Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: I often hear from wives whose husbands are on the defensive after his affair. Often, the wife is just trying to clarify what happened to cause the infidelity, what happens to the marriage now, and how she can begin to heal. As a result, she understandably has some questions and some need for clarification. But, when she tries to get these things, her husband may decline to answer the questions or even make the wife out to be the bad guy by saying that all of the questions and implications make him feel attacked.

I recently heard from a wife who said “although my husband’s affair has challenged me in all sorts of ways and I am still reeling, I have never said or even hinted that I want to end my marriage. In fact, I have made it very clear that once healing has been completed, I want to save my marriage. But in order for us to recover from this, I need to understand so many things about the affair and why it happened. My husband is so reluctant and resistant to sharing anything with me. He says that my questions are just attacks on him. I don’t mean for them to come out that way, but how am I supposed to get answers if I don’t ask the questions? I almost think that if he had his way, I would just pretend like the affair never happened. But that’s just not going to be possible for me. How can we possibly recover if every time I try to get information from my husband or even bring up the affair, he tells me he feels attacked?”

This is a delicate situation. I will be honest in saying that some men will use the “attack card” as a way to not talk about the affair. But I do hear from a lot of men on my blog who seem sincere in their feeling of being attacked by their wife. But here is an important distinction. Many will tell you that it’s not so much what their wife says (although she can and often does say some hurtful things and asks some hard questions,) it is often her tone and the look on her face that are the real problems.

On my blog, men often tell me things like “I will admit that I do feel attacked by my wife when we are talking about the affair. Because the more information that comes out, the more that her tone of voice becomes nasty. She starts talking fast. Her face clouds over. She begins to frown and she will literally back away from me. Clearly, she does not like the answers or information that I am giving her. But she is also demanding the truth. So it is like I am caught between a rock and a hard place. And her reactions lead to more questions and that’s when I know that I’ve really dug a hole for myself and when I feel really viciously attacked. Because it’s almost like she’s waiting for me to bite with the wrong answer so she can pounce on me once again.”

Of course, if you talked to the wife in this situation, she would tell you that she just wanted answers and that, in order to get them, sometimes she has to talk to her husband harshly to get the truth. And as a result, it can sometimes come out sounding like an attach when this was not her intention. This is a real shame because both people are going into this situation trying their best to move forward, but they are making assumptions about how their spouse is feeling.

This is very common because both people can feel injured, criticized, and vulnerable so it is just easier to make assumptions than to ask for clarification. I can offer you a few tips to help in this situation though, which I will do right now

Ask Your Husband To Give You A Signal When He Is Feeling Attacked And Learn to Redirect Quickly: Often, we get stuck in the heat of the moment and we know it’s not going well but we feel as though we are on the verge of the answers that we want so much and so we continue to push. What we don’t realize is that our husband is just going to shut down and then the next time the topic comes up, he’s going to keep giving us less and less information until he’s completely shut down.

That’s why it’s important that you allow him to give you a signal or to tell you when he’s feeling attacked so that you can take a break or redirect for a minute. Now, this doesn’t mean that you are never going to come back the original question or that you are no longer going to need answers or information. It just means that for right now, you are respecting his feelings enough to delay the conversation. He might just say “let’s take a break” or you might come up with some silent signal.

It’s equally important that your husband doesn’t abuse this as a way to never answer you. But if you can set it up so that he feels safe and free to tell you the truth, then he will become more comfortable over time and you will get more of the truth. Too often, we set it up so that he becomes scared and reluctant to tell us what we say we really want to know and so we never get those answers. Sometimes if you really want to the answers, you have to have patience. And quite frankly, the answers are just the beginning. Because at the end of the day, many of us want to save our marriage. Alienating our husband and making him scared to death to talk to us is not the most effective way to do this.

I know that this is a difficult situation and it’s not your fault that you have questions to which you deserve the answers. But you will have a greater chance of getting them if you can make him feel as comfortable as possible during the process.

I’m sure that my husband felt attacked in many of our conversations after his affair, but my true feelings just had a way of coming out. Over time, we both learned to communicate better and to be honest about how we were feeling and this helped tremendously. If it helps, you can read about the process of saving our marriage after his affair on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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