Emerging Ideas. Rumination's Mediating Effect on Feeling Caught and Well‐Being After Parental Infidelity

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Allison R. Thorson
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12509

A R. TUniversity of San Francisco

Emerging Ideas.

Rumination’s Mediating Effect on Feeling Caught

and Well-Being After Parental Indelity

Objective: This brief exploratory study, guided

by family systems theory, examined whether

rumination mediated the relationship between

adult children’sexperience of triangulation (i.e.,

feeling caught) and well-being after parental

indelity.

Results: On the basis of responses from 215

adult children whose parents engaged in in-

delity, adult children’s well-being and their

feelings of being caught between parents was

mediated by rumination. Moreover, the relation-

ship between these variables was not conditional

on whether adult children’s parents divorced or

remained married after indelity.

Implications: These ndings provide an initial

understanding of the impact of parental in-

delity on adult children. Further, they suggest

that future research should examine family dis-

courses that promote or mitigate rumination

because family interactions greatly inuence off-

spring’s experiences with this transgression.

In line with family systems theory (see

Yoshimura & Galvin, 2018), researchers

argue that the impact of parental indelity

is not limited to the marital dyad. Specically,

Perlman (2010) found that adolescents exposed

to parental indelity experience cognitive and

Department of Communication Studies, University of

San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco CA

94117-1080 (athorson@usfca.edu).

Key Words: family communication, family systems theory,

feeling caught, parental indelity,rumination, well-being.

emotional changes that subsequently inu-

ence their sexual scripts and schemas. Further,

Weiser and Weigel (2017) claimed that experi-

encing parental indelity increases children’s

propensity to engage in indelity in their

own relationships. With regard to communi-

cation, researchers found that adult children

often receive messages from their mothers or

fathers after they learn of parental indelity that

make them feel caught between their parents

(Thorson, 2014). Despite research suggesting

that feeling caught is negatively associated with

well-being (e.g., Amato & A, 2006; Buchanan

et al., 1991) and that well-being is negatively

predicted by rumination (Brooks et al., 2017),

family communication surrounding parental

indelity and the subsequent outcomes of these

interactions have yet to be fully explored.

Hence, guided by family systems theory, the

ndings from this brief exploratory report offer a

novel understanding of how parents’ marital sta-

tus, feeling caught, rumination, and well-being

in the context of parental indelity have impli-

cations for therapists counseling families or fam-

ily members experiencing parental indelity and

inform future family science research, because

further communicative approaches to studying

this phenomenon are needed.

F S T, P

I,  F C

According to family systems theory, individuals

are interconnected with their family members

(for a review, see Yoshimura & Galvin, 2018).

896Family Relations 70 (July 2021): 896–904

DOI:10.1111/fare.12509