Although the CDC (Centers for disease Control) in a recent study known as the Adverse Childhood Experience made some findings you’ll find surprising. They concluded that
“children growing up in homes with addiction and the related conditions that flow from it creates such chronic emotional stress as to dramatically affect the emotional and brain development of the child, too often fostering a lifetime of mental and physical illnesses.”
Although clinicians have known this for a long time, seeing it announced by a government agency is validating. When you see the government acknowledge what you’ve known for years is reassuring. It doesn’t fix the problem, it merely acknowledges that there really is one.
What the study did not tell you, and I doubt will ever say, is that children growing up in families with affairs and the related conditions that flow from them creates such a chronic emotional stress as to dramatically affect the emotional and brain development of the child, too often fostering a lifetime of mental and physical illness.
Although the comparison of the addiction filled home with the affair filled home may seem a stretch to some of you, in reality they share MUCH in common. The dynamics of substance abuse is very similar to those with affairs. You have the secrecy, selfish binges, deteriorating self-control and other factors as well.
In some ways the CDC gets close to saying it when they identify some of the consequences of substance abuse as ‘multiple sexual partners’ and ‘sexually transmitted diseases’. In my mind, they may be identifying the cause as an effect.
They won’t go so far as to say that immoral sexual lifestyles cause problems though, since that would raise too many red flags and force them into taking moral stands. It’s much easier for government agencies to identify drugs as the problem which leads to affairs rather than the other way around.
Although they all share the common thread of “loss of self-control”, selfishness and impulsivity, government officials have to be careful about what they identify as the ‘causal’ factor.
There are also the “don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” mantras in each set of homes. In the homes with affairs, there’s also a stigma attached to sexual behaviors and the negative relationship role modeling as well.
Both homes have the fights, the shame and the tension, but you’ll not find the government taking a stand against affairs. There is too much money to be made in divorces and breaking up families for them to take such a stand.
Think through what this means for you and your children. The affair is impacting them. It’s not just something between two adults. The effects of the affair are impacting your children. They are learning whether they can trust adults, trust members of the opposite sex along with how to treat members of the opposite sex. They are also learning how ‘adults’ deal with their sexual urges and self-control.
Affairs have lifetime consequences. You can stop the affair, but you can’t stop the consequences. Even the CDC study uses the term “the related conditions that flow from it” in spotlighting adverse consequences of living in such environments.
Neither drug use nor affairs occur in isolation. You’ll always see games, lies and secrecy surrounding them. These are ‘the related conditions’. Another term for these are ‘secondary effects’. All the time, energy and emotions invested in the addiction or affair has a price tag. In order to have the relationship with the drug or the lover, you have to take from somewhere else.
You have to steal the time, money and energy from someone in your family. Cheaters and addicts seldom consider ‘who’ they are stealing those things from. They are so focused on themselves that they believe the family is there merely as their support system. They never consider the bigger impact, nor the lifetime impact.
The bottom line is that affairs are not harmless to families. They pose dangers to you and your family in multiple dimensions.
If you need help in overcoming an affair or the effects of an affair, we have resources to help you.
Best Regards,
Jeff
2 Responses
Well funny that the government is figuring these things out when the bible has listed the generational curses for centuries. I can validate the effects by looking at both of my children and things they have done. She believed that as long as she kept it secret from them, there would be no effect. Truth is the action itself may have been unknown to them but she became a different person which had devastating effects upon them.
David,
In some ways it’s sad that the government takes so long in figuring these things out. Although they validate this happening, they still don’t identify the actual cause. They verify the effects, without clearly noting the cause. Your wife is like many in today’s society that refuse to see or acknowledge the cause of many problems. When they keep it secret, in their mind, it doesn’t exist.
I saw this with a family close to me. Their oldest child was acting out at school. The mother, who was cheating, refused seeing any connection between her infidelity and the child’s behavior. ‘He just has a behavioral problem!” she insisted. She worked hard at convincing other family members how ‘bad’ her child was rather than ever seeing what was actually contributing to his acting out behavior.
Sadly, the problem was never truly resolved. Years later, the child has the stigma of being a ‘problem child’ and mom never addressed the affair question. As long as the secret was never disclosed, no one ever saw the connection or the real source of the problem.