation in action. The parent continued maintaining their denial and avoidance of responsibility in the situation. It is my hope that by addressing the effects of lying that it wakes some parents up so that the situation can be improved.

Best Regards,

Jeff Murrah

adultery, Affairs and Children, cheating and children, effects of affairs on children, infidelity, lying about the affair

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!