Digi,
“Afterward I talked to her mom. She wants me to do what she did - just keep on with the status quo.”
No, no ,no! That would be turning yourself into a living human sacrifice. Maintain the status quo for whose benefit? Your cheating WW? The kids, who will get to see your wife abusing you and cheating for the next twenty years? Is that healthy for them? That’s not good for anyone. You need to live, Digi, not just exist.
“She started doing what WW always does (and even the mc near the end of the session did): turn the focus of the conversation onto my supposed failures in the marriage”
So your MIL thinks you’re a dud, and yet she wants you to stay with her daughter? There’s a uniquely dysfunctional thought process in action! Blaming the victim is a classic tactic of abusers, with a long and dishonourable history.
“I blew up at her when she refused to stop telling me what she thought I needed to do for the kids. I yelled at her that her example was the worst thing I could do for my kids, because just look at what her kids have become. Her son is fine but on the other side of the country for a very specific reason, her youngest child has been severely depressed her entire life, and her eldest is WW.”
Good for you. Not because you ripped into her – though she had that coming - but because you stood up for yourself and did not let her impose her warped perceptions on you. And then you did the best thing of all, which was to leave. There are some people in life who are just not worth engaging with, and once you identify a person like that, there is no point for any further discussion. If she can look at her cheating daughter and you, and perceive you as the problem in the marriage, she is clearly not playing with a full deck, or she is trying to break you down psychologically to the point where you will accept her daughter’s shabby behaviour as something you ‘deserve’.
“When I got home I immediately sent her a thorough apology acknowledging that I had hurt her feelings which was not what I set out to do.”
Did she apologise to you for the horrible things she said? If she didn’t, you have no need to apologise to her. She and WW will treat you badly without any apologies, and the only one saying sorry is you. Digi, even if it goes against the grain, stop apologising to this pair of abusers. That unpleasant old lady wants you to waste the rest of your life with her cheating daughter. That is not a person you need to bother apologising to!
“I wanted to call my brother. WW pleaded that I not do so because if my family knew then there could be no chance at R.”
After what you have found out, there should not be any chance of R at all. Both she and her mother are abusing you. People in the forum keep saying that the key thing to do after discovering an affair is to get yourself “out of infidelity”. The key thing for you is to get yourself out of abuse. Of course your wife does not want you talking to your brother. She wants to control you, so she does not want you having anyone on your side. If your family know, they will probably stage an intervention and rescue you from the abusive situation you are caught in with your WW and your MIL.
However, Digi, why are you even telling WW you want to call your brother? Just do it. You don’t have to clear your actions with her first. Does she ask you if it will be okay for her to spend the weekend with OM, so that you can say, “Please honey, don’t do that. There will be no chance for reconciliation if you spend the weekend with your boyfriend”? She seems perfectly happy doing what she wants, so give yourself the same freedom that she has given herself and call whoever you want, whenever you want, to discuss anything you feel like discussing. Your WW knows full well that if your brother knew what she and her mother have been doing to you, he would rip them both a new one for treating his brother so badly. She wants to isolate you to make it easier to dominate and control you; do not let her do that! Isolating a victim is a classic tactic of abuse.
Beyond all that, how come there is a chance of reconciliation when you know about the cheating, WW knows, OBS knows, OM knows, MIL knows, SIL knows, and Judge Judas knows, but there will be no chance if your family knows? How does that work?
“I had a good talk with my brother. He basically said the same things all of you have been saying. We made arrangements for me to visit him this weekend, ideally with kids in tow.”
Excellent, well done. WW has a whole rancid support team behind her, what you need to do is establish Team Digi. I think you can count all of us who have posted in this thread as your supporters, and it is great that your brother is now aware and taking an active role in helping you.
“I then had a long talk with WW. Probably the longest, most fruitful conversation with her in a few years. I still didn't reveal anything she didn't already know about my contacts with OBS. When she pushed me on it, I lied. Probably the first lie I told anyone since this whole ordeal started (and probably a lot longer). We talked about everything, pretty much every aspect of our relationship. She felt it was a very positive discussion. I did not. She indicated that she would consider R. I did not.”
It is good that you are being guarded about what you know and what you have told OBS. And when you are dealing with an abusive partner who is comfortable lying to you, it is perfectly alright to lie right back to them. The alternative is to revert to the broken record and have a stock answer to repeat, like, “That’s between her and I, we are the victims here”.
“I told her…that any anger I felt at that was a drop in the ocean compared to the happiness she gave me via the birth of our son. Consequently, I can't regret our relationship at all.”
It’s good to find something positive, and I am sure he is a terrific kid and a credit to you.
“Even after all that, she still wanted R.”
She is playing mind games with you. She has created a selfish cake-eating world for herself in which she has one man at home looking after the kids while she runs around having an affair with another man. “Reconciliation” with her would mean your submission to a life of domestic service as her Plan B, while she continues with her Plan A, the OM. When she talks of reconciliation, it is because she doesn’t want to lose her domestic helper. She has not related you as her husband for years, and possibly never if her relationship with the OM began before your marriage. Also, she probably knows that the OM is not going to leave his wife for her unless OBS divorces him, and the OM is probably scared witless of being taken to the cleaners financially if that happens. So what your WW means by reconciliation is maintaining and prolonging her own little world, not the pair of you going back to being man and wife in the traditional sense. As you say yourself, there is a chance that you were never that in the first place, courtesy of her cheating.
“Until finally I called attention to our conversation this afternoon…I told her…that she is a sick person, truly pathological, and that she needs to acknowledge that about herself, and get help as soon as possible, because in the meantime she is a person I want nothing to do with, along with her mom the worst person I could imagine having anything to do with. It's not even personal- it's just survival. They are toxic people and I need them to grant me space when I demand it, which is now.”
The most important foundation for getting yourself out of abuse is to realise that you deserve better, and to recognise abusive treatment for what it is. You can consider you speech to her as your personal declaration of independence. Good for you. Everyone who has been following your thread is behind you, we all want something better for you. You can only find that when you have freed yourself from the cage of lies that WW built around you. It may be a tough and painful road at times, but every step is worth it, because when you reach your destination you will be free to find someone very different to WW.
And do not forget, your brother will be walking along with you, and so will everyone in this forum. There is a ‘Divorce’ forum here where people will be just as supportive of you as we have tried to be in this one.
“i have never been a violent or hateful person - the opposite, in fact - but thinking about the incredibly painful road ahead of me, oh, how I wish that I would wake up tomorrow to learn that she had looked at herself in the mirror and decided to take her own life.”
I am sure you are not the only person to have posted in this forum to have felt that way, but all of them made it through without their wayward other halves doing themselves in. And you will too. Get yourself a good lawyer, and take it a day at a time. Talk to your brother regularly, talk to your friends, post here, you can and will get through this.
“I'm not going back to the mc. For the first time in 10 years, 10 months, and 24 days, i've taken off my wedding ring. Court documents will show differently, but as far as I'm concerned, I've never been married. It was a sham, a fraud, all along. There's no marriage to save. The worst, most astounding thing of all is that, even after all this, I'm not sure she feels any real remorse or empathy. I'm not sure she's capable.”
Digi, she’s all about her. Always was, always will be. What she did suited her, so what is there for her to regret? It is now time for you to be all about you and the kids. It will be much easier to do that when you train yourself not to care about her mind games and you free yourself from her control.
[This message edited by M1965 at 6:16 AM, April 26th (Wednesday)]
