Formal Disclosure & Polygraphs ?
I would love to hear advice, opinions, & feedback from any couples who have done a formal Full Disclosure in their therapists office and/or polygraph with their wayward partners.
Did it help you in any way ?
Was it therapeutic for you ?
Did you feel as if you were finally getting the honest truth(s) ?
Did it help you go forward into the reconciliation process with a deeper understanding ?
My husband is a sex addict and he has tortured me with trickle truths since the initial D-Day 9 months ago. He's trying his best to be brutally honest in his life now and has given his all in his recovery. I can see the change(s) in him, how he behaves, how he interacts with me and others, how he cares for himself and how he's re-learning his response to stressors that don't involve self-soothing from sexual behaviors. The betrayal trauma for me has been immense and I still have work to do on my end as well to heal myself. I was hoping that a Formal Disclosure & polygraph would help part of this process.
We have moments where we can talk about sordid details & I feel that he is being very honest, but he never comes forward with the information on his own (he never ever has). He is very frustrated with me in saying that he's told me everything, but he's a bad liar and I can sense that there is more he has not told me about. I somehow feel like I just cant go forward wholeheartedly unless I feel like he's made efforts to be brutally honest with me, even as much as it hurts me. The endless lies have eroded much hope I've had that he is willing to be completely vulnerable with me in his honesty.
Does anyone have ANY experience with this ?
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2 comments posted: Saturday, May 20th, 2023
Oh God...Please help me
I’m sinking. I just asked my husband to leave.
Prior to Christmas, we had scheduled a time with our marriage counselor for a Full Disclosure in the therapists office for Jan 20. I know there were more lies and he had promised to finally fully disclose it all to me. On NYE he told me more, but we were both intoxicated & even then, it was not the full truth. Each time it’s only partial truths, but later I eventually get the "full story". In the beginning, he blurted out that he had 5 escorts, but immediately after he said it, he retracted his statement and sugar coated it with half-truths (ie, saying he did meet with escorts for sex, but only had a massage and hand job). I have been begging him to please tell me all of the brutal truths so that I can try to get out of this vicious crisis trauma cycle I am stuck in. I can’t move forward because of all the lies and trickle truths and have begged him since the beginning to please just tell me all of it so I can work through it and stop being tortured over & over again – to try to move forward. Each lie he tells is always followed by "This is the truth…I swear !" But…it never is.
About an hour ago, he confessed in what I believe to finally be Full Disclosure and was eager to get it all off of his chest. I tried to brace myself with asking some general details earlier (did he have a long term affair ?, did he have more than 10 women? Did he have women in my bed ? In our house ?) and had already told him that I’d need to have him out of the house for a while after the Full Disclosure event & we already had a plan in motion. I was asking him general questions so I could brace myself in attempts at easing any big bombs coming my way. I knew there was more women he had sex with and I suspected it was 5 and after he finally admitted it, we just decided to do the Full Disclosure it in that moment. I had just showered and had only a towel on, still soaking wet. I listened quietly as he laid it all out on the line. It was gut wrenching.
He admitted to having sexual intercourse with 5 escorts over the last year and seeing many more during that time without sexual penetration (private strip shows, naked massages, masturbation). He had sex with 2 or 3 here in my home area, and 3 others in Dallas, Boston, Colorado during his travels. He started seeing them in January of 2022. I lost all my composure & sat huddled in a ball on the bed and fell into a fetal position, unable to even speak or breathe. And I sobbed. I told myself it was a nightmare that I would wake from. Repeating ‘NO’ over and over again as I fell into this catatonic type state. Up to this point, I had only believed he had ONE person he had slept with twice in Dallas (his pre-arranged sugar baby) and I had obsessed over her repeatedly with every single detail. And now…there are 5 and more. How am I supposed to digest this?
He stayed with me and tried to hug me. Tried to hold me. Gently apologized over and over again. Tried to wipe away my tears and help wipe my nose. Tried to hold me & comfort me. But it was so overwhelming no matter how I tried to prepare myself in advance.
What do I do with this? How do I go forward ? How do I process this? How can I live with this ? How do I ever heal from this ? I’m so broken. So utterly lost. So defeated. Completely numb. Its D-Day all over again. Its like I never even left that horrible day.
I have been doing everything I can to listen to every single podcast, reading books, seeing therapists and Ive been doing this all alone. Taking care of myself, pushing forward even when I want to die. Any friends I tell simply just cannot absorb it and they never bring it up again. They never ask how I’m doing. Not even my sisters who say they love me and care about me.
I am sick of this ruling every aspect of my life for the past 4 months. He has been staying at his brothers house since NYD and its been so good to have him out of my life so I can have a break from this chaos. I was beginning to feel a little of my strength come back. And now this.
13 comments posted: Friday, January 6th, 2023
3 months after D-Day & we discover he's a Sex Addict ??
Together x 9 years, married x2. The cheating began (or so I am told) just a few months after we married in Sept, 2020, the year of COVID. As more information comes forward and the patterns have become clear with more trickle truths, my therapist tells me that I married a Sex Addict, who also struggles with alcohol addiction.
He did the same with his X-wife of 17 years, but she never knew. Porn, masturbation, strip clubs, Match dot com, business-trip sexual affairs...the list goes on. With me, he escalated into escorts and sugar babies and spent around $30k when he already had debt owed elsewhere and was minimally contributing to our household.
He is working hard in IC, marriage counseling, books, podcasts and is now looking into specific individual & group therapy for Sex Addicts. I clearly see humility, remorse, empathy, & change from him. He has made many realizations as to why he is an addict (also struggles with alcohol addiction) and working to change for the better. I have promised myself that I would give us 6 months before making any permanent decisions to leave or stay, but the more I learn, the more I begin to believe that this (and me) is beyond repair.
Does anyone have any pearls of wisdom to share on Sex Addiction issues ? I've heard that a VERY HIGH majority of sex addicts will relapse and I have made it crystal clear to him that's a deal breaker for me. I have set clear boundaries and it will be over.
9 comments posted: Wednesday, December 21st, 2022
3 months after D-Day and I hate him. Why should I forgive ?
Its been barely 3 months since D-day On Aug 29, 2022 followed by 8 more weeks of bombs being dropped. Slowly...painfully. Nothing came out willingly or honestly. Even today I still don't know ALL the truths. Its as if he was intentionally torturing me. At one point in a fight he slipped and burst out with, "I just wanted to punish you for ignoring me!" Since then, lots of tears, remorse, continual apologies, books, podcasts, twice weekly therapy, talking, fighting. It never ends. Some days I feel so close to him and his 2 years of strippers, chats, hook ups, escorts & sugar babies seem like hurdles I can overcome.
Today, and recent, I just hate him and want to close my heart to him forever. How could he do this ? The one person i trusted in the entire world and gave me whole heart to -- after years of being abused as a kid and knowing how hard it was for me to love and be vulnerable. He did it. He married me after 7 years and fucked around for 2 after that (and perhaps even before that). Now, 2 years later I hate him. Constantly crying even still and obsessing about every single detail. I even created a false Seeking dot com site with his name trying to meet the escorts he'd been with. Scouring over every single detail and its never enough. Creating fake sites under his name on all the websites he was on (and there was A LOT). Trying to see what he saw, experience the allure, the rush, the dopamine fix. I'm so full of rage that I even want to create my own sugar baby profile and punish every man that comes into my path. Atleast I'll get paid for it. My brain is irrational.
I become enraged but I keep doing it. Seeing his "massage" girls reviews on RubMaps makes me sick, yet I cant stop. I even went into one of his Asian massage parlors asking for his girl by name and lost my damn mind screaming at the girls (yea, it felt good. Not gonna lie). I have said things in hate to him that shock even me. I am so filled with rage that I cannot focus on anything else. My poor 13 year old daughter doesn't know what the hell is going on with me, as much as we try to hide it from her. I'm aloof, distant, crying, sad, angry, filled with rage & despair, cant get out of bed, hate all men and the entire world. I cant clean my house, pay my bills, can barely function in my job. Its still hard even when we ARE together. I love him, but cannot get these images out of my head. How do I make this stop?
Can someone please tell me that this will get better? Will it go away ? Will i ever be able to look at him and love him again ? Is this what my life is going to be like now ? Me being a crazy bitch - wanting to love him one minute and hate him the next ? it scares me that I feel nothing for him when this rage comes. I'm numb. Is it worth all this pain or should I just leave him and move on ? I am becoming a woman that i don't even recognize anymore.
11 comments posted: Friday, November 25th, 2022
The soul-crushing details are killing me
I am a child sexual abuse survivor and trust & vulnerability are difficult for me. We have been together for 9 years, married on 9-3-20. Two years later almost to the day, I discovered he was unfaithful and it started only 2 months after we married. It took 8 weeks to get to the "truth" of what he had done and I fear there is more he is still hiding, though he has come clean with MANY details. It started with porn, then spiraled into dating/hook up sites, chat sites, then onto hook up/escort/sugar daddy sites, which is where he started finding women to see on his "business" and "golf" trips that suddenly came up so urgently and so frequently. He has shared many details with me since that time, but now I"m stuck in a negative cycle. He's been working hard in therapy and has done everything he can to make amends and wants desperately to make our relationship work, but because of my childhood trauma...it's not that easy for me. Being vulnerable is not something I ever allow myself to do. But I did with him and now I'm really damaged.
I'm suffering so immensely. This experience has been soul crushing for me. I keep reliving every single detail over & over again in my head and I can't stop. When I'm with him, some days are so good and I think we can make it work and others I find myself hating him and filled with such rage that my anger surprises even me. It's been only two months since I first found text messages from other women and then the D-days just kept coming after that and each new discovery and admission he made took days to uncover the "truth", yet each one also made me realize an entirely new level of broken that i never knew existed. I feel like everything I have known with him has been a lie and the person I thought I loved only turned out to be a complete stranger to me.
I want to believe that he is a good person at his core and that he did these things because he was missing something in his life and in our relationship, but the lies and the deception have messed with my mind and I don't know what to believe anymore. I want to know every single detail and my heart is so broken in wondering why he didnt just leave me and walk away before doing this ? Whats worse is that I was myself a cheater years ago, but I worked decades in therapy to heal and the sad irony here is that he was the ONLY person that I wanted to be faithful to and prided myself on being honest and transparent with him.
I am so lost and I fear that I will never trust anyone again. I hate the world. I hate him. I hate men. I hate the seedy women at the "massage" parlors. I hate the escorts & sugar babies & women he was with. Most of all, I hate myself for believing that he would never cheat. Is this ever going to stop or get better ? Should I just leave him and forget he ever existed ? Should I give him another chance ? I'm so lost.
3 comments posted: Friday, November 11th, 2022
