Reply to if you or your spouse cheated- how did you tell the kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The opposite of telling them isn’t normalcy. It’s the kids intuitively sensing that there is a family secret they aren’t part of; that parents are losing something; that at least one parent had some kind of major issue parents won’t discuss.[/quote]

This.  Not telling them in some way means that there is a secret they sense and they make up answers to fill in those blanks and often those answers are wrong and detrimental to them.

We split when the kids were little, so young that it was inappropriate to answer my 5 y.o. DD’s question about why Daddy and I were splitting up with, “he continues to sleep with work colleagues, strangers and prostitutes despite marital therapy and promises not to and he endangered me by bringing home an STD and not telling me.”  But it also wasn’t appropriate to say (as the shitty therapist advised) that we “didn’t love each other anymore”.  Because that was a lie.  I loved him but was emotionally healthy enough to know that what he was doing to me - the serial infidelity and deep lies/gaslighting about it - was a form of abuse.  I didn’t want my daughter to grow up with the idea that you stay in a marriage that’s abusive because you’re in love. But, I also didn’t want her to think that you can just fall out of love and leave someone - because that means he could fall out of love and leave her and that also gives her a skewed idea of marriage.

As the kids got older, their Dad exhibited towards them the same underlying traits that enabled him to cheat - a lack of empathy, breaking promises, lying about stuff, really only caring about his relationship with them to the extent that it made him look good, etc. They both, as is common, drew the conclusion that there is something wrong with them that makes them unlovable to him.

It would have been far better for them to know at a certain point - look, it’s not just you - your Dad has a serious personality deficiency that causes him to have a lack of empathy, to care about appearances more than reality, to refuse to apologize, to refuse to take responsibility, and this is why he’s doing X, Y and Z that seems harmful to you. And there are reasons in his upbringing and mental health why he is like this - it is not you.

It has been helpful to some extent that they have had therapists who have helped them identify his toxic behavior and how to set boundaries. They are young adults now and it is a major unresolved question how much they should know about why we split up.  Of course, I am never going to tell the explicit details, but some sort of information would clearly be helpful. [/quote]

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