SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I mostly agree with Unhinged (though I do stop short of "the WS has no rights").

To be fair, I should clarify that I do believe a WS has rights.

Came back to reiterate:

Please do not take anything I type here as advice, except to take care of yourselves and do what's right for you.

It was right for *us* to stop staring at the infidelity like it was a thing unto itself, to be resolved as a separate issue. Like it was THE PROBLEM. Honestly, for us, the thing itself made no sense until we put in the larger context of our flawed relationship dynamics.

Past a very basic point, there were really no more answers in the incident itself. I suppose it would be quite a different kettle of fish if we were dealing with sex addiction, or a long term affair, or an involvement with an emotional component. Our answers resided in our boundary issues, respect issues, FOO issues, agency issues, immaturity, poor skill sets, etc., not in a single one off incident long ago.

Perhaps the best analogy is that infidelity is like 'cancer.' If you speak with epidemiologists and oncologists, they will tell you that 'cancer' is really many, many different diseases with many, many different causes and treatments.

I believe that infidelity is quite similar in very elementary ways (betrayal.) However, attempting to address all infidelity with a rote approach, I believe, leads to frustration and poor outcomes.

Yes, all infidelity has some basic elements in common, but every couple's experience is as unique as the people involved. It is also as unique as that particular time in the couple's life and in the individuals' lives, as the culture in which the infidelity occurs, etc. etc.

I'm beginning to think that, apart from dissolution of the relationship, which could be seen as a basic response to intractable situations, each couple's journey out of infidelity needs to be custom designed and targeted, almost like DNA based therapy for diseases.

Take, for example, our situation:

Post DDay2, I put myself in therapy.

I'd seen this therapist before, briefly, working out a particular sticking point I was having, we were having.

Great therapist. PhD psychologist, university professor, licensed therapist, forensic psychologist, etc.

Not a slouch.

I really, really enjoyed talking to him. He had great insights and he helped me a lot.

So when DDay2 swept me at the knees, I called him and made an appointment.

We'd already talked about my life and our marriage in previous sessions, so we had a basic framework.

I relayed to him what Husband had told me to date about the long ago infidelity. I did my best to be accurate and consistent with what Husband had told me. Remember, Husband and I were in the throes of trickle truth at this point, so it wasn't a complete picture.

After I finished relating the story, the therapist sat back for a long, silent moment.

Then he looked at me and said,

"Are you sure your husband didn't have sex in that place, that night?"

Dude, I'm sure of *nothing,* especially not at the moment. My whole world just got turned upside down.

But my gut was telling me that Husband's dick did not trip and fall in an orifice. I've known the man since he was 17 years old. Hard to explain, really, to people who are not us, but knowing him as I did, it's easy for me to believe that the physical involvement stopped exactly where he said it stopped.

My gut told me from the beginning that there was always more to this story. Turns out my gut was right. My gut has also told me from the beginning that he was being truthful about where the fun stopped in terms of body parts. Honestly, for us, for me, that wasn't the essence of the situation anyway. The betrayal was between his ears more than it was between his legs.

In our earlier sessions prior to DDay2, which dealt more with life balance and relationship balance, we discussed a female coworker with whom my husband had gotten, reluctantly, enmeshed.

She was a difficult, demanding person.

(I will note here that it's not surprising, understanding more about ourselves as individuals and as a couple, that we end up with these prima donnas in our lives. =/ =/ ) (Also, fuck them.) (Thank you, Belated Awareness, but thank you for finally showing up.)

The therapist zeroed in on her immediately as being perhaps more of a source of our problems than I was ready to face.

He poked and prodded and challenged and held my feet to the fire.

I don't blame him.

Lots of loooooong hours at work, a dead bedroom, a largely absent husband, and now I'm telling him about a female coworker who is sucking all of the oxygen out of the universe.

But here's the deal:

I knew this woman. Not well, not personally, but I'd met her in the flesh several times.

I knew a lot about her work history and even something of her personal history through Husband and through some ancient history we all shared.

I knew, I mean, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this enmeshment was born of a strange brew of shared responsibility, professional image, territoriality, perfectionism, and competition.

And even though, in many 'work spouse' scenarios, that elixir I described up there would have been Love Potion #9, I knew without a doubt that it wasn't with her and Husband.

The woman simply was not Husband's type on every conceivable level.

He didn't love her.

He didn't lust her.

He actually detested her.

Loathed her.

(He was not alone in that. She was difficult.) (Understatement.)

Just a big ol' NOPE.

I'll put it to you this way:

If I were to ever find out that there'd been any sort of illicit involvement there, I'd shrug my shoulders, wash my hands of it, see my attorney, and leave. No backwards glances. I couldn't even conceive of trying to stick around in the face of that, much less try to, compete? with it? Work it out? I might as well try to compete or cope with Husband falling in love with a can opener. Or with a house plant. Or with a piece of subway tile. Or with a clothesline. Or with a Buddhist monk. Not a description of nor a reflection on her, her appearance (except it firmly was NOT *any* of Husband's 'types.') Just, trying to convey that it would be so non-sequitur as to be unfixable.

It took a bit of conversation but I finally found the words to describe and explain it to my therapist:

My husband is a straight man.

If this coworker was a guy, he'd feel exactly the same way about him that he feels about her: enmeshed, tired of the bullshit, frustrated and uber annoyed.

IN SI WORLD:

Obvs, based on what my therapist said, I'd make Husband take a polygraph to find out if he'd 'had sex that night.'

I'd have put a VAR in Husband's car and pulled phone records to figure out if Miss Thing was indeed A Thing.

I was already managing every single penny that came in or went out of our accounts. All of it. I am meticulous about those details and I received a copy of Husband's pay stub every pay day. If the man was dating, fuck, I felt sorry for his dates. Give me her address, I'll send the woman some flowers.

I might have even hired a private investigator.

None of those things would have been helpful to me, nor appropriate for us.

It would have been a waste of time, energy, attention and resources.

Our answers weren't in forensic evidence. Our answers weren't in the "GOTCHA!" or even in The Blame Game.

Our answers were in FOO issues, damage and relationship dynamics.

One more salient point from my perspective, and then I'll give it a rest:

Never, ever underestimate the FOO and preexisting baggage, FOO related or otherwise.

Hubs and I were discussing this thread, this morning while lazing in bed, waking up slowly.

(Y'all don't know this, but this thread is causing me a lot of angst and stress: not because anyone(s) disagrees with me, disagree at will! offer all of your perspectives! but because I feel really, really exposed by what I've shared here. That's not any of your faults, btw. But it did cause me to turn toward Hubs for support.)

In the process of that conversation, Hubs shared something with me that I'd either forgotten or never recognized/realized.

I think I may have actually explored this aspect more on another thread...

Of the children/siblings in the family, parented by a covert passive aggressive narcissist and a garden variety (loud mouth) grandiose narcissist (both bullies in their own special ways) Husband was the child who was scapegoated.

MIL actually chose a different child as the scapegoat. Not surprisingly, her chosen scapegoat was FIL's Golden Child. That nomination never really got traction, because she was not the 'out there' narcissist. IMHO, she actually was/is the more toxic narcissist (think Lady MacBeth) but she wasn't particularly effective in unseating FIL's Golden Child.

Take a guess, won't you? MIL's Golden Child would have been Hubs.

So I've been up against a passive aggressive narcissistic MIL whose favorite was MY HUSBAND OMG HOW DID I NOT SEE THE LIVING HELL THIS WOULD CAUSE THANK YOU GOD WE'LL SETTLE THIS WHEN YOU BRING ME HOME (or send me to Hell)

... and Hubs is locked (unwilling) into some sort of weird Oedipal drama with his LOUD AND PROUD NARCISSISTIC FATHER who perceives him as MIL's (unwitting and unwilling) 'agent,' who must be vanquished at all costs.

Think Biblical Passover. I shit you not an ounce.

Overwhelming much?

Confusing much?

Fucked up much?

Yup yup yup.

Covert Passive Aggressive MIL was much more interested in covering her own ass than in protecting her 'chosen,' her son, her child.

Once, after FIL literally, physically kicked my husband around the back yard, never allowing him to stand up, much less walk or run away, just for disagreeing with him on an outside of the family/non-disciplinary issue (think some pedestrian opinion, like politics or tv shows or a local news story) (my husband was 14 years old or so at the time)

... my husband looked at his mother and said,

"You see what he's doing here, right? Why are you OK with this? Why is this OK?"

... and Lady MacBeth responded with,

"Why do you rile him up like that?"

Thanks, Mom.

So yeah, that's a little glimpse at Hub's FOO.

Mine is equally as dysfunctional.

I'm no pristine specimen.

SO.

I did not remember this, I do not remember this, I honestly likely blew right past it, not realizing what was happening right in front of my face.

This is not a competition about whose family was worse, whose damage is worse, who suffered more, honestly it's not, but,

My family was so shattered that Hub's family looked positively Norman Rockwell in comparison- and that was and is a large part of their currency.

Husband confided in me this morning that for several years in our early to mid marriage, his father routinely goaded him that I 'wore the pants' in our marriage.

Now, I have described this thoroughly earlier on this thread:

I most certainly did not 'wear the pants' in our marriage. In fact, I was struggling to have my voice heard, and was doubling down on the codependency function just trying not to argue about fucking lunchmeat.

But FIL, who was in fact, in charge of *nothing* in his marriage nor in his household, was actively goading Husband about who was 'in charge' in his house and in his marriage.

And against this backdrop,

that infidelity happened.

"This is just what men do."

Peeps, don't overlook the baggage.

Love you all... <3

[This message edited by marriageredux959 at 5:08 PM, March 20th (Saturday)]

marriageredux959: thank you so much for sharing with us, my husband and I are literally in the restaurant we had our first date in, talking through this, and your willingness to share is amazing.

marriageredux959: thank you so much for sharing with us, my husband and I are literally in the restaurant we had our first date in, talking through this, and your willingness to share is amazing.

Thank you, so very much. <3 Thank you. <3

I am OK.

We are OK.

<3 <3

Thank you, Poppy, for your gracious, insightful, kind and loving response. <3 <3

[This message edited by marriageredux959 at 10:26 AM, March 21st (Sunday)]

sundance, years of being an active member, reading countless posts, following countless stories, learning from members, witnessing (however virtually) triumphs and heartbreaks, has taught me that all of those things which "rub you the wrong way" are incontrovertibly solid wisdom from start to finish.

noted. however, i still think most of those phrases are a hindrance to healing. and i am entitled to my opinion, as are you.

furthermore, the PURPOSE of my post, WAS to offer a different opinion. so, i'm guessing i somewhat "hit the mark."

lastly, the phrases that i object to, imho, weren't even the "meat" of my post.

but whatever, dude...

As a madhatter, I've seen the view from both sides, and it's similar in some ways I didn't initially grasp. When I ask about when other WS feel ready to assert themselves in the marriage again, I'm not talking about impatiently watching the clock until we're allowed out of the penalty box. Nor am I interested in rehashing old offenses that aren't relevant in the present. I'm really talking about surviving self-doubt. As a WS in recovery, I'm intimidated by the confidence I had in myself as a cheater. I honestly thought that my twisted self-justifications were legitimate and authentic. How do waywards know when our own voices are healthy again? What if the question isn't "again," but "for the first time ever?"

Thanks for clarifying BSR.

I won't rehash my whole post from before. I agree with WalkingonEggshelz, it's not as clean as WS heals WS, BS heals BS, together they heal the relationship. But, generally speaking the more each of you keep focusing on what you need to heal and doing the work, the easier I think step 3 can be.

Sometimes the ways we help each other heal actually helps that last step along.

I agree with BSR also as a MH, that the BS/WS do have some things in common here especially on being able to trust their view of reality. That may very well be the crux of reconciliation. I feel like by having an affair, there were a lot of distorted thought patterns that I had to evaluate. There was no way to trust myself moving forward.

I trust myself today only because I have developed a growth mindset, and because enough time has passed that my consistency and new commitments to myself and my own integrity are now my more recent history with myself. In turn doing these things that helped me heal is really the only way my husband's trust in me is going to grow.

I find that my husbands affair has rattled what I had come to believe was reality. But, because of all the stuff that happened as a WS my mindset towards that is different. Instead of trying to feign perfectionism, I find that I am okay saying I still have blindspots, I still have a lot to learn, but that's growth mindset - that we evolve until we die. In that way, I know I would have been rattled way differently had I been the BS first.

I do agree with unhinged post - that the pre A issues can get intertwined with blaming the BS or the relationship for the affair. I tend to think if both people work on their own mindset that some of that untangling of the pre-A issues becomes an easier discussion to have. I found myself not only apologizing for my affair, but for some of the ways that I was mismanaging myself all a long that got in the way of us having a better marriage.

I also find myself agreeing with Sundance on the meat of her post as well. Sometimes being told you are broken makes the issues you have seem unsurmountable. Like there is no good place to start. I certainly suffered from that for a long time and it was a big contributor to my shame spirals. After all, if you are broken as a person, where the hell do you really start?

What I learned is the things that were broken that needed fixed were much more simple in their nature than it seemed. I finally sometime in the first half of year two realized saying I was broken wasn't fixing a damned thing. That I needed to take what I learned I was doing and just fix those things. In some ways, it also took away my personal accountability. Broken can very much end up an excuse. A manipulation.

That's why I think we do need to talk about it more in the way that sundance said because the whole point of the WS's work is to reach self-actualization, self-love, self-worth, self-awareness. We do that by getting to a point we understand ourselves enough that we can see the good stuff too. Becoming reliable as the WS means you recognize this doesn't define your whole being and you do have the power to be different moving forward. Looking at this that Sundance is talking about is probably a healthier and less overwhelming place to start. I don't know if it would have made a difference over my spinning wheels that I had going on at first or not, but my inclination is that it would have.

It just doesn't grate on me when those sentences are said because I think there is a greater purpose behind them. I believe the WS often needs to gain humility and accountability over the situation. The BS needs to drop their humility and accountability over the situation. If both people want to proceed, that's part of the balancing. Once the WS has picked their piece up successfully regarding the infidelity and the ways they got to that point, the BS can then think about ways they may want to change as a spouse. Equilibrium can slowly return.

And, getting back to BSR's point, the BS often has to find their ways back to their self-love, self-worth, self-respect, etc that can feel destroyed initially upon discovery.

What infidelity does to both people is shatter the image they have of the relationship and each other. Rebuilding to something greater can only be dealt with by two people who grew from it. Unchanged people means the relationship goes unchanged. As much as I begrudgingly say this, I have to keep changing and adapting in this new reality the same way I did as the WS.

[This message edited by hikingout at 9:10 AM, March 22nd (Monday)]

Sometimes being told you are broken makes the issues you have seem unsurmountable. Like there is no good place to start..... After all, if you are broken as a person, where the hell do you really start?

I think the rest of HO's last post touches on this, but want to say that the quote above 1000% applied to me as a BS.

IOW, infidelity can "break" BOTH the WS and the BS. I self harmed, bc whatever physical pain that brought was a RELIEF to the emotional pain of dday, and was regularly suicidal for close to two full years. I was broken in ways I could not even imagine EVER being repaired. So for me, a WS getting "rubbed the wrong way" about the "broken" label sounds like a load of malarkey, given the ways in which the A(s) "break" a BS, and given the plethora of ill equipped therapists who routinely will label the BS as "broken" with CoD or other overt blaming of the BS for their biological and emotional response to the trauma that occurs in direct response to the WS's choice to betray and deceive.

Add the fact that my WH committed suicide, died, and was (miraculously) revived, I would be hard put for someone to say that his actions were not that of a "broken" person, starting with the cognitive dissonance that is a required element of choosing to have an A (and, unfortunately, that did not end with his spur of the moment decision to go to the garage and hang himself).

Same goes for trusting ourselves. As a BS, decades of my entire reality were shattered to smithereens by my WH's LTA, but even BS dealing with shorter As usually have the same experience of inability to trust ourselves and our instincts, bc we were clearly so off base in trusting our WS and believing in our Ms. IOW, the inability to trust ourselves is not something confined to a WS - it can be a huge problem on both sides of the equation.

What infidelity does to both people is shatter the image they have of the relationship and each other.

Agree completely, and would add that it ALSO shatters the images we have of OURSELVES - both the WS and the BS. That "shattering" is just another way of saying "broken", and BOTH the WS and the BS have a boatload of work to be done to come back from the shatterings that occur.

As much as I begrudgingly say this, I have to keep changing and adapting in this new reality the same way I did as the WS.

I'm curious why this is "begrudgingly", but suspect that it's part of learning to accept the injustice & disreality that a BS experiences post dday - even for someone like HO who began her journey out of infidelity as a WS.

[This message edited by gmc94 at 9:41 AM, March 22nd, 2021 (Monday)]

I'm curious why this is "begrudgingly", but suspect that it's part of learning to accept the injustice & disreality that a BS experiences post dday - even for someone like HO who began her journey out of infidelity as a WS.

You are 100 percent correct.

There are resentments there, even though it's illogical, that I have to go back and do some of the work I thought I already did.

It's illogical because if you stay with the growth mindset it's more believing each challenge, tragedy, etc can eventually serve to make us a greater version of yourself.

To do all the stuff I did in hoping not just to become a better person but also in hopes of regaining our marriage, to start seemingly from square one is fucking exhausting. I was 100 percent alone in rebuilding our marriage. He wasn't there, someone I don't know was. So, yes, the injustice feeling is definitely there.

I thought I had gotten past the hard parts of myself as the WS, only to be thrown back into relearning some of the same lessons a different way. I am tired of learning lessons ;-) It was a natural consequence as the WS. As the BS it's something altogether different.

After thinking about this quite a lot, I think the answer has to do with the reconstruction and mutual respect of healthy boundaries.

I was a WS, in a horrible and unforgivable way. Part of my personal development has been to accept that I did horrible, unforgivable things, and the path to that acceptance involves learning or re-learning what healthy boundaries are. My infidelity involved a selfish and immature lack of respect for anyone's boundaries, especially my own.

I believe that the establishment, or reestablishment of healthy boundaries, not only helps rebuild the foundation of credibility and trustworthiness, but it also helps to establish the rights one has with his/her betrayed spouse.

For example, for a long while after the discovery of my infidelity, I had no credibility, and was subjected to the worst that my BS had to offer. My BS was hurt to their core. I changed who my BS is.

But as I did my work, and took complete accountability for what I had done to my BS, I discovered that learning those boundaries gave me the moral clarity to determine what I could accept. What was the distinction between the lashings and mistrust of a BS and my right to live as a happy, adjusted person.

It takes time and effort. Trying to reclaim rights before a BS sees your growth will not work.

My infidelity involved a selfish and immature lack of respect for anyone's boundaries, especially my own.

It takes time and effort. Trying to reclaim rights before a BS sees your growth will not work.

Amen. I actually didn't even have an understanding of what boundaries were prior to all this. I thought trauma was something people who went to war experienced, or victims of crimes.

Very succinct and powerful post, ididit. Curious how far out from dday you guys are?