Affairs are destructive to marriages, even more so to blended/fractured families. Affairs often re-trigger old hurts and impact old fault lines. Fractured/blended families are fragile. Affairs put the fragile family ‘under pressure.’
Blended families present unique challenges when it comes to surviving affairs.On one hand, they have resilience. They have already dealt with a loss. They also have less power than ‘natural’ family structures. Since they have a different composition than natural families, they have different options. The tolerance level is often lower, which means bailing/divorcing is more likely than in a first marriage.
Blended Families & Affairs <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah, and I want to welcome you to another show of Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad you’re here with me today.
The topic we’re going to be dealing with is one that applies to many families out there today, and that is dealing blended families and affairs. Lately I’ve had some requests to go ahead and deal with this topic. It is a sensitive one that’s very painful for many families.
Affairs, by their very nature, are destructive to marriages. Even more so to blended, or you might even refer to them as broken or fractured, families. Because the affairs often re-trigger or reactivate old hurts, and impact old fault lines. It’s almost like all the old scars that the various members of the family had are suddenly broke open once again, and the hurt is fresh again.
Because when you’re dealing with a blended family or a fractured family or a broken family, they’re fragile. And affairs put the fragile family under pressure. Typically, when you’re dealing with something that’s been broken before, you put it under pressure, where is the greatest likelihood that it’s going to break? Along a fracture line.
You find a similar type of thing with blended families. Now, with blended families you have many challenges when it comes to surviving affairs. On one hand, they have resilience. They’ve had to develop and rebuild a whole a new family. And they’ve already dealt with loss. Maybe not (inaudible 2:02), but they’ve made some peace with it.
Another problem with these families is that they have less power than natural family structures. And since they have a different composition than natural families, they have different options, and the tolerance level is often lower. Which means bailing or divorcing is more likely than you would find in a first marriage.
One person I talked about this topic went so far as to say that in a blended family, everything is one hundred times more difficult than in a natural family. I have not tested that, but I think that that sums up the feelings that people often experience in those types of situations.
So, what are the options for blended families in dealing with affairs? That’s what we’re going to cover today. And the answer is stabilize, contain, and to really avoid encroaching.
If you put those in an acronym, I like to use the term SCARE, for Stabilize, Contain, Really Avoid Encroaching.
- Stabilize your relationships. What I mean by this, you need to have stability in the relationships before you do any interventions. In a blended family, that means make sure that things are quieted down, that you have a decent relationship with the kids, the in-laws. That they are, as much as possible, supporting you, before you start making interventions.
Make sure you get along with their children, the in-laws, all the relations. In other words, you need to create alliances, if possible. Because the relationships you build in a blended family will either make you or break you. If you have not built good or even workable relationships with all those people, when the stress of an affair comes along, it’s going to be traumatic.
Because relationships are significantly more important than status or role when you’re talking about blended family situations. In a natural family, you can depend on your status or role. Those rules don’t apply here, and you’re going to have to realize that.
2. Contain the affair as much as you can. This means take steps to keep it between the spouses and avoid involving the children in the situation. This is good counsel for any family, but especially for blended families.
In a blended family, there are many loyalty issues. And when the affair issues start bleeding over into other areas, those old loyalty issues can flare up. Since the loyalties are fragmented, things can spin out of control very quickly.
Even though some of the kids from the cheater’s side of the family, when you find something wrong with the cheater, even though you did nothing wrong and the cheater did nothing wrong, they may come to the cheater’s side just because it’s their parent. They’re caught in some really tough binds when it comes to family situations, and you need to be aware of that.
You want to position yourself as a healer or a stabilizer, rather than a home-wrecker. Because if you’re going around spreading rumors or even talking about painful topics, they may label you as a trouble-maker or, worse yet, as the home-wrecker and somebody who’s destroying things in the first place.
This is especially true if your marriage that began the blended family started off as an affair situation. This is part of the stigma that may even follow through from what happened before, and you need to be aware of that. Even though those issues may have died down, they may come up again. It’s almost like the coals still sit there and simmer and smoke for awhile and all it takes is somebody coming along spreading a few rumors and stirring things up, and it flares up once again.
Besides positioning yourself as a stabilizer, you will also need to do your confrontations in private. Public confrontation is going to be lead to loyalty issues. If you confront your spouse in public, or where the kids see it, that’s not a good thing.
That’s going to flare up all those loyalty issues and you’re going to find yourself fighting wars on multiple fronts, fighting wars you really have no business fighting because your concern is with the affair. Not with all the kids and in-laws. But you’re asking for trouble when you do your confrontations in front of the in-laws and the kids.
3. Avoid encroaching. This means you’ve got to respect boundaries. Your authority in a blended family is much more limited. Being that it’s limited, you’re going to have to respect the boundaries of the kids, of the in-laws, much more so than in a natural family. And those limits need to be respected even when the person didn’t earn it, or in your mind they don’t deserve it.
You’re going to have to put those ideas out of your mind because in a blended family, the dynamics and the rules are very different. This is why it’s often very dangerous when you read some of those self-help books and you start trying to apply them. Because you have to know what kind of a family they were designed to fit.
All those recommendations they may be making could have worked well for the families in the book. But that, if it’s not a blended family, it’s going to have limited application to your situation. You’re going to have to realize that and always be looking at all the counsel and advice you see with that kind of filter in mind, when you’re dealing with a blended family.
I’ve enjoyed meeting with you today. I want to thank you for tuning in. Here at Affair Recovery Radio, I believe that an affair does not have to mean the end of your marriage. We are here to help you through affair recovery one step at a time.
In today’s show, you learned several things that you can put into place right now. This will get you started, because I know during recovery, many times, it’s a day to day struggle, and you’re doing good to get through one day at a time.
I’m not going to load you down with five or six hundred page workbooks, multi-session programs, right off the bat, because you don’t need that. You need the help one day at a time, one step at a time.
