Isolation often leads you to make poor decisions. Isolation also brings stress and aggravates many health conditions.
It often slows down your attention, lengthens recovery from illness and increases the likelihood of depressed feelings.
If you felt bad before, when you experience isolation, it often makes things worse.
I mention isolation, since some spouses use it as a way of exercising control over you. When isolation is used as a form of controlling, it becomes a weapon. It may be used against you before during or after the affair.
There is also a big difference between being lonely and being isolated. Confusing the two can be a dangerous mistake.
One of the big effects of isolation is that it amplifies many sensations. It makes you feel things more intensely than if you had not been in isolation. That means your emotions and possibly your thinking may be distorted by an isolation experience.
There are also many forms of isolation. It can be physical, emotional, social or even spiritual. In each case, its use is designed to make you dependent on them, along with exaggerating the necessity of that dependence.
You may say, “Well, isn’t dependence a good thing?”. When someone resorts to isolation as a way of controlling you, it’s unlikely that there are healthy aspects to the dependence. It’s true that you need each other, yet the kind of dependence produced by isolation is not healthy.
Besides an unhealthy dependence, isolation also distorts your relationship and the roles each of you are in. Rather than a sharing relationship, one person has the power and the other totally depends on the other one.
Your marriage shifts from a healthy adult relationship to one where one party totally controls the other via dependency. In the Affair Recovery Workshop, I spend time going over healthy marital communication and what it looks like, which can help you spot the difference between healthy and dependent dysfunctionality.
When extreme dependency occurs, unless it is health or age related, that kind of dependency is often exploited. It’s unhealthy for both spouses and their marriage.
An exploited dependency is an unhealthy dependency. It may be used in either excusing or covering up an affair. There are also some cases where isolation is used in punishing a spouse for an affair.
Whether used for covering up or punishing, it’s dysfunctional.
When isolation is part of dealing with the affair, you’ll need more time for healing. You need healing from the affair and then healing from the unhealthy relationship that developed.
Best Regards,
Jeff
