I’ve touched on enabling in a number of posts. Enabling is of such importance in dealing with affairs, it deserves some more of your 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.
Enabling starts as 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. One reason they aren’t talking about it, is that silence 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”. A huge part of overcoming affair relapse is dealing with topics like enabling, triggers and unhealthy self-soothing.
This means that its essential to talk about what happened in order to prevent a repeat of what occurred. In going through the story of what happened, you can identify decision points and high risk situation that made the affair possible.
Click and download your copy today. Within minutes the two of you can be discovering new ways of changing patterns and habits that contributed to the affair.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
