SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I said the tattoo rubbed me wrong. Premature celebration.

For the polygraph the question should be close to "Is your written timeline and answers to questions complete, without intentional omissions, and accurate to the best of your recollection."

You can work with the examiner to get a good question for "Is there any other information related to AP, but not to the affair, that you are witholding from InkHulk because you think it might upset him?"

Just want to clarify that her tattoo was not my idea at all, it was all her.

I get that. I'm not blaming you at all or intending to. She claimed that she was "free from the sin of the A" in getting it, but we knew she was still withholding answers to questions and it turns out she was withholding even more.

I think you still love your wife. That alone is fine. But acting like she has the ability or desire to put your interest ahead of hers in any capacity is without basis in reality.

You really ought to focus on your health and your path forward. Your train needs to leave the station. No more waiting or holding the doir. If she wants back on the train, she better get a move on.

If you can allow me this, set aside the grooming piece for a second and tell me how you’ve been able to recover from D-day 2, or from Trickle Truth atomic bombs. From where I stand right now, I just don’t see it.

***As an aside I refer to d-days as the realization that an A is ongoing or that one never stopped (I mean new events post d-day 1 - things you could not have been told about at d-day 1 because they hadn't happened yet). D-day2 in my world always comes with false-r of some form.

To answer your question I presume you mean IF you stayed together after d-day 2 not how do you move on after you left the WS/they left you? My WH and I stayed together in some weird form of in-house separation for about two years due after dday 2 (finding out that the A had gone underground for a whole year - every day I was lied to - 366 days - dday 1 and dday 2 were separated by a year and one day), in part to COVID lockdown (hard to move at that time). The trust never returned while we were together - but I do trust him now (as much as I ever will trust a romantic partner - I'm a bit jaded now which isn't a bad thing IMO). Why do I trust him now? He has done the work on himself, for himself. Eventually I did leave - moved to another state - and he started IC and trying to figure out why he was so broken - who he was that could do what he did to anyone, nevertheless to me. 3 years out from my leaving I can tell he is definitely different - much more introspective, much more willing to ask questions and actually answer them. Much different than the man I met 15 years ago. We are not "together" - we still talk - we still date occasionally (a few times a year) - we are still friends and have some financial jointly held assets. Do I think we will ever get back together permanently? No. But part of that is geography and admittedly part of it is me - I don't want to share my life with anyone full time anymore. I gave enough of myself already. I like my freedom. But if I were in the frame of mind to try with someone - the improved version of him is far better than the old version - I just didn't know it at the time.

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 1:29 AM, Tuesday, May 23rd]

@InkHulk, my point is that your WW is (still) acting, thinking almost exclusively of her own best interest. Not her kids', and certainly *not* yours, Bub! She does not seem to "see" you as anything besides her husband i.e., someone who plays a role in her life, not as you as a man with his own feelings and agency. This, after all the pain she caused you and your family. And...I suspect your WW was that way not only post-affair but instead for your whole marriage.

I agree with @This0Is0Fine. You can wish all the best for your WW and can even still do what you can to help her. But you need to think of *your*self and your future too.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 6:19 PM, Tuesday, May 23rd]

I’ve been contemplating the implications of her last confession of the two encounters. They blow up the whole story. One, there are things that I specifically asked that these make lies of commission out of. And then just the fact that she’s been lying makes everything in question. So maybe I don’t know shit. All I can do is stop caring at this point, focus on my kids and myself.

All I can do is stop caring at this point, focus on my kids and myself.

This is the best (if not only) approach that you can take at this point.

Your wife is only focused on herself. For close to a year, you have been focused primarily on her. It's time that your needs and your kids take the front seat. Your wife needs to realize that she is not the most important person in the family; in fact, she's proven herself to be liability to it.

This0is0Fine said it best with:

Your train needs to leave the station. No more waiting or holding the doir [sic]. If she wants back on the train, she better get a move on.

My hope is that your wife does the hard work on herself to become a better person. Perhaps she will be more motivated to do so when she feels like her own future survival is at stake.

I’m coming at you and a couple of other people on here from my education and my job. I’m a broken record when it comes to talking about childhood but that’s what has an impact on the rest of your life.
When you have a avoidant personality, there’s a reason for it. It usually starts in early childhood and because it’s not put in there verbally it’s in your brain buried very deeply. Your wife has a governor in her brain much like the kind you can put on a car, and when she begins to feel too intimate with you emotionally that governor steps in and stops it. That means that somewhere in her childhood the adults looking after her were not doing a good job. She could not depend on them. The household was toxic and chaotic. There was no one person that could provide her with a stable life. And I had a friend whose childhood was like that, and little by little she got control of a whole group of friends, and we could not make a decision without her or make a move without her or she would become very ugly in her behavior. It all came back from having no control as a child.
Your decision is going to be your decision because there are several outcomes if your wife decides to go have some pretty serious therapy, including EMDR. It could help her dig deeply and find what’s causing all this and help her learn how to let go and trust you and y’all can make a good marriage. Or it could be so entrenched in there that nothing is going to budge that very suspicious child running the show. Or you get worn out with it and move on and somewhere down the line therapy kicks in with her, and she finally makes a breakthrough. There are many scenarios here that could happen. It’s up to you to make the decision on how to proceed.

Cooley, can you tell me more about where you are coming from there? That regulator and suspicious child descriptions are like you just peeked into my history.

What is she doing/saying today?

Has she apologized to your daughter yet?

Is she doing anything differently than she did a week ago,before you found out she gave OM private access to your daughter, and before she admitted to 2 more sexual encounters?

Is she pretending nothing has happened?

Is she looking for a place to stay?

What is she doing/saying today?

We aren’t talking much.

Has she apologized to your daughter yet?

She said she has, I suspect it was pretty low gravity though. I’m not sure.

Is she doing anything differently than she did a week ago,before you found out she gave OM private access to your daughter, and before she admitted to 2 more sexual encounters?

Is she pretending nothing has happened?

Is she looking for a place to stay?

Honestly, I think we are both still kind of shocked. I know I am. My mind keeps going to the familiar "FIGHT FOR THE MARRIAGE" and then I keep remembering all that has happened and what she has done, and what she is not doing right now. My heart is in a completely different spot now, it’s dead with respect to the marriage. I can only imagine my brain will catch up sometime here.

She is reading a lot, writing in notebooks a lot, I don’t know what. We’re civil but distant. Sharing chores, coparenting respectfully. I’m headed out of town for the holiday weekend with some of the kids to see my mom, WW will stay back with those that don’t want to go. We have some hard conversations to have soon, but like I said I’m not putting myself on a fast clock. Marathon, not a sprint.

She indicated that she has places she could stay. Worst case scenario her parents live about an hour away, she could commute.

I’m still just shocked that it has gone down like this, I’m still wondering if I’m going to wake up from this nightmare.

Why do you think she's in shock? She's known all of this,all along.

Honestly, that she isn't moving absolute mountains right now, says all you need to know. She's waiting to see what you do,what you say, to know what she should do/say.

You've been leading this (false) reconciliation all along. When left to figure it out, she does nothing.

I know it’s your signature move and all, but I’m not in haymaker shape right now. Give me a week.

Google "nesting" to see if you think it might be a good co-parenting strategy for you. You take turns in the home to minimize change for the kids.

I wasn't aware that anything I said was harsh. Blunt,but certainly not meant to harm.

I apologize if you're not ready to hear it. I will refrain from posting on your thread for a bit.

This is going to take an epistle.

Babies begin to make decisions at birth. It’s so hard to believe because for so many years we were told our brains were like blank slates. So immediately after birth, sweet voices, nurturing, cuddling, diaper changing, patting for burping, all of that gives the child close contact which is essential to emotional growth. The more dependable you are as a parent the more stable that childhood, the better that child learns to trust. If there’s chaos, if there’s no one the child can depend on, they start making decisions long before they are verbal. They stop trusting. If a baby cannot trust they cannot love deeply. There is something called reactive attachment. It is a faulty attachment to the parents. Something like EMDR can help get down to that inner child and pull those memories out where they can be looked at. The hardest thing in the world for most of us to realize is that they make decisions, we make decisions from birth on. The best thing a human being can be given is a happy childhood. It’s the rock where we build our emotional health. Anything that interferes with it that child pays for at some point in their life. There’s a TED talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who talks about the number of traumas in a child’s life can almost guarantee early death. In order to hide from the inner pain and depression, people reach out for anything to sooth them, or distract them, much like they should have been soothed as a baby. That’s why people drink too much, take drugs, gamble, have sex with strangers, there’s such a short period of time where they can come outside themselves and get involved completely in something else. For just a short period of time they are not dealing with that inner kid. They are just doing something that feels good. it has nothing to do with you, what your wife did. It had everything to do with what happened to her as a child.

I meant to add. This also depends on genetics. Some children come through without ruining their lives but a visit to a prison would tell you what rotten childhoods do to people.

[This message edited by Cooley2here at 10:05 PM, Tuesday, May 23rd]

I wasn't aware that anything I said was harsh. Blunt,but certainly not meant to harm.

I did not mean to imply bad intentions.

I apologize if you're not ready to hear it. I will refrain from posting on your thread for a bit.

I’m fragile is the truth. I’ll get to where I need to go, but I need a little time to get back to ok. I look forward to engaging in a bit.

Google "nesting" to see if you think it might be a good co-parenting strategy for you. You take turns in the home to minimize change for the kids.

Thanks, somehow we already knew about that. That is the model we plan on using.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 10:30 PM, Tuesday, May 23rd]

I’ll get to where I need to go, but I need a little time to get back to ok.

You have multiple pages on multiple threads, trying to process all the advice is like drinking from a fire hose. Step back and process what you have, take what you need and leave the rest, ask questions accordingly.

This is going to take an epistle.

That was just a warm up for Emergent

Thank you very much for sharing. It’s clear you know your stuff here. When my wife and I started looking into attachment theory, she scored very high on both anxious and avoidant. Just reading about fearful avoidant and it sounds familiar to me.

She has something like this going on, I have no doubt. Her childhood certainly was not a fairy tale. She’s been so completely unwilling to look into her self and so utterly defensive when I’ve implied that she should. She has lied/hid from every counselor that we’ve gone to over the years, apparently including this last MC that we spend thousands out of pocket on. Get me off this train.