Achieving Happiness Column for 11-14-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. ENDING AN AFFAIR Cheryl is a beauty on the outside, but her insides are an ugly mess of unhappiness, insecurity, and uncertainty. She suffers from twisted thinking. She has been having an affair for the past two years. Recently she’d been thinking that she’d leave her husband “to be with the man who loves me for who I really am.” However, when Cheryl discussed the prospect of moving in together along with her two children, the other man abruptly ended the affair. She was stung by the rejection, and saddened by the loss of a relationship that had brought her such pleasure. She was also confused about how he could turn away from someone he loved. She didn’t realize it, but her confusion actually started years earlier when she developed the mistaken belief that their relationship was based on love. He never loved her for whom she really is - a woman with two children. He just loved playing around with her beautiful body. Cheryl is confusing lust with love, and romance with respect. In her mind, passion must mean that love is present. She also thinks that if there is no passion, there is no love. So she concludes that her husband doesn’t love her because they’ve lost their passionate feelings toward one another. Well no wonder there’s no passion in her marriage - she’s directing all of her attention and affection toward another man. How does she justify her actions? She dwells on her thoughts that the way her husband parent is too demanding, and that he’s too critical when the children make mistakes. Cheryl twists her thinking by telling herself that her husband is a horrible parent because he’s always making their children unhappy. She compounds her error by thinking there’s nothing she can do to modify his behavior, and that the result will be that their children’s lives will be ruined. Cheryl is actually doing to her husband exactly what she’s complaining about his doing to the kids. She’s so critical and punitive toward him that she’s contributing to the major rift between them. The core of the problem is that she’s distorting the facts when she tells herself that he’s “always” making the kids miserable. This paints his parenting as all negative, when in fact there are also some positive moments. When Cheryl got some help to look at how she was distorting her thinking, she was able to acknowledge that when her children do well her husband is equally exuberant in his praise for them. But by having deleting this fact from her thought process, she’d made her husband appear to be a much worse parent in her mind. She further twists her thinking by projecting how horribly her children will be affected by his behavior in the future. Cheryl doesn’t know what will really happen in the future. She’s just making it up in her mind’s eye in order to justify her own bad behavior. How many people have had fathers who were tough on them, but they turned out all right later in life? There are many for whom this is true, especially if they had a mother who counterbalanced the situation by being equally strong in providing lots of positive support to them. But Cheryl doesn’t direct as much energy as she could into making that effort because she’s diverting a great deal of her attention outside of the family and into someone who doesn’t give a damn about her kids. Cheryl will be much happier if she gets some help to untwist her thinking. Trying to escape from her problems by having an affair is like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline. She needs to put positive energy into her family by overcoming her fear that she’s helpless in dealing with the difficulties she’s facing. Rather than dwelling on how bad things are, she must learn to refocus her thoughts to imagining what would happen if her energy were directed toward her husband and her children. Cheryl will have more influence with her husband if he feels he has something to lose. Once she figures out how to regenerate lots of loving feelings, he’ll be concerned he’ll diminish the positive emotions in the marriage by parenting in ways that his wife finds problematic. Facing your problems is hard, but it’s better than having them blow up in your face. Cheryl is playing with fire, but she can turn her life around with the help of supportive people who can teach her how to salvage her marriage.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.