SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hello all. I wanted to do a brief update since it was a year ago that I first posted here in the midst of a mental breakdown, desperate and terrified.

It is pretty impossible to capture the lows of this year, but believe me when I say they were lower than I ever would have imagined. Thank you to the people here who helped during some of those times.

It is still hard today. Things still feel uncertain, though they are better. My husband and I have good times and times when we feel genuinely connected. There are also still many things we haven't worked through and there is so much work still ahead.

I've been working the steps in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. I have a sponsor and go to weekly meetings, and it has helped me so much. Right now I'm on Step 4--going through resentments from throughout my life and acknowledging my role in them and looking at my sexual and relationship history and considering how it damaged people, my excuses, my fears, my role, and what I should have done instead. A lot of this work has helped me see patterns in my life and how certain coping mechanisms have served me, and the hope is that the coming work will help me choose different ways of interacting with the world. I've been so self-centered and constantly in victim mentality and I am trying to see things differently.

These kinds of whys are still not what my husband is looking for though, and I need to use my IC to get more at the whys that feel relevant to him. I'm feeling very daunted by this and scared I won't be able to get it right. It's a huge point of contention between us. There are still other sticking points, too--some of the ones I've posted about here. I want so badly to be able to address them in a way that heals him and us.

We went through the full therepeutic disclosure process with our marriage counselor, who is a certified sex and love addiction therapist. It was one of the most challenging things I have ever done, not because I didn't want to finally disclose things, but because getting it right felt so important it almost felt like a matter of life and death, and my obsessive compulsive disorder made it worse. The anxiety leading up to it was almost unbearable for both of us. It was helpful though, and it felt like a relief to have everything out in the open once things had settled some after it.

A couple months before that, we did a ritual together to symbolize our recommitment to each other and moving forward. It was so, so special and really felt like a shift.

I am hopeful going into this new year and so thankful to be in a different place than we were last year. I am so grateful he is here. I want so badly for our story to be redemptive instead of a tragedy, and I will keep trying. I want him and us to actually be ok again and not just surviving. Our therapist recommended doing some kind of art that represents our vision for our relationship, and I'm not sure exactly what I want to do for it, but I want to do something. I'm sending good thoughts to everyone here. Thank you again.

[This message edited by PleaseBeFixable at 9:18 PM, Tuesday, December 31st]

PBF, it's so good to see you check in.

Your marriage sounds just like the state mine was in at the one year mark. Your post brings back my terror of getting it wrong when I finally, belatedly was committed to getting it right. My husband had an equally fervent desire to believe me and start healing, but sanity and self-preservation reminded him that he was dealing with a known and expert liar. We still had so far to go when we stood in your shoes.

I really admire all the ways you're showing up for the fight, especially with SA and BPD in the mix. I don't have those, but I've come to realize through my own work that I'm probably undiagnosed for ADD and OCD. I guess I'm not surprised that there are many forms of dysfunction that we try to assuage with external validation. As awful as 2018-2020 were -- and they were awful -- I learned so much about how to become not just a whole wife, but a whole person during that time.

I'm hoping for a redemptive ending for your story, too. I believe in you.

These kinds of whys are still not what my husband is looking for though, and I need to use my IC to get more at the whys that feel relevant to him. I'm feeling very daunted by this and scared I won't be able to get it right.

This is the crux of one of the things I found hardest towards reconciliation.

The whys and how you are looking at are deep. They are the things that are at the core of who you are and what you have to work on. Understanding my relationship with resentment - especially my deep denial I even was holding resentment was a transformative process in which I learned about my avoidance. This was directly tied to all my coping mechanisms, and very much related to how I had an affair.

What I learned is the reasons or whys my husband wanted were also not these sorts of things because deep down he felt I was hiding some secret truth about how he failed as a man.

He just knew this truth must be brutal. Like he couldn’t satisfy me or that I had ulterior motives for being and remaining married to him.

That part is his healing. Understanding your decisions were based on things that he can’t fathom having an affair over. I find that many males who have never cheated often feel if they were to cheat it would be to get better or more sex and they impose their ideas if that onto their ws.you can only do what you are doing and keep staying very open about it.

I guess what I am saying is you are terrified and putting pressure on yourself regarding something you have very little control over. His no acceptance of things you say are all related to his non acceptance of what you have done. That is completely normal. It will take time and struggle to either find it or realize he can never find it. But it will help you move forward better when you realize that you only have so much affect in that aspect.

My reason for responding is just to say, it sounds like you are very much on the right path. By unearthing these deeper things is the true path to change. The changes that come from that if you stay dedicated will become more obvious to him over time. But, he is the only one who can decide he is satisfied with that, and that takes time and effort as well. Right now he can not imagine any answer that actually helps him move forward so you would really be aiming at an empty target. It will take time, consistency and seeing your growth before he starts to feel better clarity.

It’s your job to try and lose the fear of the outcome of the marriage because you have to work this individual journey without being hindered by that fear as it will keep the temptation of manipulation that will backfire on you every time. Trust that he has a process that you can influence by showing consistent action, but that the reason you feel terrified is because there is no answer that will justify an affair to him, a satisfactory answer of why does not really exist. What will satisfy him over time is the true growth he can see and can’t deny- and it sounds like those things that will bring you there are being examined and your dedication is there. That is all you can do.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:10 PM, Friday, January 3rd]

Thank you both.

It's so good to hear that we seem to be on the right path and that you were where we are. I really, really hope we can keep moving forward.

Hikingout, I think it's a mix of what you're saying and that I have more introspection to do about more specific questions. I will keep trying and I hope, like you say, if I do, it will come together more and more for both of us.

That makes sense. The introspection process for me was long and worthwhile. I definitely encourage that process, just try and do it without pressuring yourself because it hinders it., speaking from my own pitfalls.

You will land on answers sometimes that later you will decide was not quite on the mark or cave on the desire to placate. It’s the difference between wanting to understand for yourself or just trying to save the marriage. Nothing wrong at all with efforts to save the marriage, and that is important, but the thing driving the whole thing- and I think maybe you have this already- is self curiosity and the deep desire to be different. I just personally struggled early on with what I could say to help him versus to keep swimming in the deeper truths and I think that was detrimental for both of us. Keep going you are doing great!!! Do you feel your husband is working on his healing?

What I need to get to is why I went about things in some ways instead of others--namely, why did I do things in the most hurtful ways possible when I didn't have to to get the same things from it.

He still does not want to do IC, but he did a course from Tim Tedder. He is still really immensely struggling.

Oh I see. Do you have an example you would want to share?

A big one that has come up a lot is how on a day when I was out with my AP, I didn't answer questions from my husband even though he was worried about me and had told the kids I would be home for bedtime. I could have gotten all the same things from that day and not made him worry or upset the kids, but I made that choice.

Hi PleaseBeFixable, I wasn't reading much when you first arrived, but I remember the desperate and terrified days of my own. It seems like you are making big advances. I know it can be discouraging when you are making progress and come up against something really hard.

I've been so self-centered and constantly in victim mentality and I am trying to see things differently.

why did I do things in the most hurtful ways possible when I didn't have to to get the same things from it.

A big one that has come up a lot is how on a day when I was out with my AP, I didn't answer questions from my husband even though he was worried about me and had told the kids I would be home for bedtime. I could have gotten all the same things from that day and not made him worry or upset the kids, but I made that choice.

I wonder if your mind works like this - I feel like a victim, therefore someone must be oppressing me. The oppressor must be whomever is nearest me - my husband. I am hurt, so he must have hurt me, so I'm going to hurt him back to even the score.

The interruption to this thinking would be - noticing that you feel like a victim, but understanding that's a leftover feeling from previous experiences and that your husband doesn't have anything to do with it, and in fact he can be on your side.

The rewiring of your brain will be when you are in victim mode and instead of reacting to it by hurting him back, or numbing/ignoring the feelings, instead you share it with him. That last thing you will want to do is to tell your oppressor you need help. But the behavior has to come first - the change in belief flows out of doing different behavior and having a different result. That's when your brain gets rewired, through opposite action.

I would think it would be reassuring to your husband when you can say to him - I wanted to hurt you badly because in my twisted brain you were the person hurting me. Now that I understand the mechanism, that you are not actually hurting me, I won't want to hurt you any more.

You'll have to own that you were being as malicious as possible in your effort to hurt him. It might help him if he understands he was a stand-in for whomever you were really trying to hurt.

I had a version of this but not with my husband. After a rape at 13, I basically just wanted to hurt all boys/men. My juvenile messed up brain decided that the best way to hurt boys/men was to have sex and then reject them. Some part of my subconscious was trying hard to stay out of victimhood by hurting other people. I did that for a few years before deciding to drop that part of my life in a lockbox and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. (spoiler! that doesn't work). A few decades later, it wasn't my husband I was trying to hurt, it was the AP. By (and I now realize this makes no sense at all) being sexual with him and rejecting him. It got weird and dark when he tried to do the same thing back (that hadn't happened when I was younger, I was always the rejector) and we were stuck in a loop of who would reject and humiliate the other and walk away. My husband finds it reassuring when he sees that I am happy when I learn that something humiliating, demoralizing, or tragic has happened to the AP, because it affirms that was what was happening instead of that I preferred the AP over him. Very twisted. I pray about it constantly, that I will be untwisted. Or at least that God will love me as the twisted thing that I am, as I stay down on my knees praying instead of dragging others out with me on the Pequod in a suicide mission to harpoon the whale.

For art, how about some kind of kintsuigi?