Sunday, July 19, 2015

Shifting from crisis to rebuilding

I discovered his affair a little more than a month ago. He did not end it immediately; there were about two weeks of varying degrees of contact afterward. During that time, he would repeatedly tell me the he had ended it, I would sort of believe him, and then my bullshit radar would go off again. Off to the snoops I would go and each time that happened I would find that he had lied to me, again. I didn't trust much about my own judgment, or anything that came out of his mouth, but I trusted that I knew when he had resumed contact. My tangled gut knew. 

Running on adrenaline like that really did fine tune my focus on that one point. Everything else was completely out of focus, and consequently my judgment was pretty flawed in almost every other area. I confided in three people I shouldn't have, because I just had to fucking talk to someone. Those chickens are starting to come home to roost in one case (not sure yet if I did lasting damage with the other two). I'm learning that family members, both blood and in-law, can be surprisingly destructive and fickle.

The hardest thing so far though has been recalibrating my sense of judgment. Certain behaviors of his still ring alarm bells with me. His affair was online and had not (yet?) progressed to in-person activities, though his emotional and financial involvement was intense. So whenever he spends extended amounts of time on his phone - texting? browsing? chatting? - my emotional antennae crackle, and my impulse is to snoop his phone at the earliest possibility. Yet the last times I did do that, I didn't find any evidence of misbehavior, and, man, does snooping ever make me feel skeevy. How do I get used to the same activity that supported the affair the most - using his smart phone - suddenly no longer being a threatening one? How do I deal with the lingering doubt that he could be using my attempt at trusting him as a cover for more illicit activity? 

My tangled gut knew. In the throes of the crisis, it knew. Now that he and I are trying to rebuild the marriage, or start our second one together, I want to dial back my emotional wariness a bit. It is physically and emotionally debilitating to be constantly that on edge, waiting to snoop the phone and computer (though Google's "incognito" mode is pure evil there) or reading the tea leaves of his mood or whatever. I want to build a new normal that doesn't involve snooping and constant alertness to any possible misstep. I'm still afraid to let my tangled gut rest.

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