Anytime I find myself overwhelmed with bad news I have to talk to someone. In most cases the person I talk to is my wife.
Those times when I don’t talk it feels like an emotional bomb has gone off inside of me. The pressure builds up and my mind spins in circles.
It’s as if one of those cartoon episodes where the bomb goes off inside of someone and they expand to large proportions. I feel the emotions well up inside.
With bad news, I need the talking to sort out what I heard. I also face the challenge of sorting out what I know from what I assume.
Many times my mind tries filling in the blank spaces. When I don’t talk things out, I fill in the wrong answers or paranoid ones in those blank spaces.
This tendency of filling in the blank spaces leads me to wrong conclusions. I need second opinions filling in those blank spaces
There’s also the ‘echo chamber effect’ that happens when I keep my thoughts and emotions to myself. It continues echoing back and forth until it gets distorted.
Talking to others is a helpful way of moving past these challenges of the emotional explosion, filling the blank spaces and the echo chamber.
When you discover your spouse had an affair or has a sex addiction, it’s traumatic news. Handling that traumatic news is challenging.
You’re facing the challenge of confused boundaries. This challenge consists of knowing who to tell, what to tell and your reason for telling.
It’s like you even have to be careful about how much pain to let out and how vulnerable to be. You quickly discover not everyone can handle what you’re going through.
Telling the wrong people, sharing for the wrong reasons and telling too much will each create worse problems. Having confused boundaries creates problems for you and your marriage.
Even though your spouse cheated, talking too much creates further problems for you and them. Not everyone you encounter can handle such traumatic news.
Information about sexual matters amounts to emotionally radioactive information. Like the real radiation, it requires special handling and clear boundaries. In the video, “Getting Past the Affair Crisis”, I address issues like these and more when dealing with an affair.
How you handle it does make a difference in where it takes your marriage. Point your marriage in the direction of moving past the affair and toward recovery.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
