When You're Afraid to Tell Your Wife the Whole Truth, Part 2 - Her Trauma

 In the previous episode, we delved into the delicate topic of how to address disclosing sexual sins to your spouse when fear and relational brokenness come into play. We discussed the importance of working through your own fears and the impact of relational brokenness on your perception. 

Today, we'll explore the trauma experienced by the spouse on the receiving end of such revelations. We'll address the concept of betrayal trauma and its profound impact on a spouse's sense of reality and trust. We'll also touch on the process of disclosure and the vital role of being an ally in each other's healing journeys. 

Join us as we navigate the complexities of honesty, trust, and healing within marriages affected by sexual brokenness.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Hey, everybody, welcome back. If you weren't with this last podcast, I encourage you to go back and listen to that. We started to address this question of how to talk with your spouse when you're afraid to tell them the whole truth about your sexual sins and got into a lot of important details just about addressing your own fears and the likelihood that your own relational brokenness that is underneath your sexual brokenness may actually be playing into your perception of whether or not it's a good idea to talk with your spouse and the importance of working through that so you can make a good decision for their benefit and for your benefit. And this week we want to dive into what your spouse is experiencing, what may be going on for them, with the big responses, big reactions to what you've shared. So first of all, we have to address the reality of trauma that many of these marriages are experiencing. If you have been involved in sexual behavior and have been lying or deceiving or keeping that information from your spouse for a long time and they have recently discovered it or you've recently disclosed it to them, they're going to experience. Most often they're going to experience some level of trauma. It's called betrayal trauma and this is based on the work of Barbara Steffens, who's really opened up the world of betrayal trauma to so many of us in this area of ministry. And in essence, it works like this that your spouse has been living with a version of reality that they have been relying upon for years, and they've come to find out that that version of reality is not in fact reality, and so what they've been relying on is pulled out from underneath their feet suddenly and painfully and harmfully. You can literally picture here, for example, if you're walking to work every day for 10 years and your walk includes walking over a bridge, and then suddenly one day, without warning, that bridge collapses under you and you go tumbling down 40, 50 feet, crashing to the ground and the rubble of the bridge falls on top of you and somehow, miraculously, you survive. You're going to experience trauma from that point on when you try to walk across a bridge on your way to work, because what you'd relied upon suddenly and inexplicably collapsed beneath you.

Speaker 1: 2:42

And this is not a perfect analogy, but somewhat of a helpful analogy, I think, in understanding what happens for a spouse who has put her weight on the reality she thought was happening in her life, she thought she was living in, only to find that it collapsed underneath her without warning. And so now, when she thinks back to your vacation two years ago, that had been filled with good family memories and a feeling of connection. Now that reality is reshaped and becomes something very, very different, where she now knows that you were having an affair then or you might have been looking at pornography on that vacation, and those are the kinds of questions that come forward. And so when that spouse asks those kinds of wait were you looking at porn on that vacation? Were you lost on the vacation? Were you in the affair on the vacation, for example and she learns the truth Now, suddenly her whole world is being rewritten right out from underneath her and the story that she thought was a romance becomes a horror movie.

Speaker 1: 3:45

And I'm speaking in pretty stark terms here. I know that's not the full truth of most marriages who are undergoing the situation, but it can be how it feels for the spouse. And so when this writer says but when I've told her this stuff in the past, she's quote unquote freaked out. We should do a dress that for some people, that quote unquote freaking out is trauma. It's a person grappling with trying to take hold of what the hell is real. Where can I stand? It feels like the whole world underneath me has collapsed and I don't know where I can be safe anymore. It's incredibly scary, incredibly disorienting, incredibly confusing, incredibly painful.

Speaker 1: 4:33

And when you talk to husbands or wives who have experienced this, it's not just the relationship with their spouse that's impacted by this. It can be all manner of relationships that become impacted by this. How do I know that I can trust my own, my very own senses anymore, my own gut intuition, because I trusted it before and it let me down. So this isn't just about trusting you. It's about can I trust myself again? And it's very disoriented, very painful.

Speaker 1: 5:00

And so what we are finding is that, as painful as it is and as hard as it is for a spouse to continue to be honest about slip-ups or failures or to share the whole truth of what a person has done in the past, that that actually is the way toward healing. And, if I could be so bold as to say your willingness to share the truth when it hurts her and you actually helps to restore her sense that she can trust you to tell her what reality is where the ground is beneath her feet, and that's not me prescribing how and when you tell her, but it is me telling you unequivocally that to tell your spouse husband or wife, to tell your spouse when you have slipped up is a helpful way to regain trust that you are on the side of reality and not just the side of saving yourself from the hassle or pain or difficulty of your spouse reeling or getting angry or crying. When you share a little bit of your story and you can actually become an ally to your spouse in her own healing from the trauma if she'll let you. And I want to recommend to you a book called Help Her Heal by Carol Jurgensen Sheets Carol Jurgensen Sheets S-H-E-E-T-S. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 6:23

But that's worth working through with a mentor, guide or coach because it's you working towards being an ally to her in her healing of trauma, even as you're asking her to be an ally to you in your healing of your sexual addiction. I also want to recommend to you, given the nature of betrayal trauma, that if you are working through or need to work through a disclosure in which you are sharing with your spouse the full scope of what you have done sexually, of your sexual indiscretions through your relationship, or even prior to your relationship, that is worth working through with somebody who has been trained to help couples walk through the disclosure process. There's a helpful formal, or at least semi-formal, process that a husband and wife can work together through with a coach or with a therapist who's trained in this, where the wife works through what she really needs to hear and decides some of the things that she may be interested to hear, curious to hear but aren't going to be helpful for her, and where the husband works through what he really needs to say and so he's not relying on his own memory in the moment of his own stressful trying to recount things, but he's actually prepared ahead of time to come and bring the full truth in an appropriate way to serve her and to serve the relationship, rather than just trying to kind of…. Otherwise, what might happen is he flips into his brain, flips into that fight or flight mode, and his ability to kind of speak the full truth and to kind of keep his head about him as he shares with her shuts down and so he's not as able to do so. So we've got a couple people on our team, two or three people on our team, who have been trained in that disclosure process and you can reach out to us if that's something that you and your spouse are at a point of really wanting to work through, and we highly recommend it. So that's the beginning. That's just me addressing betrayal trauma from the get-go.

Speaker 1: 8:19

But let's say, now that you are a couple and you've done a disclosure, you've kind of the full truth is on the table, you're both working, recovery, there's been some healing from the betrayal trauma and continued help on both sides on dealing with your addiction, and now you're just trying to work through. Like, well, what do I? How much of my ongoing journey do I tell her? So, if I have a slip up at work and I and I, you know, look at something provocative and an advertisement that was sent to me, or I watched a video that was linked on a YouTube channel, do I tell her all that information? Or an old girlfriend or boyfriend reached out to me and I replied how much of that stuff do I tell her?

Speaker 1: 9:01

Well, if you've gone through this process with your spouse, you can actually begin to work through it together. Like, what do you need to share? What's going to be helpful for you, what's going to be helpful for her, and specifically regarding what's going to be helpful for her as it relates to not sending her spiraling down into that place of betrayal trauma again, not triggering her trauma as she experiences your truthfulness to her and your truthfulness with her. So, specifically, what I mean here is answering the question how much do I share with her Is a question that you, too, need to work through together. It's not a question for a coach, a therapist, your support group, to answer on her behalf.

Speaker 1: 9:45

This is actually something that you want to work through with her, and if you believe that you have solid reason why working it through this with her is actually not a good idea maybe she's never gotten help, maybe she's got some medical things going on or some other extenuating circumstances where you believe no, I authentically believe that me sharing more with her is going to do more harm than good in the long run of our marriage then I would strongly encourage you to bring that to a mentor or a coach, somebody who can listen objectively to your concerns and help you make that decision, because that would be a very, very rare case. In my opinion, we are really talking about the bedrock of trust that is required for a healthy marriage and to make a unilateral decision about how much or how little you need to share with your spouse around these things leaves a lot, a lot of room for there to be ongoing mistrust between you. With that said, final leg of the journey here, let's say that you and your spouse have walked through disclosure. He or she does know the full extent of what you've been dealing with and you are walking together in recovery. You're each getting some help and you're just finding it's difficult to navigate this and you're just looking for some counsel on. Well, give us some ideas of what might be helpful and what might not be helpful as far as what to share. If that's you, I want to encourage you.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Listen to our next podcast, which we will release next week. I want to get into those at greater length. I don't want to rush through that, because that's an important, important question, jesus, in the meantime, would you just hold each husband, each wife, listen to this podcast? I've zipped through a lot of really important stuff, lord, but I pray that at minimum, if they need it, they would be reaching out for the kind of help and support they really need and that you would be sustaining each one, husband and wife, lord, for their good, through your glory In Jesus' name, amen.