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I need advice. I'm only 3 months out from dday 1 - first confrontation with my WH and when the TT started. I threw him out and have not let him move back in. I have let him stay here and there on good days and to spend time with the kids. After a couple of good days, I always have a terrible horrible miserable day (or 2.) It feels like day 1 all over again. The nice new memories of the good days gets pushed so far back. I look at photos and read old emails to torture myself. Why do I do this? How can I stop? WH has been a model husband and has done everything I asked and more. Why am I sabotaging it? Or am I just protecting myself? Will it ever end? I get so angry and then I verbally attack with the questions and start name calling. I am so very pissed off. How could he do this to us?

I understand. I feel the same way, and I do the same thing as you. I'll have a couple of good days where I start to think everything will work out. And then I'll be alone one day, and start reading old emails, and I just get unbelievably angry. I'll fuss at him, or cry all day. It makes the good days disappear, and we focus on the fighting.

I think it's normal at this stage of things, and I hope it gets better.

What you are going through is completely normal. That is why they call it a roller coaster. It does get better. The extremes get a little less, more like a kiddie coaster. I asked myself all the same questions.

Ok, heres the deal. You'll have 4 or 5 bad days then 1 good one. As time goes by the ratio lessens. 2 to 1, 1 to 1. It eventually turns the other way. 2 good days to 1 bad. And gets better from there.

I'm 11 months out and we're at about 10 to 1.

It sounds like a long road. And it is. But stick to it. Its worth it.

You're not sabotaging anything - HE sabotaged your marriage and you're just trying to clean up the mess! No matter how good the times can be now, NOTHING can change the fact that your vows have been violated and heart shattered.

I find myself opening up his phone records all the time, and it's like suicide. I don't know why I do it; I should delete them forever. But anger is safe. And I know that for me, when things are good between us, I'm not letting myself completely embrace it because it makes me feel vulnerable. I don't trust the "good" anymore because I don't even know if it's real!

I hate saying it because I remember hating when people said this to me, but it is still SO early. Don't be hard on yourself. Don't worry about attacking him right now and needing to feel the anger. Your anger is righteous indignation. It's a natural response to being hurt. You need to feel the anger or you won't heal. Scream if you have to! He needs to know how badly you've hurt him!

I was doing the same thing with text logs and emails. Looking at them would reopen wounds but I couldn't help myself. One thing I did recently was print them out. 50 pages from just one month. Watching them spill out of the printer was like watching my marraige break apart. But then I burned them all. It was very cathartic. Watching them burn seems to have broken that compulsion.

Now if I could just break my need to look at OW's Pinterest and Facebook pages maybe I could start moving on.

Yakamishi is absolutely right.

For me the roller coaster of emotions lasted for 2 years...after that I had very few bad days. The bad days are not even that bad now, it is more like a bad 5-10 minutes.

I started to write down when I had a bad day. This helped me to see that they were become less frequent, it gave me hope.

[This message edited by RidingHealingRd at 1:42 AM, August 14th (Wednesday)]