Chapter 1: Should I confront my father about his infidelity?
My mom had found out that he was living a double life, dating another woman. She found a couple other cell phones and such. How do you go forth with forgiving somebody to that extent where, you know, this is my father, you know, my role model?
I hope to God he's not your role model. What's up? What's going on? This is John, the Dr. John Deloney Show, coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm glad that you are here. Talking with real people about real challenges, your mental and emotional health, your marriages, your relationships, whatever you got going on, kids, parents, all of it.
If you want to be on the show, go to johndeloney.com slash ask or click the link in the show notes and it will take you right to the ask page. Let's go out to Philadelphia and talk to B-I-double-L. What's up, Bill? How are you, Dr. John? I'm good, brother. How are you, man?
Chapter 2: How do I navigate forgiveness in a family betrayal?
Good, good. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you. Of course. What's up? So I have a question about forgiveness and I guess, in a sense, confrontation and how to confront a family situation with my father. So it has to do with infidelity. Eight years ago in 2018, My mom had found out that he was living a double life. He was having an affair and, in a sense... I guess, dating another woman.
She found a couple other cell phones and such on a family vacation. And they went through a quick divorce. It was about two, three months. I had to move out of my childhood home.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges of rebuilding trust with a parent?
There was a lot of lies that my mom found out in the process. I tried to stay out of it. I didn't talk to my dad for two years. I started talking to him again in 2021. And we have a It's an on and off relationship. I still don't really trust him after all that. But back in 2021, my wife and I had to move into my dad's home for about a year. We were displaced.
Our home got destroyed in a storm out here on the East Coast. And I found a bunch of pictures and such with him and this other woman he was living the double life with, dating back to about 10 years prior to when he was apparently honest and told my mom he had started seeing this woman. So he was living a double life for almost close to a decade. from those dates.
So I don't, my question for you is how, how do you go forth with forgiving somebody to that extent where, you know, this is, you know, a thought, my father, you know, my role model, a male figure who's been in my life for, you know, all these years. And, um, how do, how would I go about confronting him and asking him why he did what he did?
Chapter 4: How can I set boundaries with my mother regarding her behavior?
Um, I think you have to get to the motivation behind what you're seeking.
Um,
I hope to God he's not your role model.
Well, he used to be.
There you go. And that's my point is often we have this feeling, this sense that we're going to have this big confrontation. You've probably dressed a hearse to this conversation a thousand times, probably 10,000 times.
gonna say this he's gonna bow his head and be like i'm so sorry and you're gonna like be heard and be said there's gonna be this cathartic moment for both of you and then it will clear the deck for this future relationship almost zero percent chance that happens yeah and so then you have to ask yourself have i grieved the fact that i anchored into a man who was not who he said he was
And deal with the onion that is layer by layer what I anchored into was never real in the first place. Or parts of it were real. He did show up to work every day and provide for our family. He did give me school tuition. He did buy me shoes. I mean, he did stuff like that. And he also lied and cheated and then lied more and was deceptive.
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Chapter 5: What should I do if my mother-in-law's boyfriend is visiting?
Like both and, the complexity of it all. But if you want to figure out how to forgive so that everything moves forward rosy, that's not an honest picture of forgiveness. If you want to have a big fight just to make sure that this man knows how you feel, you can do that. you're a grown man, you can do whatever you want.
I've never heard somebody have that confrontation and say it felt as good as they thought it was going to and didn't walk away feeling more small than before the conversation. I've not met that person.
Right, right, yep.
And so I think you have to ask yourself, what are you hoping to accomplish? Are you trying to, do you want to have a relationship with him moving forward?
So, like I said, we have a relationship in the sense of we talk a couple times a week. He'll stop over. He sees, obviously, his grandkids. He sees my daughters. We don't really have those in-depth, long talks that we used to have, obviously, prior to all of this coming out eight years ago because there's obviously mistrust there.
So I'm assuming...
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Chapter 6: How do I communicate my values to my family?
he's taking responsibility or I wouldn't let this man around my daughters.
Yeah. He, in a sense right now, but the thing is, I don't really know how, I don't really know what I believe, if that makes sense, because, you know, I guess you still have that whole, is he still lying, right? Is he cheating on the woman he's with now, right? Which it is what it is, right?
Yeah, that's my other side of this for me. This is a strange question. Why does it matter to you?
So if he's cheating on the female he's with now that he was cheating on my mother with, I don't care about that, right?
I mean, you do, and that's okay, and you should, but I get your sentiment, like, he's going to do what he's going to do. You can't control any of that.
Right. I think it's more or less—the true thing I care about is, number one, it's, you know— How do you go about, like I said, forgiving those actions on my mom?
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Chapter 7: What are effective strategies for confronting difficult family issues?
I watched my mom go through years of depression, having to move her out of, you know, even like I said, a home she built and my father built for me and my sisters and things of that sort. And, you know, how do you go about just, I guess, forgiving or even retrusting? I don't know. I guess in a situation like this might go hand in hand.
And then, like I said, how do you really ask somebody like that? Hey, why did you do this? Right. Were there marital issues? you know, growing up, you know, that, you know, what, what was the motivation or the motive behind it? That's, I guess what I want to try to figure out.
All right. So dude, you laid that out perfectly. So kudos to you. Okay. So I do think you have three different things going on.
Chapter 8: How can microhabits improve my marriage?
So let me parse them apart for you and I'm going to be overly reductive and I'm going to make it sound super simple. I know each thing I'm about to say is insanely complicated. Okay.
Yeah.
First and foremost, forgiveness is for you. Yep. Forgiveness is you waking up saying, I'm not going to have the first thought of my day and the last thought of my evening about this man that blew up my family. I'm going to stop carrying around the sins of my father. Because I didn't do anything wrong.
And you carrying around the sins of your dad impacts your relationship with your wife, with your daughters, with your kids, with your mom, with everybody. And so forgiveness is the active action of saying out loud, you don't get a vote in my life anymore.
And it is a daily practice of stopping the stories when they start, stopping the imaginary conversations when they start, and trusting that over time your body will stop defaulting to them so much. But it's saying, you don't get a spot in my backpack anymore. I got too much other important stuff to carry.
Yep. That's fair.
So that's number one. Number two... Let me answer the third one first. You're never going to get a satisfactory answer to why. Okay. You might approach it from this. You might approach it from this way, which is, hey, dad, this is a hard conversation I want to have with you, but half of me is you. And I love my wife. I love my kids. I can't wrap my head around how this could possibly happen.
I would love to hear your side of the story. Yeah. And maybe he'll give it to you. And maybe you'll find out your mom wasn't who you thought she was, and you'll further just melt your picture of your childhood. Right. I mean, if that's what you want to do. And my guess is you're grasping at how can this guy that I lionized as a young kid actually be so cruel?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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