You may have suspected that an affair was going on before actually finding proof of it. You may have known
more about what was going on with the affair than you wanted to admit.
You often want to block out painful or distasteful information.
One of the steps in my “Recovery Process” approach used in the Affair Recovery Workshop, involves ‘telling yourself the truth’. Telling yourself the truth feels awkward when you’ve been selectively blocking out things from your mind with inattention to affair-related issues.
You may have been blocking out problems between you and your spouse, or the growing amount of space between the two of you or the lack of engagement. You may have dismissed such things as ‘natural’ or busied yourself with other activities.
It is easier picking up your smartphone or hop in front of your computer than it is to actually sit down and get ‘real’ with your spouse.
You may even use television or music as ways of blocking out things you don’t want to face.
You may be confronting the cheater about them avoiding honesty, while you run from nagging thoughts yourself.
Although you may want to put 100% of the blame on them, if your own selective inattention has been blocking things out, there was a part of you that knew things were not quite right. Part of ‘telling yourself the truth’ is getting honest with yourself about the inattention or blocking out of things.
Expecting your spouse to get real and be honest only works when you’re honest and real as well. Expecting more of them than you’re willing to be makes for an unhealthy one-sided marriage relationship.
If you want a healthy marriage relationship, it’s important that both of you are honest and real. Rather than avoiding issues through selective inattention or denial of the obvious, you’ll have to face those awkward moments openly.
I call them awkward moments since they take you out of your comfort zone. These moments are often situations that you have been avoiding facing or dealing with. You may have even told yourself that they are ‘too painful’ or ‘too much’, which does little to manage the situation, only adding more fear.
That fear may have been keeping you paralyzed or in a state of inactivity. You are too afraid to face those awkward parts of your relationship.
I learned a lesson about facing fear and selective inattention from one of my professors at the University of Houston at Clear Lake City. During one of his lectures, Dr. Fryrear opened up about how he experienced a series of dreams where he was chased by a bull.
Night after night, he found himself enduring the dream of being chased by the bull. He found himself fearing the bull and dreading the dream.
Eventually he made the decision that he was going to ‘face the bull’.
That night, when the dream began where the bull began chasing him, he stopped rather than ran. The bull, stopped as well. With both of them now stopped rather than doing their nightly chase and being chased routing. The professor then asked the bull, “Why are you chasing me?”. The bull, stunned by the sudden change gave a response that concerned how the professor had been avoiding some relationship issues in his life.
After the dream, the professor then faced those issues and the dream of being chased by the bull ended.
There may be bulls chasing you in your dreams. Instead of running from them, now is the time you need to face them. This starts with ‘telling yourself the truth’. (I go into more details about telling yourself the truth in the Affair Recovery Workshop as part of my unique ‘Affair Process’ technique to recovering from the affair).
Best Regards,
Jeff
