How Did You Not Know?
This is one of the questions people ask us when we talk about infidelity and spouses with secret lives.
I have gotten this question a few times from well-meaning friends and family regarding my ex-husband’s secret double life.
“How did you not know?”
It’s a normal thing to ask if you haven’t been through a relationship with someone who is highly narcissistic or abusive. It makes no sense right? How is it possible to not know what was happening with your partner? How do you explain it to others?
We can’t always put into words the manipulation, coercive control, ambient abuse, and gaslighting. We know that we felt off and knew that something wasn’t right, but we can’t always verbalize the exact thing that was wrong.
The confusion -> You just know that you didn’t really know, but somehow you did know at the same time.
It’s Not About How We Didn’t Know
The difficult concept to grasp is not how we didn’t know about their secret life, it is harder to wrap your head around the lengths that someone will go through to keep their other life a secret.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and Olympian levels of dedication to run completely separate lives. If they had put an equal amount of effort into their one life, just imagine what they could have accomplished!
We didn’t know because they hid it.
We didn’t know because they didn’t want us to find out about it.
We didn’t know because we were lied to.
And the most controversial one… We didn’t know because we didn’t want to know.
That won’t be for every case, but for many it’s true because of the concept of Betrayal Blindness. (I write a bit more about this concept in this article)
Betrayal Blindness leads us to put aside our nagging gut feelings and to accept half-truths and excuses. We equate their bad behavior to some reasonable explanation.
They didn’t come home all weekend = They must have been stuck at work.
They didn’t call for 2 days = Their phone must not be getting reception.
They stop having sex and touching you = They must be stressed out.
Money is missing from the bank account = It must have gotten hacked.
They received a sexual message on their social media account = It was a case of mistaken identity.
They say something mean = They had a hard childhood and need more love.
Someone saw their car at a motel = They must have seen someone else’s vehicle.
Their last business trip prevents them from going on vacation with you and the kids = They must be sad and overworked and need your support not frustration.
It isn’t until we look back on all of these signs that the truth becomes too plain for us to deny. We had it in front of us all along, but it was too hard to accept.
This is not a conscious activity. Some may decide to turn the other cheek and not accept reality, but that isn’t the case with Betrayal Blindness. Betrayal Blindness happens under the radar. We don’t know that we are doing this. It is a subconscious process.
In this activity, we don’t know that we don’t want to know. Make sense?
In hindsight, we often realize that they had confessed to things in little bits all along. This is the concept of the Hypothetical Confession, which is something that narcissists do to find pleasure in tricking you and to gather information about your responses to the things they have done.
If they can posit their actions as hypothetical, then they don’t have to pay the consequences for their actions because it’s all conjecture. You don’t find out until much later that it wasn’t theoretical, it was the truth.
What Kind Of Person Has The Ability To Lead A Double Life?
My personal opinion is that someone would have to be a Narcissist, Sociopath, or Psychopath to be able to have a secret double life. I mean they could be diagnosed with ASPD or NPD.
It takes more than a few lies and some mistakes to lead a completely alternate life in the shadows. You can’t whoopsie your way into this.
The planning, structure, lies, manipulation, energy, and time that goes into this kind of scheme is not something accomplished by someone a little bit narcissistic. This is pathological behavior.
Most likely, you would need a full-blown disorder to pull this off.
In the realm of infidelity, an affair that involves a double life is not in the same category as a one-time occurrence or drunken hookup at a work conference. (I was going to put one-night stand, but in a double life there could be dozens of one-nighters or prostitutes in the mix.)
The affairs involved in double lives are almost less important than the lies. The affair itself can still be a highly traumatic event, but the magnitude of the secrets and lies involved in the story behind the affair is a monster in itself. The affair is only a piece of that pie.
I recall what it was like to find out about my ex-husband’s secret life. It’s not easy to find out your reality is a lie and you don’t truly know the person you made a life with. I don’t wish that on anyone else.
If you have discovered your spouse’s secret double life, let me know. How did it unfold for you?
