Spending time with extended family when your parents are struggling with infidelity comes with a unique challenge that is not often addressed in holiday survival guides: secrecy. 

Hobbies, by which I mean anything that you do regularly for pleasure that is both meaningful and enjoyable, are important ingredients to the joy of life. When you realize as an adult that you don’t have any hobbies, it signals that you are missing out, and it may mean that a past betrayal that you thought was settled needs a bit more attention.

Plus, how understanding transactions in relationships can help adult children of infidelity answer the question, Is Cheating Genetic?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Talking about your parent’s affair is a series of difficult conversations.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

The secret is to use your relationship with your parents as a tool to tap into your own authenticity.

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.

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.

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.

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 about the effects of parent infidelity on the kids and here are the results.

The first of seven posts about how to rebuild trust with your parents after their infidelity.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Especially for kids ages 12-17, thoughts on if you should confront your parents about their affair.