A Happy New Year to you all! I offer a big, hearty “thank you” to everyone who read and commented on my Week of Brutal Honesty posts before the holidays. It was very cathartic to me to write those posts and to participate in the comments, and I hope it was for others as well.
So here we are, rolling into 2019. Handsome’s primary focus at the moment is eliminating his compulsive lying. To a “normal” brain, it sounds fairly ridiculous, but addicts are relentless liars. Handsome’s compulsive lying likely started in his childhood and escalated in his high school years when he first started living a kind of secret life. (His parents would think he was at school all day when he would actually leave and go hang out at the town library for hours on end. He was dying to learn, but hated school for a variety of reasons.) It certainly set the stage for the decades of addiction-driven secrets and lies that followed.
His assignment is essentially to do two things: (i) not lie, and (ii) journal about every time he thinks about lying, whether big or small, and explore his motivations behind why he was going to or did lie. If he lies he is supposed to fess up and correct the lie immediately. (I am fully aware of the irony in relying on an expert liar to admit to his lies, but it is what it is.)
I was working on some recovery materials this past weekend and one of the topics involved trickle truth and the damage and trauma it causes. As is often the case, this got me thinking very specifically about Handsome’s disclosures. In short, it occurs to me that the use of trickle truth – staggering his disclosures and lying by repeatedly stating that he had told me “everything” – was likely highly effective for him.
To be clear, I am not saying that there were no negative consequences of the trickle truth. I am instead suggesting that – on balance – the negative consequences of the trickle truth for him were likely less severe than the consequences of telling me everything honestly from the beginning. Handsome’s initial disclosure was that he had one physical affair. In those initial, highly charged days after disclosure, I was making a decision to stay or to leave the relationship based on, I thought, his extra-marital involvement with one person. If I had any inkling that there were at least five other long-term emotional and physical affair partners, plus all the pros and online randos, my initial analysis would have been very different. I tend to think that I would have simply thrown him out and filed for divorce.
It’s almost as if to stay in the marriage I had to ease into the concept of being the wife of a sex addict just as he had to ease into the disclosure of his acting out and acknowledgement of his addiction.
With that said, I do believe that we reached a point – probably about 2 months after our 2nd DDay (when his addiction truly came to light) – after which additional disclosures became nothing but destructive. After that point we had both put considerable time, effort, and money into healing separately and together… we were staying together if we both did the work… so further trickle truth just undermined the new foundation we were trying to build.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that trickle truth is a good thing. There are power dynamics and certainly selfishness and self-preservation at play when one is asked to tell the whole truth and they do not do so. It is also unquestionable in my mind that trickle truth exacerbates betrayal trauma. Instead, I think I’ve just come to the conclusion that trickle truth from a cheater is to be expected. It often works, to a degree, for them.
Perhaps I handled it all wrong with Handsome. Perhaps the mantra shouldn’t have been “tell me the truth or I’m throwing you out” but rather “move out until you can prove to my satisfaction that you have told me the truth.” Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, that would have been the smarter move.
I’m glad you brought this up. The conventional wisdom is that trickle truth is “bad,” “causes more trauma,” etc. etc. I definitely believe the partner has a right to know everything he or she wants to know. My own personal situation is that I got the truth in stages, like virtually every other partner I personally know. For me, I think it was just as well. I really did not understand SA and had many of the typical misconceptions. I found it to be very confusing and knowing everything that first night I found the text message would have overwhelmed me. I was not in a place emotionally at that point in time to hear it all with no support. Finding out that my partner of nearly 30 years, whom I never once suspected of being unfaithful, had been seeing a prostitute, was shocking and very unreal. The first admission was that he had been seeing the prostitute for about 6 months, once a week or so. That was devastating. That was true for THAT prostitute. The whole truth was he had been picking up street whores for about 32 years and it pre-dated our relationship. I don’t think I could have even processed that information that first night as I was in total shock.
I have read about SAs who dumped everything all at once and it seems that is not a good idea. When the partner doesn’t even know what SA is and has no therapist, no support group, no online community, I cannot imagine that going well. By the time I learned “everything,” I had a therapist, a support group, online friends, books and education about SA. I had people to turn to who understood and who were not surprised. I was able to get good support and I was at a point that even though I was sad, angry and hurt, I was no longer shocked.
The issue of lying came up for us recently in our couples counseling. My husband lied to me about a non-cheating matter. He has in his inner circle “lying without correction in 24 hours” or something to that effect. I was angry when I learned the truth and tried to process it in our couples counseling. The CSAT did not focus on my husband’s lie without correction, which pissed me off. Instead, he focused on what my husband was going through when he chose to tell the lie. Basically, my husband reverted to a child emotionally and transferred his fear of his angry father to me. Rather than risk my anger, he told a lie and never corrected it. He panicked. Of course, that’s childish and naive, but it’s what children do. The truth always comes out. Adults know this and know that even though a lie might work for a short while, when the truth comes out, it will be worse. I’ve learned that lying is an intricate part of this disorder. It’s so confusing that they lie about non-sexual matters and sometimes even about trivial matters, but it is part of the disorder. The CSAT spent a tremendous amount of time, like the whole session, trying to get my husband to get in touch with what was going on for him when he lied.
Hi Maggie. Happy New Year! I freely admit that I would have had no idea what to do with all of Handsome’s “stuff” if he had dumped it on me on our first DDay. I do wish that he had been more honest afterwards though. Like you, I think by the time DDay#2 rolled around I wasn’t destroyed by the revelations. (Dismayed, yes. Destroyed, no.) I knew enough about what he had done that some of it lost its shock value. To me, the brutality of the trickle truth hit after that… after his week with Dr. M and after our betrayal recovery retreat. Each new revelation after that sears like a stab wound because (i) he fully understood the trauma it would cause and (ii) he had every opportunity to fully disclose so that we could get on with healing and yet he didn’t.
Lying is a huge element of the disorder and Handsome seems really deep in the weeds. He hasn’t just lied to me, he has also lied to himself by revising parts of our shared history and convincing himself they are true. (example: He convinced himself that I wasn’t at his mom’s funeral. The reality is that I was there for 3 days with him.) I’m not sure how we undo that kind of crazy. If he simply said “You didn’t support me at my mom’s funeral,” that’s a matter of perspective and even if I disagree it might be the way he perceived things. But rewriting the entire experience to erase me from the event? From the entire experience itself? That seems to be a whole other kind of delusion. And yet that disordered thinking – the lies he’s told himself – needs to be addressed because it is what he used in his head to “justify” his acting out. (“She abandoned me so I’ll seek solace elsewhere.”)
And don’t get me started on the little, seemingly insignificant/ non cheating lies…
Sometimes I am truly overwhelmed by the work we have in front of us.
Addicts and alcoholics are liars. To ourselves the most.
Until one embraces complete rigorous honesty they cannot recover. The big book of AA does have some good insight.
I hope this is your year!
Happy New Year to you!!
Happy New Year to you too!
I’m looking forward to 2019!
xo
Hi there
I’m new here. My dday was nov 21. Things are still very raw. I made cheater move out immediately.
Cheater has been sober for 5 years. If this actually turns out to be the truth, his affair was his first and was short lived as I found out. He was having sex with a younger woman (20 years younger) that he met at AA.
Of course, his recent acting out is just part of his addictive ways. We travelled a lot because he was always discontent. We had tons of fun, but always doing what he wanted as he was otherwise cranky.
He has gotten many tattoos over the past 5 years. Compulsively.
He has a sponsor and has done the steps and continues to go to meetings.
I understand this. I am sober too. But when I got sober I changed. I let go of the self destructive behaviour. I found yoga, meditation, self worth.
Unless my husband is willing to do that hard work he will never be content. He will always be selfish.And he will find some bad behaviour to feed the addict demons. I see it AA all the time.
Have you gone to al anon? It’s worth understanding the philosophy, even if you never go to the meetings.
I’m already devastated by this. It’s shaken my self worth and belief that people are good. I have deep compassion for cs. But he has hurt me and our kids enormously.
It’s so complicated. Reading your story seems just too familiar, even if it’s different.
I’m sorry for all of us. Thank you for your candor. I might need to start another blog!
Anne
A
Hi Anne. I am so sorry to welcome you to our “club”… the club no one ever expects to join. There is a lot of support here in the blogosphere for betrayed spouses though.
You are still in that raw and brutal early stage of betrayal, but it sounds like you are taking steps to protect yourself. That’s huge, and so very hard to do. Kudos to you.
You say that Cheater has been sober for 5 years, but it seems like it might be more accurate to say that he hasn’t had a drink in 5 years? He seems to be acting out in other ways (moods, tattoos, and now sex). My husband is similar in that he theoretically has over a year of sexual sobriety, but he isn’t truly sober because he’s still acting out in other ways (moods, drinking). The “dry drunk” label seems to somewhat fit both guys.
I am seeing some signs that my husband has had his “come to Jesus” moment. Only time will tell though, so stay tuned. I’ll know in a couple of months whether its real or if he’s just spewing more addict BS. So far, I’m hopeful, but I’m not counting chickens yet.
Keep reading along here and check out the blogs of the folks who comment here. Some folks are partners, some were the betrayers in their relationships, some are dealing with sex addiction and others are not. It’s a great, healthy mix and the comments are always insightful.
Stay strong!
xo
Yes. As a sober person I can see the behaviour. I have seen cs deteriorate this past year. It’s a hard thing, to watch someone you love go downhill. But it’s his hill.
That’s a hard truth with addicts. We can only save ourselves.
I am thankful for my own recovery every single day.
Thanks for the welcome. I wish it was under better circumstances!