DoingThingsWrong,
This is a great question. And I am floored by your wife's loving and wonderful response. She is the victim of the damage here, and she can live with it and still love you. Now you must find that same strength and that same love for yourself.
I think one of the most crucial things to understand is that the things we did during our affair(s) are never going to be "okay". Never. We will never look back and think, "I'm pretty proud of my infidelity". That is something we WS's get all tripped up over. We somehow think that we have to be okay with what we did in order to be okay with ourselves. The infidelity will forever be a shitty thing we did and will never be okay. So... then how do we live with it, and learn to forgive ourselves for the unforgivable? How do we turn straw into gold? The answer is to stop trying to make the affair something we are okay with, and instead, make it the catalyst for us to model our future selves on. We turn a negative into a positive by making sure that we learn, change and grow as a result. Do that, and you bring meaning to the pain. Fail to change, and the damage remains meaningless. Nothing sucks worse than not learning and growing from our mistakes and failures.
Let me ask you something. When you had your affair, what do you think your motivation was for doing it? Did you hate your wife, and with that hate, set out to willfully destroy her and cause her as much pain as humanly possible in hopes that she would suffer? Was that your main goal? Or, was the focus more on yourself? Were you selfish, hurting, needy, wanting something in your life that you thought would end the emptiness inside?
My guess is that the latter is what motivated you. The affair was not about your wife, it was about you. Okay? So, what does that mean, and how does that help?
Here's the thing. Each person in this world, no matter how wonderful or how shitty they may be, is doing the best they can with the tools they have at the time. I know that it can be hard to wrap our heads around, especially when someone does things that are hurtful to others. What we need to understand is that, in the same way, that your infidelity was really all about you (hurting your wife was not the goal, it was a consequence), the pain most people cause to others is a reflection of their own pain in life.
For example, if a person was raised by wolves in the forest, it would ridiculous to expect that person to understand social graces, how to eat with a knife and fork, how to say please and thank you, or how to even use a toilet. They would seem crass, rude, gross, and incredibly selfish when compared to others who were raised in human homes and taught how to act within our social society. And to be fair, people raised in human homes would have no idea how to function in a wolf pack either. My point being, a person raised by wolves isn't crass, rude and gross because that's who they are at their core, they are that way because those are the tools they had available to them, and those are the tools that allowed them to survive and thrive in the woods. When taken out of that environment, how can we possibly expect them to know any better, or act any differently? They do the best they can with the tools and experience they have. Now, if given new tools, can they do better? Can they be different people? Of course. That is then a choice they have.
I don't know you or your personal story, but I can tell you this. People who love themselves, and respect themselves, and have healthy boundaries and healthy coping skills, are capable of showing love and respect to others and have the tools needed in order to maintain respect for themselves and others. But what about those of us who don't love ourselves? What if we were never taught to love ourselves? What if we learned unhealthy coping skills in order to survive? Are we bad people, and did we do bad things because we are bad people? I don't think so. We are who we choose to be. If we choose to be better people, then that is who we become, and the old things we did, the things we are not proud of, the things that hurt others, cease to be our "identity". Rather, our past mistakes and decisions become part of our story, stepping stones and lessons learned on our way through life, ones which we use to learn and grow and build new identities. We use our mistakes in order to learn who NOT to be and what to not accept in our lives. We grow. We change. We become. Or we wither and hide and die. It is always our choice to act upon.
In short (as if I ever say anything in short), the way you "live with what you did" is to bring meaning to it. And the way you bring meaning to it is by learning and growing from it. To be honest, in some ways, such a path can make you an even better person than someone who didn't have these hurdles to overcome. Do you know why? Because it means the things you do going forward, you do with purpose, and with conviction. Going back to the wolf example, a person who was taught to use a fork and knife all their lives does so without forethought, without reason. They do it by rote, mechanically. The wolf-boy turned human, however, he does it because they CHOOSE TO, because they desire to, because they believe it is the right thing to do. I would rather a person do the right thing because they thought it through than someone who does things mechanically because the person doing it for their own reasons will always choose the right path. Get that? You can actually gain MORE respect for yourself by choosing to forgive yourself. Wallowing in the pain of what you did accomplishes NOTHING. That is the only way to end up not being able to live with yourself.
My best to you. Give yourself the same grace that you would give anyone else who made bad choices. You really do deserve it.
[This message edited by DaddyDom at 4:42 PM, January 16th (Thursday)]