Yesterday I touched on self-inflicted wounds. It occurred to me afterward that there are more ways of wounding yourself than I mentioned.
One of the ways you wound yourself and your marriage is through enabling. Enabling doesn’t fix things or make them better. If anything, enabling makes things worse and gives additional life to the problem. It keeps the pain going rather than reducing it.
One way enabling happens is when you do things that keep the cheater from facing the consequences of their bad choices. Protecting them from pain also keeps them from facing reality. One of the hard realities is that pain is a powerful teacher. It wakes you up to reality.
When you do things that reduce pain or keep them from feeling it, it cripples them. This means that when the cheater falters in their parenting, it’s not up to you to cover for them.
It’s not up to you to send birthday cards on their behalf, make excuses for them or lie for them. Instead, it helps when you let them feel the heat from their choices.
Cheaters are notoriously hard-headed. When you’re dealing with a hard-headed cheater, pain is your friend.
Although as a spouse you wanted to keep your partner from pain, when an affair happens, pain becomes your friend rather than your enemy.
This shift is counter-intuitive. Although it’s counter-intuitive, it’s important to realize and put it into practice as part of affair recovery. It’s a new way of doing things and will feel weird at first.
Letting the cheater feel the heat will take you out of your comfort zone, yet its when you do this that there is room for response-ability to flourish. They need room to respond. They need the discomfort to wake them up to reality.
This doesn’t mean that you inflict the pain, it means that you get out of the way and let them feel the pain. With some spouses, they only learn the hard way.
I talk about making changes in how you communicate and interact with your spouse in the video “Let’s Talk: Hurting People and Healing Questions“. In the video, I share other ways of changing how the two of you communicate and take responsibility for your actions.
Instead of hoping they get it, allow them to feel the pain first. Pain has ways of waking them up and opening up their ability to listen.
Click and download your copy today.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
