Someone told me that 'rock bottom' for a cheater is when their BS hands them the divorce papers to sign. I don't know how to measure progress any other way, really...
That may be rock bottom for your marriage perhaps. But not for you personally. You could be single and still at rock bottom, right? You are not your relationship. I know that it is tempting to look at your situation and think, "Sure, but we're talking about my serial cheating, and that's based on my relationship(s), yada yada..."
The difficult thing to realize and understand is that everything in our lives originates from ourselves. Whether or not your spouse stays, leaves, or if you even have a spouse, is irrelevent to the work you need to do on yourself, and what you need to accept and understand about yourself. The affairs, and the toll they have taken on your marriage are simply consequences of your choices and actions.
Let me ask you this. Let's say your spouse divorces you. Time passes. You marry again. You cheat again. You get divorced again. Now... which one is rock bottom? Were you at rock bottom the first time? Or this one? Or the next?
At the end of the day, "Need2Do" is a broken and empty soul, like most (all) WS's. And that, my friend, is where you need to look in order to determine what in your life is broken, and how bad it will continue to get before it stops being merely painful and shameful, and instead becomes a driving force for change.
Figure out what it is you are getting from these affairs. My advice to you is to take a very, very broad look at yourself. Not just the affairs, but everything. Here are some questions for you. The answers are for you, not for me.
* Do you (or have you ever) had addiction issues? (Drugs, booze, smokes, gambling, shopping, over/under-eating, fitness)
* Were you ever molested, raped, bullied, ignored, discarded, neglected in your life, especially as a child?
* What is your work history like? Have you had a lot of jobs, are you an under/over-achiever, a perfectionist, unemployed?
* When you think about getting divorced, what is the first thought that comes to mind? Is it about you and how you will cope/survive?
* How do you respond to negative critisicm? Does it make you feel crushed? Does it inspire you?
* How do think most people (other than your spouse) think of you, generally speaking? Do you say you are smart/talented/funny/interesting? Do they like you?
The reason I ask these things is because I want you to let go of your self-value and health as a reflection of your relationship or even your infidelity. Rather, I want you to where in your life things may have taken a "left turn", and how that affects you now.
Most WS's are simply unhappy people, people who do not, maybe even cannot (at present) love themselves. We gain our self-worth through others. We define ourselves through others. And we shame ourselves when shamed in others eyes. Even though I used the word "others" several times, it is important to note that the constant here is the self. We USE others to judge ourselves, because we have no sense of self otherwise.
Many WS's report that they have addiction issues. This is because we use addictive behaviors in order to make ourselves feel better and to avoid pain and truth. We then feel guilty about our addictive behaviors, so we hide them, we lie about them, we minimize them, and so on. You know, same things we did during the affair. We need to connect those things.
Many WS's also report trauma and abuse in their lives. This alone often leaves us with a sense of feeling "less than". When others use or abuse us, it is to make themselves feel better at our expense. That sense of "I only have value when I am of value to others" sticks with us, and makes everything in our world about ourselves, since we are constantly hustling for our own worth (thank you Brene Brown).
In jobs and friendships, we tend to either constantly move on, seeking for more/better attention and praise from others, or we become perfectionists, seeking praise from others by demanding it. It is an attempt to bring control to what feels like an out of control world.
If you think of your divorce and your immediate response is to feel sorry for yourself, then what are you thinking of? Is divorce a reflection on your self worth? Why? And why aren't we more focused on the experience of our spouses and their needs and worth? When we cannot love or value ourselves, we cannot do so for others either.
At the end of the day, perhaps "rock bottom" for a WS is simply the point where nothing and no one can fill the emptiness within us any longer. It is like a gas tank with a hole in it. No matter how much and how fast you try to fill it, it will only continue to pour out and remain empty. We begin to realize that the affair(s), and honestly, pretty much everything and everyone in our lives, is just another source of attention and feedback for us. When we lose a spouse, a friend, a job... we feel badly about what we did, but we feel much, MUCH worse about the lack of praise and consolation that is now gone. We tell ourselves, "I feel really bad about cheating", but in truth, what we feel is, "I feel really bad about losing what made me feel worth something." If we go back to the empty gas tank example, it is not that we feel badly about blowing up the gas tanks, we feel badly about not having any gas left now that we did that.
That... is rock bottom.
