When You're Afraid to Tell Your Spouse the Whole Truth, Part 1 - Your Fear

Welcome to Becoming Whole Audio, where we provide insight and guidance on sexual integrity and wholeness. In this episode,  host Josh Glaser delves into the delicate topic of disclosing unwanted sexual behavior to a spouse.

 He responds to a listener's question about how much should be shared with a spouse, particularly when they have already disclosed some details and encountered negative reactions. Josh explores the importance of trust, the impact of secrets on recovery, and the role of truth in healing relationships. 

The episode is the first of a three-part series, offering a compassionate and practical perspective on navigating this challenging aspect of recovery. Join us as we delve into difficult but crucial conversations for the journey towards wholeness.

Want us to talk about a specific topic? Change up the format, or just tell us the podcast rocks! We want your feedback on Becoming Whole. You can leave your feedback here

If you are in the Baltimore Area, Regeneration is happy to invite you to our 2024 Dessert Fundraiser, Spark: One Small Thing Leads to So Much More. This annual gathering is a highlight for so many as we gather for tasty desserts, heartfelt worship, vulnerable and powerful stories, and an opportunity to partner with what Jesus is doing through Regeneration. Click Here for more info or to register.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Hey everybody, okay. So I got a question from someone who was asking how much am I supposed to tell my spouse about my unwanted sexual behavior? And by the way the person framed the question, it sounds like his wife already knows some of the details of things that he's been wrestling with and has wrestled with in the past, but he's reticent to tell her more because, in his words, she's open quote, freaking out, close quote. Whenever he's told her anything, he's told her already. So and I think a lot of guys have been in the situation a lot of husbands and wives perhaps have been in the situation where they've disclosed to their spouse some of what they've been wrestling with or some of what they've done, but because of the spouse's reactions responses, pain, anger about what they've shared, disbelief, shock, whatever but what they've shared they they feel like they want to hold back sharing more. So, for example, a husband may have told his wife that he's been looking at pornography for the last year and it's just devastated her to find that out, and and so he feels really reluctant to tell her that actually he's been struggling with pornography their whole marriage and they've been married for years and years. Or another example might be a husband and wife who are in recovery together. The husband, say, has has told his wife everything up to this point, but every time he has a little bit of a relapse he slips and looks at something for a few minutes that he shouldn't online he lost after somebody at work. His wife is kind of sent back into that spiral of just remembering all the deception from years past and so he feels like I don't know if I want to tell her every time I have a slip up. Or maybe it's the wife who had an affair with one of her coworkers or someone from church two years ago and the husband and wife been working through the recovery, but it just devastated the husband. And so today, when she has a thought about someone and she finds herself drawn towards someone, she wants to open up to her husband about it, but she's afraid that that'll send him spiraling down into the deep depression that he was in for so long. So what is a spouse supposed to do when they are in active recovery? So this is not someone who's hiding things and trying to continue to nurse their sexual sin, but they they're in active recovery, working to grow in sexual integrity and trying to navigate how to talk with their husband or wife about where they are today, when previous conversations have been really, really difficult with that spouse?

Speaker 1: 2:46

Great question, an important question, not necessarily an easy one to answer, but I want to offer just some guiding principles and some pieces of scripture that I think could offer some, some guard rails and some guidelines as you're trying to navigate this together. So, before we get too far, I want to just say that this is a it's a big topic, and so we we know that we can't answer it. I can't answer it all in just one 10 minute podcast, so we're going to do three parts to this. We'll either drop it three different weeks or maybe we couple it up I'm not sure, but in any case, this is just the first and we're going to have two other parts to this podcast.

Speaker 1: 3:21

So I want to begin by just talking to the, the spouse who has the sexual addiction. So in this case, it was a husband who's who is writing this question, so I'm going to refer to that way. I know that there are wives who've been unfaithful to their husbands and so some husbands may be listening who are saying okay, I'm not the one who betrayed my spouse, I'm the one who's who was betrayed but bear bear with me, I'm just for ease of listening. So, to the husband who has been, who's been the one who's been involved in this sexual behavior, you need to recognize a couple of things right from the get go. Number one is that trust is a bedrock of any healthy relationship and so, as difficult as it's going to be, it is very, very important that you make trust rebuilding trust with your spouse one of your top priorities. If you want your marriage to be saved, if you want your marriage to thrive and to be healthy again or healthy perhaps for the first time, you're going to need to make trust a higher priority than your own comfort and even then your spouse's temporary comfort. Secondly, second kind of bedrock principle in this is that your recovery depends on your ability to be open and honest with your spouse.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Way too many sexually addicted spouses believe that the reason they don't want to bring up their sexual indiscretions, their sexual sins, with their spouse is because of their spouse's reaction. Because their spouse is anger, their spouse is pain, their spouse is tears, their spouse is inability or, in the case of the person who wrote in here, their spouse is quote unquote freaking out. But what they fail to recognize is that under that reason is not that they're desiring to protect their spouse, they're really trying to protect themselves, and protect themselves in a dysfunctional way. Every relationship goes through hardship. Every relationship is painful and difficult because husbands and wives see each other close up in ways that nobody else does. It's one of the great joys, but also one of the great hardships of marriage when a husband comes to me and says, hey, I don't want to tell my wife because I think it's going to hurt her because she freaks out.

Speaker 1: 5:41

One of the things that we need to explore as we unpack that is what is the cost to the husband in this situation and what are his fears about her freaking out?

Speaker 1: 5:56

Is it so bad that she freaks out? Is it inappropriate that she freaks out? Might that be a normal, natural, even healthy, response to learning something very painful about what you've done, and in many cases, in fact, it is. Tears are appropriate, anger is appropriate, and so for a husband who's been on faith to his wife to begin to unpack the reality that part of the reason that you've looked outside of your marriage for sexual stimulation, sexual gratification, is because of your own relational brokenness, your own underdeveloped ability to deal with and walk with real relational issues, real emotions. To understand your own emotions and to sit with them, to attune to your own feelings and to attune to others' feelings, to sit with your own pain and discomfort and anger and shame, and to sit with your spouses anger and fear and shame and whatever else these are. Actually a part of recovery is learning to pay attention, to attune to your own emotions, including really hard, really painful hard to manage emotions, and to learn to regulate your own emotions and to learn to sit with others' emotions and regulate your own emotions in the process.

Speaker 1: 7:23

And if this sounds like deep waters for you are unfamiliar to you, then I'd say actually that it's probably right on point. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then this is probably exactly what you need to hear that your avoidance of her freaking out may actually have something to do with your own dysfunction, what it's sent you spiraling into unhealthy sexual behaviors. Your sexual behaviors have their genesis in broken relationship in your life, in painful emotions in your life, and the journey ahead for you in recovery includes beginning to get a greater understanding and a greater compassion for your own relational brokenness, the conflict and wounds you've experienced in relationship and your own emotional responses to that. And as you do, that, it'll actually help you to care more for your wife and to walk with her through the ups and downs of whatever it is that she's experiencing in your marriage and in the rest of her life. All right, so let me simplify all of what I'm trying to say here as I bring this piece of advice or this podcast, to close.

Speaker 1: 8:32

If you're concerned about your wife's reactions and her big emotions to your sexual acting out and the sharing either the full scope of what you've shared so maybe you've shared a little drip or little drips of what you've done, but there's bigger stuff you've done and you think, man, if she freaked out that much to the little stuff, there's no way she can handle the larger stuff I want to encourage you to reconsider that. Maybe what you're really concerned about is it was very difficult for you to walk through how she experienced the small stuff and that you may be terrified of how she's going to experience the bigger stuff. Well, rather than making a unilateral decision about what you will or won't share with her, begin with getting some help about your own fears of her emotions, your own fears about how she responded in the past and how she may respond here. And that leads me to the next piece, which is maybe when you shared part of your indiscretions in the past, your sins in the past, she reacted so strongly and you thought, man, my marriage on the brink with that stuff. If I tell her the whole truth, then my marriage is over. That's a very real fear and I know that it's difficult, but I want to suggest to you that the truth is always your friend.

Speaker 1: 9:55

The truth is the friend of your marriage. The truth is your wife's friend. What's your enemy is the secrecy, is the hiding and is the sin that you've done. So don't align yourself. Don't ally yourself with secrecy and deception and lying and the sins that you've done. Align yourself with the truth and step into the light for your wife's sake. I can't guarantee you that she's not going to leave. I can't guarantee you that your marriage can be saved. She'll have to make those choices, but you're inviting her to make the choice based on the reality of what you've done, rather than inviting her to make the decision based on a lie. And this is important for her sake because, in my experience, the truth comes out. The truth comes out, and if it's something that she discovers versus something that you disclose, the chances of recovery for your marriage increase when you've been honest and decrease when she had to find the truth out some other way.

Speaker 1: 11:03

There's another reality here, too. If you are sincere about your own desire for sexual wholeness, for sexual integrity, then this is important for your recovery too. Patrick Carnes discovered decades ago that one of the core beliefs of the man or woman wrestling sexual addiction is that if anyone ever really knew me, they'd reject me, and so part of what you're up against with this decision is that fear, that faulty belief, that deep core belief that drives your sexual behavior, that if anyone knows you, they're going to reject you. That's the core shame that drives your sexual behavior, and if you are deceiving your spouse and not telling them the full truth, then you're leaving room for that lie to continue with the most important person in your life. You, in essence, are leaving room for that shame to continue to perpetuate in your life, and that is going to continue to trip you up in your own capacity for sexual integrity and sexual wholeness. So if you take nothing else away from this podcast, take this away. The truth is your friend and it is the friend of your spouse and it is the friend of your marriage. Anything working against the truth in your marriage, in your life and in your spouse's life is going to be detrimental to your marriage.

Speaker 1: 12:27

Now, how and when to share those things is bigger than just what we're going to get into this podcast. We'll talk a little bit more about it in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, if you need help with this, you do not have to do this on your own. We have a team of people here who would be happy and honored to walk with you, who will not shame you, won't make you do something. They're not going to out you. They're here to walk with you towards the light, towards truth, and help you as you seek to grow in sexual integrity and restore your relationships.

Speaker 1: 12:58

Jesus, thank you. You are God who can be trusted. Thank you that you are in the light. Lord, I pray for each man and woman listening that you would give them courage to live in the light. Lord, I know this is hard. I know from personal experience that this is hard. Lord, would you grant them, would you grant us all grace to be truthful about what we do what we've done that we might have healthy relationships with no fear and no shame anymore. Lord, I pray this for their sake, for the sake of their marriages. I pray this for your glory, jesus Amen.