It’s easier finding information on the personal consequences of having to face the effects of an affair than it effects on others. There are the symptoms of confusion, mood swings, sleeping problems and so forth.
One area where little is said are the consequences of forcing a family to accept your affair. When you force a family to accept an affair or the new family created from an affair, there are consequences.
Although the family may appear ‘normal’ on the outside, there’s significant damage and the effects of that damage are very real. Trust has been demolished. The ability of the children to trust their parents is gone.
Sure you can use trendy terms like ‘bonus children’ to make is sound better. Such terms make the cheater feel better, yet leaves the family in a moral bind.
The ‘new’ family is forced onto the extended family. The cheater hopes that acceptance of the family will also bring acceptance of their affair.
How the reactions to the ”forced family’ shows up may depend on whether you are dealing with a young child or an adult child. Sure, they may obey and show cursory trust, but their ability to open up and feel secure with what the cheater tells them is GONE.
Besides trust being demolished, there is also the moral devastation. The moral structure of the family has been compromised and ruptured.
The cheater may take the children to church and maintain a religious facade, yet that often only deepens the depth of moral confusion. They learn to accept a double-standard. Not only is there a double standard on moral issues which confuses them, there is the double-bind of the messages sent to the children.
The cheaters tell the children one thing, yet live another way. The mixed messages create confusion and chaos. It puts your children in a double-bind where they feel that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
They’ll report feeling trapped, paralyzed or confused about many choices. The double-bind puts them in a situation that no matter what they do, they will be zinged. When in that situation, there are no clear answers.
Since the moral foundation has already been destroyed, effectively, there are no right and wrong other than what the cheater dictates them to be. The wacky family situation turns choices about right and wrong into pleasing or upsetting the cheater.
The perverting of morals from right/wrong to pleasing/upsetting is one of the major consequences families face when forced to deal with an affair.
When the cheater has adult children, the dynamics has some special twists. In that situation, the children may feel like their whole childhood was a ‘lie’. They trusted and admired their parent, and now that the parent is cheating, they may find themselves in a type of free fall.
They question how much of what they experienced growing up was ‘real’. They have to consider ‘How much of what the cheater taught them is to be believed’. Forcing an affair on the family creates a weird ‘la-la land’ scenario where they have a strange double-existence.
They have two separate faces, one for the family and another for the ‘real’ world. If this sounds like a bizarre existence, it is. It is a strange form of hell, where there is ‘family reality’ and the ‘actual’ reality.
It’s akin to multi-tasking on steroids. The new form of multi-tasking that the cheater forces on the family essentially breaks them, either mentally, morally, spiritually or relationally. There will be damage. There are always consequences to affairs. The extent of the consequences may vary, but they will be there.
I share this with you to help you make sense out of what is going on in your life and the lives of your family members. The cheater often doesn’t see such consequences or care about the consequences. They just want the family to accept their lover, without regard to the wackiness or damage it leaves in their wake.
This is why I created the Affair Recovery Workshop. In the workshop, I deal with family patterns of affairs along with the impact of the affair on the family.
Healing the relationship with your spouse only gets you started. Recovery also includes repairing the damage inflicted on the family.
Best Regards,
Jeff
3 Responses
In this present society this could be front page news and those who desire to do what they want without concern for the fallout will not believe it . To many ‘blended families’ seem to deny it
I can tell you from our own experience and from observing people whose lives have lived in such cases they have a LOT of things swept under the rug of their ‘well adjusted’ life.
There is NEVER ANY GOOD coming from cheating …for anyone. The way people who want what they want fail to remember that even though there is a popular saying ‘The heart wants what it wants’ as a justification for taking what they want from others…including the OP ….the BIBLE points out that the heart of fallen man is “DECEITFUL above all things and desperately wicked.”
Advertising has been working on fanning the flame of human greed, lust and covetousness for many years now with easy access by way of modern and ‘new and improved’ media feed.
Once a group has been influenced that sin is ‘relative’ they have no restraint….as it says about those agreed to focus building a tower….
Gen 11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Man’s power to choose his own way apart from GOD does have a way of excelling if not hindered by God’s grace to deter it …but today man is given an opportunity to turn from sin by turning away from sin and going to the Lord to seek what HIS way is .
Pleasure seeking has become the focus and value of many today …so thinking of the cost is the last thing that matters to many who do such things.
Zaza,
I like your use of ‘well adjusted’. Many blended families assume that because they outwardly appear functional, that ‘everything is fine’. They do not realize the ticking time bomb that they have set in motion. My own experience is that they are filled with deceit. Even in the better functioning families, there are always the issues of loyalty and loss that can flare up at any moment.
Yes….you hit the nail on the head as usual …I wonder how many people are reading these …I hope they are finding hope even as things may seem dark momentarily …we can trust the Lord but people are often too lacking in personal character these days and the teaching of such things has been replaced with situation ethics and humanistic ‘values’
Thanks for your efforts here!