Yesterday I shared an email that I received about handling the cheater with kid gloves. In it, I mentioned the role of denial with affairs, which needs more attention.
When you encounter denial, it feels like you hit a wall at a high rate of speed. Any forward momentum or progress suddenly and abruptly comes to a sudden stop.
Although you see the destruction of the affair and the pain it caused, the betrayer doesn’t. It can be so extreme that at times it feels like each of you live in different world.
At such times, it’s not that the cheater is dumb or ignorant. Denial keeps them from seeing such things.
Had they seen everything at the time of the affair, including the damage it would cause and pain it brings, they likely wouldn’t have done what they did. If they did see everything at that time, then the damage was intentional and malicious.
In having worked with addicts and cheaters, there are blinders on them about the damage and pain. They are well acquainted with their own pain. It’s the pain of others that they don’t fully grasp. They may pay it lip service, which is a mental awareness, yet they don’t have the emotional awareness of the pain.
As the denial starts going away, they start grasping an awareness of the pain and how their choices impacted others. Don’t be surprised when they suddenly realize that the affair hurt other people, which is something you’ve known all along.
They may mentally know you’re angry, but not understand the full extent of your hurt or what caused it. That kind of awareness starts growing as they start letting go of their selfishness.
It would be nice if denial went away all at once. It would make my job easier.
Instead it goes away a little at a time. Like your vision slowly coming into focus, denial clouds their ability to understand and goes away gradually. They wake up a little at a time.
This is where my video on “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery” comes in. Inside the video, I go into the changes needed for the cheater as they start coming to grips with the impact of what they did.
Click and download your copy today. It helps open the cheater’s eyes to how what they did ended up hurting a wide circle of people, and that they aren’t the only ones in pain.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
