SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It's a book by Shirley Glass. Very, very helpful for WSs.

Thanks. I will track it down.

It's a book by Shirley Glass. That is the book that started to open my eyes about the true nature of infidelity.

Here's the thing about NC: it's a brain wiring thing. They say that neurons that fire together wire together. I had AP and good feelings wired together in my brain. Withdrawal was inevitable when I excised that stimulus for good feelings from my life. It took a long while to dismantle the wiring but once the process was well underway I was able to start reframing my view of AP and my relationship to him. It isn't that I never think about AP, I have had to think about him a lot in the process of understanding the "why" of my behaviors. But. I don't think about him in an "if only" kind of way, rather in a clinical sort of way. Detached.

Without complete NC those neurons would have gone right on firing together. I think I have more to say on this topic but I need coffee first.

Get that book, though. It's an eye opener.

Yes. This:

neurons that fire together wire together

In what I consider a mixed blessing, AP was originally in the good feelings category. But for a year+, he triggers bad feelings, as he was very much so a negative part of a negative situation. I actually feel like I've gone through the hardest part of the rewiring process, as the withdraw from the good feelings fix happened a long, long time ago.

What's left is the bizarreness that, by all measurable standards, makes zero logical sense. But it's amazing what finally talking about my A & AP with outside parties can do for perspective. Yesterday, I felt like I was in an inextricable situation. Today, I'm very aware of how much control I do have, what boundaries I need to maintain, why I'm weak to certain behaviors by AP & what I can do to curb/eliminate my responses to them. I have to own this. And along those lines, I have to fix it.

splitintwo - Will you please help me understand this aspect? From my POV, it was a friendship. Truly. You could put any adult of any gender and any age into the slot that my A originally filled, and it would be a friendship. We talked about everything & nothing...lots of nothing...music, politics, whatever ... There was a shift .... the nature of the conversation changed, the reliance on the conversation changed, my attachment to the conversation changed, all that. But in the beginning, we were friends.

When you read the book, Not Just Friends by Shirley P. Glass, one of the things she talks about is the slippery slope. This is used to describe the unwitting movement of otherwise good people who cross the line between platonic friendship and an affair. It refers to the concept that otherwise minor and seemingly insignificant actions can create a significant impact in ones life through a long chain of events, actions and emotional entanglement. The illustration works well to explain why so many otherwise good people end up having affair.

In particular, more often than not, this is how a EA starts. And breaking that emotional entanglement is crucial to ending the affair. In your own words, your EA started with innocuous conversations between friends. And somewhere, for reasons internal to you, the reliance grew, the depth of attachment grew and ultimately, you find that somehow, somewhere, you crossed the line from friends to lovers.

While it can be helpful in self-healing to determine the tipping point from friend to entangled in order to identify the particular reasons behind your behaviors, in the short term, all you need to do is accept the fact that it happened. Acknowledging the reality of your situation and identifying it as such is a key step on defogging and getting back to a emotionally neutral ground. That's why we use the word affair instead of friendship. That is why we call the other person the AP (affair person)and not friend. Like EvolvingSoul said, its a matter of re-framing the brain.

If you spent hours talking, then you know the power of words. Words are only descriptive, they are also suggestive and in that role, the choice of particular words sets up the mental and emotional framework of our lives. That's why its important to be brutally honest with the words that we use to describe our behaviors and actions. If we continue to view the affair through rose colored glasses, then we're not going to see reality, we will be only seeing fantasy.

splitintwo - So is that the basic takeaway--Men & women can't be friends?

Of course, people can have friendships with members of the opposite sex. But it happens only with boundaries in place. Personal boundaries help to define relationships by setting the distances one allows others to approach. The creation of this personal space includes physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem. Do you recall the old saying of lead me not into temptation but deliver me from evil? Internal boundaries are the barriers to temptation. For some, they are strong and for some of us, they are weak. For a lot of the WS community, weak or absent boundaries were complicit in our affairs.

So, why did you invest your time and energy into this relationship rather than invest in your marriage? Are you and your H on different intellectual terms? Do you speak different love languages? Find and read the book, The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman to figure this out. Why would you be willing to have hours of talk with the AP as compared to your H? These are some of the questions that you really need to dwell into as you peel away the layers of intertwined thoughts, actions, emotions, fears, passions and destructive behaviors that brought you to this place.

HUFI

This makes so much sense to me, HUFI. Thank you for taking the time.

Out of curiosity, HUFI, are you a therapist? Or is this just the BTDT wisdom that comes from making a very foolish choice along the way & owning it?

Just as a backstory element: There was a phase where my BH & I did talk for hours. We still have long talks now about a great many things. But years ago, I nixed some of the conversation because I don't want to develop negative feelings toward my BH based on aspects of his worldview that, in truth, have no bearing on the life within our home.

A good comparison: You know how during election season, there's always one or two people in your FB mix that are diametrically opposed to you? And when you look at their belief system, it completely alters how you view that person? It's totally an "I thought I knew you...how could you be so X about Y?" thing for me. And, unfortunately, it has the very real risk of causing me to think very negatively about someone.

Not that I expect people to memorize every detail of my story, but that is, in effect, what happened when BH & I married young & then grew together as adults. Our worldviews split--mine went left, his went right--on everything from religion to social issues. The absolute last thing I want is to dislike my BH because he doesn't agree with me on philosophical things, and that's a likely result if we "fight" about politics, get into religion, all that. So that chatter died off. AP replaced it. I missed it. And since it was happening when BH was asleep anyway, I didn't see it as a betrayal of my time with him. Were I not arguing politics with AP at 2am, I'd be doing something equally wasteful, like watching COPS.

But it's amazing what finally talking about my A & AP with outside parties can do for perspective. Yesterday, I felt like I was in an inextricable situation. Today, I'm very aware of how much control I do have, what boundaries I need to maintain

I'm really happy for you and your break through! It took me a month of reading SI before I was strong enough to end things with AP. I drowned myself in I Just Found Out stories until I was scared straight on the realities of my actions. Every day I re-wire away from AP a little more, and you will too. More and more I just shake my head at the insanity of my previous actions.

thanks for this thread. It has helped me too

splitintwo - Out of curiosity, HUFI, are you a therapist? Or is this just the BTDT wisdom that comes from making a very foolish choice along the way & owning it?

Nope, not a therapist. I did take a Life Skills Coaching Certificate course once upon a time but having that knowledge didn't prevent me from falling down the slippery road to a EA either.

Whatever support I can offer comes only from my own experience. BTDT and willing to pay it forward.

HUFI

UnexpectedSong - I will always be the one with that broken soul - pieced and glued together maybe, but you can see the seams and duct tape. It's ugly.

Update:

I still haven't cut FB ties with AP.

BUT, maintaining that FB tie worked as an awesome test for me yesterday. AP was online, in a chatty mood, and he tried once or twice to get me to engage.

Instead, I watched Justified with BH, went to bed together, and here's the kicker: I didn't give the "lost" opportunity to talk to AP a second thought. There was no regret, no urge to get up again after BH went to sleep to engage with AP, no desire to get the "fix" AT ALL. And there was nothing hanging over me when I got up today...no grumpiness at the lack of contact...just...nothing.

This is huge for me. Really. Huge. I'm just going to go ahead & credit talking about things on SI for helping me break this cycle.

Consider the possibility that knowledge of him trying to contact you may be a component of your fix. Neurons. Fire. Wire.

Consider the possibility that knowledge of him trying to contact you may be a component of your fix.

I'm aware that this may be a possibility. But it doesn't feel like it. It was no trigger whatsoever. I literally felt nothing but indifference about the contact & my response to it. And that's saying a lot given that I've allowed contact--actual contact, no contact, "lost" opportunity for contact--to affect me for at least a day, or longer after the fact.

I no longer need him to reach out to me, if that makes sense. And the only way I could know that about me, with certainty, was to allow the variable & see my response.

So...time to block AP on facebook then?

Really darn close to time, yes. I have to stay connected in the near term for reasons that I can't get out of, but after that, there'll be no reason to keep the tie.

AP hasn't entered my brain all day. None of my angsty behaviors surfaced. This is actually good for me from a closure POV; it's making me believe myself when I say, "I'm done" & believe in myself re: walking away.