Your Wife Wants You to Lead the Healing Process
If you’ve betrayed your wife, if you’ve cheated on her, if you’ve been addicted to pornography and kept it hidden, but now it’s out in the open, I want to encourage you to lead your relationship to healing.
How to lead your relationship after sexual betrayal
I will walk you through what I mean by leading your relationship and some important steps if you are to help your relationship heal.
First: What will happen if you don’t lead?
She will lead if you don’t
Wives often find themselves leading the relationship after a sex or porn addiction has been discovered. There are a few reasons this happens.
She is anxious, on edge and hyperaware of any sign that you may be acting out again or lying. In order for her to feel safe and relax, she needs to feel you are leading yourself in your sobriety.
She is probably highly motivated to save the relationship. Maybe you two have a whole life together, children, house, friends.
In my experience, wives are not as afraid to seek out professional help and other resources.
The work of getting help
Your wife may find herself searching Amazon for books on sexual addiction or betrayal. She may be on Psychology Today looking for a therapist who does this type of work. She may be reading articles and random threads talking about couples who’ve experienced something similar.
She may be doing all this work but, let me be clear, she absolutely does not want to be!
Shame stunts leadership
Shame stops many men from taking the lead. They may be figuratively stuck in the fetal position. Most guys experience excessive shame after their wives discover the truth of what they’ve been doing, and it debilitates them. It’s like they can’t move. Can’t think. Has this happened to you?
I know it may be really bad right now, but you need to know there is hope. Your relationship can heal under the right circumstances.
Responsibility, initiative, a plan
One of those right circumstances is your leadership in this process. I am not talking about inauthentic, pretending-to-be-strong type leadership. I’m not asking you to be fake. The leadership I am talking about can be weak, imperfect leadership, but leadership still.
When I say leadership, I am referring to three things: responsibility, initiative, and a plan.
Your wife is thinking something like, “I didn’t cause this. This is not my problem. Why then am I the one taking initiative to get us better?”
Leadership may feel like the last thing you have in you right now, but it will demonstrate to your partner that your relationship with her matters more to you than your feeling ashamed. Give her the feeling that you are taking all this seriously, that you are doing and going to do everything necessary to help your relationship heal and grow. She does not want to lead this process. And if she does, because you aren’t or you don’t know what to do, the risk of her resenting you increases exponentially.
What to do: seek out the necessary counseling, search “betrayal trauma” in Amazon to find a book to read, go to Bloom and ask your wife to watch some educational videos with you, learn to sit with her pain without getting defensive, learn to protect the emotional connection in your relationship, and lead yourself with integrity and become more trustworthy in general.
Don’t be afraid to lead your relationship to healing.
