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My daughter had an affair with a colleague and her husband found out.

 

That was during the New Year holiday period.

She refused to speak to me for a week, then invited me to spend a night with her as her husband and son had gone to stay with other family for a couple of days.

 

She was hysterical and told me how angry she was about my divorce from her father when she was 8 years old. She has told her father the same.

 

Since then she has said that my relationship with her is "on hold" until she goes to counselling and sorts herself out.

 

I feel so bereft as she is my only blood family in the world and my only child. She doesn't want me to phone her and she doesn't contact me in any way.

 

I feel she might be avoiding responsibility for her actions. She is 45 and really old enough to know what she is doing.

 

Any comments would be welcome... I feel so very sad.

 

Cat.

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Cat, she needs to work through this herself. You can't do this for her. All you can do is let her know that you'll be there when she is ready to resume the R with you.

 

Objectively, it does seem a huge cop-out to "blame" her A on your D, but perhaps in her mind the two really are connected.

 

(Anecdote alert...)

 

My H's parents split when he was around 5 or 6. He was a only child at that time, and he took it pretty hard, even though as an adult he recognises how necessary it was, and now has an excellent R with his step-father as well as with his mother (his father has since died). But it made him very wary of the effects of D on kids - one of the reasons that kept him in an unhappy M for so long, particularly after his own childhood experiences (and fears, and then adult prejudices) were amplified by seeing how traumatised his kids were during the split, when his then-W stormed out. Which was why he took her back, really tried to make the M work, and, when it wouldn't, resorted to an A to "tread water" until the kids were old enough and he could safely leave the M without subjecting them to further trauma, and a reliving of what was "done to him" as a kid. Yes, it's not very rational, but it is what he believed at the time, and it was largely borne out by how things subsequently unfolded. And it was only with counselling and hindsight that he was able to recognise it for what it was - his own fears, based on his own childhood experiences, supported by "evidence" from a poorly handled separation attempt.

 

I'm not saying your daughter is going through the same thinking, but there may be a similar process at work. As a child she may have felt that D was the very worst thing that could - and did - happen to her, and so she has sought to protect her own kid from that, by trying to avoid a split at any cost (including an A)... Or whatever. Point is, she, like my H at the time, is likely stuck in the thought processes of a traumatised 8year old, unable to view the situation calmly with her adult experience and perspective, and is responding to you as that angry 8 year old would have wanted to (and maybe did) at the time... But it went unheard. You still D, and all of that 8 year olds anger is now coming out.

 

Counselling is where she needs to deal with it. She needs to learn to integrate the angry 8 year old whose wishes are ignored, into the 45 year old who acts impetuously on her own wishes without considering her own H and son, and try to achieve some kind of mature understanding of how to balance her own needs with those of her real (not projected) kid / family. All you can do is offer support, when she's ready to accept it, and wait.

 

If her counsellor is any good, she'll get there.

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Thank you Coco. That was a great post.

 

I do feel the child in her still hasn't come to terms with the D. She herself said she never really gave it much thought until she had this A. She always thought she had escaped any tramatic effects of the divorce.

 

I do hope she is getting there but it is difficult to be cut off from my family for such a long time.

 

Thank you again,

 

Cat.

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She definitely needs to sort herself out and quit throwing stones in a glass house.

 

She says she is angry with you, but then goes off and does something that might lead to divorce? She is definitely avoiding responsibility for her actions.

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