I don't post often, because when I do, it's guaranteed to be a novel. Take it or leave it!
Molly, I have been following your story and your threads. You are obviously in a tremendous amount of pain and feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place. I know that position very well.
What I am observing is, I think, a form of denial. Super understandable. Denial is the first stage of grieving, per Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
You have come here to get help, because you really want it and really need it. I believe that.
I can see some folks frustrated by your responses, but I (as most do) understand them.
I have found in the past 3 years of therapy, and in the past 1.5 years since DDay, that I so immediately deny my rights to my own uncomfortable feelings (almost any complicated feelings-- even good ones!) that I have trouble determining what those feelings even are, let alone get a chance to feel them.
That is, almost before I even feel anger at my husband, I have told myself that I shouldn't, that I'm letting bitterness consume me, etc. This is a way some part of me is protecting the vulnerable me against feelings of pain and (productive!) feelings of anger, so that I never fully-process them and I can stay stuck in a miserable place... but a place which is at least familiar. That "place" is not only staying married to my WH, but putting the responsibility on myself to make it work, and not truly holding him accountable. That has always been our relationship dynamic, and it was slowly killing me... but only slowly! So I got used to it.
I have been with my WH since I was extremely young. In addition to "WH's Girl" being an identity I've held my entire adult life, when we got together, I was at a developmental stage where I partially attached to him (significantly older) almost like a child to a parent. I have done tons of work on differentiating from him, but that is a huge thing to untangle. Though I've made huge strides, and I understand intellectually I can live without him... of course it feels impossible or like a death if I were to permanently leave him. I imagine this is what children of truly toxic parents go through when contemplating cutting their parents out of their lives. (My husband may not be so impossibly toxic that I need to cut him out of my life, but I'm drawing a parallel in the process.)
No "solution" is one-size-fits-all, of course. But you seem unready or unwilling to accept any commonly-helpful solution offered here. Yet you keep coming back. And (mostly, though not exclusively) shooting these solutions down. There are certainly places on the Internet and in the world in general where people hold largely different view of infidelity. In fact, SI is fairly unique in its overall tone and conviction about some things which generally run counter to the "prevailing wisdom" of most cultures and most people.
Things like...
-Virtually no one is "driven" to cheat. They choose to do so. The betrayed spouse is not at fault, nor could they have done anything or much to reduce the chances they were cheated upon. Even if the betrayed spouse is absolutely horrible, there is no or virtually no justification for cheating, nor does cheating actually help a marriage or the cheating individual, overall, even if it is almost "justified."
-Cheating is not a victimless crime, even when it's never discovered.
-Infidelity causes real trauma in the brain and bodies of betrayed spouses.
-Healing from infidelity and drastically reducing the chances of recurrence requires deep, hard work on the part of the wayward spouse to determine their own motivations and to address their inadequacies. This is true whether or not they reconcile with their betrayed spouse.
-No contact with the AP (or VERY low contact if necessary) is required for healing.
-Full transparency and honesty is required for healing.
-Emotional affairs or online affairs are still affairs, even if there is no physical contact.
Etc.
These are actually not terribly popular or widely-held beliefs in the world at large! Some have more support in the general population than others, but likely no more than 1 or 2 of these propositions would even get agreement from more than half of people surveyed. Even in a place with greater gender equality and more relationship options and resources (e.g., the United States, or maybe like Sweden, IDK) where they'd be most popular.
So if you just want to find folks to tell you how you can live with your husband without being (justifiably) angry, without changing too much... You can find them!
And yet, you don't. Or haven't yet.
What I think I'm seeing here is a little of what I think my own mind does, nearly unconsciously, to itself.
It creates a sort of straw man, almost immediately.
There's a feeling in my body of, say, anger. It's neuro-biological. It can't be helped.
With that physical sensation, my first conscious thought is "I am being unfair to my husband by carrying around resentment, and is this just going to go on forever?!? I am making myself miserable. I need to get over it, or find a way to justify what he's done. Okay, not REALLY justify what he's done-- but explain my ANGER away with explanations that he is an addict, he has C-PTSD, Borderline traits, he is getting much better and doing lots of therapy..." All true things, by the way! But not things that make my anger invalid.
Remember, at this point, there's not even an action associated with the anger! I'm just feeling it!
So, to invalidate my totally reasonable emotion of anger, my mind IMMEDIATELY caricatures it. It makes it into a grotesque straw man. It IMMEDIATELY and reflexively turns "I feel angry" into "I am going to hold it over my husband's head for life, wallow in victimhood and never do anything with my own life, be nasty to him and make our child miserable, control and monitor his every move (which sounds exhausting)," etc.
See... I'm reasonable and compassionate enough to accept that anger needs no justification, as it is only an emotion, and even if it did need justification, well, mine is justified. I know this, intellectually.
But there's that part of me that wants to protect me from ever having to consider leaving my attachment figure (husband). And what it does is immediately and reflexively transforms (as if with a magic wand) my simple, reasonable feeling into a catastrophic series of destructive and indefensible actions.
So, now I am responding to what is actually just a feeling with a lot of self-flagellation and suppression. I literally feel tightness in my chest and flushing in my face-- the only thing I'm doing is feeling sensations related to anger in my body-- and I respond with "How dare I want to punish my husband for life?!"
THAT "PROTECTOR"/INNER CRITIC DOES THIS SO THAT I DO NOT EVEN REALLY GET TO FEEL THE ANGER. Nor do I have to feel the pain and fear, for that matter, which are what underlies anger.
And the more quickly it can transform the feeling into some unjustifiable action that it's not, the more I can treat that mischaracterization of my feeling as "the truth."
Which does a few things...
It protects me from feeling very scary, very difficult feelings. Definitely a temporary relief.
It makes me feel impossibly stuck and without options, or impossibly tired because I've placed impossible demands upon myself to "fix my thinking" (about an incredible betrayal done by someone else, to me!)
That can sometimes lead to passive aggression from me (the feelings are real and have to go somewhere)
And THAT can lead to the outcome I am fighting against-- e.g., being nasty to my husband, not getting other things done for myself.
Which only justifies the function of that protector/inner critic-- that voice can tell me "SEE, you DO want to be nasty to your husband, you want to punish him forever, etc. That feeling you had was BAD and WRONG."
Aaaaand... repeat forever until I'm dead.
I absolutely do not know if this is what's happening with you, but what I think I see is...
You are upset-- angry, scared, sad.
On whatever level, you don't want to have those feelings or don't feel justified in having those feelings, or fear what you might do/"have to" do if you act upon those feelings. All understandable-- I have just detailed how I relate. Plus, it can act as a denial that your spouse could have really done something so heinous. I can tell you that realization is the worst for me, and I still fight it in some ways, every day. It makes me feel so worthless, my love and care so wasted-- no matter how much I understand it's not actually about me, and I'm not at all worthless. (hug emoji-- if you'll take it-- goes here)
In order to protect yourself from those upsetting feelings, you come to a place filled with people who are almost guaranteed to tell you to do the things you don't want to do.
You ask questions you are pretty sure will give you the responses you need to rebel against, in order to suppress your bad feelings. You even sometimes ask them in a way that is intentionally challenging. More of a comment than a question, not exactly like, but in the spirit of... "I think people who [follow standard SI advice] are just fooling themselves. I, however, am more evolved. Prove me wrong."
You have now found an "acceptable" and less scary target for your feeling-- anger.
The more "wrong" you can make those people and their ideas, the more you can justify not doing the scary things you (understandably) don't want to do, starting with feeling your feelings.
You can paint the advice as an impossible standard that you can then rebel against. After all, it's impossible to meet!
When people explain how the standards are not impossible to meet, how they practice them, that they don't have to mean taking some extreme action, that they know that their practices don't guarantee any specific outcome... you can tell them they're lying or fooling themselves.
You can twist things back into straw men, saying they claim things they do not. For example, after all the details of the 180 are shared, defining it as "liv[ing] with any person but disregard[ing] them totally." And when people say, "Wait, not doing their laundry and taking better care of yourself is disregarding them totally?" you double down and say that you are not saying that, but saying your problem is when the 180 calls for "two parents [to] completely blank each other and act as if they didn't exist." You say "Tell me where I said [it's damaging to children not to do the wayward spouse's laundry, etc.], because I didn't." A fair response would be to gently ask, "Okay, Molly, tell me where the definition of the 180 says to act as if the other spouse doesn't exist?" ...ah, and I'm (me, MyFinal Answer) being drawn in. Let me stop.
When all else fails, you can demand they do work for you (like what I started to do above!), which you are likely to reject anyway. You can lash out at them for the way they talk, the acronyms they use... anything to make them wrong, silly, unaccommodating, unreliable, not worth listening to.
When people actually do get angry and defensive, because you are attacking them and their ideas, you can use that as proof that they are all just... wrong, silly, unaccommodating, unreliable, not worth listening to.
You're expending energy here that should probably be spent dealing with your feelings. But it's a great temporary relief from that awful, awful "stuck" feeling I described above. That is terrible. For me, it makes me feel like... not exactly killing myself, but lying down and never moving again.
In being angry at an "acceptable target" you don't actually have to even consider leaving your husband (not the only option-- but a great straw man, because it's pretty much the most extreme).
(I actually expected as I was writing this that part of your response to me could be "what is a straw man, that doesn't even make any sense, I'm not going to look up your weird idioms that I know don't apply to me anyway." Of course, you probably do know what a straw man is, but just an example I'm basing on past responses. And I'll resist including a definition here, just in case you don't, because that is the kind of wasted motion I am talking about in your posts. I further expect you to make me a Wrong Person because I am being longwinded, taking too much time to write this and you could accuse me of not dealing with my own stuff... which I actually am doing by writing this. But that's cool. And it may just be my own "inner critic" saying that anyway!)
....
Instead, you could go to a place that tells you more of what you want to hear. And I don't mean that in a condescending way-- I mean a place that you would deem a better fit for you. A place where people will tell you mostly what you already think you know, which is that there aren't really any options other than keeping a stiff upper lip and staying married and doing relatively little else other than convince yourself it's all at least acceptable. Most important in this is the belief that better things are not possible. Maybe they give you some tips for how to achieve that detachment or how to overcome or un-justify your feelings?
But I think that would be unsatisfying to you. My hypothesis is that coming here instead serves a few purposes:
-To actually dip your toe into some of these concepts, which I expect you do think you need to understand, on some level. But more immediately...
-For you to have an acceptable target for anger, per above.
-For you to "prove" to yourself, with real-life examples, that "better things aren't possible." For example, those whose spouses do hard work, go NC with APs, who have their spouses' passwords... are just fooling themselves, unlike you-- and, hey, how about THIS-- are actually MORE likely to be cheated on again. Phew.
-To even perhaps occasionally comment on other threads with a "refreshing" opposing viewpoint to offer the original poster, so you can feel like your presence is needed here (unlike in a space where more people hold your views). You're doing SI a service.
-It's also true that places where people mostly say "As a betrayed spouse, you just have to accept it and mostly move on"... well, they kinda aren't going to be very active. By definition, they don't ascribe to the belief that there's much work to do. They're not going to be very satisfying. Like I said, maybe they could have a tip or two, some inspirational words to help you get through the day? But they aren't going to offer you, personally, very much.
SI does.
I've been speculating as to why, but I'm genuinely certain you have a better idea, or could at least reflect in order to uncover the reasons.
I understand this will all sound judgmental to you, and if I imagine your response based on your responses to others, I expect you to say I don't know you, I'm wrong, I am merely projecting my own misery onto you, who has it (mostly) figured out and doesn't need any of this advice or "patronizing" sympathy.
I'm okay with that.
I do wish you the best. This is incredibly hard. I see you trying to make sense of it all. As I am. Take care.