My husband is keeping total tabs on me!

Question:

I am the wife. My husband and I have been married almost 21 years; we are both in our young 40's. I had the affair, for 18 months. It's confessed and over by approximately 6 weeks now, but my husband is insisting on keeping total tabs on me. I must call from the house phone before I leave for work, I must call him from the work phone when I get there, repeat when I leave work. I can't go anywhere without him! I am under 24-hour watch. Is this healthy?

Response:

While it may be frustrating to be so closely checked up on, it's quite normal and understandable. In fact, 6 weeks is an incredibly short time, so this behavior is not unusual. It's really not a matter of whether or not it's "healthy," since nothing about having an affair is healthy—for anyone. It's just that these are some of the normal ramifications of so completely destroying your spouse's ability to trust you.

It's tempting to think that there should be no ramifications or consequences, but that's just unrealistic. (For instance, it's not too unlike the way the criminal justice system imposes constant "monitoring" of someone who has done something to demonstrate they can't be trusted.) Certainly, something as devastating as an affair is disruptive to any normal existence for quite some time.

And hoping or pretending otherwise is useless.

So rebelling against his need for you to "report in" won't make the need go away. In fact, the more you resist, the more he's likely to feel that his concerns about your trustworthiness are valid. But the more cooperative you are in earning back his trust (including calling as often as necessary), the less time it will take.

You see, the more you demonstrate your willingness to take responsibility for doing whatever he needs to feel reassured, the less he is likely to feel anxious, thus the less he is likely to need this constant calling.

Please understand, however, that even when the need for you to constantly call diminishes, there is likely to still be some lingering anxiety, uncertainty, and need for reassurance for quite a long time.

As we've repeatedly pointed out… even when doing everything possible to rebuild trust, it can take about 2 years for most people to recover from the emotional impact of a spouse's affairs to the point where they can really trust again.

If you do everything possible to reassure your husband for a couple of years and he still insists on your calling with every move you make, then that may indicate a different problem: either an underlying need to "punish" or an inability to recover, no matter what you do.

But after 6 weeks, a person struggling to recover from their spouse's affair is fortunate if they can just eat, sleep and function. They don't need to have to deal with your resistance to calling in the midst of such overwhelming destruction of their sense of trust and security in their lives as a whole.

Related Resource: Journey To Trust - Rebuilding Trust After an Affair

Cheating Spouses: How to Become Trustworthy After the Affair

By Sarah P.

Betrayed spouses report that one of the most harmful things about infidelity, if not the most harmful thing in some cases, is the loss of Trust.

The reason I capitalize the word Trust is because you haven’t just become semi-untrustworthy, but rather completely untrustworthy after you have been unfaithful. Trust is one of the very foundations of marriage and you have completely destroyed the foundation.

It’s always amazing to me how some cheating spouses simply cannot empathize with the betrayed spouse and wrap their minds around the utter harm, indeed absolute destruction, they have caused.

Continue reading…

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Take care!

Linda & Doug

Emotional Affair Journey

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