How do you get the cheating spouse to talk more when surviving infidelity and the extramarital affair?
Dr. Huizenga – the infidelity coach – helps you understand the reasons (3) why the cheating spouse may clam up and tips (3) on opening lines of communication in surviving an affair.
Be very careful about your desire to communicate, sometimes the shared words are hurtful and induce more pain than imagined. Pace your information to provide yourself the strength required to accept, reject or debate any discussion/topic. Above all, stay safe and embrace your special values!
Since we all are so unique, I suppose that we all differ with regard to the amount and specifics of an affair. I, however, assume that most persons cheated on have a very strong urge to rather face the full truth (which I very much doubt will ever be revealed, regardless of the pain all the details might cause, than to live in a surreal reality, created by a cheating spouse (just as being deceived during the affair/s!). I happen to be a rather inquisitive, analytical person and therefore am of the opinion that I am entitled to and after all deserve to know the whole truth and nothing but it. Therefore I believe that the suffering party of an affair could find it difficult to come to terms with infidelity and to find closure in the aftermath, that could be prolonged in an attempt to try and understand what caused the other spouse to stray in the first place. It really is extremely daunting to be left in the dark about your spouses deep and secreted fantasies that part of him/her evidently is not prepared to share with the one and only person that is supposed to fulfill these desires and needs as should be the case in a supposedly loving relationship. I do, however, acknowledge and understand that others might feel otherwise with regard to this topic. Unfortunately to my experience there really is no bigger lier than an unfaithful partner, which in itself could be regarded as a major character flaw.
I found that I needed to know all the details of the affair. How can you begin to heal unless you know the full truth. I found my husband didn’t want to say everything because he was “embarassed and ashamed” of his behavior once he took a step back and took a real look at what he had been doing. But with the truth, comes more hurt. I think that everyone should keep that in mind. There are things that I discovered about my husband that actually had me embarassed for him. It hurt me that he was actually that “stupid”. Not the cheating part (although that hurt), but the fact of who he had done it with. She’s a serial cheater and for some reason he actually thought that he was “special” and it meant more to her than just a roll in the hay. He says that his reasons for doing it were more on the way she made him feel about himself than any real feelings. This hurt because it meant that he did it for ego than real emotion. So he almost destroyed our marriage out of ego! This hurt worse than the actual fact. What I’m saying to everyone is, be prepared when you ask what happened. You may be more hurt than you realized.