The affair of your spouse is a wake-up call for you to make changes in your home. Your home did not cause the affair, however there may be items or reminders of the affair or what led to it.
As Louis Bromfield said, “Houses affect the lives and character and happiness of people who live in them.”
The Affair and Your Home <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you’re here with me today. The issue we’re going to be dealing with today is the affair and your home. This is one that you may not have heard much about before, but I think that you are going to find it quite fascinating. Because the affair of your spouse is a wake-up call for you to make changes in your home.
Let me go ahead and clarify a couple things. Your home didn’t cause the affair. I’m not trying to imply that at all.
But the home is often where we express ourselves, in the way its decorated and what we put on the walls, the colors that we choose, the furniture that we choose, where we choose to place things. These are all expressions of us.
Your home didn’t cause the affair. Although it didn’t cause it, there may be items or reminders of the affair or what led to it.
Your surroundings influence how you feel and how you think. There’s been studies going into how light affects us, how color affects us, and various things like that.
Likewise there may be items, old pictures or whatever, that remind you of the affair or they might remind the cheater of certain feelings that led to the affair in the first place. Like for instance, let’s say hypothetically your spouse has an affair, they come back home, back into the same old surroundings that were there before the affair.
What’s the likelihood that they’re going to get some of the same old feelings if nothing has changed?
That’s the kind of question I want you to be thinking about. Because when we are surrounded by those same old things it can bring up same old feelings.
An author by the name of Louis Bromfield said, “Houses affect the lives and the characters and the happiness of the people who live in them.”
In the aftermath of an affair you want to leverage everything in your surroundings that influences lives, character, and happiness, to your advantage. This includes your home. When homes can influence the level of happiness and the character of a person, and affect their life, you want to use that to turn things around. You’re making changes in you, the cheater’s making changes, let’s go ahead and change the surroundings.
The thing is, indifference can be toxic, both in your life and in your home. You know what indifference in your spouse can do. There may be a lot of indifference in your home that you’re not even aware of.
In terms of the solution, the solution I want to leave you with today, you’re going to need to rehab your world, not just your head and your heart. You make the changes in your thinking, you make the changes in your feelings, but you leave your world just the same and that’s going to set you up to eventually go back into the way things were.
We’re going to cover three steps as to how to begin to rehab your world.
- Remove what you don’t love. If there are pieces of furniture, pieces of artwork, rugs that you really don’t love, that you tolerate, go ahead and get rid of those. Remove them. Because you don’t need to be surrounded by an attitude, or even surrounded with things, that you just tolerate.
2. Remove reminders of the affair. If there are pictures of places that have associations with the affair, go ahead and remove them. You can put something different in place, but get rid of those.
I recall a situation where there was a mother and she did not like her son’s choice in terms of who they married. And so she intentionally kept old pictures of his former girlfriend around her house.
Of course, every time that son and his wife came over they saw the pictures of the old girlfriend. And it was like salt in the wound all the time, constantly irritating.
If you’ve got some of those old pictures it’s like it’s just a constant irritant that may be working on you on an unconscious level. But it still irritates. And for that reason remove the reminders of the affair.
3. Change the layout, the pictures, and the colors. Because the same old surroundings is going to leave you with the same old feelings. You’re making all these changes, that needs to show in the home. And when the home has a different feel to it it’s going to reinforce that whole idea, hey, I have made changes.
Your spouse can come in and say “Hey, you really have made changes”. And it will feel different. It sends a strange, subtle message for you communicating “Hey, I’ve made changes”.
The cheater comes back in the home, everything’s the same. It creates an inequality thing.
What are they saying? They say they made changes, and it doesn’t add up. But if they come home and the actual physical surroundings are different and you say hey, I have made changes, it makes more sense.
The whole idea of affairs and your home is not a topic that a lot of people address. But I feel that it is an important area to make changes.
Even if you have just a one room apartment you can make changes in it. Even if you have a large home you can make changes in many areas of the home.
I’ve given you three areas to go ahead and start in. Remove what you don’t love. Number two, remove the reminders of the affair. And three, change the layout, the pictures, and the color.
This will help you have different feelings. It will help your spouse have different feelings. It will change the environment. When your environment can affect your life, your character, and your happiness level, it is definitely important to make changes in and to use to your advantage during this situation.
Because you are wanting to make changes. You are wanting to make it through the affair. Even in cases where you don’t want your spouse to come back and you’re done with them and you’re just going through the affair recovery process, making these kind of changes will help you through that recovery process. Because you want to get past those old negative feelings yourself.
Making changes in your home is only part of affair recovery. For a more detailed plan of what you need in recovery, download the “Affair Recovery Workshop.” In it, you’ll find encouragement, direction and the explanations you need during this time.
Best Regards,
Jeff
3 Responses
This was an interesting concept. I am not sure where to start since his adultery went on for nearly all our married life. He has moved to be a ‘housesitter’ in a condo that is sparsely decorated or so he has said, I wouldn’t know since I have not been there or checked up on him.
My husband had everything to do with selecting our furniture when he finally decided to spend money on our family ….I think it was during the times when he and the OW had the children …guilt of coming into our home to what amounted to sparse and second hand furniture bothered him . He also showed more interest whenever he wanted to have a party for his co workers on a rare occasion .
Now we barely have the money to maintain our home which cannot be sold in this present market. Once again he demonstrates little concern for the way our family lives.
Changing our environment to rid items that might bring memories to him connected with the OW is probably nearly impossible since I don’t know enough about what they shared to know…They shared nearly every experience of a married couple that I can think of .
To move to another state might help me in this area but most of the places I can think of that I am familiar with they too were active in their sin.
This man and the OW have contaminated over 33 years of not just my life but our children’s memories as well.
I pray that we will all be able to move on in our lives and successfully purge these things but it may take a lot more than new paint and a garage sale….[which is not possible in our area.]
Thank you for giving me something to think about though….change is good ….one reason the ‘renewed mind’ is worthy for us in this life….sometimes that is all we have that we may have any control over .
Zaza,
The renewed mind is often key in gaining new insights, finding new solutions and getting through challenges. Given that our environment shapes our thinking, making changes in it will have an impact. It almost sounds like your husband made little room for you in his life, even when it came to picking out furniture. How furniture and decorations are selected is often a metaphor for the dynamics of the marriage relationship. Even if you can not change the furniture, just moving it around along with the wall decorations would be a start. Changing out the pictures in the frames, replacing the nick-nacks selected by him and replacing them with things that you enjoy and have meaning for you would be a start. Even putting up your children’s art to replace his selections may help.
I suspect that when God instructed the Hebrews on removing all evidence of previous gods in the cities they took over was an application of this idea as well. You have to make changes in your surroundings. Changing your surroundings will in turn change your thinking. Being continually surrounded by old reminders (or old gods) will only serve to agitate, aggravate and remind you of those times.
Jeff
Thanks Jeff,
After a time I noticed that he did not seem to care what was going on in how our home ran or looked…It was at that time I had the thought that he did not really “live” at our home but thought he lives at his office….[of course that was only part of the truth of his life…he really had his ‘home’ at the OW’s place] I
I think that it is really sad that whatever repelled him among our household and family ….[ the Lord/Holy Spirit IN us??] caused him to run away ….and though he did not want ever to be under the control of a woman that is just what ended up happening with the OW dictating so much of what has drained him of all …just as it says in Proverbs! Amazing how wise that part of the Word is …..!
I will consider moving a few things around …thanks for your suggestions.