I’m so sorry for all you are going through. My WH did the same as yours, minimize and lie at every step of the grueling discovery process. It took me years to get to the truth and I would never know if I hadn’t found digital clues like you did. The number of lies uncovered is still staggering to me. And for me, getting over the shock that a few months was actually a few years was horrifying, but the slow torture of that becoming six, then eight, then nine years of cheating that I could confirm has me still reeling. He could never tell me the truth, and his story now is I don’t remember, although I got him to admit that he doesn’t want to remember and it makes him feel icky to think about it. He said me making him talk about the A made static in his brain. It took me a long time to see that he was traumatized in his own way, and completely incapable of handling not just the truth, but the fallout and my falling apart that ensued. He actually said he didn’t think I’d be this upset.
I kept thinking if he loved me and wanted to save our M he would tell the truth at some point. Only through my IC have I come to understand that he was never going to get there, because he can’t face admitting to me or himself all that he has done. It is too uncomfortable, or shameful or whatever for him to face. I rationalize it as the same poor coping skills that led him to his A are the same skills that keep him botching recovery and reconciliation.
If you ask him, he was trying to spare me further pain, when I made it completely clear that the most painful thing he could do to me was continue to lie to my face. Nothing got through to him, and each time I caught him in another minimization or lie, or each time I found another awful breadcrumb or got a pile of horrible truths from the MOW, he unraveled a little bit more and he became pretty tangled up in his mental baggage. He became angry, frustrated and shut down and I’m not sure he ever will own what he did, or tell me all I want to know. At this point, it really couldn’t get much worse, truth wise, and I’ve told him that any questions I have remaining I just assume the worst case, or what I call Of course he/they did. It’s easier than wondering for the rest of my life, when I am now certain that baseline honesty is not one of his character traits. He will protect himself first, and he is so unable to handle his emotions and the shame that he spirals or shuts down every time, even years downstream. It’s the worst, and I’m so sorry to know how you feel now. He may not ever understand this, but each new lie, each new manipulation or deception is a complete reset, and each feels more devastating than the one before. If they could just be smart enough to rip off the bandaid, we could recover from the shock and heal more quickly.
You are very early in the discovery process. The mistake I made was thinking over and over and over that I had reached the truth, a reboot point or an understanding with my WH over the future of our M and the boundaries I was willing to tolerate. I thought I was looking at the man I knew for years, intelligent, measured, confident and could not process that I was dealing with a trapped animal, desperate and confused and sitting in a mess he had no idea how to get out of besides lying and pretending this was not happening. He wanted from day one to jump to moving forward, all that unpleasant mess just water under the bridge. He was not and is not capable of working through the healing and growth process, and I’m still learning who he really is. I’m learning a lot about who I am too. You will question everything about your life and it is unnerving, so work hard to stay grounded. Kids can help with that, and putting your head down in the moment, one foot in front of the other, getting the mom job done will help you to focus on what is important and what is true. I think I might have gone crazy without the touchstones of unconditional love I could trust and believe in from my kids and my dog during the discovery years.
I don’t know what kind of man you are married to or what his level of commitment or desperation might be. I just want to warn you to not assume you are dealing with a person you think you know. My WH did not know himself. He has told me repeatedly that I gave him too much credit for having a master plan or even thinking his way through this mess, he was in total damage control mode. That left me with manipulation and dishonesty and us with permanent, long term damage. He continued to tell himself that since the A was over the truth of all those details was irrelevant and he guarded them with all he had.
FYI, I ended their A unknowingly by scaring the MOW away by responding to an email she sent him, left in his deleted folder. I didn’t realize the A was underground, and was still dealing with the completely wrong version of the truth and never realized he was dealing with abrupt loss of contact with her after almost a decade. He never looked back, and whatever he felt for her or whatever friendship they felt they shared was meaningless in the face of his cover being blown. I asked how he could just never reach out to her again, and he said she knew the deal and the risks. No one was supposed to know or get hurt. Besides, when I am done with someone I am done with them. This may be a lie too, I’ll never know. I do know that he would be mortified to ever speak to her again after all I have said to her and told her all the awful things he said about her. So I guess it’s possible to just stop, but I wish I knew I was witnessing the end of it at the time, not trying to piece it together over a year later.
Like yours, I never got a confession unless I cornered him with undeniable evidence that he was lying. Had I not believed the first piles of lies, I might have gone into deep dive investigations a lot sooner and found out the truth in months instead of years. I want to caution you to proceed carefully, and don’t get caught up in what you think or need to be real, but try to be as objective as you can while you get to the bottom of your WH’s reality, so you can figure out your own. Doing all this while in shock, traumatized and overwhelmed while trying to parent is so very hard and I hope you have a support system in place to help you through. We never separated, I went to IC, then we went to MC, and then I found out how deep his deceptions went and we stopped MC. I continued IC for a while, then suffered for a long time and am now back in IC to find a way to live in peace moving forward, wherever that path leads.
I’m sorry for the long saga, but I want to offer you my version so you understand some of the possibilities or difficulties you may be facing moving forward. This is a difficult journey and you need to focus most on taking care of yourself so you can be there for your kids and then you will have the bandwidth to figure out what to do with your marriage. Best to you moving forward and keep coming back here for the healing library, the support and the comfort of knowing you are not alone in this. There are wonderful, caring smart people here.
