My grandfather had a mistress for 20+ years; my grandmother refused to give him a divorce because that would have lowered her social standing back then, etc. I still have trouble with his having had a mistress.

One thing that helps me is to realize that other generations have different sorts of problems because of the times in which they live and it's very different for them, living their lives, than it is for us and there's no way to truly understand what they are going through. It's a little like hurting really bad for an animal, we can't experience life they way they do because they're a different species and we tend to get anthropomorphic.

I think a lot of how you feel about your relatives' issues are based on how you think you would feel if they were your issues. It can be hard to keep ourselves out of other people's equations :-) I try to do that by remembering how I feel when I am sick/in the hospital versus how I feel about other people when they are sick/in the hospital; my own experiences I understand/don't seem so bad to me as other people's but they probably seem the same to other people (their own experiences) as mine do to me? I think we are all pretty "comfortable" with/know our own issues and, though we don't like them, we live with them okay? Other people live with theirs the same way (your grandmother and aunt, for example, don't feel as extreme about their own situations as you appear to about their situations).