245: The Truth Might Set You Free

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or you’re the “other person,” or you’re engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgements.  It really is possible to deal with your infidelity situation in a way that you feel great about, and I can help you do that.  When you’re ready to work with me, there are two ways you can have me as your coach.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my private, online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of those options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

In other episodes of this podcast, I’ve talked a lot about the nuances of truth, and what truth is, and what it means to tell the truth.  I’ve talked about the diversity of conceptualizations of what counts as truth, and the variety of understandings about when it’s appropriate to tell whatever we think of as the truth that exist in human societies.

I’ve talked about the way we humans sometimes fetishize truth-telling as an absolute good, or an ultimate good.  And I’ve talked about the trouble we can create for ourselves – and others – when we see telling whatever we think of as the truth as the most important thing to do. 

AND I have also talked about your prerogative to lie, and your prerogative to not tell the truth.  And not only do I personally respect people’s reasons for choosing to lie and evade the truth, I think it’s important for us to collectively endeavor to understand the very human reasons why people choose to avoid the truth or lie.  I’ve talked about how important it is to get away from dualistic, simplistic thinking that telling the truth is good, and lying is bad, and people who tell the truth are good, and people who lie are bad.

I talk about the nuances of truth-telling because I think the whole business of truth IS nuanced, and it’s important to talk about that.  I emphasize your prerogative to lie or evade the truth because it’s just a fact of human life: humans can lie, and they do!  Whether we like that or not, it is and will remain the prerogative of humans to lie, or bend the truth, or omit relevant facts, or otherwise not be what we might consider to be fully truthful.  And I think it is EXTREMELY important to talk about this in curious, neutral terms, instead of sticking to black and white, moralistic thinking about truth-telling.

In talking about truth and lies in the way that I do, some people have accused me of encouraging lying.  But that’s not exactly what I’m doing.  It might even be more accurate to say that that’s far from what I’m doing.

And moreover, despite all of the nuance I recognize in what it means to tell the truth, and no matter how much I respect everyone’s right to omit truths, or massage truths, or outright lie, I also believe that sometimes telling the truth – whatever that may mean in your context – can be a very, very beneficial thing to do.  An EXTREMELY beneficial thing to do.

Why can telling the truth be so helpful?  Let me give you a short list of reasons.

For one thing, it can make your life a whole lot simpler and easier.  Sometimes lying or evading the truth is simple, but sometimes it isn’t.  Sometimes lying, or not telling the truth gets COMPLICATED.  Sometimes keeping track of your lies becomes messy and burdensome.  Sometimes keeping your story straight turns into a very stressful part-time job. 

Sometimes letting the truth be known is a lot less exhausting than trying to keep the truth hidden.  Yes, you may not love the idea of people knowing certain truths – but you might prefer to simply deal with whatever happens when they do than endlessly anticipate what might happen if or when they find out.  Instead of worrying how people might react to the truth, you can deal with their responses to the truth.

If you’re pretty sure that someone knows you’re lying, or are omitting facts that everyone in your situation agrees are relevant, coming clean can be a lot easier, on the whole, than doubling-down on your lying.  If you’re lying to someone you care about, and they know it, and you know that they know it, this situation may be VERY unpleasant for everyone involved – yourself included!  And even if you really don’t want to tell certain truths – which is fair enough – cutting the shit and telling the truth may be far less unpleasant than continuing to lie.  When you lance the boil, so to speak, you clean out the gunk and let the thing start to heal.  When you let the boil fester, it may get even bigger and more unpleasant to deal with.  SOMETIMES we can ignore things and they just go away.  But sometimes things do not go away when we ignore them.

Telling the truth may help you restore credibility with someone you care about – and depending on the nature of your relationship with them, that might be really important to you.

You may believe that it is morally better – or otherwise preferable – to tell the truth than to not tell the truth.  And if you do, telling the truth may put you back into alignment with your priorities and values.  And you might get a lot of benefits from doing that, such as, quite simply, FEELING BETTER.

Depending on the nature of your situation, telling the truth may enable another person – or other people, plural – to start playing with a full deck of cards.  And this may benefit both them and you!  Keeping important truths to yourself can serve some useful purposes.  Lying can serve some useful purposes.  But withholding important information or lying about important things can also deprive another person of their ability to act with full knowledge of a situation, and that may end up adversely affecting both them and you. 

On a related note, in some situations, telling the truth can save you a lot of time and trouble.  If you’ve essentially been living your life as a charade, you’ve probably been doing a lot of things that you don’t really want to be doing.  And that might have been okay for a while.  But do you really want to keep living that way for any longer?

Overall, telling the truth may enable you to deal with the challenges or problems associated with your infidelity situation a lot more efficiently and effectively. 

And, in some situations, telling certain truths, or telling certain truths sooner rather than later may save you a lot of MONEY.  And for some people, that’s the most compelling reason of all.

This is not an exhaustive list of reasons why it may be beneficial to tell the truth.  You may find plenty more reasons why you prefer to tell the truth.  But it’s a start.

Let’s take an example scenario and look at what might happen if you choose to tell the truth or not tell the truth.  Here’s what happens.  You’re married, and you’re having an affair.  And your spouse finds out.  And they confront you.  They say, “I know you’re having an affair,” and they present you with irrefutable evidence.  Maybe a friend of theirs happened to see you making out with your affair partner in the dark corner of a bar, and they snapped a photo of the two of you and gave it to your spouse.  Maybe you accidentally left your laptop open, and you had an email exchange between you and your affair partner in plain view for anyone to see, and your spouse happened to walk by and glance at what was on the screen.  And then they took a closer look at what was on the screen and found a very incriminating exchange.  Or maybe your spouse had a suspicion that something was amiss and they did some light snooping, or maybe some serious digging.  At any rate, they have credible evidence that you are engaging in infidelity and you have no plausible deniability.

Now, in a situation like this, some people flat-out deny the whole thing anyway.  And that can get mighty interesting.  I’m not going to talk too much about that approach today, because what I see more frequently is something fuzzier.

What happens goes like this.  Your spouse confronts you with evidence that you’ve been having an affair.  And you say, “Yes, I had an affair, but it’s totally over, and I’m really sorry it happened and the reason why I didn’t tell you is because it was just a misguided fling and I didn’t want to hurt you and I’m totally committed to our marriage.”

But this isn’t the truth.  The truth is that you don’t know what you want, or you do know what you want, but you’re afraid to choose what you want.  The truth is that your affair is very much still going on, and you are not ready to end it.  And you don’t know where you stand in regards to continuing your marriage.  The truth for you is that you need to cowboy up, or cowgirl up, or cowperson up and seriously consider what you want and make some decisions.  But you don’t know how to tell your spouse that, so you tell them what you think they want to hear.  Which is that the affair is over, it was no big deal anyway, and you very much want to stay married.

What happens after you tell your spouse that your affair is over and you want to recommit to your marriage and this isn’t what you truly want?  Well, a number of things might happen.  Your spouse may expect you to start acting like you’re actually interested in them.  And if you aren’t all that interested in them, acting like you are might take a lot of effort that you don’t really want to expend in this manner.  Your spouse might want you to go to couple’s therapy, and you might not want to do that at all – but if you’ve just professed your renewed commitment to them, how do you explain your unwillingness to going to therapy and work on your relationship?  It might seem easier to just go to couple’s therapy with them – but if you do that, it will definitely take up some of your time, and it will cost money, and it will probably be an exercise in putting up a false front.    

In addition to all of that, if your spouse thinks your affair is over but you are in fact still very much involved with your affair partner, you may have to go to greater lengths to hide your relationship with them.  And that might take a lot of effort, too.  You might not be able to see your affair partner as much as you want to, and you might not like that very much.  And then there’s the question of what you tell your affair partner.  Do you tell them that your spouse busted you and that you told them that your affair is over and you really want to recommit to your marriage?  Or do you not share this detail with them?  Or do you cook up some bullshit story if they ask you why you’re suddenly aloof and unavailable?  Maybe you care deeply about your affair partner, and you really want a shot at a non-affair relationship with them.  But because your spouse found out about your affair and you didn’t know how to tell them the truth, you’re now busy playing house, and you don’t want to tell your affair partner that, so you start lying to them in ways that start to erode your relationship.  Maybe as you attempt to pretend to be enthusiastic about your spouse, you rob yourself of the opportunity to share a life with someone you are truly enthusiastic about being with.

If you don’t tell the truth in this situation, you may find yourself in the position of feeling compelled to tell less and less of the truth to support your original mistruth.  Or you might say that you find yourself having to lie more and more.  You may find yourself doing more things that you don’t really want to do.  You may find yourself less free to do what you actually want to do – or you may make it a lot harder to decide what you actually want to do.  If you’re spending your precious time and energy pretending to be a devoted spouse, that’s time and energy you aren’t spending on deciding what you want to do about your relationships.  Or spending with your affair partner, for that matter.  If you’re spending money on couple’s counseling for the sake of pretending to repair your relationship with your spouse, that’s money you aren’t spending on getting help clarifying what you want and what you want to do in the service of what you want. 

Now, when I get into talking about this stuff with someone who is in the midst of this kind of a situation, they often say things like, “Well, if I were to tell the truth, that would lead to a divorce, and the divorce is going to be expensive and unpleasant and I don’t want to deal with all of that.”  And on the one hand I get it.  Wanting to avoid a situation you think is going to be unpleasant is a very human thing to do.  But that doesn’t mean that actually trying to avoid something that may be inevitable will HELP you in any discernable ways.  If you’re heading towards divorce, you stand to gain a lot by heading right towards it, rather than avoiding it.  If your divorce is going to be uncomfortable, you can at least move through that discomfort efficiently, instead of prolonging it.  If your divorce is going to be expensive, you can minimize those expenses by moving forward steadily and deliberately.  For example, if you know you don’t want to stay married and you therefore are heading towards divorce, why spend thousands of dollars on couple’s therapy pretending you don’t want a divorce before you proceed with the actual process of getting divorced?

It’s true that telling the truth may have consequences that you aren’t EXCITED about.  But on the whole, you might vastly prefer the consequences of telling the truth to the consequences of not telling the truth.

So let’s look at what could happen if you were to tell your spouse the truth.  Your spouse discovers you’ve been having an affair and they confront you.  And you say, “Yes, I am having an affair, I am so embarrassed to have gotten caught, and I’m so sorry for betraying your trust and doing this thing that goes against the agreements our relationship is based upon.  I feel really shitty about this, and I’m sorry.  And, I don’t know what I want to do about this.  I don’t know where I stand in relation to our marriage.  And I really care about my affair partner.  I need to figure this out, and I want to take responsibility for doing that in a way that’s as fair to both of us as possible.”

What might happen if you told that truth?  Well, for one thing, you wouldn’t have to put energy into lying anymore – or at least, not as much energy into lying.  Maybe there are some truths you’re going to continue to withhold or cover up, and that’s your prerogative.  But the big truths are on the table, and you get to stop pretending.  And now everybody has the opportunity to deal with reality as it is.  Your spouse has the opportunity to say, “Screw you, I want a divorce,” or they can say, “All right, I don’t like this, but I appreciate your honesty, and I will give you three months to figure out what you want to do.”  Or whatever.  They get to say whatever they want, and you get to shift from putting your energy towards keeping them in the dark to dealing with their truths.  And in doing this, everybody gets to move forward, bit by bit.

And by telling the main truths, you may have a much easier time telling subsequent truths.  If your spouse says, “Okay, I can live with you not knowing what you want, but you have to go to couple’s counseling with me,” you may feel much more empowered to say, “No, I’m not going to do that,” if you don’t want to do that.  Or maybe it would be more true for you to say, “Yes, I’ll go, but our work with a therapist cannot be predicated upon an assumption that we’re going to stay together, or even the goal that we decide to stay together.”  By telling the truth, we free ourselves from the burdens of pretending.  AND we give ourselves the opportunity to see, in practice, that even if telling the truth is uncomfortable, and even if telling the truth creates some results that we aren’t excited about, we may MUCH prefer to deal with the consequences of telling the truth than dealing with the consequences of not telling the truth.

Sometimes people say to me, “Yes, I get all of this, but I really don’t want to acknowledge my affair because I plan to stay involved with my affair partner and once they become a public part of my life, I REALLY don’t want people to know how our relationship started.  I’m SURE that everyone will hate my person if they know our relationship started as an affair and I just can’t have that, for everyone’s sake.”

I’m totally sympathetic to this kind of concern, and I see plenty of situations in which it is possible for people to end their marriage without disclosing that they’ve had an affair, and then later presenting their former affair partner as their new partner without anyone knowing the relationship started as an affair.  Sometimes this works out fine.  But sometimes it is almost impossible to engineer this.  Sometimes the circumstances of your situation are such that you cannot hide the fact that you’ve had an affair, and that your new partner used to be your affair partner.

And here’s the thing about that.  When we’re contending with challenges, we have to deal with them one step at a time.  We have to solve the problems in front of us.  We quite literally cannot solve problems that might – or might not – occur in the future in the present.  We may really want to control for all possible future outcomes before they happen, but we can’t.  And I know how scary this can seem.  I know that when we perceive threats – or potential threats – we may want to defend ourselves against them, even if the threats exist only in our imagination!  And sometimes there are things we can do in the present to prepare for things that might happen in the future, but sometimes we just have to deal with the thing if and when it happens.

If you’re familiar with the book/program/thing known as A Course in Miracles, you may have heard the line, “In my defenselessness, my safety lies.”  Now, I take the specific ways the Course in Miracles explicates this idea with a few grains of salt, but I find the essential message here to be immensely useful.  And that is that when we try too hard to defend ourselves against something, we may lose more than we gain.  There are going to be times in life when things aren’t going to go the way we want them to, and we may be better off by dealing with these situations as they are, rather than trying to prevent inevitable situations from occurring in the first place, or attempting to ensure that everything turns out to our liking.  Sometimes the best path forward is to be willing to deal with whatever it is that we dislike.  If and when it happens. 

And moreover, the Course in Miracles tells us, there isn’t really any such thing as safety anyway.  “Safety,” the thing that we desperately attempt to create or cling to doesn’t actually exist.  So any attempt to protect our so-called safety will not only be unsuccessful, it may be detrimental to our overall well-being.

If this idea is new to you, I encourage you to consider it seriously without thinking that you have to take it literally or absolutely.  There are going to be times when we do want to defend ourselves against literal threats to our existence.  That’s for sure.  If somebody is running towards you with a knife in their hand, you don’t just stand there and say, “It’s okay, you can stab me if you want to.”  No.  You – probably, anyway – want to get out of the way or defend yourself.

But there are so many things that SEEM like literal threats to our existence that actually aren’t.  And it’s really important to examine those supposed threats in new ways, and to consciously decide how we want to respond to those supposed threats.  Sometimes our best line of “defense” is being willing to deal with a shitty situation without making a bigger deal out of it than we need to.

If you want to read about what the Course in Miracles says about your safety lying in your defenselessness, look it up.  I believe this teaching is generally listed as Lesson 153 in the course.  Again, a lot of their language doesn’t resonate with me, but it might with you, and even if it doesn’t, you may find it very worthwhile to consider the essence of this idea.  In my defenselessness, my safety lies.  How could that be true for you in the context of your infidelity situation?

I want to emphasize two things.  When I suggest that telling the truth may be beneficial, I recognize that “telling the truth” can mean or entail many things.  For instance, some people think that if they’re going to “tell the truth” about their affair, that will require them to tell EVERY truth about their affair.  But I don’t see it that way.  The way I see it is, you can, if you choose to, tell the truths of your affair that are relevant to the situation at hand, and you can leave other truths out of the discussion.  If your spouse confronts you and says, “Look, I have all of this evidence that you’re having an affair, what have you been doing with this person and what do you want to do with me?” you can answer their questions sufficiently truthfully without providing every single detail about what’s been going on.  You can tell your spouse that yes, you do care about your affair partner, and yes, you have had sex with them without going into all of the details of your sexual encounters with them.  Even if your spouse really wants that information, you do not have to share it.  You can tell your spouse that yes, you do have serious doubts about your marriage without giving them a gratuitous list of things you don’t like about them.  There is much we could say about the nature of truth and truth-telling, and one of those things is, using our discretion and telling useful truths may be far more beneficial than telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

And on that note, the second thing I want to emphasize is something I just said.  There is A LOT to be said about the nature of truth and truth-telling, and about lies and lie-telling.  This isn’t the final word on any of these matters.  This little podcast episode is one drop within an ocean’s worth of discussion.  It is not the whole ocean. 

If you’ve got your underwear in a tangle about what truths to tell within your infidelity situation, let’s talk.  Sometimes we tell or withhold the truth impulsively, or reactively, and this may not help you get the results you want to get in your relationships.  Sometimes we don’t know what truths to tell, even when we know we want to tell the truth selectively.  Sometimes we don’t know how to contend with our fear of telling the truth.  Sometimes we need help figuring out which truths to tell and which lies to maintain.  I can help you with all of that.  If you need guidance on how to navigate truth-telling within your infidelity situation, schedule an introductory coaching session with me today and we’ll figure out what’s truly right for you within the context of your unique situation.  You can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, and that’s also where you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.

And that is it for today!  Thank you all so much for listening.  Bye for now.