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I know those are two separate questions, recovery and/or reconciliation. But I am now 4.5 years out. I wonder if my compassion fatigue just got the best of me. I am a therapist, and I listen to hurting people daily. And I believe my UH as been doing what he can, but I am full by the time I check out of the office. I really just don’t know if I have settled for silence and POLF as my username implies. I feel love for him. But I really struggle with this flatness in our "renewed relationship". I know I still have questions, and I am sure I have not even asked the most pressing ones, because, I am just tired. We have an amazing teen, the kind everyone dreams of. Successful, scholastic, and wayyy obligated with activities. I feel like I get home and shift gears to parent. So marriage often takes a backseat. At least to me. But to him, he seems to feel charged, renewed, almost overly into making our marriage the best it can be. And I am like…yeah, ok, as long as I don’t have to think too hard about any of this. I really feel I have been POLFing for the last 2:years. And it just doesn’t sit well with me when I am alone with my head. Anyone relate?

I’m almost at the 3 year mark post DDay and I have to say, I’ve never felt more alone in my life. I’m guilty of the pick me dance early on, but as I travel further down the path of IC and EMDR I am working on becoming less codependent. I still love my wife but honestly have not really felt she was "all in" since I discovered her affair. My therapist and I both believe she has coping issues from childhood trauma but she is still in denial and really refuses to engage fully into healing. That has made me feel like I’m on my own in getting through this. I have really asked myself quite a bit in this last year if this is as good as it’s going to get, because I want more and I don’t think I’m willing to settle for "just good enough" from here on out.

I definitely spent some time in the POLF — or uncomfortably numb — since emotional trauma tends to be draining after all the fight or flight, sleep deprivation in the months after discovery, I initially enjoyed not feeling a darned thing.

The upside is my wife seemed to know to back off and not press during those months. We quietly co-existed, which was a respite I needed.

I got to jump back in when I was ready.

Our sons were young adults when dday landed, so I did not have to deal with daily parenting at that time.

I guess my wife usually knew when to give me space and then was there when I didn’t want space.

As for knowing R is possible, that’s only if that’s what BOTH partners really want.

I have found reading so many stories here, if recovery/recon only has ONE person leading the way or investing into the rebuild, it isn’t R.

I think that’s one of the reasons R is so difficult, it’s rare enough to have balance in a healthy relationship, much less one that is building rebuilt from the foundation up.

At the very minimum, it sounds like you need to heal more or heal enough to decide what you want or need going forward.

I wrote the 'graphs below and then realized I could summarize it this way:

My W entered her A out of co-dependence. She committed to getting authentic and showing me that she wanted me, not just a relatively comfortable life, and she followed through on those commitments. That made me think R would work. For recovery, see below.

My W - fWW - was a therapist. She was in an unhealthy relationship with a client for 18 months or so, a really sick relationship (she gave up boundary after boundary during this period) for a year, and a PA for 22 weeks, IIRC.

She says she saw that she was risking her life (little sleep, not eating, making mistakes while driving) during the night of 12/21/10-12/22/10 and decided she to clean up her life starting then. She wasn't going to tell me, but part of her epiphany was deciding to be honest. We were fooling around the morning of 12/22, and she freaked out. I asked, 'What does that mean for us?' She told me she'd been having sex with her client. I was devastated.

My response was to start a period of pretty intense interrogation that lasted ... I don't remember how long it lasted. I used every method I could find to test her veracity, and I never saw anything that came close to being untrue. She was defensive often, but she answered my questions even then.

I don't know if she breached confidentiality in her answers, but I didn't care about the client; I just cared about what my W did, thought, and felt and how she justified her A. That she was open about.

So honesty in answering questions was a big clue that R would work.

She got us in to see her therapist - call her T - on d-day. I had no trust for T at first, but she very quickly gained my trust by confronting my W. (W lied to T as well as to me.) T acted as MC for over a year. I think she confronted my W on 90-95% of the issues, and my W sat an took the confrontations. W signed a release that allowed T to talk to me about her sessions and progress and called for T to call me if W withdrew the release or revealed another A.

Taking confrontations and applying them, however slowly, was confirmation that W was honest.

T said W was working on core issues rather than the A itself, which made sense to me, but T worked hard to confirm for me that W said in her IC sessions the same things she said in and out of MC sessions - that she wanted to R.

The congruence between what W said to me and to T confirmed W's honesty.

One of the things I did during the 1st 3 months was come up with my requirements for R. W accepted most of them and negotiated in good faith about the things she was uncomfortable about. Her asserting herself said to me I was dealing with a real person and not some sort of automaton who wanted to take the easy way out.

The fact that my W had requirements for a rebuilt M said to me that she was really invested in making something pleasurable.

I've always believed that 'yes' isn't worth much unless one can also say 'no.' The fact that we could say 'no' to each other was very important. We were together out of desire, not out of need. (Of course, we usually said 'yes'.)

*****

WRT recovery, I put myself through several bouts of therapy with some very effective therapists during my life, so I was in very good shape before my W's A. The A took something out of me, but I was in good emotional shape on d-day.

The main thing I got from therapy was that self-talk is crucial. The 2nd most important thing was that I was imperfect. The 3rd: responsible for myself and my feelings. I guess the 4th was that the Drama Triangle is a trap that is also a constant threat and that staying out of DTs makes life a lot better than going into them. The 5th was that feelings rule. The 6th was not to conflate thought and feelings.

Shortly after d-day, I talked with a therapist I worked with in the '70s. She quoted other therapists as saying something like, 'R requires 3 healings. You heal you. Your W heals herself. Together, if you want to, you heal your M.'

I found that to be immensely empowering. It told me I could heal even if I didn't R.

SI told me I was not alone. SIers in my cohort told me I was thinking and feeling about what they were feeling and thinking. SIers with more experience gave me an idea of where I was headed.

Combining what I got from therapy with what I got from SI and from my actual experience helped me heal.

*****

You didn't ask for advice, exactly, but here's mine:

Separate your healing from R - they really are 2 different processes.

Your healing is a matter of processing your feelings out of your body. I can let a lot of anger go easily, but grief and fear I have to feel. I have to let them flow through my body. YMMV. Shame ... I handle shame with self-talk, far from perfectly. Part of me is comfortable that my W shamed herself, not me. But I have shared my W's A with only 2 people who aren't bound by confidentiality, and those 2 are former therapists. Anyway, as a therapist, my bet is that you have ways of processing feelings.
I learned in therapy that 'I feel...' is powerful. We had numerous incidents in which I found myself across a room from my W saying and showing, 'I'm furious that you did this!' I got rid of a lot of anger that way.

Dumping an unremorsedful WS is probably the best course of action.

What gets me, though, is that my W says she didn't begin to feel remorse for 5 months. She acted remorseful. She was honest. She was transparent. She used IC to get healthier emotionally. She didn't gaslight, minimize, or trickle information out. But she said it took her 5 months to begin to see that she had just another A; previously, she saw herself as saving her client's life (because the client threatened to kill herself unless my W put out).

Also, other people have R'ed successfully with WSes who took a while to become remorseful.

Have you read the 'Beyond Regret and Remorse' thread? https://survivinginfidelity.com/topics/324250/things-that-every-ws-needs-to-know/? If not, read them - they'll allow you to compare what your WS is doing with waht people who R think, with a lot of good reasons, they should be doing.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:25 PM, Saturday, February 24th]

What did the Unfaithful do that made you feel like recovery and reconciliation was possible?

Nothing really. In the moment I put others ahead of myself. I had a troubled teen going off the rails because she discovered this. To my knowledge she does not know that 15 months later I discovered the LTA had just gone underground. So in the beginning it was the lesser of the evils for my then troubled teen. I knew I reserved the right to change my mind at any given time once she was 18 - or sooner if I was so inclined.

During those years, I focused on my teen, myself, my life, everything. I figured I'd given WH the gift of Grace and what he did with it was up to him.

I focused my time, effort and energy on rising from the ashes - WH could come along for the ride or not.

It was pure Hell looking back to see him mourn the loss of LTAP and jones for those Ego Kibbles he'd grown so accustomed to. I watched his puppy dog eyes when he realized I no longer believed a word he said. I watched his shoulders slump when I started doing for me by myself - even if it was a simple trip to Target. "I'm going to Target" or "I'm going to get a coffee" and leave.

Once teen's friends started driving and then she did - my mombligations came to more of an end. I was suddenly available on weekend nights as I wasn't doing the carpool thing or the hosting the hangout thing. I started initiating things - hey WH - let's do XYZ this weekend. We started "dating" again kind of.

All the while - I watched, waited and investigated. Over time I realized the old Ann Landers things -I'm better with him than without him. BUT had the confidence that there was no shame in changing my mind.

All that had more to do with my own metamorphosis than it did with him pulling his head out of his ass.

She came home a bit early from 'a lab study session' and walked into the house crying and confessed before I said a word.

I didn't need to confront or let her know what I knew - just let her blubber on and "get it all out."

Decades later - get the rest of the story as I never quite chawed down the Merde Panini based on her level of emotion when confessing.

Life became and has been different from what I imagined ever since.

Stayed the course because she and I do have a lot to share in the path of life - background, values - and we still like each other.

Well, most of the time.

I'm in the Chaos camp, as my WH has done nothing, really, besides stay with me and try to distract me with adventures and hobbies and together time. He's a really great roommate and a pretty good life buddy, but he is the worst candidate for R/R.

Like Chaos, I'm better with than without him, both our lives are better together than apart, and we have this amazing tiny family with two grown kids who we adore and they love us right back. They have no idea and it would truly mess them up if they knew the half of it. We are also raising two insane dogs together and it is helping us to bond and work as a team.

But I had to work on me to have a chance of staying and I still struggle with reconciling my choices. Maybe the one thing he did was insist from the very beginning that I was his person, he never envisioned a life without me or us not growing old together. My WH hasn't done any of the work he should have or needs to or promised to do. He has instead thrown himself into trying to make me happy in every other way. Want to move? Sure! Where? You pick. Want to travel? Where to? Want to buy kayaks or grown up toys and go have all the fun? Lets go.... Oh you like to garden, right? I'm gonna build you a greenhouse and a farm and whatever you need because I just want you to be happy....

(I'll tell you what would have made me happy - some IC for him, some education about the fallout of betrayal and ways to help your spouse to heal, some truths that didn't trickle, some commitment to brutal honesty, and mostly the ability to own his actions and their consequences. I really got none of that, and yet here we are still trying to forge a relationship that won't crumble.)

It's a lot, his misdirected efforts, and not a lot of the stuff I needed. According to my IC, I may have already seen the best he can muster with all his unaddressed issues. She talked a bit about the higher calling of love, the type that carries on even in pain, even when it is not warranted or returned in kind, and I am trying not to feel like a martyr or a fool through that lens. But apparently loving someone enough to choose to stay with them when they have devastated you and are incapable of meeting you where you need to be met to heal is one of those types of love that allows for the most meaningful personal growth. Or something like that. I need her to re-explain it to me a few more times before I can add it to my nuggets of wisdom that help me get by.

You are in a different place than us, parenting wise and that takes up so much energy, so your relationship fatigue is understandable. Plus you spend your days listening to so much pain, you are entitled to a little flatness just to cope. For me, in our semi retirement, I don't know how to feel anything other than flatness toward this new version of our marriage. I had it all, loved and appreciated it all, took nothing for granted and tried so, so hard to be what he needed and wanted me to be, and yet here I am. My IC said I do not have a try problem, my problem was I felt I had to keep trying when so much is outside of my control. She is teaching me to disengage from the instinct to try to fix it all, to let go and find some peace with the life I am choosing to live now. And that involves a lot more focusing on me than my nurturing nature knows how to do properly. I'm learning and it's hard. But there is a huge difference in our mindsets as a couple. He thinks things are great, we are great, life is great, everything is better now. It is a very different story inside my head. Hence the Chaos approach. Be OK regardless, work on me, live my best life and see if he is worthy and willing to come along with me.

Best to you finding the right mental slipstream and hoping the POLF isn't hiding the tsunami of tears that mine did. Although I am grateful my dam burst and the flooding forced me to get help. I love having my therapist to talk to, because she helps me make sense of the confusion in my head, and she is such a solid touchstone to help me stay grounded. She has seen a lot, and she knows how to encourage me in the ways I need most. I hope you have someone kind and helpful like that to talk through some of this with. Best to you.

Went to IC on his own after years of evading personal responsibility and continued doing so for the last 4 years, resulting in CLEAR changes in his behavior. I do not mean that my WH has magically transformed from someone who is initially defensive or who never talks about how he feels immediately or is no longer moody and tries to evade blame. I mean that now that behavior occurs less, and he sees that behavior in himself and when it happens, circles back to it (either during the conversation or within 24 hours) and addresses it - admitting he recognizes it and wants to address whatever the actual issue is.

EDIT: He did all that work not to impress me or for us to get back together. He did it because he did not like who he was and wanted to figure out how to be someone he could be happy with. That is the best reason of them all and honestly what really gave me pause from just walking away and never looking back.

This has been a LONG process and is in no means complete. His changes have also made me realize some of my own downfalls in the communication/behavior arena and my own change is slow too. I can't commit fully to R as honestly I don't feel the same attraction for him and don't know that I want to try to get there anymore. But the limbo we now sit in is imposed by me, and is done in full honesty about where I am - so it's not that miserable limbo where I sat post discovery - nothing like it, and I'm fine with it.

I think you have to give yourself a bit of permission to feel the way that you do. Honestly, your job aside, the A kicked the shit out of your marriage, AND did a real number on the way you feel about your WS. As you likely realize, it will never be "the same" and for some that is okay - finding a new path is workable. For me, I find that I can handle my WS in smaller doses but I really do enjoy my own time and my own feelings. I find I don't care as much about his as I used to - and I think that's okay too as I put too much time and energy into caring about making him happy than I probably should have, sometimes to my own detriment. The old me saw this as part of the give and take that you have in a long term relationship. The new me sees it the same way but recognizes that the scales don't have to be so tipped in his favor.

IDK where my WH and I will end up. For now I work on finding where I want to be and if I want him to be there (and of course if he wants to be too).

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 8:51 PM, Tuesday, February 27th]

My H did everything possible to prove to me he really wanted to stay married and R.

However it took me a year before I stopped waking up every day thinking "I can’t do this".

It took me 6 years to forgive him.

We are happy. We are lucky.

[This message edited by The1stWife at 11:18 PM, Tuesday, February 27th]