To Cope with your Parent’s infidelity Find your Essential Question
This week, all of my creative energy has gone into my Camp Structure writing class to complete something called a Misperception Matrix for my memoir-in-progress. To start, you of course choose between a red pill and a blue pill. Choosing the blue pill leads you ever deeper into your story, specifically by helping you to figure out the one question-the essential question-that it is going to answer. I know! Only one! It was a hard choice. At times I wished I had just taken the red pill and remained in happy ignorance about the whole exercise.
Anyway, all of this question excavation left me with no ideas for a blog topic. To Google! I ended up on YouTube revisiting Esther Perel’s Infidelity Series. Specifically, I dove into the comments on her video entitled The Effect of an Affair on Adult Children. (Lest anyone reading this feel like they are alone as an adult child of infidelity, there are as of today 329 comments, the most recent being five days ago.) Here are a few excerpts:
The worst thing is he [a dad who cheated] is a hypocrite who prides himself on being the "family man" and regularly does charity work for his image, often spreading Buddhist teaching and advising others.
I can't even talk to anyone about this :(
I guess I'll always have trust issues.
I don't know what to do to help my mom.
We weren’t enough for him [a dad who cheated] and as a result I feel I’m not enough for anyone.
These were five of the themes that came up over and over again, and while there were more, in my experience, these five are pretty common. I realized that each of these comments mirrors that person’s essential question. There are lots of problems that can arise when you as an adult find out that a parent is cheating. It can feel like an overwhelming matrix of questions with no red pill options in sight. Where do you start? Confronting your parents? Getting into therapy for those trust issues? Confiding in a close friend?
The answer lies in getting your Keanu on and and figuring out what your essential question is. What is the aspect of the affair that bothers you the most?
In my own matrix, I realized that the thing that bothered me the most about my mom’s infidelity was how unhappy it made her and my dad. I believed that part of being a good and loving daughter was not allowing myself to be happier than my parents were, especially in a romantic relationship. (I realize that this will sound ridiculous to some people, but that is the thing about pain points. One person’s trigger can sound like nothing more than an outlandish belief to another.) So the Essential Question that I am working with right now for the memoir is How could I be happy in love when my parents were not?
In order to heal as an adult child of infidelity, I had to get myself into a happy love relationship, and learn that while I could not control my parents’ happiness (or unhappiness), I could manage my own. Addressing that most difficult pain point is what allowed me to work most everything else about the infidelity out, over time.
So in the example above, the person who believes that they cannot speak with anyone about their parent’s infidelity, needs to make talking about it a priority. The process of finding and choosing a safe and trustworthy person, who can be a compassionate witness to the pain, is the path that will allow her to find the healing that she needs. The person who wonders most urgently what she can do to help her mom may want to start with a Locus of Control Exercise to help identify what are the things she actually has influence over, rather than potentially beating herself up for the things she cannot control.
Parent infidelity can be incredibly hurtful to adult kids, but not always in the same way to each kid. Identifying your particular flavor of pain can help you to choose the next step in your healing journey. And you won’t even have to take any pills.