Hi, I'm new here. I've joined at the encouragement of my BH after reading for many months. I don't quite know where to start with my list of thoughts and questions so I'll begin with a common issue for us these past 9 months that came up again tonight.
How do you negotiate coping styles and boundaries concerning what to share? I'm more private than my BH, less talkative in general, and I deal with things by first thinking about them, then I talk to my BH, our counselor, and maybe a close friend. My husband deals with issues by talking to me, talking to multiple friends, our pastor, our counselor, the community of SI, and has expressed a desire to find other support groups of people to talk to as well... Not only does he have a much larger network of people he talks to, the level of information he shares is way more encompassing and detailed. I feel he'll share just about anything we've talked about or worked through. Sometimes I read things he's posted on here and I can't believe he has shared that with the world at large when it felt so private and personal to us at the time. I do understand the irony of me having an issue with this when I devalued and shattered our intimacy with my adultery. I would like to rebuild it and BH says he does too.
I recognize that he needs to process things however he needs to process them. And that I just need to deal with him working through things however he needs to. But I have to admit it bothers me and to me it feels like it is preventing us from rebuilding intimacy. Part of my work post-affair has been to work on opening up to him, to share my feelings and thoughts on a deeper level and on a more consistent basis. This is hard for me to do but feels even more difficult knowing that whatever I share can and probably will end up out in the world at large. I get this is part of being vulnerable and part of the risk we all take. Do I just suck it up and deal with it and the resentment I feel when our friends know more than I want them to know about our marriage and everything we're going through?
I want him to be able to process his feelings and heal from my betrayal. I realize part of my squeamishness with him sharing is that it shares ugly parts of me. Probably if he were sharing awesome things about me I wouldn't mind at all. But he is also often sharing things we're still working through - things filled with misinterpretations, assumptions, and misunderstandings and it's between us. It seems like we should be working as a team on helping him heal and on us rebuilding and I don't feel like we are at all. We can't even work out this issue of what stays private and what goes public.
Do I have a right to say that I have certain boundaries with sharing during our reconciliation? If I don't, what are ways I can deal with feeling so exposed to not only him but to the world at large?
Me - FWW, 38
Him - BS, 42
Married 15 years
2 young daughters
4 month EA/PA, DDAY 10/12