AFFAIR DISCLOSED & AFFAIR PROCESSED

GENERAL

1. The non-affair spouse is in charge of both the timing and the amount of information flow.

2. If not disclosed, these secrets can be recalled by the infidel at will later on for personal enjoyment. However, once they are disclosed, the experiences appear to lose much of their attractiveness.

3. The most common justification for not providing full disclosure is if there is a history of violence or rage within or between the spouses. This concern usually surfaces when the wife has an affair and the marriage has a history of severe conflict and abuse.

4. The infidel needs forgiveness and the spouse can only forgive what he/she knows. You can’t forgive what you don’t know.

5. The faithful spouse always pays twice in this healing process: First, at disclosure of the affair. Second, when called on to forgive the specific details. It neither feels nor appears to be fair, but there is no other way for healing to take place.

Q & A

1. Why should I tell her everything? Won’t it will only injure my spouse more and further damage our hopes of recovery?

Answer: You are right, it will hurt your spouse even more. But to not tell when asked, is worse. First, the spouse intuitively suspects or even knows the truth. To deny or discount the truth, or to be guarded in what you do share, only heightens the suspicions and usually turns the questioning into an obsessive grilling. Also, should you preserve the marriage, the two of you will not be as close as you could have been, to mistrust, and secondly, due to regret that once can’t come clean now.

2. What if my spouse just keeps asking the same question over and over?

Answer: Obsession almost always happens on the front end of the recovery. The spouse is trying to figure out: Where were they when this happened? How did they miss this? Was that old doubt really true, etc? They are trying to rebuild their injured intuition. Some spouses can become stuck in this frame of mind. However, most will move through it if the infidel is forthright and not guarded. Often this behavior reflects the inaccurate thinking of the spouse that “If I know enough detail, I can figure out why this happened”. That is not unnecessarily true. Sometimes the anger needs to be vented in new ways; sometimes mediation is even needed, especially if disclosure comes on the heels of a difficult time in the marriage.

3. What if I truly can’t remember the details I am being asked?

Answer: Sometimes “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” feels like a brush off to the spouse asking the question. I have two suggestions:

• To the Infidel: Tell the spouse you will think about the question (even pray about it if you are a faith-based individual) and that you will get back to them in 48 hours with whatever information you are able to come up with.
  
• To the Spouse: I often say, if you have ever been drunk, you might have more understanding of your infidel spouse’s inability to recall details. When you are inebriated, you don’t recall all your behaviors, time sequences, even the events you went through. Such is often the experience of the “drunk with love”, highly infatuated (read “Intoxicated”) infidel.

4. If I find out all those details, won’t I have a lot of mental pictures I have to work through?

Answer: Yes, you probably will have more mental pictures to work through, but that beats wondering what happened, working things up in your mind, checking every behavior of your infidel spouse and wondering if he said or did that with the affair partner. Mental pictures fade overtime; mental uncertainty often grows. There might be certain sexual practices, environments, or even property that you might not be able to enjoy initially, but remember the infidel came back to you.