A False Confession?

Dear Adrienne,

FW in my case said virtually the same thing but didn’t use a therapist as backup. He confessed to certain things early on after d-day, as if in a blurting trance. But later he tried to retract many of these things by saying he only said such and such because it’s what I “wanted to hear,” or because I’d “demanded [Shmoopie’s] scalp.”

Firstly, like CL said, why tf would I “want” to hear about an affair? The revelations ripped my lungs out of my body. It was horrible. Furthermore, the term “scalp” had first been used because it has been Shmoops who demanded *mine.* Long before I knew she existed, she had called me names and had expressed rage when FW wouldn’t mistreat me in the specific ways she would have preferred. So FW was retracting his admission that Shmoops demanded my scalp by reversing this onus onto me.

Weird. Yet more reason to block and go NC or gray rock and not expect truth or closure from cheaters. But for those of us who didn’t get that memo right away, you could say that FW’s ever-shifting senses of truth are par for the course. I think the general rule is that if a FW retracts an initial admission, this means the initial admission was not only true but true x a factor of 30. Anyway, for the record, every early blurted admission he later tried to retract by characterizing as a false confession turned out to be true and then some.

— FW and Shmoopie were both defineably alcoholics. FW had managed to hide his drinking well for over a year but it progressed to the point that he could not quit without noticeable symptoms. So once that cat was out of the bag, it could not be put back in the bag. Yet he tried. At first, FW had admitted that most of the marital assets blown on the affair went to booze, possibly as an alibi for the affair (demon whisky made him do it!). But then he didn’t like the sordid light that shed on the affair and on Shmoopie, so he pretended that he’d just said this to appease me and it wasn’t true and his shmoops was a wholesome, healthy angel. Except, of course, when the full financial damage was finally fully exposed, this lie became even more impossible to sustain. They spent $40k in a year and a half, mostly in bars and liquor stores. And it turned out she was not only a active alcoholic for yesrs longer than FW and regularly drove drunk, but she was also a huge pot head. Furthermore, the drug abuse aspect was maddeningly obvious because they both looked the part. They both has the tell-tale bar fly beer guts, bleary eyes and perpetual ass-faced grumpy expressions.
The one upside of the monumentally useless RIC process was the full disclosure part where all the past mindfucks and gaslights were amended. FW finally admitted the full scope of what drunken arses he and the AP had been.

–FW initially admitted, then withdrew, then admitted again that he had every reason to know he was exposing me to potentially deadly STDs because the AP had quite the shady, high-risk past. She had a history of doing anal with strangers met through online dating sites w/o condoms.
People who do anal are statistically far more likely to contract STDs and people who cheat are statistically far more likely to pass the infections to others than even those in “open relationships.” What’s more, the AP was still using those dating sites for about 6 months into the affair. Basically,
failure to admit what a high risk person the AP was was a quasi criminal failure to warn of the danger I was in.

–FW finally admitted that “scalping” me had been a ritual. Each time after he’d briefly paused the affair for various family holidays, he’d return and Shmoops would sulk and refuse to screw him until FW put me and the marriage down. Putting me down was apparently foreplay. It cast them both in an ugly light and made it impossible to “romanticize” or mythologize the affair as anything but sleazy, hateful and disgusting.

Some FWs try to blame their own actions on the “hussy” AP. Some go to the ither extreme and try to protect the AP because, if the AP is merely dogshit, that means bagging the AP wasn’t a feather in the FWs narcy cap. Either way, lies are lies, mindfucks are mindfucks. Any way in which cheaters conceal or warp the truth is abuse. Proof of this is thst I think it shortened my trauma a little that I didn’t have to just trust that they sucked but got a pretty full admission of how and why they sucked (and probably an easier divorce and better settlement because FW gave up “plausuble deniability”) . But I didn’t get the facts until after FW tried to retract every icky, telling admission, so I still have blender scars on my head.

One more thing — this goes back to the question of do you tell — Just because someone tells you something, especially about a dead person, doesn’t mean it is true. It may be speculation, or hearsay. Someone may tell a “fact” about another person without any proof, what so ever. You do not know what their motivation is. Unless you have irrefutable evidence — which would hold up in court — don’t repeat or believe gossip. I really try to mind my own business, even if I hear something I want to believe. Stories get twisted. Remember that childhood party game where someone whispers in another’s ear, and you go around the room, and the last person says it out loud? Not accurate. Police interview eye witnesses, who tell what they believe they saw. Amazingly, not always accurate. So we are fallible humans — big surprise. Some people lie. Another big surprise. Just ask yourself what would be gained by repeating what I was told, which may or may not be true? Usually, nothing good. If your significant other dismisses your concerns, thinks he’s being funny, wants to keep his secrets, or turn the blame on you, is this behavior acceptable to you? You are the one who decides how you will live.

Adrienne I am so sorry this happened. But please don’t believe him. I found hotel receipts, jewelry receipts, resort reservations and receipts ad nauseum. All the dates corresponded with nights he was working. Imagine that? My fw denied an affair. He swore he was “helping a friend” cheat on his wife. Wtf?? By implicating himself???. None of it made sense. They lie and gaslight. Period.

“he said his counsellor advised him not to falsely confess to having sex with someone to make me “feel better.” He said he would not let me pressure him into a false confession.”

word salad. (definition) a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases, specifically (in psychiatry) as a form of speech indicative of advanced schizophrenia.

having once worked psychiatry i can tell you that word salad is RARE among schizophrenics. but narcissists enjoy stringing terms together for the purpose of confusion, particularly if there’s a hint of authority to the terms/conditions. e.g. “my psychologist said…” “it’s a part of attachment disorder (DSM V)”.

I believed my ex back when we were still married (after D-Day #1) and he told me his therapist did not agree with my insistence on transparency: I had insisted the ex give me passwords to all his financial accounts but I got angry when I briefly checked each account (without time to do a deep dive into less recent months) and THEN he changed his passwords without giving me the new ones.

Due to confidentiality requirements, I couldn’t ask the therapist if this supposed lack of agreement with my requiring transparency was true. But after I got him to agree to stop seeing this counselor (because I thought the rather young therapist probably didn’t know anything about infidelity and the related trust issues), it later occurred to me that my ex had probably lied to me so that I would ask him to quit individual counseling. In all likelihood, he MANIPULATED me by lying about what the therapist said. And it worked! He got out of the annoyance of individual therapy because he got ME to ask him to quit!

Would a counselor advise against false confession? I suppose it’s possible – but highly unlikely! It sounds like subject a cheater would bring up, not a therapist.

Why would a therapist broach this subject?? “By the way, remember not to confess to an affair you didn’t have.” It sounds like it was brought up by a cheater who was continuing to deny a physical affair and trying to convince everyone it was “only” an emotional affair.

Bottom line: I call bullshit. Your husband is most likely lying with intent to manipulate.

The cheater loved to argue semantics, and would say that there was no way that he could prove to me that he wasn’t doing it, so it was up to me to learn to trust him again and get over it or not. I chose not.

Way to stick a stainless steel spoon in the mindfuck blender, CL! Scratched an itch. Oddly satisfying to read you say the things we really, really want to respond to a cheater – but know better than to get suckered into. Also, grateful that you pointed out the whole “authority” scam. That kind of triangulation is such an insidious gaslighting tactic.

Adrienne, sorry you are going through this. CL once wrote something to the effect of, “If there’s confusion/mixed messages, there’s manipulation/abuse” (or at least that was my takeaway). As you can see, a lot of us remember vividly what it was like to be where you are and are rooting for you.

My FW also lamented that he would not be “goaded” into a false confession and insinuated that I was gaslighting him for still not trusting him (he then confessed to a bunch of stuff that he backpedaled on later.) FW also told me his therapist told him I needed to let go of my anger towards him (1 month after a d-day no less…) because my inability to let go was making me emotionally abusive towards FW. He used texts I’d sent him asking variations of “how could you do this to your daughter and I?”/”how could you torpedo our entire life like this?” and he called the cops on me claiming harassment. The cops determined no crime occurred, and apologized to me for the trouble. FW then tried to use the police report from that incident to convince the courts to order me into anger management “for our daughter’s emotional safety.” The family court mediator said “No crime occurred that day, Dad, so I’m not ordering Mom to anger management. She’s mad because you cheated on her and that’s a completely normal reaction to being cheated on.” This website is a constant reminder to me that these cheating scumbags all read from the same script and say the same dumb shit to cover their tracks.

I’m all in favor of hiring a PI or just effectively snooping in order to get more truth. Not to learn everything, which is impossible, but to learn more than they’d ever tell you. In particular if you can read their own honest words, it helps to end whatever love you have for them, and that’s a good thing. Here are some examples, not made up:

*Reading their messages to their OW, about how they’re trying to get you to have an abortion, and complaining that it isn’t working.

*Reading their messages to family members you’d always gone out of your way to be kind to, describing how much of a problem you are.

*Reading their x-rated messages to other women that were sent while they were on a special family vacation with you.

This kind of discovery ends the love and longing for them. It hurts, but it also helps.

>he said his counselor advised him not to falsely confess to having sex with someone to make me “feel better.”

There’s another angle here which is worth mentioning. Something I regret failing to notice. Notice how easy it is to dismiss such an accusation as a stinky pile of nonsense, and fail to see the danger of such deep contempt. It’s actually a good habit in some situations (like working in Customer Service), to not give into an someone’s provocation. But this is a deadly mistake with FWs. Their “facts” are ridiculous but their absolute contempt is real. They’re desire to smack you down verbally or otherwise is real.

Part of why I missed a bunch of red flags with my abusive Ex was because it became a habit to tune out his nonsense. I was overconfident and just kept dismissing nonsense. It never occured to me that innocence wouldn’t protect me. There were other reasons why I turned off my BS detector. He’d tell “funny” stories which were part true but with a lot of what I thought was comic exaggeration. I just let the ridiculous parts pass unchallenged, since it was a pain challenge. Later I realized that I had been conditioned/groomed into tuning out his untruths. In hindsight, it was chilling to remember the times he threatened me to my face, and I didn’t take it seriously.

Another thing to notice is how these accusations plant seeds of self-doubt. A chump might wonder if they did something wrong, didn’t get the psych memo, or gave the wrong impression. Or sit stunned, trying to make sense of what happened, which used to happen to me. One time I was excited to go to a party, and asked his opinion on an outfit I put together. Mistake! He told me that it looked clunky, I’d embarrass myself, and men would hit on me because they think I was stupid. He knew my buttons, and said the exact thing which would leave me in stunned, immobile, remembering past shames and forgetting the party. This is why its so dangerous to share confidences with a FW. They build scar tissue sculptures on your childhood wounds, to keep you under control. Of course in hindsight, after much “no contact”, it’s easy to see that “men will hit on you because they think you’re stupid” is a reveal that I probably looked great and he didn’t want competition. But notice how framing it as “because you look stupid” would just poison with self-doubt any positive attention from the party.