These days many people resort to using foul language and threats as a poor substitute for inadequate communication. Such techniques allow you to vent and jettison emotions but they don’t make your message clearer.
Technically, the cursing, name calling and threats are more about emoting than they are about communicating. You may call your tirade communicating, but if your message isn’t coming across clearly to the person listening, it’s not communicating.
Typically, when you launch personal attacks, your spouse will defend themselves rather than listen to what you’re saying.
Since affair stir up so many emotions and such deep passions, the assumption is that yelling or adding curse words will get your point across. It gets your point across to yourself, but that doesn’t mean it was clear to others.
Let me be clear with you. Today we are looking at communicating betrayal.
One reason affairs stir up so much is the betrayal involved. There are layers of betrayal involved with an affair. There is the sense of betrayal of being traitorous to your marriage, the aspect of revealing secrets, the misleading, the fraud, the failing and the breaching of trust.
Who knew one word could express so much or that an affair incorporated so many types of betrayal?
So when you yell to your spouse “You Betrayed Me!” Your statement could mean several different things, and could be true as well.
They violated your trust, they kept secrets, they failed in their promise to stay loyal to you, and they mislead you. You’ve probably just focused on feeling betrayed rather than taking a hard look at what kind of betrayal it was.
This is not some intellectual exercise. If the cheater isn’t clear on what aspect of betrayal bothered you the most, they may correct the wrong thing.
When you’re not clear on what kind of betrayal gnaws away at you, how can you know what it’ll take in comforting you? If you don’t know, how will your spouse know?
It’s going to take many conversations in working through the betrayal. It’s not a once and done kind of thing.
If you don’t know where to start, you may want to consider joining the support community at Restored Lifestyle. There you’ll have access to the video dealing with ways of opening up communication between the two of you.
The better the two of you communicate, the less uncertainty, the less confusion and the less time it takes in recovering from the affair.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
