I Can’t Shake These Dreams That He Is Cheating Again
It’s almost universal that, at least for a while, the faithful spouse is going to be very paranoid about her spouse cheating again. He can do or say all of the right things. His behavior can be above reproach. The couple might even be in intensive counseling. But still, the worry is there. Going through this type of betrayal is so painful that it’s natural to want to avoid going through it again. So you’re sort of always watching and waiting – afraid that as soon as you let your guard down, you are going to catch him cheating again. After all, if he did it once, what is to stop him from doing it again? This worry manifests itself in a number of different ways. Sometimes we experience it as suspicion or anxiety or even anger. Unfortunately, try as you might, it can be hard to control it. The feeling can just come over you. It invades your dreams so that there is really no escape from it. I get some questions about dreams sometimes. Some wives think that their dreams are a sign that their husband is cheating again. They think that the dreams are their subconscious minds’ way of alerting them to what they already know.
Someone might ask, “do cheating dreams mean anything when your husband has already cheated? We are in counseling and there are times when I really do believe that he wants to make it work. There also aren’t any blatant behaviors that make me suspicious. It’s just a general feeling of unease that I have all of the time. Lately, I’ve been having this reoccurring dream that my husband is cheating with an old neighbor of ours. The irony of this is that my husband really disliked this woman and she and her husband have moved to another state. So it would be difficult for him to be carrying on with her when they live sixteen hours away. So I know that this sounds crazy, but the dreams seem so real. My husband gets angry when I tell him about the dreams and says that the scenario is a ridiculous one. In my head, I know that, but there’s something nagging at my heart. Do our dreams give us hints about what is really going on?”
I’m sure that you’ve attempted to research this and have found that cheating dreams are among the most common dreams that people report – even among people in faithful relationships. I had these dreams. There were times when I was sure that my spouse was cheating again. It has been a long time since the affair and he has been faithful the whole time afterward and now. He wasn’t cheating again, but you could not have convinced me of that at the time. My therapist said that the dreams were likely a manifestation of the worry I was experiencing. I would go to bed feeling anxious and worried and of course my dreams would reflect that. Interestingly, months after we reconciled and began to hit our stride again, the dreams stopped. I used to convince myself that they were prophetic, meaning that I was glimpsing into the future. However, in my case, they never came true in real life – not even close.
I wish I didn’t have to admit this, but a lot of times, the dreams made me accuse my husband of wrong doing or lash out at him about the pain that the dreams had caused me. This wasn’t really fair because neither of us could control my dreams. I finally decided that I would use the dreams in order to ask myself if there was anything SPECIFIC that was bugging me that I hadn’t explored. Was there a clue I was ignoring? Or was I just being paranoid? I gave myself permission to dig down clues if there actually were any, but I agreed to try to let things go if there weren’t. In the end, I was truly just being paranoid. But I can’t be too hard on myself about this. It’s natural to be paranoid after you’ve been burned so badly. This is simply a manifestation of your fears and all human beings face fears about the people that they love. As an aside, after my child had a medical issue, I used to have dreams about the condition coming back. I used to wake up worried that my child was surely going to relapse. Then that made me wonder if this was my subconscious telling me about symptoms I was missing.
Again, it was the fear talking. And I came up with the same conclusion – that I would watch my child for symptoms and keep up with medical appointments. But beyond that, what more could I do? So far, my child has continued to be healthy and the dreams were not prophetic in this case, either. They were simply manifesting my fears at bed time.
I think that the best that you can do right now is to ask yourself if there is anything that you are missing where your husband is concerned. If the answer is no and you know that you’re likely being paranoid, try to let it go. You can’t control what you dream, but you can control how you react to it for the rest of the day. As you shrug it off and continue to heal, the dreams should fade – as they did with me. Eventually I told myself that if there was something I should address, I would. Otherwise, I would just know that the dreams were reflections of my fears – and nothing more.
Thankfully, I no longer have the affair dreams. Lately, I dream about my grandmother, who is going through a pretty bad illness. But as far as my marriage goes, that continues to be good and I’m glad that I never acted on those paranoid dreams. If it helps, you can read more about how we recovered from the affair on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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