I've had a few pretty heavy conversations with my wife over the last couple of days.
Some new information has came out recently. Nothing that changes the basic story or where we're at now, but some details about the affair that I had been asking about for a long time and that she either didn't remember, had buried, or had actively avoided thinking about.
That in itself has led to some difficult conversations.
My wife has been pretty open about the fact that she has spent a lot of time trying to put the affair behind her by simply not thinking about it. She's ashamed of what she did. She hates remembering it. She knows how much it hurts me. She wants it to just go away.
I understand all of that. I mean, I'd like it to go away too.
But we've been talking about the fact that avoiding it and trying to bury it isn't necessarily the same thing as actually dealing with it. So yesterday we were talking about all of the lies involved. The lies to me, the lies to other people, the cover stories, etc. She interrupted with an offhand comment:
"And I lied to myself."
She didn't make a big deal out of it. She didn't even seem to realize that it caught my attention.
But it did.
In the last 17 months I don't think I've heard her say that before.
Those of you who know my story also know that I've been pretty positive about the way she's been handling R. I've even referred to her as a unicorn a few times. She's turned things around more quickly and in ways that I've not seen very often here. She went from wanting to maintain contact with AP as "just friends" at first to going all-in on saving our marriage very quickly. She's been remorseful. Transparent. Affectionate. Accountable. She's changed her behavior dramatically. She's been consistent about it for the last 16 months.
I stand by everything I've said about her, but that little comment made me realize something.
There are more layers to "doing the work."
Maybe I was giving her more credit for internal understanding than she had actually developed yet. That doesn't mean the other stuff wasn't real. I want to be really clear about that because I don't want this post to sound like I'm suddenly saying, "Well, I guess she wasn't really doing the work after all." She was. She was changing. She was participating. She was being a good wife and a good candidate for R, but internally I think she still had some things she wasn't willing or able to really look at yet.
The driving situation is probably one of the best examples.
She had legitimate reasons to be miserable before the affair. She really did. I was deep in depression and withdrawal for years. From her perspective, she had lost her husband. Then her epilepsy got worse and she lost the ability to drive.
She had been driving since she was a teenager, and given her history, getting her driver's license was a huge deal. She had significant neurological problems as a child and wasn't expected to live anything resembling a normal life. Graduating high school with a partial scholarship and getting her license represented independence and normalcy.
Then she lost it. That was devastating for her. I understood that. I don't think I understood it as deeply as I do now, but I understood that it was devastating. So I tried to make it easier. I drove her everywhere. I took her to her appointments. I asked her every day if she wanted to go anywhere, and with the hours we keep I had the flexibility to do it. And honestly, I wanted to do it. I knew how important it was to her.
She wanted to go shopping? Okay.
She wanted to see a friend? Sure.
Hair appointment? No problem.
I didn't roll my eyes. I didn't make her feel like a burden. I tried to make losing her independence as easy as I could, but she didn't see it that way at the time. She saw me as the guy who had taken her independence away because I was no longer comfortable with her driving. When I started going to her neurologist appointments and made sure he knew the truth about her seizure frequency and my concerns, a 90 day suspension (Arizona state law) was no longer safe in my eyes, she was furious with me. She saw it as a betrayal. Then when he told her she wasn't safe to drive, she was devastated. She saw him and me as being on the same team against her.
Then we got a new car. She hated it. I didn't understand that at first either. We needed a new vehicle. Our old truck was getting older and then she had banged it up during one of her two seizure-related accidents.
But to her, that new car represented something completely different. It was another reminder that she couldn't drive. She felt like I was rubbing her nose in it. Of course I wasn't. I was driving her everywhere in that car, but that's how she saw it, and looking back now, I think she had created a story around her life that she eventually started believing.
She was miserable. That part was true.
She had lost a tremendous amount of independence. Also true.
Our marriage was struggling. Definitely true.
But those things became the whole story.
Then along came Mr Wonderful, who shared the same seizure disorder and displayed unrealistic levels of compassion, compliments, understanding, and the big one we always talk about here... validation. Validation that she's right to be angry amd resentful toward me for ruining her life. That she should be able to drive, because afterall, "I have epilepsy and I still drive. I don't see what the big deal is."
Meanwhile, there were other things happening that didn't fit the story. I was starting to come back. I was becoming more involved. I was doing everything I could to help her. There were good things happening, but I don't think she could see them anymore, and I think that's what she meant when she said:
"I lied to myself."
Not that she wasn't miserable. Not that she hadn't lost something incredibly important to her, but maybe she had convinced herself that her entire life was terrible. That I didn't understand her. That I didn't care about her independence. That I was doing things *to* her instead of trying to take care of her.
She sees that now.
She apologizes to me regularly for not seeing it then. She realizes now that I really was right beside her trying to make things easier and keep her safe. She's still sad about losing her independence. She still cries about it sometimes, but it's different now. She's not angry at me about it anymore. She knows I understand.
In fact, she just recently told me that she knows I understand her better than Mr Wonderful ever could have, despite the fact that he's also epileptic. I actually care about her safety. I actually very deeply care about her. I looked up an learned a lot about TBI and epilepsy. I took a course on seizure first aid and got certified. She even thinks I understand her better than her own mother now.
That means a lot to me.
That's what got me thinking about this whole idea of "doing the work."
My wife has done an extraordinary amount of changing over the last 16 months. I don't think that was fake. I don't think she was just going through the motions. I don't think she was pretending to be remorseful or pretending to want the marriage. I think all of that was real, but I also think there were parts of herself and the affair that she was still avoiding looking at.
Maybe that's another layer of doing the work?
Not just changing what you do. Not just answering questions. Not just being transparent and accountable, but eventually being willing to look at the story you told yourself. The story that allowed you to become unhappy enough, resentful enough, or disconnected enough to start making choices you never thought you'd make.
The things you exaggerated. The things you minimized. The things you conveniently didn't see. The things you told yourself so you could keep moving forward without having to stop and really look at what you were doing.
Maybe sometimes doing the work means eventually being able to say "I wasn't just lying to everyone else. I was lying to myself too." And then being willing to ask what those lies were.
As far as we've come in the last 17 months since d day, I'm realizing that she doesn't know if she has all those answers yet. Neither do I, for that matter, but I think that little statement represented something important because she didn't say, "I was miserable and that's why I did it." She didn't say, "I lost my mind." She didn't say, "I don't know." She acknowledged that somewhere along the way, her own thinking had become distorted.
That's what's new, and honestly, after everything we've talked about over the last 17 months, it surprised me. I thought she was further along internally than she apparently was.
Again, that doesn't take away from all of the things she has done since D-Day. I still think she's a great example of what a remorseful wayward spouse can look like, but I think I'm learning that reconciliation and personal growth don't necessarily happen all at once. People can change their behavior before they fully understand themselves. They can mean every apology while still not completely understanding how they got there. They can genuinely love their spouse and be completely committed to reconciliation while still having blind spots they haven't examined.
That's the epiphany I wanted to share.
If you're trying to figure out whether your wayward spouse is "doing the work," maybe don't just look for the obvious things. The transparency. The remorse. The accountability. Not that those things aren't important as hell, but maybe also pay attention to whether they're starting to examine themselves.
Not just what they did, but how they came to believe what they believed. How they justified things to themselves. What they stopped seeing. What they avoided. What story they were telling themselves about their life, their spouse, and their marriage, and whether they're eventually willing to challenge that story.
I don't know, I'm still processing this myself, but that one little statement stuck with me.
"I lied to myself."
So I asked her, "is that something you heard me say, or is that something you've just recently started realizing?" She confirmed it was the latter. She's done actively trying to forget what what she did. She's beginning to reluctantly examine it. She's no longer "sorry for everything." She's sorry for each specific lie, deception, and action. She names them all now, one by one, and apologizes for each one when it comes to the front of her mind.
That lands so much better for me than simply saying "I'm sorry for everything." Because "everything" becomes a generic catch all for all of the things she did. Just put it all into one big box, label it "everything," close the lid, then apologize for it without actually examining the contents of the box.
For me, that little phrase, "and I lied to myself," and really meaning it, meant that maybe she's finally starting to look at something she spent a very long time trying not to see, and I think that's probably worth paying attention to.
