Infidelity: Influence On Your Children

How are your children influenced by your affair(s)? Children are influenced by everything you say, think, feel, and do. Infidelity is no exception.  Consider this. Children know pretty much everything on an intuitive level. They may not know the facts, but they do know when something is not right and have a sense of what that might be. Further, children are apt to repeat in some form the dramas of your own life. Their experience in childhood is their programming of how to be as an adult. For example, a female child whose father had affairs, whether confessed and/or out in the open or not, will often marry someone who will have affairs. A male child whose father had affairs is more likely to have affairs himself as an adult. As a therapist in San Diego County for over thirty years I have had many clients who are struggling with childhood family secrets. Often the secrets are covered up affair(s) of one or both parents. The pain of such secrets is intense and lasting. Most frequently the client who is struggling with such secrets has repeated in some form their childhood family drama. When in therapy the client does a regression to the source of the distressing drama they often go to a moment in time when the child is aware of parental infidelity. Then the pain can be dealt with and healed.