So, I don’t think the bs can get a ws to see a truth until they are ready to see it.
I had to work on myself in therapy to recover from the callous person I was following the affair. That is not uncommon.
My affair was about two constant months of texting from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed with breaks only to handle the bare minimum of my life. And it culminated in a meetup that turned physical.
The obsession was more with me being able to see myself in a different way with the praise of an audience. But no matter what they are seeking if they perceive they are getting it their brain is rewarding them with excess dopamine.
I had to tell you all that because what I am leading up to is the pure cognitive dissonance someone who has an affair begins to deal with very early into the situation.
To continue getting the payout of the affair (whatever they went in seeking) then I had to tell myself so much bullshit in order to enjoy it. Rewriting the marriage, projecting things into the AP that are simply not there, fueling my entitlement by inflating what I brought to the marriage and minimizing what my husband brought. Exxagerating how sexy, exciting, interesting and funny I was.
That’s why when we are discovered we say a whole lot of shit that is unbelievably cruel, non-sensical, and usually extremely narcissistic in nature.
The best thing you can do is focus instead on protecting yourself from this person in every way possible. If they decide this is not who they want to be and start figuring out what they need to fix in their own life, they are more likely then to become genuinely curious about your pain.
The ws is in this self- created world of pain and shame and often does not have a lot of deep answers on why they did it to start with. So they can not create enough compassion for themselves to make it bearable to take you fully in. Someone wallowing in shame can’t take the confirmation of what a horrible person they have become.
However, sometimes that pulling away you need to do in order to protect yourself from them can be a precipitous factor for that work to begin.
Despite what I had done, I did not want to lose my husband. He put up his boundaries big time and I marched double step to see if I could get to where I needed to go. However, I only got there because I also didn’t want to be this kind of person in life.
The work a ws does needs to have 100 percent commitment to it. I was probably 8 months in before remorse came. And it was then that I realized until until I understood what I had done to him could I make amends. Affairs are thousands of little cuts and the more of them I could name the more accountability and change was possible.
Your power can be found looking only at yourself, what you need, healing, protection. You have little control of your ws or the outcome. And by healing you will expect more, and you will become More confident as to what to do if they do it or if they don’t.
[This message edited by hikingout at 5:32 AM, Sunday, February 12th]