“The truth,” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Healing Is Never Pain-Free
You may recall that I began the preceding chapter with a brief discussion of the Hippocratic Oath, noting that it can be summed up as “First, do no harm.” Then I suggested that this should be your mantra from now on. However, this does not mean that relationship recovery will be free of pain and hurt. In fact, what comes next is likely to be quite difficult for all concerned.
If you’re reading that and thinking, “WTF,” I totally understand. Really, I do.
Let’s return to medical doctors and their use of the Hippocratic Oath. All doctors are taught that in order to do long-term good their actions may initially cause distress, pain, and even illness in their clients. Despite this, their painful choices are carried out intentionally—with the sole goal of healing. Consider, for instance, oncologists (cancer doctors). These physicians often choose to treat their patients with radiation, chemotherapy, or other procedures and medications that cause all sorts of distress and discomfort. In fact, many cancer survivors will tell you that the treatment felt worse than the disease. Yet doctors proceed and patients go along because they know they are working toward a greater good: remission and recovery.
The list of medical reasons for ignoring the “first do no harm” tenet is actually pretty lengthy. Think about any surgery at all: “You want to drug me until I pass out, slice me open, and do what?” Nevertheless, people do agree to such procedures when they understand and accept the goal of healing.
In many ways, recovering from infidelity is the same. You, your spouse, and your relationship will occasionally experience deep stress and pain as you heal. Even if you approach this process with the best of intentions, determined to cause your significant other no further pain, you will not succeed. She will ask you for more information about your cheating, you will need to tell her the truth about some secret you’ve been keeping, you will make a mistake and forget to check in with her when you promised, you will run into an old flame and have to share that with her . . .
So you might want to brace yourselves for a bumpy ride.
A Few Ground Rules
As you begin the process of rebuilding relationship trust, I strongly suggest the following to both you and your spouse:
These suggested guidelines will not prevent you and your mate from experiencing pain and emotional discomfort as you work to regain trust. What they can do is provide a bit of a cushion, softening the landing if either of you spirals downward. In other words, these cautionary measures won’t prevent pain, but they can certainly diminish the impact.
Rigorous Honesty
If you want to get out of the doghouse, you will have to rebuild relationship trust. And let me be clear here: Relationship trust is not automatically rebuilt just because you stop cheating, nor is it rebuilt because you manage to stay stopped for a certain amount of time. Instead, relationship trust is regained through consistent and sometimes painful actions engaged in over time. Thus, you will need to make a commitment to living differently and abiding by certain relationship boundaries, the most important of which is ongoing rigorous honesty about pretty much everything, all the time, from now on. This means that you need to fearlessly tell the truth no matter what, starting right now, even when you know it might upset your mate.
When you are rigorously honest, you tell your significant other about everything, not just the stuff that’s convenient or that you think will hurt her the least. There are no more lies and no more secrets. With rigorous honesty, you tell the truth and you tell it sooner. You keep your spouse in the loop about absolutely everything: spending, trips to the gym, gifts for the kids, issues at work, needing to fertilize the lawn, and, oh yeah, any “interactions” that she might not approve of. If your spouse would want to know, then you have to tell her. Period.
THOUGHTS VS ACTIONS
Rigorous honesty is more about your behavior than your thoughts. For instance, if you slip up and have a conversation with an old affair partner, you should tell your spouse, and the sooner the better. However, if you merely think about the fact that you would like to call an old affair partner, you should talk about this with your therapist or a close friend who knows about your cheating and is supportive of your healing process. So if you think about it but don’t do it, you still have to talk about it, but you should do so with someone other than your spouse. If you actually do it, however, then you have to tell your mate.
In their book, Worthy of Her Trust (2004), Stephen Arterburn and Jason Martinkus refer to rigorous honesty as “I’d rather lose you than lie to you.” They write, “A shift must occur in your paradigm of honesty that puts the truth in a place of utmost importance and highest priority.” They recognize that women tend to view life and relationships much more holistically than men, and therefore even little white lies are out of bounds—no matter what your reason for wanting to tell such a lie. They explain, “If your wife catches you in a white lie, she will likely extrapolate that to the whole of your life. She’ll think that a little lie here equals big lies there.” So when your mate asks if her favorite pants make her butt look big, you had better answer honestly. And when she asks how much money you spent on coffee this morning, you should answer to the penny.
You also need to understand the difference between active and passive truth telling. Active truth telling means you get honest with your significant other without her prompting you. If there is something you think she might want to know, you volunteer that information, and you do it sooner rather than later. Sure, she might get angry about whatever it is that you did, but she’ll be a lot angrier if she finds out that you did it and then tried to keep it secret. With active truth telling you become fully transparent about every aspect of your life. Your spouse doesn’t have to guess, make up stories that explain your behavior, ask probing questions, or play detective because you are actively disclosing the truth no matter what.
Passive truth telling forces your significant other to do the work. With passive truth telling, even if she already knows or suspects that you’re doing or have done something she might not like, you wait for her to ask you about it. And when she does this, you tell the truth about what she asked but you don’t volunteer other pertinent information. Instead, you withhold this other information, possibly telling yourself that what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. You might also try to convince yourself that you’re not a liar because you answered her questions (more or less) truthfully. However, failing to disclose fully is just another form of lying. Believe me, that is certainly how your significant other sees things. This means that passive truth telling will not help you to rebuild relationship trust. Furthermore, it will annoy the living daylights out of your wife.
Let’s think back to our windows and walls analogy. When you actively and voluntarily tell the truth, you create nice big transparent windows that your partner can easily see through. When you passively tell the truth, you create little translucent windows through which she can only see blurry shadows and outlines of your life. This, of course, invites her to use her imagination about what you might actually be doing. And can you guess the sorts of things she might imagine and how she’ll react to these imagined fears and transgressions? I bet you can, and I bet you would rather she didn’t. If so, all you need to do is tell the truth and tell it sooner.
Even when you’ve slipped up and done something that will anger your mate, it is best to disclose the truth. If you can’t bring yourself to reveal it today, then you need to tell her tomorrow at the latest—also letting her know that you waited a day to tell her because you knew that she would rightfully be upset and you selfishly did not want to experience that. While she might be angered by your delay, she will nevertheless appreciate your honesty.
Unfortunately, this process is not as easy as it sounds. Ongoing rigorous honesty is often difficult and painful. You won’t enjoy it, and your significant other will not enjoy it, either. However, it is a necessary part of healing.
When you practice rigorous honesty in your relationship it is important that you not expect your mate to immediately pat you on the back and thank you for your truthfulness. After all, you’re in the doghouse, so that’s not going to happen. And why should it, after you betrayed her, traumatized her, and made it difficult for her to believe anything you say? Over time, of course, if you truly are rigorously honest, she will begin to appreciate this fact. Until then, you will not be able to predict or control her reactions, and you should absolutely not try to do either. Your job is to keep your side of the street clean, day after day, until she finally starts to believe that you really are living your life openly and honestly.
How Secrets Leave Your Own Needs Unmet
About a year ago, one of my clients, Sam, told me the following story about his belief that “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” As you will read, the lesson Sam learned was that what she doesn’t know actually hurts him.
Sam was at the office and had just finished lunch when his work-at-home wife, Ellen, called him, sounding upset and exhausted. It was summer, and their two wonderfully rambunctious sons, both under the age of ten, were out of school and home all day, bouncing off the walls and getting on Ellen’s nerves. Having had enough, Ellen asked Sam to come home early, around three o’clock if he could, so she could go to a yoga class and then meet a few women friends for dinner and a movie.
She told Sam that if she didn’t get a break she was going to lose it, because she was completely drained both mentally and physically. Sam, sensing her distress, agreed to be home no later than three to play with and feed the boys.
Sam was happy to leave work early, but helping out around the house was not the only thing he had in mind. For quite some time, without Ellen’s knowledge, he’d been spending a fair amount of his free time (mostly during his lunch hour and on breaks at work) cruising hookup apps like Ashely Madison. However, because of his busy schedule he’d not found much time to make the physical connections happen. So this situation felt like a golden opportunity. He told his boss he had to leave work right away for a family emergency, even though he didn’t need to be home for another two hours, and then he took off to meet a woman he’d sexted back and forth with several times. As far as he was concerned, this was the perfect plan. He had a legitimate excuse to leave work early, and he had two hours in which to act out sexually. Best of all, Ellen would be none the wiser.
The plan worked great, too. Sam had his sexual liaison and made it home with ten minutes to spare. Ellen thanked him and left for her yoga class. After that, Sam and the boys roughhoused outside, and then he made spaghetti (their favorite) for dinner. After eating, he and the boys played video games until Ellen returned.
At 9 pm Ellen walked in the door to find her family happy, engaged, and playful. She was relaxed and centered from her yoga class and time with friends, and she was more amused than upset by the mess that Sam and the kids had made. (No one had cleaned up in the kitchen after dinner, and video game boxes were all over the living room.) These little things didn’t faze her because of how she felt about the family bonding she saw. Leaning over her husband’s shoulders, she gave him a big hug from behind and whispered into his ear, “You know, you are the man I always wanted. Seeing you here with the kids, after giving me the time I needed for myself, just renews all my feelings of love and appreciation for you. I’m so glad I married you.”
And there it was, something we all want and need simply because we are human—for the people we love to value and acknowledge us just for being ourselves. Honestly, who doesn’t want and need to experience that at least occasionally? Being validated in this way, especially by those we love, is a basic human need.
Sadly, Sam wasn’t able to hear or appreciate this valuable message. Instead, his wife’s words brought feelings of deep shame and regret because Sam, unlike Ellen, knew the truth about where he had been before this episode of domestic bliss. The minute Ellen walked through the door, Sam flashed back to the woman he’d cheated with, and he immediately felt awful because he knew how Ellen would feel if she knew what he had done. In his mind, he didn’t deserve, nor could he accept, her kind words.
This is the hidden cost of secrecy and lies in our intimate relationships. While we may sometimes feel proud of our cleverness for getting away with all kinds of things our significant other will never know about, we also push ourselves away from the relationship intimacy that brings genuine happiness. So our secrets—maybe not so clever after all—tend to keep us numb and self-hating, preventing us from receiving the love and appreciation we are given for the things we do right. When we know that we are keeping meaningful and potentially shameful sexual and romantic secrets from our mates, we can never fully accept the love that they give to us. So, can we get away with doing whatever we want in secret? In practice, maybe we can. In reality, not so much, because this kind of behavior comes at a steep emotional cost—to us.
She Wants to Know Everything! And She Wants to Know Now!
It is understandable that your mate might want to know the complete history of your infidelity. In fact, she may want to hear about every graphic detail. Even worse, this desire to know everything could be mixed with periods of not wanting to know anything at all. Either way, your spouse has a right to know about anything and everything that has gone on during her relationship with you. After all, she is trying to figure out what you’ve done and how likely you are to do it again in the future.
It is possible your wife thinks that if she knows everything, she will feel a sense of control over an out-of-control situation. This is completely understandable. In fact, it is a perfectly normal reaction to almost any kind of traumatic experience, including the deep and incredibly painful emotional trauma caused by infidelity.
Generally, full disclosure about infidelity best occurs in the office of an experienced couple’s counselor. (If you’re curious, I’ve explained this process more fully in an addendum at the back of this book.) That said, there could be a few things you need to disclose immediately, such as the following:
In regard to things you must tell your significant other immediately, here are few ground rules:
1. No graphic details. While your partner may want every detail, and you likely remember every detail, giving her a clear image of you and another woman being sexual could send her packing. So if you must, tell her general information about your behavior but skip the gory particulars. If she demands more, you can insist on help from a therapist.
2. No more lying. If you tell your spouse more lies or half-truths about your behavior, you will destroy the process of healing before you even begin. Don’t do this. If you do, she will find out, and she will not forgive you.
If your spouse is demanding that you give full disclosure right this instant, tell her you are more than willing to tell her anything she wants to know, but you won’t do that unless it is safe for you both—meaning disclosure with rules, boundaries, and guidance from a therapist.
As stated above, any attempts at full disclosure should occur only with the support of an experienced couple’s counselor. Without this supervision, attempts at full disclosure can be disastrous. Even if it makes you feel better to come clean, it is unwise to just dump a bunch of painful information on your spouse. And this is true even if she’s asked you to do it. As long as you are no longer cheating and you are telling the truth about your current behaviors, your spouse can wait on a full disclosure that takes place in a therapy setting. You should not, however, delay full disclosure for more than a month. So if your wife is demanding to know everything and you are serious about saving your relationship, make an appointment with a therapist and give disclosure as soon as possible.
At the end of the day, you need to understand that even if your spouse thinks knowing everything will help her feel better, it usually doesn’t. Sometimes, the more she knows, the worse she feels. However, full disclosure is still a necessary step toward rebuilding trust in most relationships, and you should therefore be prepared to give it. But please understand that if and when full disclosure is demanded, the best thing you can do for yourself and your relationship is to find a safe environment in which to give it, preferably the office of an experienced couple’s therapist
The Personal Benefits of Integrity
Disclosure is not all about your significant other. You too will benefit. For starters, getting everything out in the open reduces the fantasy-driven allure of “the other woman.” After all, forbidden fruit is exciting primarily because it is forbidden, exotic, and taboo. So if you keep your cheating hidden, you are able to romanticize it in whatever way you choose: worshipping it as your perfect sexual prize while ignoring its flaws and also the related consequences. Until you burst the bubble and dissolve the fantasy by talking about your behavior, you are likely to feel torn between your wife and your cheating.
When exposed to the light of day, infidelity rarely seems as enticing as when it was secret. The shortcomings and consequences are much easier to spot. In fact, after talking openly about their cheating, many men wonder what they ever saw in other women. They often realize that the women they’ve cheated with are not as pretty, smart, fun, and loving as their wives. However, this becomes clear only when the bubble is burst. Until then, old liaisons linger as obsessive fantasies, causing other women to seem more attractive and appealing than they really are.
Other benefits of full disclosure include the following:
How Simple Lies Can End Relationship Healing
Eric came to see me for help after his wife of eight years, Jeanette, discovered that he’d been going to local strip clubs and massage parlors. He told me he was willing to go to any lengths to work on himself and make things right with his family. And so we went to work. Jeanette said she wanted to stay with Eric, so we found a counselor for her, too—someone to help her work through her anger and grief related to Eric’s extensive betrayal.
Eric attended individual therapy sessions and also support groups with other cheating men. Through this process, he realized that his relationships with sex workers had nothing to do with his initial assumption that he was just really horny. In truth, he’d been leading a lonely life for quite some time, and he’d turned to sex workers for validation and attention. In therapy, he slowly came to realize that his chronic loneliness and sexual acting out stemmed from his childhood-to-adult feelings of “having to go it alone,” and not from being a typical horny guy.
To be blunt, Eric had a very difficult childhood. Both of his parents were alcoholics, his father was mostly absent, and his mother was emotionally abusive. As a result, Eric learned he couldn’t fully trust anyone, and as he grew older, he determinedly became a completely independent person. As an adult, he took great pride in the fact that he did not need help from others. For instance, he had built a successful business without going to college or accepting financial help from his parents or anyone else. Unfortunately, this same “completely independent” thought process made him blind to and dismissive of his (mostly unmet) emotional needs.
Because of this, if Jeanette angered or disappointed him, he wouldn’t talk it out with her. Thanks to his traumatic childhood he just wasn’t able to trust anyone—not even his loving wife. So instead of talking to his spouse like most guys would, he sought out other women and turned to them for the attention, validation, excitement, and distraction he desperately craved.
Eric did well in therapy, shifting his focus from work and self-sufficiency to self-care and emotional connection. He learned to make healthy recreation and downtime with friends and family a priority. As he began to feel more balanced and supported, his interest in seeking sex outside his marriage dissipated, but not his ongoing fear of losing his wife. Though he viewed both he and Jeanette as independent and stable people, he was in fact quite needy emotionally, and he struggled with his healthy wife’s seeming lack of need for him.
Meanwhile, Jeanette, who felt like her world had gone completely out of orbit due to her husband’s sexcapades, just wanted her old life back. Though very angry and deeply hurt by Eric’s infidelity, she was willing to work to save their relationship with one caveat: “I’m in, but only if he’s done lying to me.” So with this in mind she and Eric slowly started to move toward reconciliation.
And then this happened.
One day, about five months into their healing process, Jeanette had to leave early for work. Before leaving, she asked Eric to take out the trash, which Eric assured her he would do. Then, caught up in his own concerns, he simply forgot. That evening, as Jeanette walked through the door after a long day at the office, she casually asked, “Did you take out the trash?” Eric panicked. As silly as it might seem, he feared the anger and frustration Jeanette might express when finding out that he had forgotten to do “the one thing” she had asked of him that day. So rather than admit his mistake, he went into cover-up mode, looking Jeanette in the eyes and saying, very sincerely, “Of course I did.”
Well, a few moments later, while in the washroom cleaning up for dinner, Jeanette glanced out the window and saw Eric sneaking to the curb with the garbage he had forgotten to take out that morning. Unsurprisingly, Jeanette felt a knot of tension and anger grow in her stomach. For her, this seemingly small white lie represented something much greater. Suddenly, she could no longer trust a single thing Eric said or did.
Back in the kitchen, with no rancor or rage, she told Eric, “You lied to me again, and I’m done.” She explained that she could not and would not allow any more lies and secrets in her life.
“But it’s just the trash,” Eric said. “It’s not like I’m going back to strip clubs and fooling around on you. So why this reaction? You know I love you, right?”
Jeanette, feeling very calm, centered, and fully sure of herself, said, “I still love you too. And I get that it’s just the trash to you. But that’s not where I’m at. I’ve been working very hard to regain my trust in you, and now I catch you blatantly lying to me yet again. I can’t go back to that. And if you can’t tell the truth about something as simple as admitting that you forgot to take out the garbage, how can I trust that anything you say or do is real?”
Two days later, with grace and sadness—and the support of her family and therapist—Jeanette left Eric and never came back.
Note: The story above is not about men having to do everything perfectly to heal a broken relationship, nor is it about never making mistakes. Rather, it is about the power of lies and how even the simplest mistruth can finish a relationship that’s on the brink. The point here is simple: Tell the truth and tell it sooner, even when you are afraid of the result. Do this even when you fear she will be disappointed or angry with what you have to say. Remember, she is watching carefully for your lies, secrecy, and manipulations to return because, to her, honesty is paramount. Your job is to do everything you can to regain her trust, so you need to be fearless (but never unkind) about whatever has happened. Whether you like it or not—trust me here—this is the path to healing your broken relationship. Being honest is far more important than looking good.
QUESTIONS FOR
Reflection
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