SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

How do I know when I have got the truth?
How do I decide when I have got enough truth? (How to decide I know enough?)

Polygraphs aren’t really a thing here in the UK.

I feel I have now got the true answers to all the big factual questions about my WH’s infidelity. Any gut instinct doubt about his story that didn’t feel ‘right’ turned out to be well-founded, and accurately signalled a lie. My gut instinct is now quiet… I am feeling quite ‘still’ in terms of questions. However, my gut instinct might just not have detected everything yet…

There’s lots more I could ask, but I actually don’t feel the need to given where I am mentally at the moment (which is kind of detached and looking at things more factually but with a tinge of anger/ hope).

However, there could be a whole other world of infidelity that I simply haven’t cottoned on to or uncovered yet.

Do you reach a point when you just accept that you have the truth you need and work forward (understanding that something else could surface)?

Ahhhhh this!!! Such a great question!

My gut is quiet too and I’m worried as well! I also don’t want to pain shop which I feel like I do.
I’m going to be creeping answers on this thread.

My take on this is that the ultimate goal of the BS getting answers about the A is to come to a place of lasting peace about it. Our minds go on fire and demand answers, and we need to supply that to come to peace. It’s hard to know what is enough. I recommend patience in evaluating. If your peace is stable, then you’ve met the goal. If you feel continued questions troubling you, then ask those.

Your knowledge about the A will always be a fragile, fragmented house of cards, built on the fallible recollections of a self deluded liar. It can be good enough to bring you peace, but it will be a strange place in your mind. And if new lies come to light which knock the house of cards to the ground, you should walk away.

Yes, ‘pain shopping’ is a good phrase. This is what I don’t want to do. But perhaps I do because I don’t what him to forget…

Perhaps one fear is that, once you have what you think is the full truth, you then move to more of a ‘making a decision’ phase to start to try and trust again, and that is scary… (I realise one can make all sorts of decisions at all sorts of times, but that is my feeling: I need to know where to focus my energy!).

Let’s see what folk say!

Gosh, Inkhulk, you phrase things beautifully!

Doesn’t he?

Thanks ink. That makes sense to me.

Do you reach a point when you just accept that you have the truth you need and work forward (understanding that something else could surface)?

I asked 5.3 billion questions — most of those over the first two years. It was probably more. It is a fairly fine line between truth seeking and pain shopping. Your brain is going to keep trying to find a path to fix the trauma, with or without the answers you require. It always comes down to what you need to feel like you have ‘enough’ of the truth.

Over eight years in, I feel like I have about 95 percent of the truth.

I assume the absolute worst about the stuff I don’t know.

I accepted that horrible stuff happened and I never have to be happy about infidelity.

Moving forward is something I had to do, for me, regardless of how the M was going.

As for your M to move forward, that’s far more about what your WS is doing to be a safe partner.

Not everyone is willing to look hard at the horrible choices they make and then really change.

Your next questions should be more about why your spouse needed to be validated outside of the relationship. The next time the WS is having difficulty in life, will they turn toward the M or away?

One of the biggest lessons that I learned from infidelity is that one can never truly know another person's heart or mind. There's no way to know when you have the full truth. When the person you're supposed to be able to trust the most has proven themselves completely untrustworthy and pulled the rug out from underneath everything you thought was fact, you must really learn to trust yourself. Your gut. Your eyes. Your heart. If you don't, you'll flounder.

I made the decision to "trust but verify" based on what I could see and feel from my H, and how he was answering my questions truthfully even when it was very painful (for both of us). He would ask me things like, "You know I would never do that to you - or myself - again, right?" and I would answer, "No, I don't know that, but I believe it." I trusted myself enough to handle it if it turned out that I was wrong.

Yes, ‘pain shopping’ is a good phrase. This is what I don’t want to do.

I admire that you're aware of the perils of pain shopping and are stopping yourself from doing so. I

I'll guess 'pain shopping' is taking on the Victim role in a Drama Triangle. If it means something else, will you describe how you're using the term?

BSes experience so much pain that I doubt pain shopping is even possible in the first year or 2 that one knows one has been betrayed - it's all pain, almost all the time. No need to shop for more.

In the end, the only resources we have to determine truth from fiction are our thoughts and feelings. It's up to each of to decide what we believe.

So, noticing that one has no more answers may, in fact, be 'it.' My reco is to be open to new questions, though. Hell, I'm almost 14 years out from d-day, and I asked a totally new question in the recent past. My W continues to answer honestly, even if the answer is, 'I don't remember.' If IDR is the answer, though, she'll say that the answer probably would be something like _____, and she'll fill in the blank.

*****

I went into Q&A the way Oldwounds did, asking anything and everything I could think of. I did so because I thought the answers would lead to my understanding why my W cheated, and because I thought that understanding leads to healing. I ended up knowing my W's POV, but I still don't really understand how she let herself fuck up so badly.

What the Q & A really did was the following:

helped me recalibrate my ability to tell when my W was truthful or not -

each answer helped rebuild healthy bonds -

each answer helped rebuild trust -

each answer helped her take responsibility for her actions -

each answer showed she was open and honest (finally!) -

each answer showed she was committed to her own healing -

etc., etc., etc.

So the Q & A did help me heal, but in a way that was very different from what I expected.

*****

Trust your gut. It may be wrong - if your WS is a better liar than you think they are, you may very well be wrong. As long as you ask the questions that scare you, and as long as there are no important questions that you're hiding from, the gut-level sense that you know enough is a good sign. Not a perfect one, but very good.

*****

Now, if you do know everything you need to know, what's your next step?

If you're uncertain about your next step, what do you need to learn?

You will never have the full truth. It's impossible for it to be conveyed to you second hand. So there is some amount of gap you must live with.

Hence, I think your well informed second question. When do you have "enough" truth? That's something that only you can determine. If you feel you are suppressing your own doubt to move forward, you do not have enough. You have to live honestly with your feelings. As discussed in this thread, if there is a question burning you ask it. You asking questions or getting information that you feel may push you over the edge and make you want to end your relationship is critical. You can't keep yourself in the dark to keep the peace. It's completely unsustainable.

I wouldn't worry about "pain shopping" in this context. I think of that activity as something more like stalking AP or ruminating on information you already know that hurts you (re-reading sexts or something like this). Essentially "pain shopping" is not a search for new and meaningful information (which may be painful), it's returning to known yet painful information.