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Grace was suspicious that her husband was hiding something. She put a tracker on his car. She would snoop on his emails and Facebook page. She even hired a private investigator for a few weeks.
She spent tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours of her time while he was at work, and countless hours torturing herself emotionally, wondering what, if anything, was going on.
Grace is not alone.
Thirty-seven percent of spouses say they have checked their partner’s email or call history on the sly, according to a study by Retrovo.com. As it becomes easier to have indiscretions, it’s also becoming easier and more common to snoop on our partners.
But if we are finding the need to snoop on our spouses, then there’s something else going on that needs to be addressed. There’s something way more important than finding a piece of evidence. And that is where the focus and attention should be placed.
If you’re snooping, then there is either something broken in the relationship, or there is something damaged within you that needs to be addressed.
Maybe there’s something to snoop about.
Maybe you have good reason to not trust your significant other. Maybe you’ve sensed him pulling away within the relationship and spending more time either away from home or distracted. Maybe she’s been keeping her phone unusually protected, or you overheard something that made you wonder.
It’s been my experience through my coaching practice that – for the most part – where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. So most of my clients that begin snooping find something. They thought they needed to see the proof, but now they can’t un-see what they have seen, and it becomes incredibly difficult to heal.
Maybe there’s not.
Maybe the thoughts spinning around in your mind second-guessing your spouse are just a projection of your insecurities. Maybe you’ve had experiences in past relationships that taught you not to trust quite as easily. Maybe you’re a jealous person. Maybe you’ve even done some things that you wouldn’t want your significant other to know about, and that’s got you thinking and overthinking.
It’s a worthwhile exercise to understand whether the concerns are within us or outside of us. We don’t need to use this information as a weapon against ourselves, but we do need to heal the baggage that we bring from past relationships into this relationship for it to thrive.
We don’t need technology. We need to trust ourselves.
The chatter running through our minds is almost always based on fear and shouldn’t be trusted. The average person has anywhere between 60,000 – 90,000 thoughts each day, influenced by our thoughts, beliefs, judgments, external influences and expectations.
The natural instincts we have within our bodies are not influenced or corrupted by external factors and can be trusted. That gut instinct that we all have should be heeded. Every single time I asked one of my clients who had been betrayed, “Did you know?” the honest answer was always some form of “Yes.” That’s because on some level we know the truth because we can feel the truth. But we don’t trust that instinct, so we go looking for evidence to calm our fearful minds or confirm its darkest beliefs.
The time when we begin snooping around on our spouses is the time when we need to identify and address the deeper issue that’s taking place. Maybe there’s a good reason to snoop on your significant other; maybe there’s not. But we can always trust our intuition to guide us to the truth.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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