SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

2 things I’ve been wrestling with these past few days:
1. I still distract to avoid my feelings. It is still a habit I automatically do without thinking. Every day I feel extreme grief and guilt, and I use different things to distract my thoughts: knitting, paint by numbers, puzzles scrolling on my phone, or working. I try to practice meditation, journaling, and I’m continuing therapy but I notice that my fall-back habits are still subconsciously "how can I distract myself right now". I will do paint by numbers or puzzles for 12 hours straight and dissociate the whole time. I’m intentionally choosing to sit with my uncomfortable feelings.

2. I have felt so stuck in shame, and a big part of that I realize is that I refuse to accept some of the things friends or therapists tell me. "You weren’t evil, you’re not a bad person, you made bad choices but you didn’t destroy your lives" etc.
I believe the reason I have felt stuck is because my brain continuously fights these beliefs. I will loop and loop through shame spirals, until I realized: what if I accept these as truth? Then what?
Then I vow to do better. To move forward actively choosing to be better. I need to accept that I was a terrible person, I did evil things by having an A in college and choosing to hide it throughout my relationship and marriage to my ex husband.
The day I confessed is the day I chose to actively not live a lie. But yes, I was a liar and a cheater and a bad person. I destroyed our lives, the lives we built together for 15 years.
Once I accept that, I can finally become better. I don’t need to fight or deny those truths, because then I will always be stuck. Now, I can say "I was a bad person for a long time. I will always feel guilt. But drowning in shame doesn’t undo it, doesn’t take away my ex’s pain, and doesn’t make me a better person."
I feel a sense of relief- no more lying to myself. Radical honestly includes being honest with myself.

This week will be challenging, but I will carry my honesty with me and try not to avoid anymore. One day at a time.

This resonates with me. My therapist is really pushing me on self-compassion, but it is not taking. My wife and I were taking about this today and I told her for some reason I do not seem to want to give myself any grace as it feels too much like justification.

At its core, I think a lot of this is from a traumatic childhood and being raised in a high demand religion / purity culture. I went off the rails pretty early after my dad left us and I think my brain got wired that I was just a bad person. I can look back now and see that I was a kid experiencing trauma and acting out as a result, but understanding that does not automatically change my the way I still perceive myself in relationships with others.

When my affair started I genuinely believed my wife was not really in love with or attracted to me and would leave me once our kids were grown. This was not because of anything she really did or said, but more because I felt a lot of shame from experiences I had before we met that I never shared with her including my childhood issues. I still find myself thinking that and even went down a deep rabbit hole thinking she has convinced herself she loves me because we have a comfortable life and divorcing is a worse option than staying. This is really unfair to her as she has been totally supportive.

My thinking often extends even to my kids. I think because I barely tolerate my dad that I think they must think the same about me. When I dissect our relationship I can believe they really love me, but it takes work.

The combination of past trauma and the guilt from the affair are hard for me to reconcile with anything that resembles a good person and I think that is why I am having a visceral reaction to self compassion.

I realize this is probably not helpful, but want you to know I admire the work you are doingb and it inspires me to try and think better of myself.

Acceptance is a critical part for both sides in my view.

This is how it works for me and as usual I got here the other way around but still I share as I see similarities in what I observed as well in my personal journey.

I don’t believe we are defined by our actions but we do often allow our actions to define us.

I am neither good for being faithful nor my wife is bad for being a cheater. In the absolute meaning, that event didn’t define the baseline person as good or bad.

What she allowed herself to do was evil at towards me, for her might have been a dream or whatever she told herself that was, that turned out to be again judged as evil the moment she discovered that the OM was not the dream partner she wanted but trash to her.

To me? Yes it did destroy my life because it was evil, it was abused and caused trauma ptsd and so on. But also Because I allowed it.

I might have never allowed myself to choose to actively do a similar evil to a partner, but I have allowed someone else choices to destroy me.

See what I am talking about? Agency.

The moment you take back your agency to allow yourself to chose what is good and not allowing yourself to chose what is evil, it is no longer the action of behavior that defines you, but is you defining the decisions.

Is basically what we teach kids but that’s not making it any less relevant to us adults (again we allow ourselves to forget the basics).

If you consider yourself a good person, no matter the flaws, that’s likely your baseline, your set of values and boundaries about what is "good " and what is "evil".

This is what WE define, our agency. You choose someone who aligns with your values as a partner, reject the rest.

For some reasons at some point you allowed yourself to betray your values and cross those boundaries, and when we do that we feel it even if we aren’t the recipient of the biggest amount of harm our decision causes, we do know we betrayed what we held dear, so we betrayed ourselves first.

That’s the contrast and conflict you feel, the choice and its fallout makes you identify as it changed your baseline from good into bad.

It’s not, or else you would not be reformed or reforming, your baseline would have embraced unapologetically the way of the betrayer (in this example).

That you loathe it is telling is not your innermost self, is the betrayal of the self that pains you.

I will expand later