Do you have your mother’s nose or your father’s temper? You often hear grandparents make such statements. From their perspective, they can see the physical traits that are passed on.
In raising children you may even see traits of one generation passed along to the next, whether it be temperaments, food preferences or appearance. Although it’s easy seeing the physical traits, have you considered that other traits are passed along as well?
One of the traits passed along is that of internal traits. The internal traits are not often seen so easily, yet they’re passed on along with the nose or the temper as well.
Not only internal traits, but also behavior patterns, including the tendency for affairs. Although it’s unpleasant, the facts are that affairs are often a part of a pattern found in families.
This doesn’t mean that your doomed if affairs happened in your family, but it does mean that those families are at higher risk for affairs.
This means that some people have hidden genetic bombs that could go off unexpectedly many years later. I mean, when bombs from the Civil War and unexploded ordinance from World War II are still being found and defused, it’s not impossible for genetic bombs posing a threat decades or generations later. Not only is it possible, it happens routinely.
The genetic bombs are the propensity for affairs along with the scars that come with traumatic events. Although an affair happened in a previous generation, the impact it had leaves scars that impact future generations.
Although each of these are passed on, for this email, I’ll focus on the pattern of cheating.
All it takes is the right circumstances for a cheater to be triggered into action. Your spouse may not have planned for an affair to happen, but when those circumstances lined up, they reacted. They may actually be telling you the truth when they said “I never meant for this to happen” or “It just happened!”
Those statements could be true observations rather than excuses. The scary thing is that there is a genetic component behind up to 40% of affairs.
This means if your family or your spouse’s family has a history of affairs, your marriage already has a 40% chance of an affair happening in it.
Just ending the affair doesn’t defuse any genetic time bombs. Just because the genetic weakness is there doesn’t mean they will act on it, yet it does mean the danger exists. Ignoring the danger doesn’t remove it.
This is why I included a section on dealing with affairs across generations in the Affair Recovery Workshop. It’s important to remove the affair problem at the root rather than remove symptoms. The genetic roots have to be dealt with in order to be risk-free from affairs. It shows you how to identify them along with ways of dealing with turning off the risks.
You can’t help if you or your spouse has a genetic time bomb in your genetic code. You can take steps in defusing any genetic threats to your marriage.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
