The moment you start talking to the cheater about affairs, you’ll encounter games. Ttheir games are designed to distort the truth.
As part of distorting the truth, they tuse lying, denying, twisting and manipulating. They may even come across as very sincere while they’re doing it to you.
A sincere liar is more effective than one that doesn’t truly believe what they’re telling you. Part of selling you with their lies and manipulation is them believing it themselves.
Cheaters forget who the first victims of their own manipulation is. The cheater’s first victim of manipulation is themselves.
The cheaters have manipulated their own thinking in order to justify the affair in their own mind. Since they’ve manipulated themselves, they come across as truly believing what they’re telling you. You don’t like being manipulated, yet the first person manipulated in an affair is the cheater.
Once the cheater has manipulated themselves, they have momentum to manipulate others. Like a stone rolling down a hill, the more lies, the more twisting and manipulating they do, the easier it becomes.
The affair develops its own momentum, crushing the truth and any feelings it encounters along the way.
By definition, manipulation is playing with something. In the case of the cheater, they are playing with you and your emotions. Their games are another way of playing with the situation.
One way they manipulate is by shifting focus.
They go from generalities to specifics. If you want to talk specifics, they talk generalities. If you want to talk generalities, they shift to specifics. By shifting the focus back and forth, they confuse the situation. With the situation confused, they manipulate it to their advantage.
Another popular manipulation consists of debating the meaning of words.
They either don’t define their terms or argue with you over what specific words mean. Definitions of words like sex, affair, involvement, and relationship change . Words you thought were clear suddenly become murky when you’re dealing with a cheater.
You feel like they are constantly dancing around these words. You are speaking one language and they are speaking another, yet you are both using the same words.
This creates an intentional confusion. It’s designed to make things murky. Their hope is in hiding their misdeeds in the murkiness of the situation.
Manipulation and games interfere with recovery from the affair. They keep the both of you stuck. The manipulation amounts to a dysfunctional way of maintaining the ‘status quo’.
The challenge lies in moving past the manipulating behavior. In the downloadable “Affair Recovery Workshop“, I’ll tell you ways of moving past the communication games. You’ll find ways that move you beyond the games and into restoring intimacy.
You can get your relationship unstuck. The two of you can move past the ‘status quo’.
Best Regards,
Jeff
