Wanted to provide a quick update.
Over the past two weeks, I took a week long vacation, followed by a week of business travel. So I’ve not really been in a place to collect my thoughts and provide an update until now.
Between the vacation and the weeklong business trip, I was able to have my first appt with individual counselor. My second appt. is this week.
The therapist specializes in betrayal trauma (so fortunately no rug-sweeping, blameshifitng, pathologizing of the victim, etc.) and sees betrayed spouses all the time. I’m encouraged. Therapist really gets it. Therapist also works as a “team” with another therapist who is seeing my WW — and they manage a disclosure process as well.
I learned a lot from the very first appt. In contrast with the marital counselor we unfortunately made the mistake of seeing right after D-Day, this therapist immediately empathized with my feelings of ambivalence and emasculation and gave me concrete details to begin to understand it. I was stunned and validated all at once. I never felt like I had to argue my case with this therapist or get him to pay attention to what I was trying to say.
For example, I didn’t know that men release both oxytocin bonding hormone AND vasopressin when sexually intimate, while women only release oxytocin. In addition to the “bonding” nature of oxytocin, vasopressin (according to my therapist) has a stronger “possessive” bonding impact on a man — and this goes a long way toward understanding the chemical and empirical basis of emasculation from wives’ affairs. After having been intimate with one woman for years, a man’s physical body has been sending reinforcing signals that this woman is “yours” - it’s not a toxic social construct; it’s a physical reality.
When your woman has offered herself for sexual conquest to another man and has been “taken,” betrayed men thus feel completely violated and emasculated. Their physical chemistry inside their own bodies has been disrupted. This is probably especially true in a case like mine, when I’ve only ever been intimate with one woman, ever. Men also routinely describe the pain of viewing their wives as damaged goods. It probably also at least hints at why men are perhaps a little more inclined to cut their losses after a wife’s betrayal.
Emasculation seems to have been a constant puzzle and debate on SI in many forums, so I wanted to share this, as it seems a logical and scientific basis for understanding the undeniable reality of emasculation.
Further, it seems that vasopressin release levels are probably linked to somewhat higher T levels. Cuckolding a man may be the “Samson haircut” or Achille’s heel of men with more robust T levels — something that lays them quite low indeed. Lastly, it’s not something a man can talk themselves out of or try to rationalize away. When it happens, it happens. It is physical and real.
This made me oddly feel better about myself.
I thought also that WW’s on SI might be interested to learn this. It helps make sense of the very real physical pain that betrayed men seem to feel. It also suggests WW have (more than likely unknowingly) triggered an ancient and unalterable physical process inside their husbands. They have permanently altered the relationship, any relationship going forward, and they have permanently altered their BH’s brain chemistry — and while we always say here on SI that marriage 1.0 can never be retrieved, it may be even more true to say this in the cases of BH’s. I believe this accounts for the oft-expressed feeling of BH’s here on SI that the ‘specialness’ of their WW’s is gone (and that this feeling seems permanent). While this may be discouraging in some respects, I also find it realistic and a way of looking at a new relationship with a WW moving forward. It won’t be particularly “special” even if you build something new, but neither would any relationship with any other woman. WW’s won’t typically be “special” in any sense in a BH’s eyes after innocence has been shattered, but a BH can decide on their own terms to have a relationship that is still rewarding with this woman.
I believe this vasopressin phenomenon also accounts for the “ache” that BH’s often seem to feel every time they look at their WW’s, hug their WW’s or are intimate with them. For me, it’s a raw nerve pain I would liken to herpetic neuralgia (having had shingles as a younger man, I know well what this particular nerve pain feels like — and the “ache” of loss when looking at a WW is very similar). A particular type of severing has occurred — and for BH’s it may be more acute in a special way, and firmly grounded in the lived, physical experience of being a man in three-dimensional time empirical reality.
I also learned something from my appt about “liminality” which my therapist described as feeling like an astronaut cast adrift into deep space. This describes the feeling of ambivalence and limbo that many betrayed spouses feel almost perfectly. “I miss the earth; I miss my wife / It’s lonely out in space” - from the lyrics of “Rocket Man” encapsulate the experience of liminality.
Combine this with the very real nature of emasculation and you have a recipe for alienation, feeling stuck, feeling uncertain, feeling flat etc.
Liminality is also a rite of passage. The astronaut can’t go back to the spaceship; it has been destroyed. The only way is forward — through dark, deep space into an unknown future. This also made me feel better, because it suggests that my feelings at the three-year mark are quite normal. It’s somewhat like the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey model — and indeed, that model may be the best way of making sense of a betrayed spouse’s journey (something I hadn’t thought about before).
Other news: WW continues to work on the list of things we’ve discussed. She is on the verge of sharing her detailed timeline with me and we are working with both IC’s on a disclosure process for that.
So mostly good news.
On the mixed news front, after having initially agreed in September to a polygraph, my wife is now balking at having a polygraph. I consider this a non-negotiable and have been quite clear about this.
She is trying to use our therapists as a way to object, opting for the disclosure process instead. However, I have been clear about a “both/and” approach for the disclosure and poly — and the therapists have no objection to this (they simply don’t use polys themselves).
While there is a good deal of debate about the efficacy of polys, my intent is to simply use the poly to “force the issue” on truth I suspect I’m not getting. My WW has said our decision to reconcile or not is “a matter of the heart” not a legal trial. My response has been that our decision to reconcile is indeed a matter of the heart, but the truth is a matter of facts, and if the truth is being withheld, I can’t make an informed decision.
If my WW refuses to move forward with a poly, it’s a deal breaker for me, and I’m prepared to walk. A refusal to submit a poly would be a tacit admission that she is simply continuing the pattern of gaslighting, burying information, refusing to let me see texts, withholding details, trickle truthing me, etc. Obviously I find this untenable, if that turns out to be her decision.
I’ll update soon with more information.
[This message edited by Thumos at 2:06 PM, October 29th (Tuesday)]
