Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: It is very common for a spouse who suspects cheating to wonder if they are losing their mind. Even if they have at least some evidence, the cheating spouse will often be completely indignant in response. They will do everything in their power to make the faithful spouse seem overly suspicious, paranoid, and crazy. This is somewhat understandable. They don’t want to be caught and they sometimes want to continue with their cheating. So, they’ll spin a web of lies in the hopes that they can carry on with both their marriage and/or the affair.

When the wife or the faithful spouse finally learns the truth, the hope might be that now the lies and the spin can stop. But, unfortunately, this does not always happen because the cheating spouse can still be in self-preservation mode. He’s often not going to concede defeat so easily. He’s worked very hard to create doubt, uncertainty, and hesitation. Why would he just give that up?

No, very often the cheating spouse will keep right on gaslighting. What I mean by this is manipulation meant to improve the cheating spouse’s situation and weaken the faithful souse’s position. Frankly, this is not always a conscious decision. It is human nature to want to minimize pain and blame. So the cheating spouse figures if he can spin a yarn to diminish the impact of the affair, who is getting hurt? What he may not realize is that this type of manipulation hurts the faithful spouse on top of the pain already caused by the affair.

A wife might say, “my cheating husband has been gaslighting me this entire time. I knew that he was cheating with a coworker. I just knew it in my bones. But rather admitting to it, he made me seem like a raving lunatic. He told me that the other woman was married, that his job depends on working closely with her, and how dare I accuse him of something so morally wrong? He acted like I was the bad person in this scenario. He kept on at me until I backed off and I really did start to question myself. But he made some mistakes and I caught him. But do you think he stopped gaslighting? No, he didn’t. Now he’s saying that, well yes, he lied about cheating, but only because he was trying to protect our family and he was trying to protect my feelings because he didn’t want to admit that I’d been neglecting him, neglecting my own appearance, and neglecting our marriage. He was trying to spare me the shame, you see. What a crock! The thing is, although this makes me so furious, in the back of my mind, I know there’s a kernel of truth in it. And he’s made me question myself so often, that I waffle back and forth on how to react. I want to tell him to stop lying and to jump in a lake. But when I try to come back at him, he only comes back at me harder, so I back down. He is determined to be the one who lays out what actually happened and it is so frustrating. How do I get him to stop gaslighting me? I just want to get some sort of baseline for the truth, because if we don’t, I fear we’ll never heal. My husband would be very happy if I would just allow him to paint his own picture, but that’s just not fair.”

I agree that it’s horribly unfair and that if you let him set the narrative, you’re also conceding that he may dictate how the recovery will go. Since YOU are the one who is going to have to live in a marriage that he has damaged, I would accept no less than your dictating how it goes – at least to your own satisfaction. I understand that it can be difficult to insist on your own reality when he keeps trying to flip things on you. Below, I will offer some tips.

Allow A Third Party To Help You: Your husband may attempt to manipulate your reality because you have a long emotional history together. But a therapist, counselor, or third party who is in this to help you may not be so easily manipulated. A good therapist will not hesitate to call him on his nonsense and manipulation. Better still, you don’t have to be the bad guy who is always questioning his story and his logic. The third party can do it while you just sit there silently cheering inside.

Momentarily Walk Away When He Continues. Refuse Him An Audience: The next time your husband starts with the gaslighting, you might try something like, “we both know that this version of events isn’t true. It’s not going to become true just because you keep repeating it. If you truly want to make progress, you are going to need to stop this spin and tell the truth.” Then, give him a chance to regroup and get honest. If he doesn’t and continues with the gaslighting, try, “I’m going to stop you right there. I’m not going to keep repeating myself here. You’re going with alternate realities again and, as I said, we can’t move on until we are dealing with the truth.” Keep us this process until he realizes that you will accept nothing less than the truth in order to move forward. If he truly wants to make progress and move on, then he will learn to stop the gaslighting.

Practice Building Yourself Up Until You Believe That You Can Trust Yourself: As you have suspected, it becomes easier to stand up to this injustice when you are confident in yourself. Give yourself some outlets outside of this situation that will build your confidence. Hang out with nurturing friends. Consider individual counseling. Do some self-improvement. Whatever will give you confidence in your own competence and abilities is so worth doing right now. The stronger you become, the less you will question yourself and the more you will realize exactly what you deserve so that you accept no less than this.

Over time, this shift should become obvious to your husband. If he does not get the desired response to his attempts to gaslight you, then there is no need for him to continue. He needs a willing audience to pull it off. When you refuse to become that audience and make him understand that you will only listen to the truth, then he’ll have no choice than to either bring honesty to the table or live in his own reality by himself.

Initially, my husband did try to deflect some aspects of the affair.  I made it clear early on that this would not fly.  Sure, I had to repeat myself because he would occasionally try again, but I held firm.  I knew that if I gave in, then I was only playing my own role in keeping things chaotic.  And I knew that we desperately needed clarity, honesty, and progress.  You can read more about our recovery at http://surviving-the-affair.com

 

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