SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Despite the setbacks of TT, continuing (non-sexual) contact and keeping it a secret from me, R is finally going well. Hard to believe, but there it is.

The problem right now is the obsessive thoughts in my head. I'm only 4 weeks out from the final and most devastating dday, so I know I shouldn't be expecting to feel wonderful at this point. I have moments--sometimes whole half-days--when I don't give C**tface a single thought. And then there are days when she's ALL I can think about--her and all the things she and fwh did together.

Fwh and I had a really great conversation last night, about the past, about what led us here, and what we want to be for each other going forward. He said things to me that even I can see shouldn't have really bothered me, because it's stuff I already knew, even if he'd never said it outright before. He said he wants our relationship to be that of equals--no one person should be putting the other up on a pedestal. I pointed out that he'd told me before that when he was with that lovely young woman who fucked my husband, he felt like a king. That doesn't really fit with the not putting anyone on a pedestal thing. So he said to me that because she made him feel so good, that he treated her very well. THAT'S what's making me crazy today. That he treated her very well. SERIOUSLY?! I totally already figured that! Hearing him say it, though, really hurt. He told me about an event where he bought her a $70 garnet necklace. From that same event, he brought me a pair of socks.

I guess it really just stings to know that I really was NOT being thought of at all.

So I guess my question for all you successful people is how long did it take until you were able to get through a day without all the fucking movies and intrusive thoughts?

I can see the potential for our marriage being better than it ever has been, but I'm afraid that these feelings will never go away or even fade.

Will they?

ETA: had to change OW's nickname.

[This message edited by JustForgave at 5:24 PM, April 29th (Monday)]

JustForgave,

Thank you.

Where is the Reconciliation Forum guideline, please?

Early in the process my therapist gave me techniques to handle intrusive thoughts. It worked well for me. I will share my simple steps, but it is likely best if you get similar advice from your own therapist as your particiular needs may be different.

What she had me do, was schedule a time every day to *think* all those thoughts. So every day from 4 - 4:30, I would sit and ruminate over everything that had plagued me during the day. When the thoughts enter your mind, you tell the, "we aren't thinking about those now, we are going to do that at 4:00." Then, don't blow off the 4:00 appointment. Sit and think and torture yourself if necessary with those toughts. In a fairly short amount of time, I was able to push out most of the thoughts in general.

The forum descriptions are all listed on the main page just under the link for each forum

My sitch sounds like it rhymes with yours. It took five years before thoughts of FWWs A didn't intrude regularly. I even had my own RA along the way, which helped with that, but created other worse problems.

37 years later, I still get whacked from time to time. PTSD.

R is a long road, but I'm still glad we took it.

I wasn't successful, but can I offer a suggestion please?

Pick up a book called "the Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. It explains how 99.9% of us are caught in a trap of incessant unconscious thinking... either about the past or future. It also offers real solutions that will allow you to stop this process completely... thereby eliminating the hold it has over you. It's worked wonders for me when almost everything else has failed.

Worth a shot don't you think?

P.s. PM me if you want more info.

Write it all down!

Call it journaling if you want to get fancy, but that helped me get it out of my head. I filled up spiral notebooks at lunch, in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes just a page other times I wrote until my hand cramped. I didn't care about spelling or grammar or what anyone reading it would think- it was just for me. As the thoughts came, I transcribed them.

I did this more in the first 6-9 months (multiple times a day every day for a week to a couple of times a month) but I still do it. I would like to say the time spent journaling was less and less as I got further from dday, but it isn't like that. It comes more in waves. Sometimes they are closer together and other times further apart.

Writing down got it all out of my head, allowed me to pinpoint issues for discussion with WH or IC, and help me stop the torture of the constant reel playing in my head. SI helps too. The people have great insights and it is nice to be able to talk to someone who doesn't know you in RL, who isn't connected to your life per se, who isn't judging you. Someone who knows what this horror feels like and has survived.

Take care of you! You can survive this!

Are you in IC? Is he?

We sound at exactly the same point in R. I also talked with my WS last night and even though what he tells you really hurts and gets you mad, you won't be able to heal unless you know as much as you can. Up until last night I think out R wasn't fully up and running but we discussed what we both need to do for it to work and discovered what went wrong and we are gonna do our best to make sure it never happens again. Is the WS remorseful and is the A over? If you can answer yes to these you are going the right way. I sometimes think about OW and the worse things are she was innocent didnt know nothing about me. She thought they were just 2 people in a relationship so he has hurt 2 people in the process. Plus she sounds like a actually nice person. It's hard not to over think about the A but you need to concentrate on the future too and building a new relationship not trying to fix the old one