SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Shes saying shes worried about me, that Im losing it.

The woman whose personal motto is "I don’t remember doing/saying that"—who suggests she experiences fugue states and has brain damage that cause very selective, infidelity-related amnesia— is saying that you’re the one who is losing it.

Cheaters typically don’t have any self-awareness… but do you not see the irony in this?!

5bluedrops, as much as your toxic mother in law, your WW, and even you say this all happened 11 years ago, this is still happening right now. The physical cheating might be over, but the emotional and mental abuse are ongoing.

She stabbed you in the back and keeps twisting it…. And then has the nerve to say, "You keep losing blood. I’m really concerned."

You need to get the knife out. Only then can the healing begin.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 3:25 AM, Friday, April 4th]

As someone who went thru the ringer in real time on SI, BTB was dead on accurate about my partner pretty much from day one. She has experienced it herself, and she’s seen a ton of shit here. I pushed back against her for a while, but her practical view proved prophetic for me many a time over.

I agree she is using Darvo/Gaslighting when she is out on the spot. And I agree that this is harmful to you and eroding chance for trust to be rebuilt. I have been direct with her on that.

I think she has basically kept her finger in the dike for so long trying to control it that the dam has burst and she has done no preparation work. She is curling into a ball and yelling please make it stop. But she is also the only one who can get up and create the solutions that will actually make the course corrections needed. I have been in that state. There are coping skills and emotional regulation that need to be learned and applied for her to even get up.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think you will bleed out while waiting for it, nor am I suggesting an outcome.

I think what we are looking at is a deeply codependent relationship. Your best bet is to recognize your part in that and start working on some boundaries. Boundaries is probably the most misunderstood word on this site. Generally, it means knowing where you end and the other person begins. What your responsibilities are versus what things are her responsibilities. I think that’s best done with your therapist.

I think your feet are firmly planted in staying as things stand right now, but doing that without your own preparations you will continue to be damaged and the more that is allowed the harder the healing is going to be. So you need to work on your side of the codependency. You need to work on your self preservation.

You have been willing to sacrifice your mental health to give her time to work on herself. She has been unwilling to give straight answers because she doesn’t want to get a divorce and she is afraid of saying the wrong answer- even though when she does come out with the answer it’s not even a surprising answer or nefarious in nature when compared with what she has already admitted.

This deeply ignites deep fears in you that I think sends you on investigation as part of a faulty self protection system being used as crutches without the administration of the kinds of boundaries I am talking about. And this isn’t helping either of you. I am not saying that you don’t have great points or questions or even a good picture of what you need. I am saying she has made it impossible to believe her so even if she tells the truth your fears about believing her will cause you to dismiss it. The fact there is so much hiding and deflection combined with the length of time , I don’t know how anyone could react differently.

I think a discussion about responsibilities to yourself and how to navigate those may be a great one to explore asap in IC.

I think your wife right now is her own worst enemy. I know that because I have been mine.And what I know about change is it’s slow as fuck with no guarantees it will happen.And when one panics they do a lot of irrational illogical shit that you can’t try to logic through. Nor will it ever have a good answer. It’s just quick reactionary crap that has little meaning. Your wife is doing a lot of panicking Why? No one here knows. Is there a deep dark secret she is hiding? Not necessarily. But I don’t rule that out, I don’t have a crystal ball and try not to make assumptions as much as I can notice them.

Something from my own experience may be relevant here. I actually confessed everything in one sitting, on my own. I was terrified but I did it. However, as we entered the inevitable questioning period (that typically goes on for a year or more by what I have experienced and observed) my answers were dart throws. I couldn’t tell him what he really needed to know because I had no idea why or how I could do this or that. Yes, he needed the facts of what happened and I spewed those out at every turn. But when you get to the harder things, why did you do that kind of questions, it was a literal dart throw. I couldn’t put logic to any of it. And then when asked the same question in every way possible, there were answers that disputed or contradicted other answers. All I was doing was panicking because I couldn’t really answer. It felt like lying from his standpoint, whereas when I look back on it, it still feels like evolution to me. As my self understanding grew my answers changed, but I couldn’t go back in time and remove previous answers or make the dart throws go away. And this eroded any trust I built every time.

By the time we got to the end of year one, I was just getting to a place that I didn’t panic nearly as much because I worked through some of the big picture answers but for him it felt too late and he was too worn out, didn’t know what to believe saw no path to trusting me again.

Now mind you, I do not see your situation exactly the same. But I can see how over the space if 11 years of trying to keep your finger in the dyke there is a lot more built up justification and fear to conquer that wasn’t balanced with any kind of introspection.

I also never did the gaslighting thing and that part troubles me considerably. I feel like that’s part of the control she knows she is doing and there are endless scenarios of what it means. A group of anonymous strangers on the internet making assumptions based from our own experience is all we are. Are we right a lot? Yes. Are we wrong a lot? Probably almost as often.

All this to say, I think your focus needs to be on how to protect yourself from further damage by figuring out how to have boundaries on certain things. I think your wife needs to focus on working on herself to the extent that she can overcome her fears of abandonment and let down the self preservation.

I don’t know if she will do it or not. You need to prepare for the not because that’s where it is right now. You have to deal with the tangibles.

In essence, a lot of this same thing I have said pages back- Focus us on your own healing (which means find ways to stop the bleeding now, and a key point of that is no longer relying on her to stop it-that’s going to take more time and practice if it is to happen) because she isn’t going to be ready tomorrow. I think she wants to be, but isn’t there and the panic is doing nothing to get her closer to that. You both need a little air, time and space to think about your approach to this situation, and the best place to start is to start sorting where you end and she begins and vice versa.

I can’t claim to know what that is or looks like. I don’t know either of you. I am only telling you what I see that you should talk to your therapist about. I have seen worse situations make it, I have seen better situations not make it. It all depends on the two people in it. Right now one of you is deeply traumatized and the other has a lot of growing into herself to do. These two people are not prepared to fix the relationship but if they both work on healing and growing they may then have the tools to navigate their way through.

I hope yesterdays appointment was fruitful.

Its been a very hard bit of time since I posted last. We were directed in therapy to 86 our activity here. Ive been doing that till now but as you can see, I dont particularly agree. I was going to wait till Tuesday to get the therapists permission to resume, but Im posting this cause I feel like it.

Without saying too much, the day after our therapy session I found a big cache of information from the affairs that changed perspective, filled gaps, raised issues, and caused a lot of damage.

Finally got a glimpse, just a glimpse, at what she was doing in her own words.

My faulty self protection system, I suppose.

Irony of ironies is, therapist directed me to make a plan for our dating anniversary which was April 9. But the day after our therapy session, I learned in that info cache that the physicality of Wws relationship began with J right around our dating anniversary.

I sucked it up and made it nice, but I felt sick. Suffocated. Alone.

Its all so fucking cruel. Im not supposed (or cant) rely on family, this forum, or anything.

Needless to say, Im still in the fight.

Actual marriage anniversary falls on easter this year. Poignant. Coming up fast. Feels like God is trying to tell me something about forgiveness and redemption by grace. But Im not there. Im not particularly graceful, in my own heart. O that I were.

I’m sorry you’re still in pain, and new pain to boot.
I just don’t see what is so hard with "tell me everything and we’ll deal with it"
It’s like gd get out of jail free card. Yet they sometimes just don’t accept it.

As far as the counselor goes, a smart one asks this; "do you feel like posting on si is helping you personally? y/n" "oh, it is helping? Well then, keep at it."
otherwise, it seems like they just want a paywall (them) for any self progress.

Irony of ironies is, therapist directed me to make a plan for our dating anniversary which was April 9.

So your therapist told you not use SI for advice and isolate yourself from your support system… and you were "directed" to plan an anniversary date for the woman who has betrayed you and continues to gaslight and abuse you, even in the wake of finding a trove of new evidence.

If I wasn’t aware of just how many criminally incompetent marriage therapists existed in the world, I would assume that she was on your wife’s payroll.

Fire your MC as soon as possible before she does anymore damage.

Actual marriage anniversary falls on easter this year. Poignant. Coming up fast. Feels like God is trying to tell me something about forgiveness and redemption by grace

Considering all you’ve learned in the past few months, I would say God is indeed trying to send you a message… just not the one you want to hear.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 9:21 PM, Sunday, April 13th]

Feels like God is trying to tell me something about forgiveness and redemption by grace.

As a fellow Christian, may I gently remind you that forgiveness does NOT mean you must swallow all this 💩 and stay in the M. There’s a very important reason Jesus repeatedly affirmed D as an option in the presence of porneia. He didn’t put any qualifiers around that. Your Creator knows the destruction of sexual infidelity. You can forgive, and divorce. I’m of course not saying you MUST. But look to His Word, where this matter is clear, and not on your anniversary falling on Easter as some kind of "message".

Its all so fucking cruel. Im not supposed (or cant) rely on family, this forum, or anything.

Oh, friend, I’m so sorry. Posting on SI in the face of my WW hating it was one of the most self-choosing actions I have done in my entire life. It doesn’t matter that your wife may hate it. It doesn’t even matter that your disaster of an MC doesn’t approve. If you judge that it’s good for you, then DO IT.

I sucked it up and made it nice, but I felt sick. Suffocated. Alone.

For your own sake, never do this again.

Needless to say, Im still in the fight.

You are, just remember that you don’t have to be.

For a long time while I was fighting for R, I had the story of the prodigal son as my signature. I fought long and hard, exhausting myself for almost two years with a betraying woman who didn’t acknowledge the most obvious of distinctions between right and wrong, but still somehow made me think she was sorry and wanted to repair. So exactly like your wife. The spiritual lesson that I came away with is that the reason that the imagery of forgiving adultery is so prevalent in the Bible as the model of God’s forgiveness is because it is so difficult, to the point of being truly miraculous. And my read of that book is that even God himself doesn’t accept anything less than genuine humility and repentance. Trying to white knuckle R with a raging, deceptive liar bears no resemblance to how I understand the messages of the Bible.

I hope you choose yourself and keep posting.

I sucked it up and made it nice, but I felt sick. Suffocated. Alone

We had one MC who said we should try for 5 "positive interactions" each day (didn't stick with her for very long). Nothing felt positive to me - I would try to go out and have a good time with WS, but the positivity always felt forced, and in the long run, it ate me up on the inside. I think the inability to express and behave in authentic ways becomes a poison to ourselves in the long run.

To this day, I can't say I've done anything that involved WS that felt truly positive. That doesn't mean I can't have an okay time with him, but it's only ever "okay," and I know the different because I have had 100% positive experiences since dday. Just not with him.

In my case, I made the choice to maintain the facade for the sake of our kid's mental health (she was going through a very hard time for other reasons). Think carefully about why you're not allowing yourself to be yourself and what the consequences are for your spirit in the long run.

Whatever is wrong with your wife appears permanent. So, do you want this in your life for the rest of your life? The bs on here are trying to get you to see how much damage her behavior has caused you and nothing in her current behavior shows she will stop. That is the bottom line. You cannot fix another person. Period.
This reads as if you have slowly, over the years, accepted her terrible treatment of you and the marriage. You are a classic victim of manipulation by a woman whose issues are buried so deep that she is not aware of how badly she has behaved. Whatever drives her will probably take years, if ever, to change. In the meantime you are using your one life to save a marriage that is actually harming you.
Dump the therapist. Find one for individual therapy. You have years of this to discuss then discard. You need to enjoy your life.

I think it's pretty clear what you need to do here.... An about face, throw up the double birds, walk, and never look back.

I agree with the others.

Friend, your MC isn't *YOUR* ally. She instead like too many MC, got her accreditation from The University Of Rugschaweeping (no good, very bad school!) and is part of the Reconciliation-Industrial Complex that we have talked about a lot on here. I worry for you as you are told by all sorts of sources that you need to stay in this marriage for your WW, and how you are being inundated on several sides with nonsense saying how your WW's cheating is really partially your fault anyway. And in the meanwhile, now you are being told by MC how you should cut off all sources telling you to look out for yourself. No matter what it does to YOU personally, you are being told to swallow it.

This--the advice you are getting from MC, your family, WW's family--all is absolutely FALSE.

Break yourself free from your ball-n-chain and the nonsense and abuse your WW is spewing. It's toxic and it will end up ruining you in the end. You deserve better my friend.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 9:59 PM, Monday, April 14th]

5BD....my friend....I hear your heart. I really think your therapist is wrong. You need community...that has been a proven part of healing. Please follow Jake Porter as I have told suggested before....a VERY successful therapist. I do understand there comes a point...after a substantial amount of healing....where constantly reading others fresh betrayals can keep you in a cycle of hurt...but you are not there.

You will know when you reach that point. As other have said....I am real concerned about this therapists direction. Ask this person....who do they suggest is your support system?

Regarding grace and forgiveness....YES...the Lord is teaching you this. He is showing you just how vast His forgiveness is....and only He can empower us to do it. But....we are also NOT God...it is a true process for us. Please know that. I again refer you to Jake Porters explanation of forgiveness. There is decision at a point in time...but then there is a PROCESS which happens day by day. And part of that process is related to healing of the RELATIONSHIP....which is heavily dependent on both partners.

AMENDS ARE CRUCIAL. In the scripture....it is packed full of the concept of making amends for the injuries we have caused through sin. Your wife must become broken and get on the amends train. But absolute bedrock for this....IS TRUTH. Do you have the truth?
What are these things you discovered if I may ask? Was she lying? Or was it just revelation of more context? Anyway...details do matter to your heart....so don't beat yourself up. This take times.

Lord bless you friend.

I see this a little differently.

Blue drops has hired a MC that is an infidelity specialist. That persons job is to work with both blue drops and his wife. This is not his IC, this is someone charged with accommodating and mediating for both parties involved. Blue drops wife is struggling, and very sensitive to what is being said here. I know, I KNOW, but the reality of it is what blue drops wants most is for her to grow courage, be honest, and fix the ways in which she is being toxic to their relationship.

If a temporary moratorium from this site is what is needed, I don’t think that necessarily makes a bad therapist. If I were spending all that money to see if the issue could be fixed, then I would probably follow along in program for at least a short period of time.

I understand that most may not care at all about what his wife thinks or needs, but to disregard that is to disregard what blue drops mission seems to be. It seems counterintuitive to me to disregard a therapist so early in the process in order to hear things from people who have never met them in real life.

I have fired a therpist before so it’s not I think they are all great. However, it would not surprise me that an MC would want to shield his wife from the court of public opinion in an anonymous forum when she is already self loathing. I kept thinking to myself now she not only has to build the courage for him to know whatever it is she is hiding but also to see this all play out on the internet. That’s an extra road block and she wasn’t doing well with the ones already in place.

It doesn’t matter what people think she deserves, supporting blue drops to me means letting him exercise his process. Otherwise what the heck is he shelling out all the money and time for? In order for him to have any chance at all to get what he believes he wants, that means accommodating her for some period of time to see if it’s possible.

I know that won’t be popular, but it’s my belief.

Do I know it will work? Hell no. I have no idea what will happen. But why even try it if you aren’t going to fully immerse in doing it?Something tells me if it doesn’t work that may end up being some solace to bluedrops that he did give it every chance. I feel he has been saying that’s what he needs the whole time. How many other ways can he be given warning of the damage he may be causing himself?

So my advice, blue drops, is to seek support via messaging if you need to. Not forever but I would follow through with a few more appointments and let the therpist know the assignment backfired on you. And also- if circumstances change after you have been given an assignment don’t do the assignment if it’s going to be without the spirit it’s given in. I would not have followed through on the anniversary date and explained to the therapist why. They had no idea you were going to discover more things between talking to you and the assignment being fulfilled. Call the assignment off if that happens again.

You have a good pool of folks here who have been helpful to you. I would let her have her process in some privacy for at least some period of time. She is perceiving this as publicly shaming and honestly I can understand that view point as much as I can understand blue drops need for support. MC is for mediation, so her feelings do count in this scenario.

Also, this is why I think it’s better for the bs to keep this place to themselves when it comes to their ws. I have rarely seen it work well when both people are on the site. I don’t really see this place as having a lot of people resources for ws anymore anyway. Lately it’s just been me and Pippin holding it down and I am getting ready to be in less due to some upcoming changes.

We may be a better place for ws who find us without their spouse. If this place is a needed place to vent my recommendation to not tell your spouse about it. I am not sure that you can heal a marriage where the ws watching you get online and then perceives it as talking badly about them, and feeling like everyone is against them in the comments. It doesn’t matter that their perceptions are very skewed, those are their perceptions and it will impede progress. We can easily say, who cares? But the bs who wants to try does care.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:38 PM, Wednesday, April 16th]