JimBetrayed62, I really appreciate hearing how you have thought through these things from a Christian perspective. I am a relatively new Christian, having come to it through Maia’s guidance. When I saw the peace she had, the joy and the wholeness, I thought, I want that! But that means that my friends and family are generally not Christian, other than the new ones I have made, and most of the organized places I go (bible study, church, etc) don’t have a lot of space for people using Christianity to truly grapple with the difficult stuff of life. Or maybe they do and we don’t talk about it during coffee hour. I thank God daily that my husband has also engaged with Christianity (he did earlier in our relationship as well, but I did not), and that I can hear about what he sees and the parts that stand out to him. (I could write a book about the way that he helped me was a Platonic shadow of Christianity and how much that made everything clearer to me). I am so grateful that your situation created a desire in my husband to respond to you. I love hearing his thoughts, and writing on SI is another avenue for understanding him. Reading your prayers, your process, your dreams, your reflections, has been very encouraging for me. I wish more people would share about this way of finding peace and how they lean on it during turbulent times.
why won’t this nagging frustration over her lack of explicit remorse, and failure to connect with my pain, my story, go away? Should it?
She does not like to apologize, probably because as a child it would mean her mother could then emotionally abuse her.
Armchair psychologizing even when you know someone well is fraught, so I offer this perspective knowing it may only be helpful that you say "no, that’s not it."
Your question is why has your wife not shown remorse for the affair, and you have the answer right here in the third point. From her earliest days, your wife's relationship with mistakes, errors, doing something wrong has been that she will be humiliated. Can you imagine the neural pathways and coping mechanisms that follow from that? Instead of mistakes being an opportunity to learn, and a way to strengthen the trust and connection with the people who care for you and help you understand how to exist in this messed-up world, every time you make even a small mistake, you frantically figure out how to deny the mistake and avoid humiliation. What might that look like for your wife? Hiding (which is a form of lying), perfectionism, avoiding people around whom you make mistakes, blaming others when there is a mistake, fear that someone will find out your mistakes that you are covering, feeling like you are always making mistakes so what is the harm in one more.
I am sharing something about myself so that you might see something similar in your wife. It is how things that seem small on the outside can become equivalent in one’s mind to huge things. I used to think that my husband was constantly judging me in his head and that I was constantly failing, that he assumed I was a pathetic, bad, and unwise person. And that he remained silent because he felt duty-bound to remain with me. (There are direct lines from my FOO to this thinking. This did actually happen to me growing up, and still happens when I am around my family). This thinking made everything seem big. A parking ticket seemed like evidence that I was a complete failure. He was at work all day, being honest, working hard, and I can't even get my act together to arrange to have enough time to find a legal parking spot, or take the car to a garage. And what excuse did I have? I had no excuse, he makes enough money so that the cost of the garage is not a factor, I structure my own time during the day, why wasn't I taking public transportation, like a decent person. These thoughts were not verbalized, they were murmurs deep in my soul. I can tell you how any action of mine is evidence of being a worthless person. Any! I used to hide my impulse to be generous. I now identify these thoughts as not only issues from my FOO, but the enemy pressing hard to make it worse. When you feel constantly under assault from stupid insignificant things, and you feel like you are already a shit person, the actual big things, like engaging in interactions with another man, feel equivalent. I suspect that where my deepest wound is "you are a bad person" your wife’s is "you’d better not make a mistake." So the same logic applies to her: I would spend my time both avoiding being a bad person and quietly believing I was a bad person, and she spends her time desperately avoiding mistakes or owning up to them but quietly believing that she herself is one big mistake.
Having children can put a mother (or father) to the breaking point. The stakes are high and it seems you are constantly screwing up. Your wife might have felt time and again that she wasn't doing things right with the children. They didn’t make the cheerleading team and are devastated. Should she have stated gymnastics earlier? If only she wasn’t so tired, she SHOULD have taken them to gymnastics …You set a limit, they fuss and complain. You don't set a limit, they behave badly in front of your peers. You set a limit and they STILL behave badly. Your husband comes home and the house is a mess, you are a terrible wife (even if he doesn't care, this happens in your head). The flaming arrows coming at you are constant, you have no defenses, and you are both criticizing yourself constantly and also trying to defend yourself. Along comes a man who says you are wonderful. The small evils in your head (which are not even really evils! Just the difficulty of raising children and being a wife) have become huge, so the real evil sneaks in looking like the same thing. You are desperate not to feel like a worthless person. A satisfied person despises honey, but to a hungry person any bitter thing is sweet.
IC can help your wife, but so can you, if you want to. You can start to talk about mistakes in general as opportunities for learning. You can say how glad you are that your child makes a mistake because it gives you a chance to help them. You can talk to her about your own mistakes and how glad you are that they are chances for you to learn. You can talk to her about other (non affair) mistakes in your marriage that have been chances to grow. Little by little she might find some space between her initial thoughts (which seem like reality) and this new thought that mistakes can actually be opportunities to grow. Not that the mistake is not evil, it is evil. But the evil reveals a place that needs attention and care, not avoidance. Someday, she may feel safe with you talking about her affair as the most terrible mistake of her life, and then she will be able to show remorse without feeling like her worth as a person is gone. My husband does this for me - on a daily basis he addresses my deepest wounding, and I think I do the same for him. It binds us tightly together, so much more than if we never had the wounding in the first place.
My destructive thought patterns will always be there. They are smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter, and I am more skilled at separating myself and understanding that my thoughts are not reality. I will always feel like I am a bad person with bad motives, that thought is always going to be present reflexively. I will always reflexively think like my husband does not love me but is with me because it is his duty. The understanding of where these thoughts come from gives me the mental space to say: that's just a thought. That's not reality. You know where it comes from. Perhaps you should check it with your husband or someone you trust. Then I ask him about the parking ticket, he looks at me fondly, reassures me with concrete and specific reassurances, and I am grateful for the wound, because his help with it feels incredible. Better than if I was whole.
Your wife's destructive thought pattern about mistakes will probably always be there. It may heal little by little. I doubt that as you raise the affair as an issue to discuss openly that she will be able to express remorse right away, but as she learns to manage her fear of humiliation, little by little she will be able to take responsibility for the effect it had on you. I am hopeful that is your path.
