Knowing how to confront a cheater is essential to your affair recovery. Giving the cheater a ‘piece of your mind‘ may make you feel better, but it’s not the same thing as confronting.
How to Confront a Cheater <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you’re here with me today. Thank you for tuning in. Today we’re going to be dealing with a very timely topic. In going through my podcasts I realized I had not touche4d on this one. It’s a very important one. And that is how to confront a cheater.
Some of you may think “I know how to confront”. Well, you may. But many people that I have talked to out there, they really don’t know how to confront in a way that gets the point across.
Knowing how to confront a cheater is essential for your affair recovery. If you blow them up much, if you tear them apart, you may get your point across, but then they tune you out. You don’t want to run the risk of that. That’s why this is an important topic.
Giving the cheater a piece of your mind may make you feel good, but it’s not the same thing as confronting.
In a previous segment I addressed the issue of how to ask questions without fighting. This is similar, but not quite the same, because here you’re not asking questions, you’re not in the information gathering stage.
You are in the position, at least at this point where you’ve got to look at confrontation, the need to confront. The need to put something right there in their face.
There is definitely a time for asking questions, and there’s a time for confronting. This is the time for confronting. And each of these calls for a different approach. You want your confronting to be clear and specific.
The solution I’m going to present is the AQS. It’s going to get the point across.
- Capture their attention before confronting them. Many spouses make the mistake of going ahead and confronting the cheater before they have the cheater’s attention. Big mistake. You’re wasting your breath if you start laying into them or confronting them before you get their attention. You want to make sure that they are tuned in before you deliver your message.
It would be like broadcasting on the wrong channel. You may have a TV set, but if the TV set’s not tuned into the channel it’s not getting anywhere.
It’s just going out there into the solar system. That’s not what you’re wanting here. You want their attention before you confront them.
2. Use questions rather than statements. The reason for this is that it makes them think. Now, you can use statements as you’re leading up to the questions, and if you are going to make statements stick with the facts.
When you make statements like “You’re a jerk”, they may be a jerk but they’re going to deny that. They’re going to get defensive about that.
You can say “You didn’t call! I’m not your highest priority”. You can make all sorts of statements like that.Such statements are better than the name calling, but they are not a good way of confronting.
Those behaviors may all be signs of jerky behavior, but don’t go around calling them a jerk, instead try asking “Why didn’t you make me a top priority when you…?”
That’s a better use of a question.
It’s going to be important, when you’re asking questions, not to overload them with too many items. Bear in mind that just with the working of the brain most people’s attention span can hold maybe five to seven items, somewhere in that range.
When you’re confronting a cheater with 10 or 20 different accusations, it’s not sinking in. Maybe the first few, or maybe the last few, but everything else is just floating in the breeze. You’re not getting anywhere.
For that reason you want to limit your statements to a few at a time.
Besides not limiting it to too many items, which is important, at the most, if it was up to me I’d recommend two items at a time.
You get more than that. it’s not sinking in. You can try it, you may have some success throwing five or six items, but usually with cheaters I find that their mind is elsewhere anyway, so let’s just put as many things in your favor as we can by limiting the amount of items that you’re throwing at them.
3. Realize that silence is your friend. I know some of you out there you may feel uncomfortable with silence. That’s the whole idea.
They feel uncomfortable with silence too. After you say something don’t just go rushing in with a lot of chatter or anything such as that. That’s going to mess the situation up. That’s going to let them off the hook, it’s going to water down what it is that you’re trying to say.
Because what you have to say is important. And you need to get that across to them what you have to say is important.
After you do your confronting, once you go ahead and lay your confronting statement, it’s okay to be silent. Even for up to like five to ten minutes. That silence is working for you. Some cheaters need the silence to think. When you’re confronting it’s almost like that statement is having to break through a lot of different walls of denial. And if it’s a very strong confrontation it’s got a lot to work its way through.
If you want it to work its magic, or do what it’s intended to do, you’re going to have to give it time. The silence, essentially, lets things sink in. It does add a dramatic effect, yes there will be tension. Let’s not worry about that right now. You want the tension working for you. That’s not something you want to get rid of at this point.
Because rushing in to fill the space gets them off the emotional hook. You don’t want them off the emotional hook. As long as you keep them in a state of tension that’s where you’ve got their attention, that’s where you’ve got their heart and mind, and that’s where you want to do your confronting. And that’s where your confronting is going to have the greatest impact.
These are things, it may take a little bit of practice learning how to go ahead and create questions and finding ways of getting their attention. These are things that you can start crafting now, before you confront them, but I encourage you to go ahead and put these three in place.
You’ll find that your confrontations will be listened to, be taken much more serious, and you’re going to feel like you’re able to communicate better.
Once again, this is the AQS approach. It stands for Attention, Question, and Silence.
After confronting the cheater, you may wonder, what comes next. A good place to start is with the video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery“. Click the link and purchase a copy for the cheater.
Better yet, have them assume responsibility and buy it for themselves. The video guides them through some of the many changes that are needed. They may not know where to start. This video guides them through that start.
Best Regards,
Jeff
