How to Communicate Without Arguing

Terry was lost in his thoughts as he drove home after a long, grueling day at the office. He was not looking forward to arriving home. After spending all day trying to get prospective clients to give him their business, he was convinced that upon getting home that his wife, Donna, was going to give him the business, and he wasn’t buying it.

“I can hear it now already,” he thought to himself. “The minute I get in the door, ‘We need to talk!’ will be the first words out of her mouth.” He wished that he could tell her, “No, you need to talk and I am supposed to listen to you endlessly drone on with the same old song and dance.”

Encouraging Your Spouse to Believe in Your Marriage

Ann was frustrated, frightened and lost when she explained to her best friend, Cindy, “I don’t know what to do. When Bob comes home, he stays isolated in his own little world. He just withdraws and won’t communicate.

“After dinner, he turns on the TV and tunes me out. It is almost like he doesn’t care about me or our marriage. He doesn’t seem to have any confidence in us being happy together anymore. He seems to have given up on us. I tried bringing up going to a marriage counselor, but instead he said we can ‘figure it out ourselves.’

Jessica had noticed a change in Eric’s behavior lately. He was pensive, distant, disconnected. He seemed to be hiding something.

She had seen him act this way before, and it made her sick to her stomach to see it again.

The last time he was like this, he was having an affair.

Her mind reeled at the terrifying possibilities.

What if he had gone back to his old lover? What if he found a new one? She had already been through the nightmare once. She didn’t think she could handle it again.

When Jessica asked Eric about it, he said, “I know I’ve been a little off recently. And I know what you’re thinking. You have every right to your suspicions, but it isn’t like that. Not this time. I’d like to tell you about this sweetie. But I can’t. Not right now. Give me time, and I will share everything with you.

In my last post, I began a conversation about sex addiction: what it is, who it affects, and why it happens. That post has only been up for a week or so. But in that brief time, I’ve received dozens of comments and questions. Many of you have dealt with a sex-addicted spouse, or have tried to overcome your own sex addiction.

The refrain I hear, again and again, is: What do I do now? What is the next step? Is there any hope for us? Sex addiction can be devastating. It leaves many unanswered questions in its wake, and it brings its own kind of mistrust into the spouse’s mind.

Today, I would like to share steps you can take RIGHT NOW to prevent a sex addiction from ruining your relationship. I want to show you ways to deal with suspicion in potentially productive ways.

“Our sex life was good for years. Then, something just snapped in him. It started around the time he turned 50. I would go to bed, and he would stay awake. One night, I got up to grab a drink of water and found him in the den, staring at porn on the Internet.”

Many women have had this experience, or something very similar to it. Maybe you cherished your “normal” sex life with your husband, only to find out that he’s been harboring dark and deviant fantasies. Maybe you have stumbled across a stash of pornographic magazines and DVDs—even though you never suspected your husband of being aroused by such graphic images.

“When we first started dating, everything was exciting. You know—new. The emotional and physical sparks were undeniable. We could talk for hours, and the sex…wow. Now that we’ve been married for ten years, things just aren’t the same. We still love each other, of course. But the romance? I guess there’s just not much time for it anymore.”

I can almost see you nodding your head as you read this person’s story. Maybe you have been married for two, ten, or twenty years. If you feel the romantic spark dimming in your marriage, you are far from alone. In my practice, I meet couples every week who are looking to strengthen the intimacy in their relationship.

“My husband works in sales, and he attends at least five conferences each year. He’s cheated on me twice with women he’s met at the conferences. I want to believe it won’t happen again, but then I picture him at the hotel bar, sitting next to an attractive woman. Two or three drinks later, he’s lost his inhibitions – and broken his promise to stay faithful.”

“Because of her high-powered job, my wife travels all over the world. She met Stephen on a trip to London, and they slept together. She confessed the affair to me, but I still feel sick when I think of her traveling to London. After all, Stephen is still there. And if it happened once….”

Do these scenarios sound familiar to you? These are just two of the many, many stories I have heard over the years. For a cheating spouse, travel can be the perfect excuse to meet up with a paramour or to have a one-night stand. For the injured party, each business trip can create feelings of suspicion, anger, and fear.

How can you rebuild your marriage when your spouse is so far away? How can you maintain honesty when you are sleeping alone at home, and she’s in a hotel halfway around the world?

It is possible to protect and strengthen your marriage – even when you and your spouse are separated by hundreds of miles. Here are some strategies that have I have seen work.

Coping with the First Business Trip After the Confession

You’ve found out about the affair. You’ve argued, cried, questioned, and slowly attempted to rebuild. But now, the calendar looks like a doomsday clock. Your spouse is going on a business trip in two days. Will he cheat again? Will he be tempted by a woman at the sales convention? Will he sleep with his sexy colleague?

You may be thinking, “There is no way I can trust him.” This is a completely natural and common thought. But let me suggest to you that there are ways in which you can rebuild trust in your partner again. First, there are probably other ways in which he has never violated your trust. This is because trust takes many different forms.

Your partner has broken the first form of trust: fidelity. That is huge. But consider the other ways in which you might still trust your partner, including:

Form of Trust: Emotional Predictability – Knowing Your Partner Will React Within Reason.
You probably have a good idea of how your spouse will react to certain situations. If you can’t attend a family reunion because of an important medical appointment, you can probably count on your partner not becoming violent. If dinner is late because you were picking up the kids at their soccer game, you feel safe that he will not scream and storm out of the house.

Emotional predictability is incredibly important – and the sad truth is that not everyone in the world can count on it. It is extremely painful if you do not have this level of predictability in your relationship. If you have never stopped to think about it, that probably means you trust your spouse in this area.

How else might you already trust your spouse? Consider:

Form of Trust: Discretion – Keeping Secrets Secret. Discretion is a key form of trust. This means that you:

1) trust that your partner will keep private information private, and

2) trust that your partner will not make fun of you in a hurtful way.

Everyone has stories that are embarrassing or personal. In a marriage, you share things about your past that you likely wouldn’t share with anyone else. You trust that your partner will treat these issues with sensitivity and respect. You trust that he will not tell anyone else these things, because that would be hurtful. If this isn’t a problem for you, then you have just identified another area of trust in your relationship.

In my system How to Rebuild the Honesty, I discuss "The 7 Forms of Trust: Learning How You Still Trust Your Partner... Even Now." I encourage you to read about these forms of trust. They will help you identify strengths and weaknesses within your relationship.

Once you know and understand each of these forms of trust and how to use them, it will help you:

• Build a more transparent relationship...
• Motivate your spouse to share everything with you...
• Reduce suspicion...
• Help you communicate your suspicion without igniting a firefight...
• Create a clean slate to start over again...
• Build a fence of protection around your relationship...

Discover how to strengthen your relationship with complete honesty.

An affair can be difficult to forgive and nearly impossible to forget. Even the smallest things might bring up painful memories: seeing an affair on a television show, or meeting someone with the same first name as the ex-paramour.

But one of the most heartbreaking situations is when the cheater and the ex-paramour have a child.

For the wife whose husband has cheated, this is constant torment. An affair is bad enough. When there’s a child, the situation becomes overwhelmingly complicated.

There are ways to cope. There are ways to lessen the pain and make life bearable, even happy, again. There is hope, and you can heal. But it does take work.

“I see her every week at church. There she is, sitting three pews in front of us: the woman who slept with my husband. I want to scream every time I see her. How can we work on rebuilding our marriage when I can’t avoid seeing that woman? There’s no such thing as ‘forgive and forget’ when I’m constantly reminded of his affair.”

It’s hard to restore the love, trust, and honesty back into your marriage when you are crossing paths with the “other woman.” Every time you see her, the images of the affair haunt you. The negative thoughts chip away at your self-esteem and you get so overwhelmed by anxiety that sometimes you even become physically sick.

What to Do When You Can’t Forgive …

You’ve been betrayed.

Your spouse, the person you once loved and trusted most in the world, took advantage of your confidence and walked all over it leaving you to stew in your sickening feelings of anger, shame, resentment, fear, and maybe even jealousy.

Perhaps your spouse cheated on you, breaking the sacred oath of fidelity that was the foundation of your marriage.

Or maybe your spouse broke faith with you by systematically lying about who he was or what he was doing. Gambling, stealing, drinking excessively, or getting involved in nefarious business dealings are a few examples that come to mind.