In the heat of the moment, you may have shouted to your spouse that you want to know “everything”! Knowing everything is often more of a curse than it is a cure for the affair. Honesty is important, yet knowing everything is NOT the same thing as honesty or ‘coming clean’. Coming clean involves admitting what happened. Knowing everything often involves a voyeuristic gorging on the sordid details of what occurred. The more you know, the more trouble you will experience with forgiving what happened. each of the lurid details constructs a vivid memory or word picture, that are often hard to erase and let go of.
What this means is that you want to emphasize honesty, yet retain some limits. I am suggested limited honesty or honesty about a limited number of items. If the details would bring more hurt than healing, they do not need to be included. Honesty can be used to hurt when there is an overload of it. Too much honesty makes it difficult for you to ever move past the affair. It may cause you to never see your spouse in a good light again. As humans, we can not handle too much honesty and too much information. You may have great intentions of being able to handle it and perhaps be objective. The more you know, the more you will find yourself being in the role of judge, and less spouse.
So before demanding to know ‘everything’, consider what you are asking for. It is better to ask for honesty than to ask for everything.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
