As long as there have been affairs, there have been false accusations. The damage from false accusations can be as damaging as the affair itself.
Dealing with False Accusations <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad you’re here today. The topic we’re going to be dealing with in today’s session is dealing with false accusations.
As long as there have been affairs there have been false accusations. The two go hand-in-hand. There are situations where although you may be accused of an affair nothing happened, and there was no affair.
Then again, maybe there was. But we’re going to go ahead and be looking at the false accusations today.
There can be many reasons and many motivations behind false accusations. They have a long history. Even the Bible records episodes of having to deal with false accusations of affairs.
The damage from false accusations oftentimes is as damaging as the affair itself. Because regardless of the source or the cause you’re going to need to do something quickly when you have accusations.
The accusations create a situation filled with mistrust, it can damage your reputation, it can poison the water so to speak.
Many people can be behind these false accusations. It may be a rival, either business or political rival. It can be family members, enemies, people that are jealous of you.
Even in terms of espionage, I know that sounds way out, but some of you have government jobs, and some of you may be in a situation where you’re in a financial institution or even a business that is highly competitive, and there’s a lot of business espionage. The whole idea of spies using false accusations is not that out of hand.
Some of the areas where damage can occur from a false accusation involve trust, intimacy, security, and communication. It’s almost like there’s an explosion there within the marriage, even though nothing’s happened, and you still have to deal with the fallout.
That’s part of the reason we’re going to be dealing with this. Even though the false accusations are dismissed, the marriage can continue to have trouble regaining solid footing and solid stability.
Once your reputation within the marriage has been shaken you’re still on shaky ground for awhile. So we’re going to be talking about what you can do about it.
My solution is to take care of the RASH. I’m using RASH as an acronym, so I’m using RAS at home, meaning you need to do these things at home.
Much like a real rash you want to take care of it before it spreads. Likewise with the accusations of an affair, in the case of false accusations you need to take care of it before it spreads.
- The R part, ‘respond in like kind to accusations‘. What I mean by that, when your spouse makes accusations to you and they’re talking about some behavior you’re doing or some emotion, respond emotion to emotions and behavior to behavior.
This is important because many times they may just have a feeling that something’s not right, respond to that feeling with some of your feelings. If they say that you did something wrong, then you talk about doing wrong.
I mention this because some folks mess up by either ignoring the feelings of their spouses in this area, or criss-crossing them. The spouse is talking about feelings and they say well I never did XYZ, ABC, in terms of behavior in responding to it.
They came at you with an emotion, you responded with a behavior. And it misses their message totally. That leads to some shipwreck.
2. The A part. Avoid the appearance of impropriety. You need to do some proactive intervention, especially when there’s been accusations. You don’t want to appear that you’re doing anything wrong.
This mens you need to be extra careful involving meetings, calls, emails. You’re going to need to take a look at all your interactions through your spouse’s eyes. I know through your eyes you don’t see that you’re doing anything wrong. You need to look at it through their eyes. That may be where you’re messing up.
3. In terms of the S part, make sure of your relationship with your spouse. Move fast, move strategically, and show that you are committed to them, and that you are loyal to them.
The mistake that people make here, they quickly respond after there’s been a false accusation and say “Oh, I would never do this, I would never do that”, and they dismiss the accusation before making sure of their relationship.
When this happens you want to make sure that you send the message to your spouse that you love them, that you’re committed to them, then you can deny whatever accusation.
But you want to make sure of the relationship with your spouse first. Because in the event that there is a false accusation, like say for instance a business rival goes ahead and starts spreading vicious rumors about you, if you have your spouse on your side that teamwork of you and your spouse is very powerful in turning things around.
I know it may seem like it’s alarmist of me to bring up this topic, but I have worked with couples, business situations where somebody was jealous of another person because they got a promotion so they started spreading rumors of an affair.
I’ve seen some situations where one worker wants to sleep with a coworker so they start spreading rumors of an affair to create an atmosphere where it can happen. That was a false accusation.
I know from talking to people these things do happen. And you need to be aware of it, and you need to have some ideas as to how to deal with it rather than just say I didn’t sleep with this person, I didn’t sleep with that person, and that’s that. No. It’s going to take more than that. That’s why I wanted to go ahead and give you this today.
In going over these again, 1) respond in like kind to the accusations. 2), avoid the appearance of impropriety. And 3) make sure of your relationship with your spouse. Taking these actions, in this case using the acronym take care of the RASH, at home. Take care of this stuff quickly, at your home. It will put you way on the road of getting past these false accusations.
It is hard to prevent any false accusations at all from being made, but these are some things you can do when those accusations come, to make sure that your marriage is strong as it can be and to move past these false accusations before they start turning into fears, doubts, resentments, and so forth.
When you’re needing a support group in recovering from the affair, consider joining the support community at Restored Lifestyle. There you’ll find others like yourself along with videos and resources designed for helping you recover.
Best Regards,
jeff
