SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

You are doing well in the aftermath of this trauma dumped on your life. Time is your ally. Remember this is not a race. One thing I noticed in your list: "how long do I try to fix things?" Please drop the idea that you can control the outcome or fix things. You can only control yourself. You can work on yourself. You can’t control your WW. You can work on being a better partner for yourself, but you can’t make her want to still be in the M. I think the best thing that happened to me is that I learned to like myself. I knew that I would be okay whether I D or eventually decided to R. Always value yourself. I think this will lead you to see more clearly what you want going forward. Good luck.

Theevent,

I think I got the books off a site Langley has, not Amazon. They came by pdf, and they sure weren’t $100.

I think that by telling her you want to reconcile – basically no matter what – you have removed that fragility from her. She has no need to be careful.

I think that's true, and I think that may be a Good Thing. In committing with no strings, you gave your W permission to be herself.

The problem is that one needs to be ready to cut one's losses if the WS does not act remorsefully. You're not there yet. That's OK ... if you are getting yourself there.

IMO, you need to make D an option for your sake and for the sake of your kids. Many people say they'd rather be from a broken home than in one. D at least frees you to make the most of your own abilities without being bogged down by an excessively dysfunctional spouse.

I need you to convince me that you are never going to cheat on me again, and I need to see you doing things I ask to get me there.

I think you're setting the bar too low. I think what you may be - probably are - setting yourself up for an unhappy life.

You need to work together to define the M that you will build. If you don't come to an agreement on what that M will be, your best bet, IMO, is to split and to be the best co-parents you can be.

There's a difference between 'I'm pretty confident they won't cheat again,' and 'I'm happy to be with them.'

To commit to R, I wanted a remorseful WS, and I also wanted 'yes' answers to 3 questions:

Do you love me?
Are you in love with me? (I didn't realize it yet, but I really meant, 'Do you desire me sexually?')
Will you be monogamous from now on?

I feared the answers to those questions, but I asked them anyway. SI told me I had to risk the M to save it.

What answers do you fear the most? Those are probably the questions you need most to ask.

BTW, IMO 'commitment' to R includes that you'll split if R doesn't go well. That doesn't need to be said - D is ALWYS on the table in an M.

I think maybe she is just trying to communicate what she wants our "new marriage" to be, but it comes across as her criticizing me for everything.

A good MC can help you distinguish between blame-shifting and 'defining a new M.' My guess is that she's blame-shifting, but that's just a guess based on what you've written.

I was mostly complaining about how it would have been much easier to have waited to agree to R in the beginning, and only committed to that after seeing real change from her. She would have seen real consequences early on, and directly in response to her behavior.

The path to healing is through your internal processing, not externals. The shorthand way of saying it is: you need to set and maintain your boundaries.

On d-day, and for some months afterward, it's very difficult to know what one wants their boundaries to be. As others have said, you can change your mind.

*****

You ask a some questions that can be answered only by someone who knows what the future will bring. No one can do that reliably. (The mythical Cassandra could, of course, but nobody believed her.) My reco is to recognize your questions for what they are and to put the ones about the future aside. I suspect they're products of fear.

Fear of the unknown is pretty normal. Just don't let it drive your decision-making. You pretty much have to take risks to heal from being betrayed.

I don't want to paint the wrong picture here. I think she does think it was wrong. She was disagreeing with the part where I link that feeling it was wrong is necessary to prevent a reoccurrence of that behavior. She disagrees on that part, and I still think it's true.

Why is this a sticking point if it's not applicable to your situation?

I know that no more in person contact with the AP is a hard boundary for me. Any other contact of any kind would cause me to explain that it needs to stop immediately and would become another hard boundary.

Why aren't you setting boundaries preemptively? I think that's an important topic to cover with your IC, along with why you feel duty-bound to stick with R just because you committed to it in the beginning.

Are you an engineer? You are, aren't you?

1. Even if WW does all the things I need, will I ever really be able to trust her again? Am I just wasting both of our time trying to reconcile?

Q: Those who have reconciled, how did you decide that you could trust your partner again? What questions did you ask yourself that helped give you clarity?

My WH had a series of PAs back in the 70’s. We reestablished trust after that, yes. He had a PA in 2005, and we did reestablish trust after that. I recently discovered an EA online/text/phone, and that back in 2005 he had a second PA he didn’t disclose at the time. We are working on reestablishing trust. So, make of it what you will.

So we had trust for 30 years until we didn’t.

2. As I have said in a previous post, our couples therapist is not addressing the affair at all (going to find someone else), and my wife is doing a lot of the things recommended in the affair recovery books, not all, but a lot. I see her efforts, and appreciate them, but in the back of my mind I wonder if she is really digging deep to change, or if she is doing the superficial things in order to say she "gave it a good try".

Q: What did you need to see to convince you that your spouse really did change into a person that would never cheat on you again?

. Our couples therapists in the past made things out to be my fault. I wasn’t "meeting his needs". Our therapist this time? She laid it on the line. He has issues he needs to address, and made him do just that. There is no "try", only DO. She has held him accountable, he writes in to her regularly. He is doing the reading, takes notes, and there is visible and behavioral change. I am seeing the person I married reemerge.

3. Based on our conversations, the affair for her was a very positive time. She has many fond memories of it. She has said many times that she is sorry she hurt me, and that if she could go back in time she would not do it again. She assures me that she would never cheat on me again because letting go of that relationship was so painful for her, and seeing my pain was so painful for her. However saying those things is not the same as saying "the affair was wrong, and I will never cheat on you again".

Q: Should I be concerned about these positive emotions, and the fact that she seems upset by the fallout of the affair not the affair itself? Or is this generally expected behavior from wayward spouses, and part of the recovery process?

I asked my WH this same question early on. He was unable to verbalize a coherent answer, but it was kind of like your wife’s. He got "good feelings" from the interactions with AP. Once the fog lifted, and he stopped being so guarded and ashamed, he talks about how the fantasy was the thing. How he knows none of it was real, but that there was a feeling that went with it all that was uplifting for awhile that felt almost addictive, and it wasn’t really love but more like self-directed and self-filling. It was ego-driven, and had nothing to do with "giving love", but with "getting something out of it", and that isn’t love at all.

4. I love my wife, and really want to reconcile. The last few weeks I've been having a difficult time though. Every time I think positive things about her, the "she intentionally betrayed me" thoughts creep in and ruin my good mood. I'm having a difficult time getting past the idea that she intentionally had an affair, and that this affair really for all intents and purposes destroyed the part of our marriage that mattered - our vows to each other. Without vows we might as well just be friends with benefits.

Q: Is this a normal place to be 6 months out, and how did you move past these thoughts in order to really reconcile?

Normal at this point IMHO.

Am completely with fareast on this.

I feel you are looking in entirely the wrong place for the reassurance you are seeking. It can only be within you. Take your focus off your WW and bring it back to you. This is really about a journey to self, grab this opportunity to ask yourself some deep questions with courage and a growth mindset, it will be really worth getting to know, understand and accept yourself.

You say you are a people pleaser? Where do the roots of that lie? How can you change? What actions can you take? When you say you ‘want’ to reconcile, it feels like you are being driven more like some kind of ‘need’. Can you articulate that need? Is it a need that can be met in other ways? Perhaps see this period as an experiment, an investigation into what YOU want from a relationship. I.e. a commitment to experiment with what reconciliation might mean for you and not a commitment to reconcile at all costs.

Read ‘honey, they always affair down’ in JFO. I hope that will help you to feel better about yourself.

[This message edited by Edie at 10:34 AM, Monday, December 23rd]

From what you have been posting since you began, it looks like you have trauma bonded with your WW. You cling onto what has caused you your pain, and you seem to be too scared to let go. A lot of your actions point towads you making the effort to 'win' your WW back.

I know that no more in person contact with the AP is a hard boundary for me. Any other contact of any kind would cause me to explain that it needs to stop immediately and would become another hard boundary.

This seems to me that you are trying to convince yourself to 'man up', but still leave some wiggle room for your WW.

If your WW really wanted to R, then it would be a total NC. No contact of whatever sort, yet you give her an 'out' as you seem to be too scared to put your foot down in fear of 'losing' your WW. Hint: You have already lost her.

As I had posted in one of your other threads, you had put the cart before the horse. Determining an outcome without all the information, and skewing all information to achieve your outcome. This will end in tears if you do not adjust your mindset.

Please realise that YOU are the PRIZE in this situation, not your WW. She should be the one making Herculean efforts to have a chance at R.

RR

Hey Theevent,

How? Day 1 because she told me about the affair on her own, seemed very sorry, and made several promises to me.
Why? Because I didn't want to loose her and destroy our family. I still love her despite what she has done. Though I realize now that I was saving nothing. She had already destroyed our marriage and I was trying to resuscitate a corpse. Trying to make it be like my memory told me it was. crying (this f*!#ing sucks)

I still want R, but I am learning that she is not healthy and I need to firm up some, and set some boundaries for my own safety.

She is making significant efforts, just not always the way I think she should be.

I've been where you are with a pretty whimpy WW. Has a hard time losing the feelings and doesn't do the WW actions that will help or even allow R.

I just want to say that it took a long time for my WW to clear her head. Now she is ashamed of her actions and has zero feelings for the OM. She wishes she had never done it and sees it as the worst decision she ever could have and did do. It is her deepest regret in her life. But, it took her years to get there.

Do I view it as it destroyed trust and destroyed our marriage? Yes. Even 10 years later, there are deep scars for me and our marriage will never be the same. Would I go back and still R? Yes. Because of the children and because I want to stay a part of their lives. I do still love my wife and she does still love me, but "the special two" is not so much the special two. Listen to that song by Missy Higgins. Six months is still so raw and new. It takes 2-5 years to recover from infidelity. Your WW won't want to hear that, but it is true, I think.

Also, listen to Daft Punk's Aerodynamic and Veridis Quo, just because they are good tunes. Music will be your friend. I found spending $150 on good tunes from one's past did more help than several sessions with a therapist. Some therapists really do not help with the suffering of betrayal or adultery. Though DBT Therapy did help me...

You can and will get through this. Don't give up.

I will echo a little of what not perfect said.

As the ws, it probably took me a solid year to get my head completely back together.

The first six months was what I would equate to basically a withdrawal from addiction. I was completely dependent on the dopamine and adrenaline the affair produced. And psychologically, we tend to brainwash ourselves and ignore convenient truths in order to do something that we know is wrong. I could not have seen or articulated that until I processed all the lies I told myself to allow myself to even do it.

I had an affair around your wife’s age, and after reading everything I could get my hands on during that time I was using escape as a coping mechanism of a deep depression spurred on by burnout/mid life crisis. A lot of people like to debunk that but it’s too text book for me to ignore. I am not sure that is your wife, but likely the affair was escapism from something?

Know I do not blame any of these things for the affair, I was a grown woman who made atrociously conscious bad decisions. I state it because 1) it wasn’t my husbands fault or our marriages fault and 2) because understanding how it happened is crucial for where treatment growth needed to be focused.

It’s also relevant because when someone uses a high dopamine/adrenaline based escape such as an affair, gambling, shopping addiction it can obsessive compulsive. It takes time to rebuild the wiring in one’s brain to support normal dopamine function and also to unwind the brainwashing they did to themselves in order to justify their horrible behavior. I went through physical and psychological withdrawal for probably six months or more. And filling all the space the affair occupied with healthier coping mechanisms and hobbies helped me stabilize but that too was a process.

I am not saying any of this because I think it should influence you. I think you should know what you are dealing with.

I would like to echo sacred soul in that she is being honest with you and that will better allow you to track progress. Sounds like there has been some the last four months since you made the original post.

Likely if she remains committed to the path of working on herself, you will find that before you get back round to summer you will see her remorse and reality shift back in. I made the most progress between 6-12 months when compared to months 1-6.

The reason is those first months the ws is dealing with their own huge emotions- shame and guilt after being caught is often debilitating because they never really entertained consequences. People who have not had an affair do not understand that when you are using escapism to cope that considering consequences is not part of that function. We lie and hide from ourselves in our most avoidant acts. I felt humiliated about my decisions and didn’t want to be a villain in my new narrative versus the narrative I just held where I was this wonderful hot commodity.

Everyone is different your results will vary but I have spent a great deal of time with other ws when this site was more active and I don’t think I am an anomaly in this way.

It’s good and also predictable you would be hitting the anger stage at this point. It’s stages of grief. Most bs spend the first 6 months in shock, denial, bargaining. Anger is an improvement because 1)it’s a higher vibrational feeling and 2) it prepares you for the part of healing where you have to consider yourself on more of an individual level than being part of a unit. I think all bs’s who have healed here had to find that independence because it prepares you for making a real decision on your marriage. I am convinced most people are not ready the first six months as bargaining, denial and shock are disorienting. Anger starts bringing in orientation and action and it’s healthy.

You should focus on yourself, what you need. I consider the first six months to a year recovery not reconciliation. Neither person is equipped to move straight into R, they simply have the prerogative they might like to stay married and maybe feel committed to that decision.

But it takes healing in both sides to get to a point where both are stable enough to start the R process. This is why MC is pretty much useless most of year one for doing repair. It’s helpful for some to help mediate the discovery process and improve communication but a MC is not a miracle worker. IC is much more useful because as I already said individual healing is so important.

Your wife needs to be to a place that she abhors what she did, feels completely on your side, and sees that the affair was not love, nor were she or the ap good people during that period. Then, you can think about whether you want to attempt reconciliation. Right now in my eyes, both of you have committed to staying married. The majority of couples facing infidelity take that path initially. But it’s not a new set of vows or a decision that should be seen as permanent.

Know you can change your mind anytime in the process. Do not pressure yourself for an outcome, focus on you and your healing, and as she ramps up where she needs to be you should see dramatic improvement otherwise - pull the plug. Pull it anyway if you decide. You do not owe her R.

I hope this helps!

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:45 PM, Thursday, January 16th]

Everyone thank you for your responses! It's been a while since I posted. I've been trying to integrate everyones advice and really do a lot of introspection about what I want in life, and what I want in order to feel confident in my decision to reconcile.

fareast
You are doing well in the aftermath of this trauma dumped on your life. Time is your ally. Remember this is not a race.

Thank you for this. I really needed to hear it. I have been pushing and pushing in my mind to make some kind of progress and to see a direction either way. I've been like "I don't want to waste anyones time if I can't really reconcile and so I need to decide ASAP". It's been causing me a lot of stress. But really, like you say, there is no rush. As long as I see her making progress, and not continuing any affair activities, I can wait it out and see what happens.

sisoon
IMO, you need to make D an option for your sake and for the sake of your kids. Many people say they'd rather be from a broken home than in one. D at least frees you to make the most of your own abilities without being bogged down by an excessively dysfunctional spouse.

I very much agree with this. I'm in it for the love. I'm not the type of person to stay just for the kids, or finances, or whatever. My parents divorced when I was young, and the rest of my childhood was turbulent. No it's not fun having divorced parents but it's better than living in a dysfunctional home.

To commit to R, I wanted a remorseful WS, and I also wanted 'yes' answers to 3 questions:

Do you love me?
Are you in love with me? (I didn't realize it yet, but I really meant, 'Do you desire me sexually?')
Will you be monogamous from now on?

Questions like these are what I included in the lie detector test I asked her to take early on. She answered in the affirmative to all of them, and passed the test. For me these types of questions, along with ones verifying she has not continued contact with her AP, are table stakes for R.

A good MC can help you distinguish between blame-shifting and 'defining a new M.' My guess is that she's blame-shifting, but that's just a guess based on what you've written.

It is so difficult to find a marriage counselor that I would define as "good". It seems like the vast majority of them believe in the unmet needs fallacy, and want to treat this issue as a "marriage" issue, when really it's not. Its a 98% her issue. For the time being I am holding off on couples therapy until I can find a therapist or coach I feel like will actually address the affair and not try to subtly blame me for things like she is doing.

The path to healing is through your internal processing, not externals. The shorthand way of saying it is: you need to set and maintain your boundaries.

On d-day, and for some months afterward, it's very difficult to know what one wants their boundaries to be. As others have said, you can change your mind.

Working on this one. But it's difficult. I am leaving space for mind changing now .

Edie
This is really about a journey to self, grab this opportunity to ask yourself some deep questions with courage and a growth mindset, it will be really worth getting to know, understand and accept yourself.

Easier said than done. I am working on this though.

RocketRaccoon
it looks like you have trauma bonded with your WW

This is possible, or maybe I've been codependent for our entire relationship. How would I know if I did trauma bond?

This seems to me that you are trying to convince yourself to 'man up', but still leave some wiggle room for your WW.

If your WW really wanted to R, then it would be a total NC. No contact of whatever sort, yet you give her an 'out' as you seem to be too scared to put your foot down in fear of 'losing' your WW

I mostly phrased it like this because I wanted to give room for misunderstandings. She understands that no contact is 100% what I require. But I believe in her mind, looking at his social media was not her contacting him. It's a gray area as far as "contact" is defined, but I made it very clear that there is to be no more viewing his social media at all.

notperfect5
I just want to say that it took a long time for my WW to clear her head. Now she is ashamed of her actions and has zero feelings for the OM. She wishes she had never done it and sees it as the worst decision she ever could have and did do. It is her deepest regret in her life. But, it took her years to get there.

Maybe I'm deluding myself here but I do see signs this is beginning to happen for her. For example the other day she thanked me for staying, and working on our marriage. To me thats a positive sign. She is also very kind to me and says "I love you" often.

hikingout
I really appreciate hearing from a WS.

As the ws, it probably took me a solid year to get my head completely back together.

The first six months was what I would equate to basically a withdrawal from addiction. I was completely dependent on the dopamine and adrenaline the affair produced

This helps me relax a little and not feel so stressed to come to a conclusion in a rapid amount of time.

I had an affair around your wife’s age, and after reading everything I could get my hands on during that time I was using escape as a coping mechanism of a deep depression spurred on by burnout/mid life crisis. A lot of people like to debunk that but it’s too text book for me to ignore. I am not sure that is your wife, but likely the affair was escapism from something?

I believe in her case it was a mid life crisis as well. She had just come out of a long illness and was feeling like she wanted to "live" her life.

I went through physical and psychological withdrawal for probably six months or more. And filling all the space the affair occupied with healthier coping mechanisms and hobbies helped me stabilize but that too was a process.

I see this in her as well. It's really difficult to be patient at times with this kind of progress though. It keeps me second guessing if real progress is being made at all.

Likely if she remains committed to the path of working on herself, you will find that before you get back round to summer you will see her remorse and reality shift back in. I made the most progress between 6-12 months when compared to months 1-6.

I hope you are correct. I see some progress, but she still hasn't let go of the blaming and deflection she did for the first 8 months.

Your wife needs to be to a place that she abhors what she did, feels completely on your side, and sees that the affair was not love, nor were she or the ap good people during that period.

She is definately not there yet. She still seems to view herself and her AP as "good people" during the affair it's difficult to be patient through this process.

Then, you can think about whether you want to attempt reconciliation. Right now in my eyes, both of you have committed to staying married. The majority of couples facing infidelity take that path initially. But it’s not a new set of vows or a decision that should be seen as permanent.

This is accurate. We are both trying, but also it seems like we are both waiting to see how things work out as well.

How long would you say it took you to feel like you really "reconciled"?