When you are faced with news of your spouse’s affair, it is natural to experience repulsion and anger. It is natural despise something that threatens your marriage and your family. The strength of your reaction is likely in proportion to the amount of hurt you experienced.
That hurt is often not limited to just your marriage. Many times family members may react strongly to news of the affair and take up hurts as well. One of the early challenges you will face after finding out about the affair is containing the damage from the news.
Containing the damage often means being careful what information you share and who you share it with. Just the news of the affair often opens old wounds and resentments that family members had toward the cheater. The affair suddenly gives them permission to ‘attack’. They may attack the cheater or the lover or both.
Although you may not be violent, that does not mean that they will not be. Family members taking up offenses for other family may go to extreme measures to ‘protect’. In their attempt at protecting, their actions may turn more vigilante in nature. This may show up as forms of violence or destruction. In one case I became aware of recently, the adult child took it upon himself to cut the brake lines of the lover’s automobile.
Although their parent had been working on patching things up, this was a setback for the relationship.When it comes to news about the affair or domestic violence, such items arouse passions. There is a strong relationship between domestic violence and infidelity. Although one does not have to lead to the other, they often do.
You will want to be open but firm in how you share such information (infidelity and domestic abuse) with other family members. Family members may try to fight for you, if they perceive you as being weak or unable or unwilling to stand up for yourself. This is another reason you will need to be firm in containing news of the affair, even with close family members. They need you to set boundaries, and they need to see you being able to stand up for yourself.
The family member who may take up offense may love you very much. It may be your child, your parent, your sibling or an uncle / aunt. When they take up an offense, they often do so with the zeal of a crusade. Some communities are even tight knit enough to where cousins take up offenses for affair situations.
Allowing information to spread like gossip is a sure way to escalate the issues between you and your spouse. It turns into an out of control wildfire. If you hope to repair your marriage, you will want to judiciously contain the news of the affair. What happens is that others take up your offense. In their zeal to fight for you, they may be keeping wounds open that would have closed naturally. Those family members may also develop their own resentments of the cheater or the lover.
It is not that you are keeping secrets, you are taking steps to keep other family members from creating more distance than already exists. Although there is distance between the two of you now, it is hoped that you and they will be taking steps to resolve the problems and improve your marriage relationship.
If you do feel weak, then you will need to ask family members not to take action until you either approve of it or are strong enough to take that action yourself. They often understand when fellow family members want to ‘do it themselves’.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
