M2R,
I feel for you. Sadly,I am now familiar with all of those things. Illicit sexual activity after many years of faithful but unhappy marriage, hypersexuality, hypomania...all of it I never thought of before.
Coming clean with your BH is essential IMHO. I truly believed confessing would be the certain end of my marriage. I did not believe my BH could handle the true horror I had brought into our M. But I knew I HAD to tell for me to be able to become a person I could learn to love. And my H deserved to know what was happening in his M so he could make his own decisions about how he wanted to deal with it. I can see now that I had already hurt him and my M. He knew something was wrong. He just didn't know the source of the pain so he had no power yet to decide what he wanted to do about it.
I had to get myself to a place where I knew I had to tell him no matter what happened. I accepted (and expected) that he could kick me out, tell all of our family and friends, divorce me, and battle me for our kids. I had to let go of that accept that his responses were and are beyond my control and decide that I was going to do the right thing from there forward to the best of my ability no matter what the outcome.
My BH surprised me and gave me the gift of trying R. We are both all in and I'm beyond thankful every day. This is really really hard but in spite of all the hurt, anger, sadness, and anxiety I never knew that we were capable of M like this. We really communicate now. About everything. I don't have to hide things even if they are hard to talk about.
This is so worth it. Not the A, but the R. Hardest thing I have ever done but we are doing it and we both know we will make it. Sometime one of us gets discouraged but the other has always been there to pick up, dust off and say, "we are doing this, dammit!" BH hates me some every day I think, but he is so much more than I ever gave him credit for. Even when he is hating me he still insists that we will make it through this as long as I'm doing my part, which is being all in, all the time.
About the hypomania. See a PDoc. I'm sending you a PM.
Good luck!
Eta.
I read this to BH and he said, "you didn't say how much I love you in there. We could be doing this for the kids or some other reason by the way you wrote it."
We both LOVE each other and we are determined to get through this and be deliriously happy at least some of the time, generally happy most of the time, and at least stable, faithful, and honest the rest of the time.
[This message edited by knightsbff at 12:58 PM, January 12th (Saturday)]
fWW 40s, BH 40s
D-day 27 Aug 2012. Kids 25, 17, 13. 2 dogs.
I edit often to fix stuff ☺️
Profoundly grateful Every. Single. Day. that I am blessed with an H with strength, integrity, and compassion, and that he decided to try.