I understand how movies that contain adultery would be a trigger for my BH. I typically read a plot summary of movies before we watch them to see if adultery is a part of the theme (if so, I avoid it). I am learning most of the time there is no mention or it just a couple minutes referenced in whole duration of a film. Other times there are triggers I do not even understand.
An example is a psychological thriller called Mama begins with the husband killing his wife who is having an affair with his business partner. He then takes the children (which happens to be two daughters) out into the woods to kill them and then commit suicide. This of course put my BH's mind into a tail spin and the rest of the evening is filled with tension. I understand why he felt incredibly hurt by this and why he related to it. I was empathetic and supportive. I acknowledged why it would cause him pain. He told me after watching that I should feel lucky knowing he never actually wanted to kill me or the girls and how he never did horrible things he had read about in the news recently about a betrayed husband. That was an odd statement to me but I let it be.
A different weekend we watched another psychological thriller (I won't say the name so I don't ruin parts of it). There was a scene where a serial killer made up a story to a random guy about a made-up wife who was into beastiality (sp?)/animal porn, which he caught by looking at the web history. The serial killer said he bought an animal mask and raped his wife, as a stranger. His made-up wife never told him about the rape, stopped looking at animal porn and was happier after it occurred. That triggered my BH for the next day or two. Can I see the deception within the made up scenario, yes which I acknowledged, but the rest of it I don't understand why it had such a profound effect on him. He couldn't really explain it to me but the rest of that weekend was rough. He even went as far as to wear an old Halloween mask of a wolf to scare me after movie was over...
He does feel awkward with sex scenes (but not necessarily triggered) so I try to find movies that do not contain or minimally contain sex. This is harder than you would think.
Even shows aimed at kids (Disney shows) contain a boyfriend or girlfriend . If my BH sees it, we are not allowed to watch any episodes of it anymore as a family.
I hate how my A & selfishness ruined so much. I hate how I did not think about the consequences of my actions. I hate what I did to my BH and my family. This is just really small piece of every day things ruined by what I did. I will never understand the extent of the pain I caused but I want to and will continue to try.
