When you find out your spouse cheated, it forces you to deal with hard truths. It makes you look at things you have tried not looking at. This includes hard truths about yourself, your marriage and your spouse.
You have to consider how you are doing as a spouse. This includes your habits, your self care routines and your availability. As you try to work through the trauma of cheating, it’s important to be honest with yourself about your role in this.
Your spouse cheated because he or she felt it was an option. They created a choice that should never have been made. When making that choice, it was a decision about how they value you.
You have to consider that your marriage is not as good as you thought it was. This also means that you missed some important clues about your marriage relationship and how you deal with your spouse.
You also have to deal with a spouse that betrayed you and lied to you. You now have to face a side of them that you avoided looking at. That side was always there and you missed it.
They also did you wrong. They made choices that ended up hurting you. They did not cherish you above all others. You have to accept that you were not their first priority.
You have to face the fact that they have been dishonest on a scale that is hard to imagine. You may not want to put your mind around all of it, but now you have no choice. Your life has been turned upside down and you need some hard truths in order for it to function and make sense.
Those hard truths force you to consider difficult choices. Hard truths bring a reality about what is going on and what your options are. You may not like them, but now you have to deal with them. You have to find options that you can live with on a daily basis.
There is no sugar coating hard truths. They force you to grow up and look at the world differently.
It could be that you and your spouse are both lying as ways of dealing with the hard truth about your marriage. When you consider the inability to deal with hard truths as a driver behind lying, you see things differently.
One of the hard truths is that you need help. Try saying it out loud “I need help!”
If you resisted saying it, you are struggling with hard truth about help.
In the download, “Affair Recovery Workshop“, I’ll guide you through the challenges of ‘telling yourself the truth’. The affair took you out of your comfort zone. There are things you need to learn in order to turn your marriage around.
A good follow up after saying “I need help!“, is asking for it and following it.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
