Yesterday I touched on the topic of enabling. Enabling is of such importance in dealing with affairs, it deserves more attention.
Let me begin by pointing out that enabling doesn’t make you a bad person. Typically, enabling starts as part of a natural response. You care about your spouse. You may not like what they’ve been doing, but you learned to live with it.
Also, what you do is not the same as who you are. They are two different things. Your identity and behavior are not the same.
Enabling starts with you ‘putting up with’ this undesirable part of what your spouse has been doing. You literally turned a blind eye to what was going on. In some cases, there may have been other issues flaring up and turning a blind eye to this behavior was the lesser of two evils.
Although you were powerless over the affair happening, you aren’t powerless over your own behaviors now and your choices in continuing unhealthy patterns.
You can change patterns that were part of enabling behavior. There’s a reason why the cheater doesn’t want to talk about what happened. That reason is that not talking about it allows them to avoid responsibility for what happened.
Talking about it forces them to face the uncomfortable. It also forces you to face the uncomfortable as well. Talking also needs action concerning the covering up, lying excuse making and not following through on things.
If you really want to move past the affair, changes are needed in how each of you do things. The affair changed your lives and affair recovery involves changing your lives as well.
I lay out many of the needed changes in my video on “Overcoming Affair Relapse“, which is available to members at Restored Lifestyle as part of their membership. The video guides you in what to do so that you don’t have to spend hours haggling over what’s next in recovering from the affair.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
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