Here in this final post for the 12-part series on infidelity and infidelity counseling, I’d like to go back to the beginning…back to where we started…back to talking about trusting…now in a way you are perhaps ready for. But brace yourselves. This post has the potential to push you ahead quicker than you need to go. It’s far too easy to push yourself far too quickly in the process of affair recovery, and oh so important not to! If you are just beginning your process of working through infidelity, you may want to skip this one for now. In the beginning, dealing with the intense emotions or grief is what is most important. If you are at that stage in your affair recovery, I hope that you will sit this one out.

Trusting and Entrusting

Many couples who have been married for many years get to a place where they stop trusting their spouses. They stop trusting them to listen well, to truly understand, or to take out the damn garbage. Sometimes, for many who are reading this blog, trusting is a far greater challenge because of infidelity. Yet, it seems to be a significant and deeply emotional challenge in most marriages regardless, causing extraordinary pain for those involved. So, what is going on?

In my work with couples over the years, I have found that “trust” is a tricky concept—infidelity or not. I think sometimes maybe we are using the word “trust” when what we are really talking about is a process where people “entrust” their spouses with important things…things they MAY be able to take care of themselves. Yes, even when it comes to infidelity. Perhaps especially when it comes to infidelity.

It’s Not Either/Or

If you find yourself not getting very far in your infidelity counseling work—or in any marriage counseling endeavor—one way to think about it might be reflecting on what you may have entrusted to your spouse over the years. While trusting may have to do with a working partnership, entrusting may have to do with a dependency on each other that ultimately seems to run couples into a brick wall.

But “dependency” isn’t a “bad” thing. It’s a normal, human thing. If we start thinking of it as “bad” we are vulnerable to start blaming ourselves or our spouses for it or to start trying to create a force quit. But we can’t stop it. We can’t force a quit on this one. We can very slowly over time begin to let our dependencies go peacefully, little by little. Through our own quiet, determined, profound, unmercifully slow centering process. Our own process of differentiation of self.

In a more trusting marriage, individuals are less concerned or worried about or obsessed with what their spouse is or isn’t feeling and whether they express it or what character flaws they may have—and more invested in their own personal wellbeing and integrity within and throughout their interactions with their spouse. In a marriage where important things have been entrusted to spouse, people seem to become preoccupied with what their spouses are thinking and feeling and doing. This preoccupation doesn’t seem to go very well for either involved.

I want to be clear. It’s not a black or white, either/or kind of idea here. It’s not trusting vs. entrusting. It’s both. It’s always both in marriage and in any family relationship. However, all seemingly unworkable problems arise from the entrusting side of things.

What might you be handing over and when do you do it?

When we lean more towards “entrusting” in marriage, we get stuck in an automatic process of handing something over to spouse—something usually quite unconscious and deeply emotional and something core to one’s very sense of self. This is one of the reasons affairs are so difficult to work through. It’s not the affair itself. It’s all that we have so deeply entrusted to our spouses. An affair seems to be a violent wrench in this already poorly working system.

When we entrust our spouses with whatever this is (and there isn’t a human on the planet who doesn’t do it) we are at the mercy of an emotional process that makes trust either very difficult or down right impossible. And an emotional process that was running the show that lead to an affair in the first place.

Conventional marriage therapy embraces this handing over process. It encourages it, calls it love, and works to coach couples to get better at handling it. Spouse 1 is to get better at handling Spouse 2’s unconscious and emotional need, and Spouse 2 is to get better at handling Spouse 1’s unconscious and emotional need.

I wonder what you think about that idea? I wonder what experiences you’ve had with working with your husband’s deeply emotional and unconscious needs. I wonder what experiences you’ve had working with your wife’s. I wonder what you yourself have handed over to your spouse. Even for those with the best of intentions, this process doesn’t seem to get them very far. For most people, this approach only relieves anxiety for a little while, never relieves it, or it only relieves the anxiety for one spouse and not the other. I know, as my practice is full of folks who have tried this route for years and years and years.

Either Avoiding or Chasing After

Some of us reject our own internal need for our spouses, and we develop a kind of allergic reaction to them—so we shut down, avoid, and run for the hills. Some of us find that the need at play is the need to be needed—the need to be the one with the answers or the money or the support, etc. Some of us drown in our own neediness and spend a lot of time in pursuit of spouse or other family member, demanding they be met in one form or another. Either way, it seems to be based in this process of entrusting self to spouse.

What’s Marriage for If Not to Take Care of Each Other’s Needs?!

I think most people object to some degree or another about being responsible for one’s own emotional needs—especially when it comes to marriage. The very reason I think most of us get married in the first place, whether conscious or unconscious, is to have our needs met. And I think it is fundamentally human to have this kind of feeling about our relationships. I really do get it. I struggle with it myself. I don’t think there is a human alive who doesn’t in one way or another. It’s just human nature to want someone to tend to us, to make us feel a certain way. It just doesn’t seem to work very well—when we entrust self to other to a significant degree. I have yet to see a marriage in distress where this isn’t a significant factor. The hard part is that we miss how empowering it can be to do these things for self. When we’re less concerned about what spouse is feeling or not feeling, etc. we free up so much energy to explore self in deeply satisfying ways.

Moving Towards a Trusting Marriage

Moving more towards trusting and slightly more away from entrusting is an empowering effort. It looks like letting our spouses off the hook for what they really can’t do for us anyway. It is an opportunity to know self and to value self without the distraction of being overly concerned about spouse.

What does a more trusting marriage look like, and how does one move towards it? How does one move towards a more empowered, self-embracing, self-nurturing, personally accountable stance in marriage or in family life? A stance where spouse, parents, and offspring aren’t being either held hostage or avoided for not meeting needs?

I think there are no easy answers. And perhaps only better questions than the ones we are asking. Here are a few that might help:

How much time am I spending trying to figure out what my spouse is doing wrong?
How much time am I spending thinking about either self or spouse in a blaming way?
How much do I get caught in the thinking: I’m-doing-MY-work…WHY-isn’t-he/she-doing-his/hers?!
What do I find meaningful within myself? What do I find beautiful within or in the world around me? How much energy do I put towards this, and how much of it do I share with spouse?
What does humility mean to you? (not to your spouse…to YOU)
In which other relationships in my life does the entrusting process seem to be at work? (If you can’t think of one, consider relationships that you avoid or reject, and you’ll find it there.)
How much do I approach sex out of need or want? Out of fullness or out of emptiness?
How do I feel when we don’t have sex? Am I OK or do I crash in some way?
Where do I get my sense of whether I’m sexy?

These are just a few ideas of questions to ask self. I’m sure you can come up with some good ones of your own.

If you are interested in learning more about this process, check out The Bowen Center in D.C., or reach out to me to get started with individual or marital counseling. Dr. Bowen developed his unconventional approach to thinking about relationship problems through the 1950’s on. His theory was developed out of the evolutionary and biological sciences, and he was one of the earliest objectors to Freudianism and its unfortunately and incredibly unscientific approach to human problems.

If you have been with me for this entire 12-part series, thank you. Thank you for reading, for reaching out, and mostly for considering the ideas I have presented here. I wish you and your spouse well in your healing process and in your marriage.