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BETRAYAL TRAUMA AND FEELING LIKE YOU ARE NEVER DOING THE RIGHT THING
After betrayal trauma, one side of the coin is the constant fear that you will uncover another secret. The other side is the constant fear that you are never doing enough.
THREE STEPS TO MANAGE ANTICIPATORY GRIEF
In this post I will share my own techniques for how to stop fearing that you will be left, hurt, abandoned or betrayed all over again like you were in the past.
“Put Yourself First” Ignores Women’s Emotional Intelligence
Women in the sandwich generation have gathered years of emotional intelligence that is dismissed by advice to “just put yourself first” as a way to cope with overwhelm.
Three Things that Parenting After Betrayal Advice Gets Wrong
From the hundreds of messages I have received from teens and young adults about their parent’s cheating, here are three crucial but often-missed factors to consider when speaking with your kids about infidelity.
6 Ways to Build Trust with a Hard Conversation
Talking about your parent’s affair is a series of difficult conversations.
How to Have a Conversation that Builds Trust
Trust is such a crucial building block of a healthy relationship, both one that you have, or one that you are working to create, say when you are dating.
How to Help Your Parents after an Affair (with videos)
Couples generally go through a few predictable stages after an affair is discovered. How you help depends on which stage your parents are in. I have simplified the stages so they are more relevant for kids (of any age) and extended families.
6 Common Reactions When Kids Find Out a Parent is Cheating (with video)
A myriad of emotions arise for children when they discover their parents’ cheating. Some, like anger or confusion, most people understand. Others are less obvious, highlighting the complexity of adultery for a child
7 Tips for Confronting A Parent about an Affair (with Video)
Found out that one of your parents are cheating? If you decide that confronting your parents is the best route for you, here are 7 tips for success when speaking with your parents about their infidelity.
When your Dad’s Affair Makes You a No Person
Around the holidays, lots of people talk about the need to set boundaries, say no to things, prioritize self care. But what if you have the opposite issue? What if your knee-jerk reaction is to say no when what you really want is to feel comfortable taking the risk of saying yes?
How to Stop Loving Your Parents
Many adult children grappling with a cheating parent say that one of the biggest issues is they want to want to spend time with their parents. But they don’t actually want to spend time with them. They want, sometimes desperately, for the love and connection that they felt with their parents before the affair came out to still be there. Often with the upheaval of the affair, the fighting, the secrets, the pain, it feels like it would be easier to just stop caring so much. It would hurt less.
Why Your 20s is the Best Time to Process Your Parent’s Affair
What better time to examine your beliefs about commitment than during the decade when most of you are trying to figure out what you want in a relationship anyway? AND, you have the advantage of riding the wave of your brain’s natural growth spurt. So you will be creating the neural pathways in your brain that will help you form the long term relationships that you desire.
How to Cope with a Parent Affair When You Do Not Want a Family Cutoff
The secret is to use your relationship with your parents as a tool to tap into your own authenticity.
To Cope with TRUST ISSUES from a Parent Affair Start by Rebuilding Trust with Yourself
Many adult children who have discovered a parent’s affair say that they develop trust issues that linger long after they have dealt with the logistics of their parent’s infidelity.
While these trust issues often focus on other people, including friends, co-workers, and especially romantic partners, the solution for tackling these issues lies not in other people. It starts by re-building trust with yourself.
For Adult Children: What to Do When a Parent is Cheating
I can summarize what you will learn from an extensive on-line search about how you as an adult child should cope with a cheating parent in one sentence.
Six Ways to be Accountable to your Kids After an Affair
Part 3 of a 7 part series on Rebuilding Trust in the Parent-Child Relationship after Parent Infidelity, this post is especially for parents who have decided to stay together after infidelity. Accountability means that you own your mistakes, apologize and make amends for them, and this post offers six ideas for being accountable to your kids.
How to Rebuild Trust with you Kids After Parent Infidelity
Simply put, reliability means doing what you say you are going to do. Not just once, but over and over again, so that others expect it of you. Here are five small, manageable steps that you can take as a parent to be more reliable for your kids, which will help rebuild trust with them.
I Asked ChatGBT to Write a Blog Post on Parent Infidelity…
I asked ChatGBT to write a blog post about the effects of parent infidelity on the kids and here are the results.
How to Hold Your Boundaries with a Cheating Parent
The first of seven posts about how to rebuild trust with your parents after their infidelity.
Infidelity and the Mother/Adult Daughter Relationship: Why Your Mom Overwhelms You and What To Do About It
In this post, I will narrow in on the nature of estrangement in mother/daughter relationships, and offer my own thoughts on some solutions for daughters who are struggling with their moms post-parent infidelity.
Here are 5 Positive Outcomes from Parent Infidelity for Kids. Seriously!
Not all of the effects of growing up with a cheating parent are hurtful. With a little shift in perspective, some young adults are able to see and express what they gained along the way.
To Cope with your Parent’s infidelity Find your Essential Question
This post will help you on the road to healing from your parent’s infidelity by beginning with your essential question: What is the aspect of the affair that bothers you the most?
I am the Betrayed Parent. Why are my Kids Angry with Me?
While each family situation is unique, this kind of reaction from your kids is common, and generally, it is not about you. In this post I offer the two most common reasons kids (of any age) blame the betrayed parent, and what you can do to cope with it.
7 TIPS TO HELP YOU STOP WORRYING ABOUT YOUR DAD’S CHEATING
Here are 7 tips to help you stop worrying about a parent’s affair, regardless of your parents’ relationship status, or how old you are.
READ THIS BEFORE YOU ASK REDDIT FOR ADVICE ABOUT A CHEATING PARENT
In this post I will explain a little more about how culture mediates secrecy because it is not often discussed in the context of infidelity and I think kids of cheating parents (from all cultures) will find it helpful.
What to do When A Parent is Cheating: Part 3
One often overlooked aspect of deciding to confront your parents about infidelity is secrecy. If you have found out that a parent is cheating, you are likely holding a secret. Before you consider confronting your parents, you need to know a bit more about secrets and what they do to you on the inside.
What To Do When a Parent is Cheating Part 2
Especially for kids ages 12-17, thoughts on if you should confront your parents about their affair.
Video: What to do When You Find out a Parent is Cheating Part 1
The first step to consider after finding out that your mom or dad is cheating.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Ruminating on Parent Infidelity
This is a research round up of two related studies by the same author. Both look at the concepts of feeling caught between parents (also known as triangulation), and at rumination as it relates to parent infidelity.
ARE YOUR ISSUES FROM A PARENT’S INFIDELITY? THREE REASONS IT’S HARD TO KNOW
Sometimes it’s hard to know if your issues stem from growing up with a cheating parent. Here are three reasons that things gets confusing and how to cope.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Exploring the Lived Experience of Parental Infidelity
This study points hopefully to a pathway to healing for kids of cheating parents. Healing means being able to understand your parents’ affair intellectually, and being able to be honest and open about the affair.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Parental Infidelity and Children’s Reactions: A Case Study in a Filipino Family
This research asks actual kids about their experience of parent infidelity while they are going through it, as opposed to all other research which asks adults to reflect on exposure to parent infidelity in their past.
FOUR BOOKS TO HELP KIDS OF INFIDELITY
Four books to help kids of any age dealing with parent infidelity, and the parents, teachers and therapists who support them.
INFIDELITY AND THE FAMILY: TIPS FOR THERAPISTS
Tips for therapists working with families where one parent has cheated.
Two Moms Model How to Speak with the Kids
Two moms model 4 important parts of communicating with your kids about infidelity.
Why Write a Memoir?
Writing the memoir has changed me in ways that I am still not great at articulating. I updated my understanding of what happened to my family from the eyes of a child to the lens of an adult, which may explain why I can now think more clearly. I am calmer. I am more myself.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Communication and Parental Infidelity: A Qualitative Analysis of How Adult Children Cope in a Topic-Avoidant Environment
This study tackles the question of topic avoidance in families coping with parent infidelity. While topic avoidance is common in families, even the perception of it can lead to unhappiness. If families are unable to put traumatic events into words over time this leads to suppression, rumination, and health issues.
Intergenerational Infidelity: What We Know So Far
Like anything else, infidelity carries its own set of beliefs, which begs the question, what is the intergenerational nature of infidelity? There have been few studies done on how infidelity is replicated through generations. This post will summarize these studies.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Exploring intergenerational patterns of infidelity
This research is some of the first to explore the intergenerational effects of infidelity, and clearly indicates that children who grow up with cheating parents are twice as likely to cheat in their own relationships, even if they believe that infidelity is wrong.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Family Background and Propensity to Engage in Infidelity
This research concludes that parent infidelity and how happy parents are with their relationship are the greatest predictors of whether a child of infidelity will cheat in their own romantic relationship as an adult.
How to Help Your Parents after Their Infidelity
One of your parents has cheated on the other one. The secret comes out. You want to help. What do you do? This post describes four stages that couples go through after an affair is discovered, and how children, extended families, and friends can help at each stage.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Effects of Parental Infidelity on Adult Children’s Relational Ethics With Their Partners: A Contextual Perspective
This article describes a few factors that make it more likely that women who grow up with cheating fathers will cheat on their own romantic partners. Specifically, this article points to how parent infidelity may leave long-lasting misconceptions of trust and loyalty in romantic relationships.
For Therapists, Teachers and Helpers: How to Encourage Parents and Children (of any age) to Discuss Parent Infidelity
How to encourage parents to speak with their children about infidelity.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Adult Children’s Discovery of Their Parents’ Infidelity
The five ways that children typically learn about parent infidelity.
HELP! I AM A PARENT. HOW DO I SPEAK WITH MY KIDS ABOUT INFIDELITY?
As a parent involved with infidelity, the decision to share the information with your kids is a difficult one. This post addresses the If, Why, When, What and How to speak with your children about an affair.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Feeling Caught: Adult Children's Experiences with Parental Infidelity
Feeling caught between your parents means that you feel like you need to side with one against the other. This article offers 5 ways that parents communicate with their kids about infidelity. Some make the kids feel caught, some do not.
in plain english: A Prototype Analysis of Infidelity
Infidelity remains a complex topic, but this research sheds light on how young adults tends to include the outcomes of infidelity, such as pain, crying, sad, hurt, guilt, and heartbreak, as part of their definition of infidelity.
How Keeping Secrets About Your Parent’s Infidelity Stresses Your Brain
This post will take a closer look at the dilemmas that children face when they find out about parent infidelity, and then have to decide whether or not to share what they know. Secrets are tricky things, and both keeping family infidelity a secret, and sharing it with others, come with difficult consequences.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Investigating Adult Children’s Experiences with Privacy Turbulence Following the Discovery of Parental Infidelity
This study tackles the question of who owns the story of parent infidelity. Once a child or family member discovers infidelity, do they share it? Does sharing it help?
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Parental Infidelity: Adult Children’s Attributions for Parents’ Extramarital Relationships
This study gives language to how children understand why a parent affair happened. Children often see the reasons behind cheating as much more nuanced than they are given credit for, citing not only individual behavior but also historical or community circumstances. Parents do not need to be so afraid of admitting their infidelity to their children.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Adult Children’s Experiences with their Parent’s Infidelity: Communicative Protection and Access Rules in the Absence of Divorce
How is information about parent infidelity shared in a family? The takeaway here is that infidelity adds a layer of secret information in a family that needs to be managed, which takes mental and emotional effort and can cause stress.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: Parental conflict and infidelity as predictors of adult children's attachment style and infidelity
Hint: it’s all about the conflict.
If My Parents Cheated, Will I? Myths, Realities and Solutions
Statistically, children of infidelity are twice as likely to cheat on their partners. This post examines the myths and realities about this statistic and offers solutions for how children of infidelity can minimize their chances of repeating family patterns of infidelity.
IN PLAIN ENGLISH: A summary of Duncombe and Marsden’s Affairs and Children
A brief summary (in plain English) of Duncombe and Marsden’s 2004 article Affairs and Children, often cited as the foundation of Western scholarly research on the effect of parental infidelity on children.
HOW TO SPOT A CHILD STRUGGLING WITH CHEATING PARENTS
A myriad of emotions arise for children when they discover their parents’ cheating. Some, like anger or confusion, most people understand.
WHY PARENTAL INFIDELITY SUPPORT IS IMPORTANT FOR KIDS
As every couple’s therapist knows, infidelity presents a serious relationship challenge. Parents struggling with infidelity face the work of managing their adult relationship, while also caring for their kids.
TIPS FOR SPEAKING WITH YOUR PARENTS ABOUT THEIR INFIDELITY
Found out that one of your parents are cheating? Before you decide to speak with them about it, go back and read these posts.
FOUR FACTORS TO CONSIDER BEFORE CONFRONTING A PARENT AFFAIR
Finding out about a parent affair often throws their kids into a dilemma. To confront the parent about the affair or not?
FOUR COMMON REACTIONS WHEN KIDS CONFRONT PARENT INFIDELITY
You have just found out that one or both of your parents is cheating. What do you do?
JUST FIND OUT A PARENT IS CHEATING? HERE ARE YOUR NEXT 3 STEPS
No matter how old you are, finding out that you have a cheating parent can be jarring.
BEIRUT BIRTHDAY
About halfway through that first birthday party, I questioned, albeit in haste, whether moving a child with severe nut allergies to the Middle East was a sound decision.
SUMMER WINDS
Why listening to what your body wants to eat can be harder on summer holiday.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Having now practiced self-demand eating for close to 25 years, in my experience refining it never really ends.
BIKINI BODY
It is not lost on me that by most standards, I am a skinny white woman. Suddenly my self-consciousness about not being a skinnier white woman seems completely ridiculous.