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Posts Tagged ‘lying’


Jul 09

Letter From a Betrayed Spouse

By Jay Slupesky
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Marriage Dynamics

ShatteredRick,

I didn’t begin this letter with “Dear Rick” because you aren’t dear to me right now. Far from it. So for now “Rick” will have to do. It’s hard for me to even think about your name, let alone say it out loud.

There is no way that you will ever comprehend the magnitude of what you have done to me. The devastation is total. Everything that I married you for, hoped for in you, believed about you, KNEW about you is gone. All of it. There is nothing left. Where do I go from here, Rick? What do you expect me to do?

So even though I don’t believe that you will ever really get how I feel, I’m going to try to explain it anyway. My therapist says it will be cathartic for me to write this letter.

Remember the night you asked me to marry you? I do. I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve always been a dreamer. When I was a little girl I dreamt about the day a man would propose to me. I imagined what it would be like. And then it actually happened. I was the happiest girl in the world. I started to dream about our perfect wedding.

Remember when we talked about what name I would use after we were married? You told me that I should keep my maiden name because it’s my dad’s name and I am so proud of him. You were right. I am so proud of him. But I was marrying YOU and I decided to take your name so that it could be one more thing that we would share. I wanted us to share everything. Rick, I didn’t want to have my world and you have your world. I just wanted us to have OUR world. You could say that I left my family behind and invested my whole life and future in you. EVERYTHING. In YOU, Rick.

Then we had the perfect wedding and started our life together. I was still a dreamer, only now my dreams turned to us having kids, buying our first house, even growing old together.

Those dreams are shattered now. My whole life and future have been ripped away from me over the last few days.

How could you do this, Rick? I put my WHOLE LIFE into this. Everything I did, every thought I had, was about US. I thought you were doing the same for me and that you felt the same way about us. And all the time you were deceiving me. I feel so stupid now for falling for your lies. I cannot believe that you had a secret life that I wasn’t a part of. It’s hard for me to see how I could ever get back to how I used to feel about you or to ever trust you again.

Here’s the part that I don’t understand: I still love you. And that really puts me in such an awful place. I love a man who has treated me like dirt. Where do we go from here, Rick?

This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.

Becky

Note: this is not really a letter from a betrayed spouse. I would never violate a client’s confidentiality. This letter is merely the product of my imagination.



May 11

Lying, Marriage, and Counseling

By Jay Slupesky
1 Comment
Marriage Dynamics

Liar, Liar

Recently I’ve been counseling a larger-than-usual number of couples who have issues with lying in their relationship. Yes, that’s right: husbands and wives who lie to one another!  I think most people would agree that lying is a sign of dysfunction in the relationship. If you can’t be honest with your life partner, something is very wrong,

Psychologists who study dishonesty say that a person who is lying is undergoing strain just by being dishonest. This stress can usually be measured by skin and heart sensors, as in a lie detector. Besides the stress of telling the lie, it can be mentally tough to continue the deception, as sometimes more lies must be told to cover up the fact of the original lie.

So why do spouses lie to one another?  I’ve noticed three reasons:

  1. To avoid an argument. The dishonest individual is afraid to tell the truth because it is not what the other person wants to hear, and therefore, being honest could result in conflict. What is the solution to this?  Learn how to communicate so that you can talk about things you disagree about without arguing.  This includes being respectful of your partner’s position even if you disagree with it.
  2. To defend against low self-esteem. In this case, the dishonest person doesn’t like himself/herself too well, and believes the partner feels the same way (Freud called this defense mechanism projection.) This is hard to accept, of course, so the lying person inflates accomplishments and denies things that would make him/her look bad.  The liar wants to convince others that he/she is not so bad after all.  What is the solution to this type of lying?  Individual work to increase self-esteem.
  3. To cover up cheating.This is the big one, of course. All kinds of cheating, including physical affairs, emotional affairs, and porn addictions, must be covered up.  Solution?  Stop cheating on your spouse.

One final thought. When a spouse gets caught lying, he/she sometimes will only confess to as little of the truth as possible, and continue lying about the rest. I see this happen over and over again in marriage counseling, and I have found that it is not a good idea. When the rest of the truth comes out at some point in the future, the damage is just as great as when the original disclosure occurred.  It’s best to come clean and admit everything.



Jan 12

I’m Not Going to Lie to You…

By Jay Slupesky
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Infidelity

TroubleWhen there has been infidelity in a couple who is in marriage therapy, questions about rigorous honesty and disclosure usually arise. This is because the unfaithful spouse has been keeping secrets and telling lies. In some cases, he (I’ll assume it’s the husband who was unfaithful) may even have been living a double life, sometimes the good husband/father, but at other times the drinking/flirting/sneaking cheater.

Part of the healing process is to restore honesty, openness, and transparency. Confession is part of this. However, hearing the truth can be very painful to the aggrieved spouse. Handling this disclosure process in marriage therapy can be tricky.

I ask the wife how much detail she wants to know. I find that some wives want to know only in general what happened, while others want to know all the details.  But by letting her decide how much material will be shared, I am able to give her a small sense of power in this situation in which she may feel powerless and helpless.

If there have been many acts of infidelity, it’s typical for the unfaithful spouse to only admit to as few as he thinks he can get away with revealing. I know this in advance, and I tell him that it will be much better for the health of the relationship if he comes clean right away with everything that he did.  Only admitting part of it, then maybe a little more later on, then a little more as necessary, is called staggered disclosure, and it’s much more damaging to the aggrieved spouse, because she is never sure if she has heard everything yet. This makes it more difficult to rebuild trust in the relationship.