The interesting thing about blaming your spouse for your affair or addiction is how it is so empowering.  When you blame your spouse, you take any and all pressure off yourself and lay the fault on your spouse and their actions or inactions. It empowers you to believe, “I need to get my needs met.  I mean, shoot, my spouse doesn’t seem to care about my sexual needs,” or “She/He’s never happy anyway. I’m one big failure to them and if they would do their job, I would do my job. So you know what, I might as well get my needs met and be happy.”  

Blaming your spouse for your affair simply empowers the dysfunction and self-deception inside you.  It removes any personal responsibility for your actions and keeps you an immature 7 year old emotionally, as we respond to anything with, “well, they made me do it.” 

We learn early on in middle school that no one makes us do anything.  We choose to do what we do, and there are consequences to our actions.

With infidelity however, we retreat away from owning our failures, as we usually are not healthy enough to own our choices, take responsibility for them and then deal with the consequences.  We’d rather hide in our shame and our guilt and push away any sort of accountability.  This is not new in life and this is more an observation in human nature which is magnified when it comes to an infidelity specific situation.   

As blame continues to empower us to increasing amounts of deception, we run further and further away from truth, clarity and an honest understanding of what is happening in us and around us.  More than just our own pain and hurt, we are immune to any true coherent understanding of the suffering our spouse is enduring due to our blindness and blame.  When we utilize blame as a numbing device, we become a prisoner of our own doing, a victim of our own transgression, locking ourselves further and further away from safety and truth. 

The remedy comes when someone is able to penetrate the dysfunction within us.  It’s not overnight.  It’s a process.  A systematic process which will bring light to the dark prison of blame and justification.  Typically the betrayed spouse does not hold the keys to the jail cell, and will only tighten the lock by accusation, attacking, or reminding them of their horrible choices.  This is where the right help comes in to bring about a redemptive sense of personal responsibility to the equation.  Without an understanding of the need for a process and the understanding of that process, the unfaithful spouse will only revert to using the anger of the betrayed spouse to reinforce the blame they feel toward their spouse.  Only the right help can break the cycle.