Honesty: yes or no?

Do you really need PROOF that you shouldnt lie to your husband?

We have proof that radical honesty works amazingly well, but I am aghast that you even need it.

Dont Christians have to abide by the Bible when it comes to lying?

Even if your husband was to respond badly and not agree to meet your needs, that is not a license for you to lie to him.

Lying is wrong. dont you know that?

It is not his EN meeting that is to blame. Its your poor boundaries that is to blame.

You know that if your husband were to start watching you, you'd have to give up your nasty little addiction and that is the real problem you have with telling the truth.

Only truth tellling will free you from this horrid addiction with a loser married man.

"And ye shall know the truth: And the truth shall set you free"

The really sad thing is how insightful and smart you are. Yet your better instincts are totally trapped by the addiction.

You have diagnosed self delusion 'my mind tries to use that to convince myself'

When you look back over this trap, you dont feel good about being trapped here: You feel guilty and miserable.


You realise this guy is simply trying to get laid, and has laid a trap for you with his IC, "I told him emphatically that I would not disrespect my husband (or his wife) like that"

Yet like all addicts, you dont want to lose touch with the source of all your troubles. When looking over the past - you're rational, but looking toward a future with no OM and suddenly you turn into a fool:



You havent told him about the EAs! He has no idea you have poor boundaries and are an addict. He has no way to help you stop being an addict - because he does not know. He doesn't need to know about his poor EN meeting at all at this point because that is not the problem - YOU are. Even a happily married woman who is completley fulfilled will respond to man who talks devotedly for hours. You know you shouldnt have done that in ANY circumstance and are talking like a fool.


How does someone give a 'general idea' that they are an adulterer and need help stopping their adultery? Genuine question, no sarcasm. I'd love to hear this.

Then there's the whole debacle about how not one single person you know can be trusted with the truth. WH would "use it as ammunition" and the church folk "would not be discreet"

Well let's hope you're right. Our aim is for your WH to use it as ammunition. His marriage is under attack from a POSOM. He needs ammunition to kill your addiction and bust up your affair for good.

And why should the church people be discreet? Their pastor's wife was not careful of her reputation, so why should they be?

If before you decided to chase men on the internet, you had known you would have to confess, you would never have done it.

Start living your life openly and then you will not do things that you would be ashamed to have people know.

Stop whining and get to work. They probably will lose respect for you, because you deserve to lose respect. What you have done is not respectful. So then you have to earn it back over time, starting with a brave confession. Thats the job you have created for yourself. No one made you cheat.

Oh and you also need to come clean and apologise to this man's BW.

Difficult? Yes.

Can she be 'trusted' to be kind/discreet/understanding? No, her reaction is up to her. It's her marriage and you have no business in it.

It's the fact that YOU cant be trusted that is the issue on the table.

Only truthful people can be trusted. Start today.

Is this the radio show you were on?

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/radio_program/play_segment.cfm?sid=3243

MM, everyone here wants you to start showing actions you can be proud of. this is what Dr Harley says about exposure of the affair. He even advises exposure for long-dead affairs that happened decades earlier.

It is not just prevention of an affair. It is about your spouse KNOWING you and what you have been feeling.



Oh and lots of BSs find out about the affair 20/30 years later. Then they also have 20 years of lies and fake marriage to forgive on top of the A. Most people cant do that.

Of course your BH is likely to figure it out much sooner. But if you are unfortunate enough for much time to go by before he finds out, what will you say when he asks 'Why didnt you tell me?'

Are you really going to say you dont trust him enough to tell him the truth?

Mary,

Since you have had an affair, I strongly encourage you to get Dr. Harley's book Surviving an Affair and read it and follow the steps to recovery.

Dr. Harley advises that the path to recovery from an affair is a very narrow path. If it is not followed strictly, recovery does not result. As you say, you have been unfaithful before. The reason you have been unfaithful again is that you guys never recovered properly.

It sounds like your husband has been extremely neglectful. You need to drop the attitude of "accommodating each other's shortcomings." I don't know where you got that, but that is not from Dr. Harley!!!! Please understand that other marriage "counseling" approaches do not work and have an 85% failure rate. Your husband's neglect needs to be addressed. If your husband is controlling that needs to be addressed. And your unfaithfulness needs to be addressed.

Your marriage is full of problems and one reason for that is that you, Mary/Savannah, sweep problems under the rug and try to ignore them and hope they will go away! I am listening to your segment on Marriage Builders Radio right now, and it is obvious that you gave Dr. Harley almost NO details about your situation. You just wrote about "religious differences" and didn't give him any of the details you gave here, like the fact that your husband's ministry takes precedence over your marriage. So you got a general answer from Dr. Harley about "religious differences" that didn't advise you to do ANYTHING! Dr. Harley couldn't help you with the problem of your husband's neglect, because you didn't even tell him there was a problem of neglect. So here you are two years later, and you are still neglected, and the problem is worse, and you have made it even worse by having a string of emotional affairs.

A lot of people have the idea that they are just supposed to be "content" in marriage, rather than actually blend together (which requires changing). A lot of people think it's wrong to expect your spouse to change. And some of those people decide to go out and have affairs in order to try to stay "content." It doesn't work. It just makes the problems work.

This attitude of sweeping your problems under the rug has made you miserable, and I predict you are not going to find much happiness in life unless you make a RADICAL change and quit running away from your problems and trying to hide everything.

That's a common misconception, Mary, but let me put it to you in Marriage Builders terms and maybe you will understand the problems in your marriage:

Unmet emotional needs + poor boundaries = affair
Met emotional needs + poor boundaries = affair
Unmet emotional needs + good boundaries = no affair!
Met emotional needs + good boundaries = no affair!

Look that over very carefully.

You have two problems in your marriage: your poor boundaries, and your husband's neglect. Trying to mix those two together is an attempt to make yourself feel better about your failings by blaming them on your husband's failings. But you will never solve your problems that way, you will only make things worse. You have to tackle each problem for what it is, on its own: your poor boundaries, and your husband's emotional neglect are both serious problems that you need to face head on. That means you have to start talking about them.

So Dr. Harley sent you Love Busters? There is a chapter in that book that covers your exact situation. In my copy it's Chapter Ten - resolving conflicts over career choices, the section titled "What if God's calling is the issue?"

I suggest you skip there and read that. It addresses the problem that you didn't tell Dr. Harley about.

There are tools here and you have been lazily refusing to learn to use them, possibly for years (you are hiding your original ID from us, so we don't know how long you've really been here). Your problems are only piling up and getting worse, and you are headed for some serious unhappiness if you don't start doing something to address these.

Mary, did you and your current husband meet each other's emotional needs while he was still legally married to his ex wife?

"Getting to the root cause" is one of many favorite excuses for people to perpetually do nothing about their problems.

You can actually make the right changes, for whatever reason, and fix your problems without ever knowing the "cause."

Do you want to have a happy life and marriage, or a lot of insight into why your marriage fails?

So true. Mary, My H betrayed me a year ago and of course I had a need for love, affection and companionship after I kicked him out. But over the past year, I havent gotten involved in a single EA while still married because of MB boundaries. I will keep high boundaries while still married despite not having ONE single need met. I am sure your H meets at least one need.



No one wants you in an unhappy marriage, Mary. Of course not. When the MB principles are followed in full, religiously, marriages don't just survive, they THRIVE. Give your H a chance to know you and meet your needs and protect you from your own weaknesses.

You need to become much more honest YESTERDAY. It is your lack of honesty that has created this situation because no one knows what you want!

You were on the phone with the best marriage counsellor in the country - and you didnt even tell HIM what the trouble was!

You said yourself that when you tell your H about a problem - he responds - but that you resent telling him!

It's crazy Mary. Pull on your big girl pants and sort this out.

When?


Why should he trust you? Look where trusting you got him ...

This is only a half-hearted repentance, and will only destroy your marriage. The path to recovery is a very narrow one. If you stray from the path, even just slightly, your marriage will not recover.

He will know that you are not telling the complete truth. He will know. And that knowledge will almost be worse than the affair.

Actually, it doesn't paint any such assumption. It is good advice, handed out to unfaithful spouses here all the time. If the world knows your sin, you're less likely to go back to that sin.

"Evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God." John 3:20-21

You do not want to tell other people because of your guilt and shame. These other reasons you give are excuses.

Your husband has a right to know.
Your church has a right to know what their pastor's wife has done.
Your husband will need the support of the people around him.


Stop being dramatic.

It will only hurt your pride. But you will recover. It will not kill you.

They cannot place your failures on a billboard if YOU put it there first.

You will be amazed how freeing getting your "little secret" out is, in the end.


Forget about friends right now. You need to be thinking about your marriage.

I forgot to mention, my favorite is excuse is "working on." You can be "working on" issues for years and make no progress, without ever having to say what "work" means. I "worked on" my anger problems for a long time before I actually did something about them.

Do you have Facebook at all? I know you did not meet on there, but if you have an account you need to get rid of it. You cannot be trusted on ANY networking sites.

No, please put it off indefinitely. Most individual counseling is detrimental to marriage, because they encourage you to seek your own happiness at the expense of your spouse.

Do you want a happy marriage? We can help you learn what people in happy marriages do to make their marriages happy.


What kind of stuff?

True. you have 'emotional angst' because you are doing awful things that would shock right-minded people, and you know it. If you stop doing these things you will recover your sense of worth and if you are brave enough to face what you have done, it will lessen your angst, not increase it.



Absolutely. It is inspiring and admirable when people face the music unflinchingly. If you do not do it, the truth will out and people will haul you into the light by force, unless you do it yourself.

Without doing this, what you are saying is: "How can I do the bare minimum? How can I get away with this theft without having to do any repaying? How can I keep misleading people as to what I am really capable of?'

You have to do the work.


BTW, I exposed my H without his knowing and his family, who he does not get along with, still love and support him. He is not accepting of it while still wayward, but it made them realise how much he needs them and they plead with him to become honest. He is an 'under the rug sweeper' too

Most counselors do not believe that romantic love can be restored in a marriage.

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8118_real.html

The stuff you are seeking in all these emotional affairs -- you can have it in your marriage.

Mary, how many times have you listened to Marriage Builders Radio?

God didn't say "confess your sins to Jesus." He said "to each other."

MM72 --

Just wanted to give you a *high five* for recognizing and attempting to deal with your situation.

I understand the difficulties in making yourself heard.
Neglect is the disease that is like a cancer in your marriage.
You've "told" your husband what your most important emotional need is...and frankly, he doesn't much care about meeting it.
He'll give it a try - and then fall right back into the same old patterns.

Then you try again to make him hear you. And again. And he still doesn't seem to care much.

So until you go to him with a CRISIS in your marriage -- he won't put you first, and he won't stick to his plan to meet your needs.

So you need to tell him what is going on - and you can't sugarcoat it. He needs to fully understand how much at risk your marriage is.

You don't know that he doesn't care to meet her needs, Lexxxy. He may very well care, he may just don't know how. Don't encourage her to DJ her husband any more than she already has.