Rick's Q & A Call on May 6

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"smothering vs accountability

My husband has voiced before that I smother him. of coarse it was during the time he was hiding the affair from me. What I want to understand is, is my wanting to keep him accountable and confronting him with decisions he makes that could be portrayed as sin or an ungodly lifestyle, different than "smothering". I want him to live a life that is godly and respected. I also want him to call me out on things that could be sin, or turn into sin if I keep in that direction. I don't want to frustrate him with him feeling like I'm being his mother or treating him like a child. Can you help me understand what separates these two from being the same, and what I can do to be doing the right thing in helping him and stop doing the wrong things that are unhealthy.

Cycling In and Out of Trust and Wanting to Stay Married

Rick,

My wife had a three year emotional/sexual affair with a coworker.  I like so many others trusted too much and never had a clue, even though as I look back on it now, there were clues.  I discovered the affair on October 14, 2012.  Since then my wife started, and has four more weeks, of H4H.  I just completed HH.  Durimg her lessons, there was one on "walking completely in the light".  My wife professed to me beginning about in late January 2013 she was completely open an honest with me and she very much loved "walking in the light".  Now, on September 9, 2012, we were up at the lake with my brother and his wife and at about 5 AM that morning my brother's wife awoke me screaming in my ear she had just caught my brother and my wife about to have sex.  I went out, and questioned my wife, who said nothing at the time.  Later, while still at the lake, she did admit my brother had gotten on top of her.  We went home and I questioned her at length about it and she had nothing more to add.  Remember, this is all before I discovered her three year affair.  I directly questoined her about that event for about fifteen minutes back at our home and I was convinced nothing had happened.  After discoving her three year affair on October 15 2012, I asked her many, many times again about her and my brother, and each time she said nothing ever happened.  Well, fast forward to March 15 2013, after my wife had been in H4H for quite sometime and professed to me she had told me everything, and that was only about her three year affair.  On March 15, she sat down on our bed and told me she had had sex with my brother one time earlier in the summer of 2012, before September 9 2012.  I was devastated.  Here she was telling me for basically five months she loved being totally open and honest with me.  Five months of that.  And here she was telling me she had been lying for those five months.  It was another D-day, really a TRIPLE betrayal: she was lying when she told me she had come out with everything, she had drunken sex with my brother, and admitted they were about to have sex again on September 9 2012, drunk again, and now I knew my own flesh and blood brother betrayed me.  My brother who said sex with my wife meant Nothing to him!  Now I know that means also it meant Nothing to him to betray his own brother.

It happens every now and then that when I get very close to my wife, that after a week or a week and a half, I bounce out and say to myself what am I doing?  What am I doing here beginning to trust my wife and falling in love with her again, what am I doing trying to work on our marriage skills, most notably intimacy in the new sense I have learned the word in my HH class, that it is radical honesty that at first may be destabilizing but in the long run is for the greater good. 

I am very, very, concerned with myself and this "cycling behaviior" where I get really, really close to my wife, and then suddenly, just out of the clear blue, I do a complete reversal and want to leave the marriage and I talk about completely giving up, we end up sleeping in different rooms, we don't talk, and things degenerate greatly until I "come around". 

I know my wife did the bravest thing she has probably ever done in her entire life; she did not have to tell me that truth about her and my now estranged brother, she volunteered it.  I know it was probably the most intimate thing anyone has ever done for me, and she is diligent with her H4H and she shows me every day she is "all in".  Even when I am cycled "out of the marriage" she is patient and non-defensive.  I know those behaviors are what keep me coming back, that and my love for her.  But still I cycle, even though it is getting less frequent, it is so alarming to me. 

What can I do beyond praying to God to let me be a vessel for His love for my wife, beyond realizing she gave me the greatest gift I have ever received (that is hard to swallow but I know it to be the truth), beyond realizing I see her chaniging, beyond our successes at communicating honsetly, both emotionally and sexually?  Those all seem like powerful changes and ought to keep me out of the cycling out zone, but I know they can happen.  Please help me with any thoughts, knowledge you have, and any suggestions of what I could pray for about this behavior of mine specifically.

Full Transparency w/ my spouse

 

Hi Rick,

My wife and I just completed week 10 of EMS and it was a very challenging week for us. The topic of relapse is very relevant to me specifically because I have relapsed so many times in our marriage of almost 7 years. I have never had a physical affair, but my battle has been on and off with pornography since I was a child, where I was exposed to it at a very early age. I have come a long way in this battle, but it’s been a long road with success and failure. It has gone from no porn for the first two years in our marriage, to a couple years of viewing porn on my iPhone, to no porn, to another season of lying and looking at porn, to viewing movie trailers and trashy TV shows, to online photo sharing, to now double takes of women.

Just last week, my wife asked me if there was anything that I haven’t been telling her and that she was praying that the Holy Spirit would convict me to share with her. After standing there for about 30 seconds I eventually told her that yes, I have not been sharing with her that I have struggled with ‘double takes’ over the last month or so (a good portion of this time we were in the EMS class). I did commit to telling her if I did have any double takes then I realized that it was something I didn’t even necessarily agree with sharing with her. I tried to bring up my thoughts on the subject during a counseling session with our pastor one Sunday and it did not go well. She was furious, angry, sad, upset…. And we ended up not even going to church but just leaving immediately. I basically told them how I felt that a double take wasn’t necessarily a sexual sin, but maybe just a stupid thing to do that was disrespectful to my wife.

When I do a double take I’m not having sexual fantasies, imagining what that person would be like to have sex with or having much thought at all. Sometimes, I do notice a draw to look at girls that are running or walking by, or if they are wearing something that is maybe a little too revealing and I although I make an effort to not look, and to think about my wife, sometimes I do look. Sometimes I notice 20 girls in a day and‘double take’ 10 times, other days 2 times, other days none. I feel in my heart that at that point I have crossed a line between being tempted an actually doing something sinful, although I don’t think or know if I would call it sexual sin.

I know that lying to her is wrong, and I have and need to continue repenting of this if I do this in the future. I know in my heart that ‘checking girls out’ is a sin also. I hate it, I am trying to be accountable to other guys on this topic and want to be transparent with her but don’t want to agree to share things with her that I don’t believe will help either of us. When she flips out, it puts squeeze on me and I am tempted to lie to her.

I don’t want to lie, but I also don’t want to agree to something that I don’t view is healthy for her or that leads me to more temptation to lie. I can call it sin, or stupidity or a high risk activity, but I know that in my heart it is not the same degree of struggle I face when I look at porn or sexual material online in private. I don’t want to have her spin out of control over every time that I bring something like that to her.

I don’t feel like sharing that level of detail is healthy in our marriage but agreed to do it in an attempt to rebuild trust. I don’t think that it ‘builds her up in love.’

I do have guys that I talk to on a regular, weekly basis about my struggles and share real struggles with them with regards to sexual temptation and I am willing to share this type of struggle with them, as I have in the past. I know God is changing my heart and healing me of this but it’s been a slow process, with lots of stumbling along the way.

Any advice you have on how we can move forward is much appreciated.

Intimacy Question

Hi Rick, My husband and I continue to battle through the topic of what our daily and weekly walk looks like together in terms of open and honesty and what we will and will not share with one another. About 2 and a half weeks ago he admitted to another betrayal - he confessed that he had been lying to me again and struggling with double taking/checking out other women while lying straight to my face about it on multiple occasions since this course has started. This came out during the relapse prevention week after watching the video. He said that for the first month of the class he didn't do double takes because he was so disturbed by our separation and his sin that had just been confessed (a year of porn and lying to me). Then one day after about a month in he just decided that he needed to live life and started double taking again without drawing it out into full blown fantasy episodes, etc. Double takes do hurt me, however, and I am very sensitive to this particular act of visual interest towards attractive women and we have defined it as sin in our marriage if that sexual interest is there. Then he just decided to not tell me about it when I asked him and simply lied to me. He has male accountability and I agree with the idea that I am not his primary accountability partner, but I want to talk about intimacy in this context and what is going on here between me and him. We just read through the "Intimacy" section within the "You've lost that loving feeling" chapter and it talks about the biblical concept of "naked and unashamed" and how we very often replace intimacy with closeness. I think this is exactly what Steve wants to do in this area! He does not want to share double takes with me, thinks it is unhelpful to me and our marriage to tell me when they occur (even though it is important for me that we check in on this occasionally like on a weekly basis during the process of building trust back), and has basically told me that he is not going to confess this but is "working through" if this is right or not. Our evening last night ended in another argument :( about this with no conclusion. It is really starting to wear on me. I can tell that Steve doesn't value openness and honesty as much as I do and I feel like he is just wanting to take the less painful path. He has also told me he doesn't even know if he can stop doubletaking at all which seems to really deminish the power of the cross and is so so so discouraging and hurtful to me. We also had a very young new pastor (who had very different views than your perspective) recently tell us that "openness and honestly is really overrated" and that sharing all temptation and sinful thinking within marriage is simply unhelpful and hurtful (double takes included). I felt really defeated, scared, and in disagreement over this advice, and ever since Steve has really been parroting and agreeing with that person's advice. We are at a pretty major standstill and I am very hurt. Would love direction from you if you have any. And prayer!

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I would highly recommend giving this a try.
 
-D, Texas