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Staying with your spouse is hard enough, but what do you all do about the sex? I mean, you start and you are ok, but afterwards I have to go to another room or make excuses bc I cry my eyes out. Will it ever be different? Will I ever be able to just have sex without seeing them together and being hurt bc when he orgasms, I know he had just as much fun with her and if felt just as good if not better with the AP. It’s been a year since Dday (well, just 3 months since I found out ALL the truth) and I still feel this way. Please tell me there’s a day that I won’t feel this way and it won’t feel like my heart is in a vice grip every time after sex.

Eventually, it gets better.

Stop going to the other room to cry. Let him see how it affects you. He needs to see it. If he is remorseful, he will comfort you. And it shows him how deeply his actions have affected you,and the marriage.

You finally were given the truth? So you had him take the polygraph?

IHL:

I’m so sorry. I hate the lying too BTW. On the sex I hear you. I found out it was PA 10 months ago. He let me think it was EA for 7 years. It was mostly kissing - like 30 times. One episode that I think could have been sex but he denies. Let’s assume it was sex for sake of argument.

For months during parts of us kissing I would get triggered by thinking of them kissing. It does feel awful, it is so triggering and horrifying. Now that seems to fade after a couple distracting thoughts. I try to advance quickly to other sex stuff because only the kissing really kills me because that’s what I have the mind movies of. In your case I guess it might have to be the opposite. Like stay more with the kissing because the other stuff is a little more difficult. I do think it fades with time.

What seems more important is why you don’t stay hugging afterwards and cry there? Do you feel too vulnerable? I get that but I wish you were able to get that comfort and support from him directly at the exact time you are feeling hurt. I usually feel closer after that and maybe that is why the feeling has faded for me. If your husband isn’t making you feel supported to hear your pain in that situation maybe you could talk about it in counseling? I also remind myself of other people I have kissed and people he kissed before we were married. I am not sure why that helps me…maybe it demystifies the whole thing a little bit. It is still an incredibly difficult thought to imagine your spouse sharing this stuff with another. For me verbalizing that sentiment to my husband definitely takes the intensity of the feeling down a notch, maybe 10%. It takes it down into the bad but somewhat manageable range. Or maybe sometimes manageable is more accurate. There are times the feeling is still probably going to be intense. As a psychiatrist who has done a lot of trauma work with patients I know that the goals have to be incredibly small at first. I am not sure it is best to push through with the sex if your triggers get too intense. That is a really tough question you should probably address in therapy. Pros of pushing through are that it may get better with time and/or your physical pleasure might blunt the trigger somewhat. Cons include the fact that you could feel abused or exploited if you force yourself through it. That sounds like a recipe for intensifying your resentment.

Best to you. So so sorry you have to go through to this! Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy (except maybe the AP!). Actually scratch that. I am working on forgiveness. Forgiveness is a bear. But I remember when I forgave her for the EA, not even completely but just a little bit each year over the 7 years (10% at a time!), it really did free up my heart from some of the pain. So that’s one of my goals.

Hellfire - he agreed to take the polygraph after he told me this last bit. There was one woman that was a one time oral, but he couldn’t get it up. There was another woman that gave oral and hand job and fooling around for like 3 months. Then there was the one that he had the complete affair with for like 9 months.
I was going to get a polygraph on my own, but after going to marriage counseling (been once and then he was off for a month 🤦‍♀️) I’ve decided to wait until after the full disclosure and let them do the polygraph. I can only ask 4-5 questions so I figured it would be more thorough if he did the disclosure and then took the polygraph.
And I don’t want him to see the extent of my pain bc then he will not tell me anything else. Everything thing rides on the polygraph. He will use "me being hurt" as an excuse to be honest with me. I’ll let him know exactly how I feel afterwards. That may not be the right way to go, but I’m just tired of lies and him using the excuses that it will hurt me or whatever.

Stillconfused2022 - if u read what I wrote to Hellfire then u know it’s kissing and everything in between. I could feel normal before sex, but as soon as it’s over and sometimes right at the end, I just can’t do it. I try to block images out of my mind, but I’ll still see them screwing and messing around. I can keep trying to push the images away, but half the times I can’t even finish (myself) bc that’s all I can see. And then after he finishes….he’s so expressive and that makes it worse. I always liked that about him bc it’s like I "knocked his socks off", but now it hurts worse than anything else bc I know he acted the same way or more so with her. He’s opened up to me about his feelings and while that’s what I wanted and needed….still hurts. And I do want to know how he felt toward her and anything he’ll tell me bc I don’t want to be in the dark. It’s not fair to me to try and decide what I want for my future when I don’t have all the details.
So I asked him if he regretted just the hurt he caused, but didn’t regret the affair. He said he regretted it all and even while he was having sex with her he felt bad. I asked why he continued then and he said bc it felt too good and he was having fun. And I appreciated the honesty…really I did. It just hurts knowing that she wasn’t just a "piece of ass" and that he had feelings, but didn’t love her…he said he loves me. That makes me want to puke, too. So it all boils down to….if he actually knew how hurt I was and how I hide and cry and the pain that literally ropes me apart…..he’d never tell or share anything with me and I need the truth to be able to make an informed decision about the rest of my life. Hence the reason I’m waiting on the disclosure and polygraph to share ALL my feelings. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve cried and screamed and raged and thrown things…..but that’s anger and hurt. What he doesn’t get to see is the actually emotional and mental pain he has caused, if that makes sense.
And even if he knew….I still don’t think I could cry and let him comfort me. It seems so….hypocritical (maybe that’s the word I’m looking for) to let him comfort me for the pain he caused. It’s like him beating the shit out of me and then me letting him comfort me.

I just gave up in the end. I'm 1 year in and felt it was better for me to not have to be traumatised every time I had sex - It started to affect how I view sex in general & made me feel guilty & dirty afterwards, which I realised is actually very damaging as time goes on so decided that had to stop. I'm not saying that's what best for you, I'm just sharing what I chose to do to protect myself & my self esteem 💖

I know what you mean about not wanting to let him in on the pain that's caused by being intimate because it'll just make it weirder and more difficult. But I do think that, when you're ready, you need to tell him about your pain and your needs, and advise him of how he can help you to stay in the present during sex. Maybe it's making eye contact the whole time. Maybe it's saying your name. Maybe it's not doing certain things. Maybe sometimes you need to stop and be held and comforted. Whatever you need.

My H thought he was in love with the OW, too, but realized later that she was just a willing participant in his dysfunction. It's so much harder when there's an emotional component. My H also had two other instances of infidelity that were PA only, no EA, and I barely think about them.

I can tell you what really helped me, and it may seem weird, but it worked pretty well: I imagined OW watching us and eating her friggin' heart out that I was getting all the good sex and attention from "her" man. That technique came later.

These days, when she pops into my head, I've started imaging that Denzel Washington gif where he slams the door on someone. Get out of my head, bitch! It works!

Big hugs to you. R is hard.

You shouldn't be having sex with him if you haven't received the full disclosure and completed the polygraph, if you're crying and miserable after the act, and don't trust him enough to provide you with comfort and support. Also, he's already given you several STDs so putting yourself at risk when you're not in reconciliation is dangerous.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 9:36 PM, Thursday, May 18th]

Bluerthanblue - I’m with him 24/7. There’s no chance he’s cheating. We own a store and while this was going on, I was always a stay at home mom. So now I work with him every day. It’s impossible to find good help.
He would give comfort and a support if I let him and wanted him to. But like I mentioned above….it’s me….I just can’t take comfort from him when he’s the one that put me in this situation. Ig I’m the wrong one, but idk. Sigh

Sacredsoulsister- it’s not only having to think about them…I actually found a video and the way he talked and crap is the same as he’d talk to me. Sometimes he’ll say something (not in a sexual way, but still what he said in the video) and it makes me physically cringe and sad. It’s all just so hard. And if I’m honest, everything rides on the disclosure and the polygraph. If anything more comes out….I just don’t know if I can do it. Heck, don’t even know if I can do it regardless, but I’m going to at least try. It just disgust me and saddens me when I let myself think about it. And I can try to ignore it, sweep it under a rug, but that’s not healthy. The marriage counselor mentioned that I should be in trauma therapy so I’m going to ask more about that when we go back. Lord knows I need something. My reg counselor was nice, but not really helping at all.

I'm so sorry that you had to see and hear that. My H was good at covering his tracks, so I only saw one email exchange between him and the OW. It was about them going on a picnic and him calling her by a cute name, and that was bad enough. I can't imagine actually hearing and seeing it. Big hugs.

I think trauma therapy is a great idea. I wish I had done that. I've actually been considering it now so that I can get some of this obsessive nonsense out of my head.

Again, I don't think you should be having sex with him if it's causing you this much pain and if you're unwilling or unable to reach out for him for comfort. Maybe things will change after you've gotten your full disclosure and the polygraph.

At this point, he's really done nothing to help you heal. He's agreed to the disclosure and the polygraph, but believe that will happen when you actually see it. Scaling back his emotional and physical abuse doesn't mean he's a safe partner, either.

Also, just because might not have any opportunities to physically cheat at the moment doesn't mean that he isn't still in communication with other women, which has been part of his behavior throughout your marriage.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 5:12 PM, Friday, May 19th]

HI Ihatelying, I’m sorry you’re struggling right now.

Please know that the way you’re feeling is totally normal. Also, you should be keeping time from your most recent dday, not your original one. Based on that you’re only 3 months out. At 3 months out (and a year out too, for that matter), sex can be incredibly triggery. It certainly was for me. To that end, I really encourage you to seek full disclosure as soon as possible. You’ve felt firsthand how painful new disclosures can be (whether they are lies or not), there is a reason why we rip a bandaid off rather than spending months and years drawing out the process and the pain. I agree with you, that its impossible to

My best technique to avoid triggers during sex was to focus ENTIRELY on me. What I liked, what I felt good, how hot I was. Honestly, as selfish as I could be. Every time my mind drifted to the OW or the A, I would (metaphorically) slap my wrist, and try to re-focus my attention back to me (it can help if you have some go-to ideas/thoughts/fantasies that YOU find a turn-on. It didn’t happen automatically, I had to be disciplined but the way I saw it, it felt like the OW took so much from me, I was dead set that I was not going to let her intrude on MY enjoyment of MY sex life too.

Honestly, this worked pretty well but certainly not 100%. When I was overcome with mind-movies and triggers I would stop what we were doing and acknowledge that. That is totally and completely okay. Please do not feel bad about it. I would share with my husband what I was experiencing and allow him to be a comfort to me. I agree that you should avoid leaving the room to cry. If you’re planning on reconciling, and it sounds like that is what you’re trying for right now, I really found that sharing triggers and talking and working through them together was a great way to find common ground and togetherness rather than separation. Does your husband know the right sorts of things to say when you trigger? Obviously there is nothing that can change the past, but there are helpful and unhelpful things you can say in the moment. The general stuff I felt was helpful was for him to acknowledge what I was feeling and why, apologize for his role in creating the trigger, assure me that he loved me and only me, and that he was never going to do anything like this to create this sort of hurt ever again while acting as a patient comfort. This was something we worked on together.

For women in particular, so much of sex is mental. We are trusting another person with our body and our safety. Evolutionarily, the act of sex can come with incredible risk for women (several decades of consequences). I imagine that is why it can feel contrary to every natural instinct in our brains and bodies to have sex with someone when we are not feeling safe. It makes perfect sense that you do not feel emotionally safe with your husband right now. I made the choice to try to take back my sex life, but you are not obligated to do that if you don’t want to be doing that. Please be kind and patient to yourself.

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I think initially the stages of grief are against us. Bargaining and denial. Yesterday everything seemed mostly fine, today your spouse cheated. It takes time for the brain to compute that. We want nothing to change.

Sometimes that can thread the needle towards true reconciliation one day. Sometimes it sets the bs up for more pain and being dragged through the landscape of hell.

But to me the simple answer is bargaining and denial at first. Just like when someone dies we don’t know where to put those feelings. Some people go to the anger step early or first and make decisive moves as a result. But no one skips the other steps of grief.

Emergent8 - yeah…he says he’s empathic, but he’s not. I mean, he thinks he is. And I see he’s trying, but for someone that’s never tried and has always had zero patience….. it’s not fun. But like I said….I see he’s trying, but at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable expressing my feelings bc he doesn’t understand. The triggers….his comment is….I have too many freaking triggers and I need to talk to my therapist about it bc it’s not normal for everything to trigger me. He’s says I’m just letting it trigger me. Sooo…..telling him my triggers and talking through them is a no go. I mean I could, but he’s just going to think it’s silly or that I’m too extra. Until he goes through things, he doesn’t understand them and what it’s like. So if I’m not willing to go screw with three people for about a year, year and a half, then he’s not going to truly understand.
And knowing the right things to say doesn’t mean they actually mean them d I don’t want to just be pacified. I want understanding.

So sorry that your WH is not sensitive to what he has put you through- pure hell.

For him to say you have too many freaking triggers is awful! If he didn’t cheat on you, you would not be having those triggers!

He doesn’t sound remorseful. He doesn’t seem to get it.

I am sorry.

I hope he will wake up and understand what he has done to you and to your marriage.

[This message edited by cedarwoods at 8:58 PM, Saturday, May 20th]