WaitedWayTooLong:
You and your wife were specifically and cruelly targeted by a sadistic sociopath, who inflicted as much intentional damage as he possibly could, using sex as a weapon.
While I bristled at your reference to a rape victim (I am not a rape survivor but I in fact do have experience with women who were drugged and assaulted) I can, upon further reflection, see how and why you would reference rape.
It is my opinion that you and your wife, and your marriage, were 'raped' after a fashion. This was a cruel, sadistic, intentional defilement and despoilment, exactly meant to destroy your marriage and your love for each other.
It's not like the callous, reckless, selfish, stupid disregard and disrespect for the BS in most infidelity.
This was on a whole other level of damage, IMHO.
And you have an incredible amount of graphic detail. Honestly, more, it seems than most here on SI have.
I'm not sure that most of the usual discourse about infidelity on SI would even apply to you.
I am in no way criticizing you, or trying to minimize your damage or pain, nor am I inferring that you don't 'belong' here.
In fact, just the opposite.
Me getting on top of my mind movies by stripping out my assumptions based on my anxieties wouldn't even begin to touch your experience of the injury that was intentionally visited upon you and your wife by a sick sadist.
I wonder if your damage is actually more in the 'assault' or 'rape' category than in the 'infidelity' category. It's a trauma, for sure, but IMHO it has additional dimensions to it.
It also occurs to me that out of the active participants in this conversation, I appear to be the only BS who identifies as firmly in reconciliation.
And, I will freely admit and always have, my experience with infidelity is not as protracted, involved, or even as severe as many here on SI.
It probably sounds all kinds of glib to people who are not in reconciliation and/or ended the relationship in lieu of reconciliation for me to say,
"Just stop envisioning the worst! It may not even have happened!"
Hrrm, yeah, *exactly* how does one do that?
Again, I got to a point where I realized that I was directing my own mind movies, and I was stuffing a lot of content in there that was not necessarily factual.
BUT- I couldn't get there until we were way past and out of trickle truth, when I felt that my husband was not only being fully truthful about the physical facts, but when I felt that I could truly trust his accounting of his whys, what in the hell was going on in his head that made this thing even possible.
That took a solid two to two and a half years of peeling back layers of not only the infidelity, but also our relationship, our relationship dysfunctions, and our individual dysfunctions.
Somewhere around 2.5 years I realized that the mind movies no longer had a grip on me. Like WiseOldFool said up there ^^^, I had finally reached a place where I could hear my husband, where I could receive what he was saying, accept it and believe it.
And as I believe I said in an earlier post, we came around full circle. Husband had been telling me almost from the beginning, certainly since about 6 months out when he gave up completely on trickle truth, that he wished he could upload his mental content into my brain directly, so I could see for myself exactly what this thing was, and what it wasn't.
He saw me inferring so much more emotional content into my mind movies and into my perceptions- not emotional involvement from him or in the act- but I was layering so much more implication on the incident from my own insecurities and he wanted to alleviate that unnecessary and unhelpful pain.
A big part of diffusing the mind movies for me was as I have already described, which became easier when I was confident in Husband's accounting, when I wasn't connecting the dots or filling in the blanks, and I wasn't assuming the worst as a self defense mechanism.
I'm likely in a very different place re: my understanding of my own mind movies than BS's who have not achieved reconciliation and/or have ended the relationship.