Years ago the musician Freddy Fender recorded the song “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” which was a popular song. I was reminded of the song when considering how many of you who are hurting spend time worrying about and chasing down answers to questions that get you nowhere.
Questions like “What kind of affair was it?” , “Why did they hate me?”, “Why her/him?”, “Why …” Such questions often bog you down in self-pity and suck your self-confidence right out of you.
They clog up your mind with remorse, regret and self-pity while keeping you from moving ahead. I often use the term “mental masturbation” in describing this activity.
First, “Why” questions focus on the past. They look for explanations or who to blame. Since you will move in the direction of your questions, such questions will keep you in the past. (I address the danger of ‘why’ questions more in depth in the ‘Affair Recovery Workshop‘).
Questions focusing on ‘What kind of Affair is it?‘ lead you into a quagmire of analysis and explanation. You end up spending a lot of your time and energy deconstructing the affair.
Your mind is overwhelmed figuring out motives and the reasons for those motives. Addressing what kind of affair it is too early puts you at risk for developing circular logic.
It may satisfy your curiosities, but does little in terms of improving your marriage or communication with your spouse. The time to consider such questions is AFTER you and your spouse are together and past the affair.
It’s only then that the two of you will be able to see what happened clearly enough to get straight answers. Trying to understand the affair beforehand makes your situation worse than it has to be.
Not only does it make your situation worse, working at finding answers to those kind of questions too early in recovery end up pushing the two of you further apart rather than bringing you together.
A better alternative is considering questions that move your relationship forward. Questions directed at solving problems and improving intimacy.
This is one of the reasons I stress communication and asking the right questions.The questions you ask determine the direction you take your marriage, whether back into the past, with the ‘same old fights’ or forward toward the future.
Whether or not the two of you stay together, you will still have to talk with each other and solve problems together. No divorce will stop the communication.
Once the two of you are working together again, then you can analyze and understand what happened. This is better in that the two of you working together will accomplish more than you trying to analyze it by yourself.
Plus, when you are working together, a safer environment is created to explore what happened. The information is not so threatening at this point.
Best Regards,
Jeff
