Gee, the trust issue revisited. the Short answer: You can rebuild trust, but it takes time. Months. The long answer based on personal experience:
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I would not have stayed in the marriage I was in, pre-DDay, if I had known about the affair, and was only barely holding on, even not knowing. I wanted out, but didn't think divorce was the right thing to do, and did not know how to fix things. So, I was not willing to go back to the “way things were”, once I found out about it. My wife did not know if I would be willing to continue to stay married to her after she confessed. She simply knew that she had to get right with God, and had to get her integrity back, and that confessing to me was the only way to do that. I think her idea in telling me was that things would go back to the way they were, more or less, except that she would no longer deceive me, and no longer let the invisible elephant get between us, if we stayed together. She had no idea what changes were in store for us.
A part of me always wanted to stay together – I had worked my butt off for years in our relationship, and never seemed to make any progress, so it was kind of hard to just chuck everything and start over just when there seemed to be some possibility of progress. Furthermore, I knew that people who get divorced once are likely to get divorced again, and usually for the same reasons, and I did not want to find myself in the same place some years down the road. But, I was not sure I could overcome the pain, I had no idea how to re-establish trust, I frankly didn’t know if I could forgive her, and I had no desire at all to go back to the way things were, because frankly they were pretty miserable (even pre-A) for me. So, I never suggest people go back to the way things were. The way things were for me, my wife had an A, I wanted an A, and I wanted her to die in an accident so I could be free of that marriage.
So, the first thing I did was go to God and repent of a couple of habitual “minor” (in my eyes) sins, so there would be nothing between God and I that would get in the way of our communication. I spent many hours in prayer asking God to show me my sin. I think at some level I thought the A was my fault. While I no longer think that, that time of humbling myself before God was really crucial to our recovery. Because, I HAD sinned, and had gotten so distant from God that I was unaware of many of my sins, so He did show me. As I agonized over what my wife did to me, it became clear that I had done almost identical things to God. That helped keep me from self-righteousness and arrogance which are poison to any recovery. Also, if I expected Him to forgive me, I had to forgive her. That got me a long way down the forgiveness road, but forgiveness and reconciliation are two separate things. The pain and trust issues remained barriers to reconciliation. It turns out the pain fades with time, if the actions that produced it are not repeated. That leaves trust, and trusting that the actions will not be repeated, as the sole barrier to reconciliation.
As far as I can discern there is really only one approach to re-establishing trust, and a couple of well-established ways to get there. In both cases, the bottom line is: believe their actions, not their words, at least until you have seen a consistent pattern of their words and actions being aligned for a period of many months. That necessarily means you have to be more involved in their lives so that you have the ability to verify that their actions and words are cohesive.
The path to get there, according to Willard Harley, is to have no secrets from each other, and to use the Policy of Joint Agreement (POJA) in all your decisions. Once you see your spouse consistently use the POJA, and the two of you have learned to understand each other and communicate with each other well enough to implement it, you will trust them when they are out of sight, too. Perhaps ironically, one thing that will convince you of your spouse's honesty is if they tell you things they know will hurt, instead of lying to "protect" you. So this process will likely not be painless, especially since, if you are like most couples, it will require learning a new way to communicate. Change is hard.
A second path, promoted by Carder in “Torn Asunder” (and the younger Harleys, too, I think), is for the WS to really dig in to the "WHY?" of the affair, and in gaining that self-understanding, communicate to you both why it happened, and how he or she will change their behavior in ways that you can verify and that will prevent them from having another.
Of course, these two paths are not mutually exclusive. I view them as complementary, and think “Surviving an Affair”, by Harley is extremely helpful in figuring out important parts of the why, at least as far as the answer involves unmet Emotional Needs, and it almost always does, especially for a woman who has an affair.
The fallacy is the belief that unmet EN’s “cause” affairs. If that was the case, I would have had the affair, not my wife, because my EN’s were less well met in our marriage than hers.
Unmet EN's do not cause affairs, they cause lousy marriages. If you read Harley thoroughly and carefully, he does not say unmet EN's cause affairs, either, though it is a so common a misconception among his readers that I would say he should do some re-writing of his material. Reading SAA, it can be easy to conclude that unmet needs are the reason for affairs. Not so. Affairs are entirely the responsibility of those involved, and the reasons vary.
Our MC worked w/ Bill Harley for 8 years, and one of his biggest dis-agreements w/ Bill was on this very issue, because according to him, in about 40% of MEN'S affairs unmet EN's had very little to do with it. Yes, there were usually unmet EN's in their marriages, because no marriage is perfect. But, having the wife find out about and meet his most important EN's did not stop the affairs from re-kindling or stop the husband from having another. Harley is aware of this, which is why his plan for recovery is a lot more complicated than: 1.) Take the EN questionnaire. 2.) Meet your spouse’s EN's. Our MC said that in his opinion, for that 40%, if the wife had been meeting the husband's top 5 EN's PERFECTLY, the husband still would have had the affair. If you want to learn more, read "The State of Affairs", by Todd Mulliken particularly the chapter on "The Double Life Man". I liked "Torn Asunder" because of what it says about non-EN-related reasons for affairs "character issues, FOO issues, habits, beliefs, and unresolved guilt", which helped me understand the "Why?'s" of the affair, so I could be confident it would not happen again.
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<small>[ May 23, 2003, 05:49 PM: Message edited by: johnh39 ]</small>
