A reader recently wrote to me concerning the pain of an old affair and his struggles with it. His comments and suggestions are something that you and your marriage may benefit from.
First, you need to realize that an old affair still burns and inflicts damage. Some cheaters and counselors have the mindset that if the affair happened long ago, it is best not disclosed.
The excuse is often that bringing it up would do more damage than help. I am well aware of the old saying “Let sleeping dogs lie,” yet when it comes to your marriage, you will want to rethink that approach.
Bringing up old affairs opens old wounds or brings new ones where none existed before. But although there is often some emotional pain, the two of you are no longer living a lie.
Neither you nor your partner have to live your marriage under false pretenses. I find that genuineness and honesty is preferred over peace-inducing lies.
But although I find honesty to be important, you may be one of those who prefers living a lie or continuing in a Pollyanna fantasy that “all is well,” even though you are either dying inside or feeling like you can never really connect with your spouse.
The whole idea of peace-inducing lies is popular these days, in marriages and at many universities where some students prefer their peace-filled “safe places” to facing harsh realities. You will have to decide if your want your marriage to be a peace-filled fantasy, or whether you want real feelings and real people.
There is also what I call the “long tail” of affairs. Although they may have happened years ago, they still do damage. Even in cases where the affair was dealt with in previous decades, all it takes is a few trigger words and those old feelings and hurt return.
Those old feelings are just below the surface and can reactivate.
One reason for this is that affairs and their disclosure freeze moments in time. The shock of discovery or disclosure is a flash bulb moment, in the sense that, like a stop-action scene in a movie, freezes everything to a standstill.
Years can go by, yet those feelings and thoughts have not moved on. It is as if they were frozen at that point. Anytime you try processing the affair, you may find yourself stuck at that point.
This is the nature of traumatic events. With affairs often being traumatic news, they have this effect. (If you want to go deeper into the topic of what happens with traumatic events, my training webinar on “Affair Trauma” is available).
The cheater may wonder “why” you cannot move on. They look at the calendar and see that it has been “x” years since the affair. They have moved on and genuinely wonder why you cannot.
In such cases, you may think something is wrong with you, since you cannot move past the affair. If you have chosen not to forgive, you may be making a choice to not move on.
If you have forgiven and worked on your marriage, but still cannot move on, what you are encountering are the effects of trauma.
The trauma you are dealing with has to do with how your brain froze things in time. This is a phenomena you can learn to move past. It often takes special interventions to re-integrate your thinking, emotions and ways of functioning.
The “flash bulb moment” has a way of not only freezing the event in time, but also paralyzes your thinking and isolates it from your emotions. This compartmentalization is designed for protection, yet when faced with the traumatic news of an affair and not handled correctly, it contributes to the problem.
So, old affairs do burn. But there are also ways of moving past that burn so that the two of you can have a genuine and real relationship in your marriage.
Best Regards,
Jeff
2 Responses
I speak from experience And I’m living the pain I gave 30 years and 4 children to a man who screwed around behind my back and conceived not one but two children and by two different women I found out recently about them there’re both adults now I don’t like talking about them don’t want nothing to do with it or them. We are separated our youngest just turned 15 it’s been over two years I tried to forgive him not for him for but for me because i feel like such a fool and the love I built for him was on a man who I thought was true and honest to me . Who I thought and made it clear i was proud not to have no other baby momma drama in my life and I never new I had two that I didn’t no about and they obviously new they fucked up and hide it well I have yet to come face to face and hope I never do. As for the cheater who I gave my love to completely and honestly and lastly truly to for 33 years he ruined a lot of lives not just mine and my kids I no he loved me and choose me and how he managed to keep shit like that quiet for 30 years is beyond me but it don’t mean anything when the trust is gone and you talk about head changes he accuses me of things to make it look like its my fault were not together . How can I still love this man when I can’t forgive him
Imma Fool,
First, I am glad that you wrote to me with your situation. Thank you for sharing it.
Wow! Talk about a rude awakening and something that will rock your world sideways, discovering that your man has two children from two different mothers will do that.
You ask a challenging question “How can I still love this man when I can’t forgive him?” When you have 30 years with someone, that is a lot of shared times and memories. There is a saying in the counseling community, “The brain that fires together, wires together”. When you consider that for many couples which have spent long periods of time with each other often influence each other’s thinking. It is not just imagined, the two of them actually become a part of the wiring of each others brain. Over time, some couples function like the two halves of the same brain.
With 30 years, that makes for a lot of wiring together with him, be it for good or bad. The reality is that both of your brains have over time wired themselves into each other. When you are that wired in, it is hard not to still love them.
In terms of forgiveness, it may not be time to forgive. With a hurt as deep as you had, it is going to take a lot of forgiveness.
Jeff