(This is part 4 of 7 on rebuilding trust after a parent affair, based on Brené Brown's Elements of TRUST. Click to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

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.

Wait, what? I didn’t do anything wrong?

Correct! But…

The Trust Issues are Bigger than Just the Affair

When a parent cheats, the infidelity inadvertently calls many aspects of the whole family’s life into question. While being distrustful of the cheating parent is common and often warranted, that is not the only trust that has been broken. You may not even recognize all of the things about life that you don’t trust anymore.

For example, perhaps you looked at your parent’s relationship as a model for your own future relationship. As a kid you would pour over the glossy 8x10s in their wedding album, and dream about wearing your mom’s wedding dress someday. Knowing that the marriage ended in betrayal means that not only do you not trust your dad for cheating, but you don’t trust in the idea of marriage itself. Worse, deep in your heart, you still yearn for a connection with someone that could lead to a deep, life-long commitment. How do you reconcile all of that?

Or perhaps you have always wanted to be like your dad. This could be in a traditional way, like wanting to be an electrician like he is, but it could also be in more subtle ways. Like, you want to tell jokes the way he does, or you hope to emulate the way he manages to choose exactly the right gift for your birthday every year. When he cheated on your mom, he didn’t just change the marriage, he called into question every other trait he had as well, including whether the man you looked up to still deserved to be emulated. 

As a young adult, you are likely at a time in your life when you are trying to build a career, find a relationship, and make some choices about what kind of adult you want to be. Most adult children at least start with their parents for role modeling on adulting, but when a parent has cheated, that role modeling can get shaken up and even shattered. 

The concept of the vault in building trust

Brown uses the idea of the vault to describe the importance of acknowledging confidentiality in a relationship when you are trying to build trust. In that context, the vault means that no one shares information that is not theirs to share. So your secrets are yours to share, I will keep them in my vault and not share them with others. 

In addition, I will not share other people’s secrets with you. Sometimes people use secrets as currency to hotwire a relationship, to build closeness with someone based on gossip, rather than vulnerable sharing. 

When a parent cheats, it is typically a secret that comes to light. Ironically, it is the kind of secret that needs to be shared to build intimacy. Sometimes cheating parents will ask you to keep their secret, which challenges the vault concept. Because you want a good relationship with your parents, you want to protect them, but keeping the secret makes you crazy.

The solution is to rebuild a new vault. This new vault needs to have a few characteristics:

• One where you do not keep secrets that feel bad to you. 

• You only trust people who demonstrate they are trustworthy (this will be a subject of a future post)

• You trust yourself first

So, it’s a little different from what Brown was describing, but the tenets are the same. Part of recognizing trustworthy people is trusting yourself first. Part of trusting yourself is acknowledging your pain and tending to it. In order to tend to your pain, you need to see its full circumference.

In the case of a parent affair, the pain is in the cheating for sure, but it is also in all the other parts of your parents that you now question, or perhaps even feel that you have lost completely. 

How to start fixing those trust issues

Acknowledge all of the aspects of your parents that were called into question by the affair.

Get a paper and a pen and list everything you can think of, no matter how small it seems. Make sure to include both parents, the cheating and the betrayed. If applicable, you may also include the affair partner, if this person was someone close to you or your family who you looked up to. 

If this feels very scary or fills you with sadness, take it in small bites. Set a timer for 2, 5, 10 minutes, maximum 20, and write whatever comes to mind. Then commit to putting the list away to look at another time, and treat yourself to something that feels good to you. 

If you try to push yourself too hard in this process, or allow yourself to get so upset that you cannot continue with your day, it will actually slow your healing. While it may seem counter intuitive, taking breaks in this process will help it move faster. 

Go back through the list and notice any themes

What I mean by this is, are there any attributes that that come up over and over? For example, in one case of a dad who cheated by having multiple partners found on Tindr, one adult child may be particularly upset about the lewd language dad used, another by the fact that he was cheating with men, another by the fact that he jeopardized his career by being online that way. 

There is no right or wrong answer, and you can be upset by a lot of different aspects of both the affair and each parent. Most people find some common threads as to what especially bothers them about the affair and their parents. Start with your top 3.

Mourn it

Spoiler alert: this is the part that really sucks. Ok, at least it did for me. This is the part where you take those top three things that really bother you about the affair and/or your parents, and you need to mourn them. Because the affair did take them away from you, and it is likely that they are gone forever.

Going back to the above example, and the wedding album. It is true, the affair did kill the dream of a marraige. It may have also taken your dad away from you, in the sense that you believed that he would only ever love women, and now he is cheating with a man. The dad you believed that you knew is indeed gone. And that is truly heartbreaking. 

Again, if this is hard, take it in really small steps. There is no right way to mourn. Some people cry, some need to run, some need to talk it over with a friend. Some need to nap, to go to bed, a long walk on the beach. 

Take all the time that you need, and recognize that you may believe you have coped with it, only for the sadness to return.

Find the parts that are still viable

Slowly, as you are ready, the next step is to look for the aspects of your parents that are still there. That you do still trust and believe in. Even if they are super small. 

This is where you start to realize that while the affair is huge, and it likely took over much of your family’s life and your view of your parents, it did not take everything. There are still good parts of your parents that you can look up to, value, and even try and emulate.

I have heard from many adult children who are in families where in addition to the affair there is extensive physical, emotional or substance abuse. While I believe that this advice still holds as it is important to acknowledge all aspects of your family, I also encourage you to find additional support. In this case the affair is one part of a larger web of abuses, which may need to be dealt with separately.

Create something new

Here is where you get to get a bit more creative. Now you have reckoned with what you have lost and what remains, what do you want to fill the gaps with? As an adult, you have agency over your life and your relationships. What do you want it all to look like? It is possible to keep your dad’s sense of humor and really try to emulate and relish that in yourself, and still be honest in your relationships. What are the parts of your parents that you want to keep, and what are the parts that you are going to create for yourself?

By building the life that you want from the pieces of the past that resonate with you, you will not only become the person that you want to be, you will have more faith in yourself. You will trust yourself more. Which will go a long way towards coping with those trust issues. 

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

I am working on creating a resource for adult children who are coping with a parent’s affair and I need your help! What help do you need? Email me or hop on a call with me and let me know. Not a sales call, I promise, I want to be sure what I offer is what you need.