Are you telling yourself a pack of lies? Being lied to is bad. Believing lies is foolish. Lying to yourself is tragic.
Are you lying to yourself?<<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. Today’s topic takes us back to one that we’ve covered a few times from different angles. But since it is such a predominant issue with affairs we need to cover it. And that is the whole issue of lying.
Today what we’re going to be dealing with in terms of lies is the question of are you lying to yourself.
The problem comes up that you may be in a situation where you’re telling yourself a pack of lies. It’s one thing if your spouse is lying to you, that’s bad. The spouse is lying to your, or friends and family are lying to you. That’s always bad.
Believing the lies that they tell you, that’s foolish. But lying to yourself is tragic. And you may be lying to yourself about what’s going on with the affair, about what’s going on with you, about any number of things.
But, if you’re lying to yourself, you’re creating your own hell on earth, so to speak. Because whatever solutions you come up with in terms of your affair recovery, they will only be as solid as what they’re based on. If your solutions are based on a pack of lies that makes for a weak foundation. And that weak foundation is going to eventually give way and create even more problems.
That’s why you need to be very careful about whether or not you’re lying to yourself. You probably know when your spouse is lying to you. But lying to yourself is a little trickier because many times we want to believe what our head tells us. And sometimes our brain and our head does not tell us the truth about situations, and we need to be aware of that. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
First off, in terms of discovering whether or not you’re lying to yourself, is to ask yourself are you making choices based on what you know, or what you assume.
Many times with an affair there’s a lot going on. And you may be making all kinds of choices about whether or not you stay with them or not stay with them, what you do, whether or not lawyers are hired and all this stuff, based on assumptions rather than the facts.
I like this one quote by Mark Twain that sums it up. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. And that about sums it up. What gets us in trouble many times is what we assume we know for sure, and that’s just not the way it is.
You need to ask yourself whether or not you’re making choices based on what you know, or what you assume.
Number two, consider the source of your information. Because people are going to be giving you information all the time. Information about what your spouse is up to, what the lover’s up to. Who knows. But that information’s going to be coming to you. You need to pose the question is it coming from someone who’s reliable and without an agenda.
The reason I pose that question is because when there’s an affair there are some people that are unscrupulous and they take advantage of those situations. Because they know at that moment you are vulnerable. The other half of your marriage is not there being a part of your life and you can be exploited. And there are some people that are so lowdown that they will take advantage of that in order to take advantage of you. To move in because your spouse is cheating, so to speak.
I have also seen situations where people will create the whole rumor of an affair to exploit a situation or to get close to you, to get you all to themselves. I know that sounds terrible, but there are people that do that. That’s one of the realities you’re going to have to realize.
While we’re on the topic of liars and sources of information, bear in mind that the best liars are the ones that give you half-truths, and then allow you to draw your own conclusions. Because the thing is, when your mind comes up with your own conclusion and you start connecting the dots, and you have this insight or this revelation, we tend to believe those kind of conclusions rather than an out and out lie.
And they know if they can feed us enough false or misleading information, yet we come up with a conclusion on our own that’s based on lies or half-lies, we’re going to hold onto that much firmer than had they told us an out and out bald-faced lie.
This is one reason why you’re going to have to be careful what you know and what are the half-truths. And know what they are.
Number three, run your major choices by your chain of counselors as a double-check. I encourage each of you, if you’ve got to make major decisions during this time, to develop a chain of counselors. And by chain of counselors, usually an odd number of people, these are folks that you trust. That look at your best interest. They may or may not be part of your support system. Hopefully they are. They may be family members.
Because the thing is you’re not going to be seeing things clearly. And they can help you during this time. If you’ve got a major choice, and by major choices I realize that business goes on, life goes on, things like that, despite the affair. Although you may feel like your life stopped, or suddenly froze in time when you became aware of the affair, the reality is many things are continuing.
Houses still have to be bought and sold. Cars have to be bought and sold. Lawsuits have to be dealt with. People get tickets. Things happen and you may find yourself having to make major choices. If you have some, at least during the unsteady time shortly after finding out about the affair, you will want to run your choices by your chain of counselors as a double-check.
Because in those early stages a lot of emotions are going to be affecting your thinking, and you may not be thinking clearly. And by going ahead and having a chain of counselors it serves as a convenient double-check on your choices.
Back when you were in school in math, one of the things that they probably taught you was to double-check your problems. Sometimes that involved reworking the problem using another technique to make sure that you got the same results. That’s basically what you’re doing here. It’s just applying it to relationships.
In terms of whether or not you’re lying to yourself, you’ve got some places to start to figure out whether or not you are lying to yourself. And I encourage you to put these things into place. They’re designed to where you can start putting them into place today.
Let me go over them real quickly. Ask yourself are you making choices based on what you know, or what you assume. Number two, consider the source of the information. Number three, run major choices by your chain of counselors.
Each of these will start you on your way of making sure that the information that you’re basing your choices on is based on something solid, rather than being based on a pack of lies. Because if you’ve got solid information you can come up with solid solutions and make solid choices.
Until next time, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. Goodbye.
