SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I'm new here. I told my husband about an affair I had a few years ago. It was a complicated time but also supposed to be the happiest time. It started as an emotional affair, something I hadn't even noticed was happening, this was before the wedding. My husband realised something was up and questioned me about it. I admitted feelings. My memories after this become fuzzy, I remember being so stressed out and I lost loads of weight, my husband hadn't taken that news well. However, his memory of the event is different to mine which leaves me feeling confused.
We went ahead and got married and it was a beautiful wedding and we went on our honeymoon, during which my husband was looking up divorce.
After that I feel like everything went wrong, I don't even remember the physical side of the affair starting. But my husband and I were a mess at home everything felt tense and I felt like I was on eggshells. My husband was hurting and I was too absorbed in my own hurt that I didn't do anything to help him. I lied to him and everyone around us making it seem like he was the bad guy. He was calling me names at the time and generally being quite mean even though he didn't know back then but I still did this :(
The affair lasted over a year and when I look back at what I did I struggle so much with it because I do love my husband and yet I did this to him and to us.
His view of me has completely changed and his opinion of me always mattered to me so I don't know how to cope with the fact that I am a horrible person to him now, the worst person he knows.
I'm struggling with how this stupid decision and the decisions after have changed how I and others see me.
Has anyone any advice for how to cope with this?

Hi SHB

The one word that comes to mind is acceptance. You have to accept and embrace the fact that you did these things. That you were capable of this kind of deception and betrayal.

Of course that typically flies in the face of our own self perceptions of who and what we think we are. I always prided myself on being a good guy. I used to sneer at people who cheated, I was above all of that after all. 🙄

Once I really stopped and examined myself and my behaviors, I realized that I had been lying to myself for a very long time. I had very questionable boundaries and what I viewed as acceptable behavior. The thing is, it was always through the lens of how things would affect me. I really never considered how my actions would affect others. I had to start putting myself into other peoples shoes.

My other recommendation is don’t wallow in self pity. That’s easier said than done. While cheating will always be a part of your history, it doesn’t have to define you. You can change and become a better person but it will take a ton of work and effort.

Hello and welcome. Thank you for being brave enough to post. A willingness to get down and dirty with yourself to ultimately heal deserves a lot of credit. You're walking the right path and I hope you stay on it.

So let me see if I have this straight: You began an affair while you were engaged and it continued after the wedding for a total of one year. And you recently disclosed the A to him. The part that confuses me is when you say he was researching divorce on your honeymoon. Did he already know about the A or did he just suspect and you tried to trickle-truth him by saying it was nothing? I'm a little unclear with that part.

How long have you been married? My BW (betrayed wife) and I were married nearly 15 years when my first PA occurred. That PA sprang out of a long-term EA (emotional affair) that I didn't even know was an EA at the time. What I mean by that was the fact that it was a co-worker who I had mutually shared a lot of personal info with for years before it turned physical. I had never heard the term EA before then.

Anyway, as ff4152 posted, wallowing in self-pity is not a healthy place for us waywards. It led me to shame-spiral quite a bit and it was a comfortable rut. Rather than challenging myself to move forward, it was so much easier to just sit in the mud and cry "woe is me, look what I've done" over and over.

Are you in IC? A good therapist can help tremendously. I caught lightning in a bottle by finding a good one right off the bat. He held my feet to the fire quite a bit in the early days and challenged me on my bullshit thinking. Lots of tough love and accountability, which is what a conceited, selfish asshat like me needed in spades. 5+ years later and I now see him once a month to check in and I look forward to it each time. This is coming from someone who grew up hearing from his disfunctional family that therapy was only for "loonies" and who had a real fear of being labelled "crazy".

Is your husband in IC? Many men feel totally emasculated, especially when their WW (wayward wife) has had a PA (physical affair). If he is open to it, he could find help in therapy as well.

One thing that is advised against and which I endorse is not to start MC (marriage counseling) until you both are healed or mostly healed. Your marriage didn't cheat, you did. There are a lot of terrible counselors out there with little experience with infidelity who end up encouraging rug-sweeping rather than communication.

One last thing: Please read the pinned thread at the top of the forum "Maia's Withdrawl Survival Guide" and also pick up a copy of Linda McDonald's How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair. It's an easy read yet so rich for a wayward who truly wants to heal and become a better person and safe partner.

Hopefully some of our more euridite waywards will be along to chime in with their wealth of knowledge and experience. I don't post much but I read on an almost daily basis and I'm always learning something new from them.

Please keep posting. It helps us as much as it helps you. I wish you and your husband peace and healing.

Acceptance takes a long time.

The thing that helped me the most is identifying why I did what I did and from that try and improve. There are universals things to everyone who cheats like striving for integrity, recognizing why we felt entitled to do what we did, committing to honesty, etc.

And then there are things unique to us. I was a people pleaser who didn’t ever recognize many of my own needs. I needed instead to protect my happiness by investing more in myself.

It can be many many small things that if we actively work on those things we will start to create a new track record. By doing the right things, we don’t erase what we did but we can start to see we re redeemable, and start to have a little more compassion for that person who was sleep walking through life.

For now it’s going to be uncomfortable, painful. Do the right things here, no holding back on truths, focus on empathy for him, read, write journals, get therapy.

Life does get better again. You may not be able to save this relationship, don’t just try and change for it, change because you deserve to be a version of yourself that you can hold your head high.

The pain will stick around for some time to come but be thankful for it. I know that sounds crazy. But by realizing that it’s there to mold you, to teach you, it serves a greater purpose. You are divinely loved and redeemable, just keep making the next right decision and stay on that path.

There are other people here with much more wisdom and experience than me, but I wanted to say this:

Rather than challenging myself to move forward, it was so much easier to just sit in the mud and cry "woe is me, look what I've done" over and over.

It's also another way of staying self-centered. I am in no way saying I've gotten out of this mindset, either. I struggle with it and often fail. I know it is very difficult to walk the line between self-pity that lets you center yourself and self-compassion that lets you function, but I know it's important we keep trying.

There is a different thread about mindfulness, but I wanted to share that recently I did a metta or loving kindness meditation and it was helpful for me with both actually-helpful self-compassion and empathy. I had a hard time holding myself with loving kindness because I did not feel like I deserved it. But the meditation suggested imagining yourself as a child or baby if it was hard. And then imagining sending loving kindness to others helped me send it to my BH a little more outside of the lense of clinging to a particular outcome for our relationship.

[This message edited by PleaseBeFixable at 2:45 AM, Monday, July 15th]

I felt the same way for years. Still do sometimes. But the truth is, as much as I'd like to go back and time and kick my own ass for cheating in the first place, I'd also like to do the same for all the wallowing I did. I'll share this with you... feeling badly, while natural to do, does absolutely nothing to make anything better. In fact, all it does is continue to make things worse.

Our spouses were just decimated by our actions, which were selfish, and completely about us and our needs in the first place. Nothing about an affair benefits the BS. We did not think about them, what they wanted or needed, or how they would feel, we just got self-absorbed and did what was "right" for us in that moment. Now, here we are, after the fact, and wallowing... in other words, we are once again, making it 100% about us. You can feel like shit every moment of every day, how is that going to make things better? How will that make your spouse feel loved and respected? To our BS's, that descent into blame and shame is just the WS being selfish and self-focused once again, same as they were during the affair.

So stop it.

Rather than focus on the shit you did wrong, now is the time to focus on who you should have been, and then make every effort to be that person NOW. You lied during the affair. Now make an effort to be the most honest person you can be. You were thoughtless during the affair. Now find your empathy and compassion, and show it to others.

My point is, CHANGE is the only possible path forward if you hope for healing. You already know how to hate yourself. Now you have to learn to love yourself again, and you do that by being someone that you can respect. Keep doing the right thing, and each time you do, it gets a little easier, and over time, it becomes natural, second nature.

It is much easier for a BS to forgive a spouse who owns what they did and is making every effort in the world to be a better person, then it is to forgive a WS who says "woah is me" all day.

Good luck in your journey

Amen, Daddy Dom. Great post.

DaddyDom and Hikingout,

Thanks to both of you for your responses. How do you do this if one of the main problems with me is that I have always rationalized and selfishly justified my actions and "been okay with myself" while cheating and lying? I don't want to sit in the mud and wallow, that doesn't help my spouse either. But when I don't dwell on my actions and forgive myself and try to be who I should be I seem to lose sight of the fact that in truth, and especially in her eyes, mind and heart, I am that monster who hurt her so badly, not some nice, good guy. I have completely failed and reconciling this and seem to make it worse every day. This is especially true when she has the grace to act kindly and caring and we are "getting along"; i tend to think "I must be doing something right because this is the relationship I could have had and want." Then right when I am getting comfortable (I just saw it as i wrote it that this is a big problem) everything blows up because in reality I am still the awful me and she is still epically hurt.

Not sure if this makes sense.

Yes. Whenever I say something about feeling like things have been ok for a little bit, he says that things are never ok for him--the pain is constant and everything is a reminder. I'm trying to remember that a lot of the time he is pretending so he can make it through the day.

I get what you're saying about having always rationalized and justified. It feels like a lot of things want to get me to forgive or accept myself when that has been the problem. Lately I've tried communicating that that isn't what I'm looking for in a particular interaction--expressly saying that my problem has been being too easy on myself and what I am doing by being hard on myself is practicing the accountability that was missing. Sometimes I do need help coming down from dangerous self loating or destructive self pity, but often I need a place to acknowledge how bad what I did was, so I'm trying to communicate better which I need in a given circumstance.

So, it’s okay for you to heal AND hold space for your partners healing.

For me, the best way to do that is to check in frequently, don’t assume what you feel is what they feel. Ask them how are they doing, bring up epiphanies you are having about the affair. Ask them if anything the are processing is bringing up new questions.

Honestly, they are always thinking about it so don’t assume you are just going to remind them of it or start a bad conversation. Bringing it up takes the burden off of them, it makes them understand you want to be in this together and they can talk to you about all of it. The fears you have around this lie to you, and it keeps them feeling isolated and left to deal with it in their own.

Make some time and show you care. It doesn’t mean that you should spiral into shame again. what you are feeling about your own improvement is something to demonstrate to them and that means being their partner in their healing while still honoring your own path.