SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Also, that you compared your wife sexually to a Toyota,and your stripper to a Ferrari doesnt make it any better. We all knew what you meant. And when you try to clarify that the Toyota is more dependable,etc? Sounds like your wife is Plan B.

I wonder how your OW who has multiple partners gained all that sexual experience...

I wonder how your wife would rate your performance, why is a mediocre sex life in the marriage always the BS fault.

Let's be honest here, what you've shared about your wife's mental health is terrible and must have been a strain on both you and your marriage BUT you weren't concerned about her when you were having sex with the OW for 2.5 years. You weren't concerned about anyone seeing you when you took the OW everywhere with you during that time, you even admit to not feeling guilty in your opening post. You don't seem bothered about leaving your wife alone with the children while you run away from the OW.

So why now? Is your OW demanding too much from you? You're trying to escape your affair without any consequences. Oh I know you think you're facing them just now, let's be frank - you're not!

Your wife NEEDS to get a full STI check you're just looking for excuses not to do it.

As I said before you may want to request a stop sign so you only get answers from fellow waywards, however don't think they'll agree with not telling your wife.

[This message edited by Carissima at 8:13 PM, July 11th (Saturday)]

Find your man parts and leave your wife for your Ferrari. A real man will appreciate her. I'm from Texas. It's not all that. Get over yourself. You are killing her not saving her.

It’s a long road. You are at the first steps. Hang in there and if you really want to heal dig in and do the work this is the place for you.

Your anger at your wife for wanting a fourth child seems unfounded. You state that you fully understand unprotected sex but somehow it’s HER fault for forcing a pregnancy. What pretzel logic got you there?

Perhaps the kind of logic that led you seek intimacy with a stripper. Not an educated choice. The worst lies are the one we tell ourselves. And you’ve got some whoppers that you’ve sold yourself. That’s a good place to start. Reread your post. You aren’t even close to remorse. You are dealing with your pain, and sadness. Which happens we are all humans here.

From your current perspective your resentment at your wife’s perceived attempt to control having another child led you to choose to alter your wife’s life forever. Yours too.

For someone so upset at your wife for altering your life, you chose for yourself and her. And now you want to continue that control. Her ignorance will help her to be safe and stay out of the hospital..........oh and you too. That side benefit of not facing any real life consequences may be of some consideration in keeping your partner safe.

By your own account you are an educated, hardworking successful man. How much did living with integrity used to mean to you and what are you willing to do and suffer and learn and fall and get back up over the next several years to fix the damage you’ve done?

And that’s where you start. Read back through your posts. Examine your rationalizations, your use of language to minimize and double speak.

Your wife has every right to know who you are. To know what you’ve put her at risk of. To determine the course of her own life. Look at yourself and ever action and decision you made. You weren’t a passive actor in the story. You chose every single bit of it. You were a lot less led and acted upon than your current narrative.

Dig in and see it.

I’m going to quadruple the comments about Pap tests and leave the implications of that alone.

I’m a WW, so I know I don’t have a moral high ground to stand on, but everything you said after this

Let me preface what I’m about to say that I’m coming from a place of remorse.

is actually the exact opposite.

My husband cheated during a psychotic break. His sister is admitted to the psych ward for a month at least once a year. This has been going on for 14 years now (Schizo-affective disorder). My own brother suffers from depression and is often suicidal. I understand mental illness all too well, unfortunately. It does not absolve you of your responsibility to tell your wife. The truth is — you don’t want to lose her. You want your cake on the side. It is selfish. Beyond selfish. Doctors no longer recommend annual Pap tests. My friend who got cancer got an aggressive strain that was very advanced after only 2 years. Men are NOT tested for HPV. You do not know that you do not have it. In fact, unbeknownst to you, you likely have several strains. What you are doing is telling yourself more lies and offering more unfounded justifications for not telling your spouse. She needs the truth. And if at all possible a family member to stay with her while she goes through the worst trauma you can imagine. (My aunt and father moved in with me for six months given I could not eat or parent or function initially). Let this sink in: you did NOT use protection with a sex worker. A woman who uses sex and her sexuality to make money. She has been to jail (no explanation here?). Her exposure level is extraordinarily high. I’m not even going to really comment on the Ferrari comment and your subsequent attempt to downplay what that meant. You are quite an expert at self-justification and perverting the truth. So much of what you’ve written sounds puerile. You are not a victim. You have been a villain in this piece. Again, no stop sign. I would be far more sympathetic, however, if you made sure your wife knew she should be tested for a potentially deadly disease. I’m so disgusted by your “gottman-trained” therapist etc. I’ve seen several therapists since DDay. Two of them were so egregiously piss poor at their jobs they should not be practicing (a psychologist even barked at me that I had to accept that they had “had sex and had orgasms” and I should not be so grievously wounded (at 3 weeks post DDay), she went on to suggest I had a personality disorder to be so deeply distressed, never once questioning my husband’s mental health (and he was told by a psychiatrist he saw that he needed medication). I’m tired of your excuses and rationalizations.

There is so much wrong with your thinking. I doubt you’ll be able to admit it though.

In order for you to heal you are going to have to see and admit some hard truths. You were using the stripper for ego kibbles and sex. It’s not her you are addicted to- it’s the way she made you feel- the high from the ego kibbles and the sex. She was using you for cash and anything else she could get out of you. You didn’t love her. To love someone is to want the best for them. Was it best for her that she be the side piece to a married man for 2.5 years? If you loved her you would have divorced your wife and pursued an honest relationship with her. She didn’t love you or she would not have encouraged you to betray all that is good- your wife and kids and your sense of yourself as a good and decent man. You concocted some kind of noble fantasy narrative for a typical sleazy affair between two selfish people who didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. You had the affair because you wanted to- you wanted it bad enough to hurt your wife and kids. Don’t blame shift (the move to NE, your wife’s pregnancy) rationalize or minimize. You knew exactly what you were doing. As you are now, you are the kind of person who is so self absorbed that you see other people as objects, just props in the play of your life. Do you see that your wife is actually a human being with human feelings? You certainly didn’t act like it. Are you capable of seeing things from her point of view? Have you ever actually felt empathy towards her? Did you ever think that she deserves an honest man who loves only her? If you can’t be that man, let her go and find someone else who can. I’m sure it didn’t help her psych issues that you were abusing her by betraying her for so long- I’m certain she could sense something was terribly wrong in her life. You certainly weren’t protecting her like you promised to. Are you able to admit that as of now, you are the type of person who cared more about getting his jollies with a stripper than protecting the innocence of his children. Nothing will improve until you can admit the truth to yourself, and focus not on your own selfish shame but on what you can do to become a better man and to make it up to your wife and kids.

Are you capable of becoming a better man- a good example for you kids? As an addict, you won’t quit using until you hit rock bottom. I think rock bottom for you is the pain in realizing how selfish you allowed yourself to become, and realizing that not changing is more painful than actually doing the hard work it takes to change into a better man.

I want to make sure I have this right.

Your wife is so mentally unstable that you believed her capable of drowning your children in a bathtub.

You nevertheless left those children with her to take a job 2,000 miles away.

Your psychotic wife became pregnant, lost the baby, and was grieving, but this did not worry you enough to come home.

Instead, you started fucking, and fell in love with, a drug addicted stripper who is so dangerous and negligent to her own children that she was declared unfit to raise them.

You spent months of time and thousands of dollars on this woman, living a second life with her, while leaving your children home alone with their psychotic mother.

The fourth time she left you, you had an emotional breakdown and returned to Texas, but still not to your family.

You say that it's far too dangerous to be honest with your wife. There's no telling what she might do. You've consulted two therapists who both agree with you.

Simultaneously, you casually dismiss the possibility that your paranoid, criminal girlfriend, who has alienated everyone in her life and whose main goal is to get you to dump your family and marry her, might call your home at any moment and drop the bomb.

You believe that you are, "in some senses," a devoted father. You characterize yourself as a stable guy with solid relationships who is well regarded by his peers. You find us judgmental and feel we aren't giving you enough credit or the kind of feedback you need.

You've described a long term affair with a stripper, child endangerment, financial infidelity, mental illness, sexual prowess/body comparisons, intimate conversations, unprotected sex, unintended pregnancy and abortion, AP's desire to carry your child, physical violence, knight in shining armor (KISA) syndrome, violation of "first and only," travel, playing house, meeting her family, resentment at your BW's loss trauma, desperate pining, bad advice from a therapist... the list goes on and on.

Let's just say that if you had composed your narrative to deliberately trigger every BS on the site, it's hard to imagine what else you might have included.

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 1:26 AM, July 12th (Sunday)]

fBW here. Look whether or not you put up a stop sign, imho you probably won't find a whole lot of SIers that are going to sympathize with you or pat you and say, "yeah poor guy is having such a rough time right now." If you actually are serious about dealing with this, SI can be an amazing place to get real help from people who have experienced the devastation of infidelity first-hand. And no one here even needs to be gottman trained to give you far better advice than these therapists you are seeing.

All of this, ALL of it came from choices YOU made. Conscious, repeated, deliberate choices to engage in an affair and do unbelievable damage to your wife and children. Their lives won't ever be the same.

Tell your wife the truth - another one almost everyone on SI will tell you to do. Accept the consequences of the choices you've made. Not telling her is so cruel it's frankly hard to fathom.

You are no unique, special snowflake. All of us Waywards have dealt with the hard reality of pining for the AP and how hard saying goodbye is. She is still a dopamine drug racing through your veins. Sometime, maybe weeks from now, what we want to see is real contrition. Real humility. At some point you will melt into a bowl of quivering jelly with remorse for your actions and calling out to your higher power for help. You will stop looking back at your affair with such great fondness. Right now you just want the pain to go away. Not be a better man.

Think about your children. Your actions are devastating to them.

I don't get a couple of things:

- Why would you leave your family behind for a job change. You split your kids from their dad willingly. If you had to go that far you could have brought them. Families stay together.

- Why would you think the AP would be any different than any different than 100% of the others up on that dance stage. Have you ever met a dancer that did not fit fucked up life profile of your AP.

When you get a minute look up "Honey they always affair down". You'll get to a thread on the JFO forum. I love this sentence

She is not more attractive. She does not get the best parts. What’s is attractive about the OW is that they are the sickest, the weakest, the most injured of the pack. The insecure WH, wanting to feel strong and powerful, scans the herd for the easiest to kill. The self assured, the strong, the healthy will not do as those women want nothing to do with a married man. Our wayward husbands, needy and looking for someone to boost his ego, must look for someone beneath them, someone who will look up to him, someone who will make him feel superior, if only temporarily

You were a sucker. You succeeded in bagging a very weak victim. A person of no character. No virtue. Just a hot body and a pair of eyes that played you like a fiddle.

One one hand you claim to be the great career dude with a level head and discernment. Yet you actually met with cumbucket's parents and children and spent thousands of $$$ on her probably buying some fancy bling. Did you buy her some diamonds perhaps?

Let's just say that if you had composed your narrative

BSR is spot on. I would argue that you have even bigger issues in your marriage if you leave your kids alone for long periods of time with someone who might drown them. So which is it? Was that an exaggeration of your wife's mental state that you tell yourself to justify not having to be honest with her or are you the kind of father who puts their career above the safety, well being, and very lives of your kids? Is it really a surprise that therapists agree with you when they only have your side of the story in which your wife is so unhinged that she may very well kill the kids and herself if your affair is exposed? If that's the narrative you've sold them, of course they will say not to tell her. Because you've lead them to believe that telling her could make her the next Andrea Yates.

Honestly, I don't know if your fears are founded or if it's another lie you're telling yourself just like you did when you chose to lie in OW's bed and tell her you didn't want to do PIV with her. You're not above selling yourself a bridge or two and thinking there's truth in those delusions. But what I do know is that every day that passes is a roll of the dice that your wife finds out about your affair. Maybe the OW tells her. Maybe you weren't as careful as you believed and someone else saw you with OW who tells her. Maybe she finds a text or an email you thought you deleted. Maybe she finds a charge on your card for the strip club or several and starts asking questions. Maybe she just has a gut feeling and decides to pursue it. If you look under each poster's username, there's a number and each and every single poster here has personal experience finding out or being found out with regards to infidelity. And we're only a small percentage of people who come to SI as a result of being cheated on/being outed as a cheater. Do you honestly believe that you can keep this secret from your wife forever? Do you really want to keep rolling those dice knowing that it will be 100x worse if she finds out by herself?

If you work with a therapist to come clean with your wife in a controlled environment, you can get your wife whatever help she needs. She can't hurt the kids. She can't hurt herself. If you're wrong and this secret does not stay buried, you have zero control over what happens and you are also responsible for making the choice to roll those dice. It's astonishing to me that there is even the question in your mind between these two options when one option guarantees safety for your kids and your wife and the other option is a complete gamble. But hey, I would never leave my kids with a woman who might drown them for as little as 5 minutes so I guess we just have different perspectives on this.

WhatWas -

First, if you only want to hear responses from fellow wayward spouses, you can ask a mod to do that (you can start a thread in general titled MOD PLEASE and someone will get to you and you can ask that a stop sign be added to this thread). Having the stop sign is usually encouraged for newcomer WS, esp those who are experiencing the withdrawal from their limeraant affairs.

As to the "two Gottman trained" therapists? I'd bet a pretty large chunk of SI members (WS and BS) kind of shook their heads reading that. Many/most folks here have had at least one shitty therapist. Some have had several. So, I could "see" your 2-Gottman trained (I've seen 2 as well) and raise you a couple of CSATs (Certified Sex Addiction Therapists), and I doubt it would matter much.

There is at least one book that is pretty universally considered to be the immediate "go to" for a WS who is trying to come to terms with their crummy choices. That book is "How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair" by Linda MacDonald. It's a pretty short book, takes an afternoon to read. Get an electronic version & read it - TODAY (as in right now). Given you haven't told your BW about your LTA, a lot may not resonate. Read it anyhow (sounds like you have a good income, so you can afford the $10-15 even if you can't digest its contents - yet).

I don't see reason to rehash the STD issue. The risks here are basic science - the existence of the risk is not really open for debate IMO. The potentially lethal consequences to the mother of your children from your years' long sexual escapades with a sex worker outweigh ALL other factors here (and it doesn't matter if you used condoms, eg herpes can still be transmitted when using a condom, and you can be an asymptomatic carrier - it is not at all unusual) . Those risks outweigh even your wife's mental health issues.

I'm gonna echo what a lot of others said... there is not a doubt in my mind that your stripper girlfriend WILL tell your wife about your A, and it will not be done with an ounce of empathy or compassion for your wife or your kids.... or you. And I'm kind of curious what your "two Gottman trained" therapists think of that possibility. My WH had a 20+ yr A with a former GF, who never spent a day in jail, or traded sex for $ or many of the other poor character traits you describe. Yet that former GF (whom he'd known for close to 40 years at the time) told me. It happens ALL THE TIME, and from folks who - at least "on paper" - would seem to be far far far far far more trustworthy than your AP.

It is astounding how many WHs are so skillful at their cognitive dissonance to believe that their girlfriends would never tell their wives. Put simply, there is NO honor amongst thieves, and you and your AP are absolutely thieves. I'm confident you are very much aware of this.

One suggestion that came to mind (and I hope others will weigh in on this, as it may be brilliant or stupid) is to meet with your wife's mental health professional(s) and get their reading on the best way to become honest with your wife. This means accepting and deciding that you WILL disclose the A to your wife - and not letting anyone tell you not to. The goal is to figure out to do this in the most compassionate way, including making sure that a comprehensive support system is in place for her - even if it means having to hire 24hr/day live in care (which may be expensive, but given the $$ you've spent on your AP, perhaps its time to invest in your wife and not your affair). If your wife's mental state is as bad as you say, I assume she's got an IC and probably a psychiatrist. If not, why not? And if not, NOW is the time to get that all in place (again, even if you can't man up to tell her, you are foolish to not see that eventually your AP will do that for you).

I sure hope you don't close the door to SI bc of the response to this thread. Ask the mods for a stop sign and reread those from fellow wayward spouses (brave sir robin or Mrs Walloped come to mind as two WS who have posted on this thread). Get How To Help Your Spouse Heal - it focuses on what makes a successful rebuilder (and while she may be speaking in context of rebuilding the M, I think it's just as important to see it as rebuilding yourself - you are the one that is in need of some serious fixing). I just happened to read some of it again this AM, and one thing that resonates with your situation is that successful rebuilders learn how to set aside their feelings of shame in order to become empathetic to their BS. Sounds to me like a pretty good place to start.

ETA:

Another book you may find helpful is called Help.Her.Heal by Carol J Sheets. It's a workbook for a WS to build empathy. It's directed to sex addicts, but I think any WS can benefit.

And stay as far away as possible from Esther Perel and Mira Kirshenbaum. Most BSs (and some WS too) find their work to implicitly and explicitly blame the BS (even the "what made you vulnerable to an A" shit implies that there was something about the M that forced a WS to choose to betray and live a secret sexual life). That is not a good recipe for healing generally, and I believe could be more damaging to a BS with pre existing mental health issues.

Many Gottman folks are on that bandwagon too - the "what about the M or the BS made you vulnerable" bullshit. I think it takes time for a WS to get to the place where they can fully own their choice to lie. And from what I've seen, recognizing, accepting, and truly owning that NOTHING about your M or your BS made you choose to lie and to cheat is the only way to truly start changing yourself. You were vulnerable to cheating because you wanted to. You opened the door to that strip club all by yourself.

[This message edited by gmc94 at 11:24 AM, July 12th, 2020 (Sunday)]

Being a BS I can offer you some advice.

1. Forgive yourself. You made numerous terrible decisions and mistakes. But guess what no one gets through this life without them. But the most important thing for you to do is LEARN from them.

2. The truth will with out a doubt come out. I understand you are afraid of the after math and the paint hat it will cause your wife but withholding this will only hurt the both of you more in the long run. You will never be able to make your wife happy and vice versa with this secret. It will tear you up I side everyday. And it WILL come out. Atleast you will be able to control how it comes out.

And with the knowledge of this you need to prepare and take the necessary steps ahead of time to plan for her reaction. But it needs to happen. Until it doesn’t you will be stuck. Neither of you could move forward.

3. If you have such strong feelings toward this OW you need to ask yourself why. Is it because of the person she is? Or is it only because how she made you feel. She made you feel all the things you felt were missing from your marriage. So in my opinion don’t tie those emotions to her. Shift them to your wife. Repair what is missing from your marriage.

4. If you are truly remorseful as you say you will not need to keep this from her. Let her decide how she feels. It will feel so much better in the long run. You will tell her everything you were feeling at the time. You can’t begin to heal or repair the damage until she knows. I can’t stress this enough. Not just for her sake but for yours as well

5. Again I in ow a lot of these posts make you upset but sometimes the truth hurts. Still.. regardless I will say again.. forgive yourself. You are human. You made many bad decisions but now is the time to make them as right as you can. Start making the right decisions now. That’s the only way to heal and move forward.

I'm sorry if this seems harsh but in my opinion there's a lot of work to be done before the OP can even begin to forgive himself.

Obviously it's a personal thing and subjective to each individual's experiences but the OP hasn't even hit remorse yet, I'm not even sure about regret apart from how this has all affected him.

I'm with Carissma on the forgiving part. The ONLY way forward to forgiveness is THROUGH the acts of remorse, empathy, etc (eg getting it and owning it).

Third on the forgiveness thing.

He has work to be done before he should even start to forgive himself.

We have truly remorseful WS here who have been doing the work,and still haven't reached self forgiveness. Some who,IMO, have earned that right.

I’m so angry on your BW behalf that all I’m going to comment on is the medical aspect of this. I’ve spent over 20 years in the medical field, I used to order the tests for paps and stds for my doc in clinic. It always baffled me how many people thought that paps were an std test. They are not. A pap is looking at cervical cells and only cervical cells. It is looking for cervical cancer and that is it. You said your BWs pap and test were normal, that means nothing in regards to stds. Paps are ordered in one of two ways; a pap with a reflexive hpv test or with a co-hpv test. Meaning that for a reflexive hpv test they will only look for hpv if the pap is not normal. A co-hpv test means that they will look for hpv regardless.According to the new guidelines if your wife is over 30 and has never had an abnormal pap they will do a pap once every 5 years with a co-hpv test. That is what the guideline is, doesn’t mean that’s what will happen, they will order what insurance will pay for. If she is getting paps every year they are are probably ordered as reflexive hpv test.

Hpv, like most stds, can lay dormant for a while. Just because her last ones were normal doesn’t mean future ones will be. Do you really want her doctor to be the one to tell her her husband has been cheating on her? You are taking away her right to advocate for her health! I have an auto immune disease that I treat with immunosuppressants, my specialist recommends I get a pap every year for that reason alone. Since I found out my WH cheated on me, I make certain that it is always ordered with a co-hpv test. I request a full std panel every time as well. I haven’t seen my WH in almost a year, he’ll be home in a few weeks. He will be wearing a condom for the foreseeable future, quite possibly for the rest of our relationship because he has proven he can’t be trusted with my heath. His AP wasn’t a sex worker. His APs XWH was a LEO who used to rape female inmates. I’m sure she is full of stds, but probably not as many as your AP is. Do the right thing for your BW for once and tell her the truth so she can take care of herself.

Where to start on this one. First, I guess, I wonder if we work together.. But, either way, if you work on Wall St, I'm pretty sure you've seen and lived the same things I have. So, let me talk to you like I would if we were sitting in a bar downtown and you told me this story. Your kidding, right? I mean, I feel like you're "trying out" your story that you're going to tell your wife here, how about you give us the real version, which, I suspect, has a lot more to do with "Ferrari sex" than it does your "love" for this woman or being addicted to anything other than her vagina. I've seen this behavior plenty of times in my professional career and, as I'm sure you know, it's pretty common and accepted on Wall St, so, what is it you want from us? If it's how to smooth things over with your W and keep sleeping with strippers, which, in my experience, is usually what that group of guys is trying to do, well, you're in the wrong place. Try Reddit.

If you want to "fix this", come clean and change who you are, well, this is the right place, but, no, you're never going to get away with "not telling" as the right answer. You've taken away her autonomy, her ability to choose and decide for herself. How would you feel if I did that to you? Or your W did that to you? You need to tell her man, it's the only way to restore the balance in your relationship.

All,

I sincerely thank you for your input. I specifically did not put a stop sign up as I want the insight of the BS on this board.

Again, a few clarifying points - the concern about the harm to my children has subsided, only because my youngest is now older. Further, he is living with me temporarily as we move across the country to get back to our place of origin. Nevertheless my wife continues to seek professional help, medication, etc and her mental well being has always been a significant concern of mine.

I am hesitant to go against the counsel of my therapists for a number of reasons. First, I initially vetted her (my primary therapist) and wanted to make sure she was indeed pro-marriage (in non-abusive situations) as I knew I wanted to rebuild my marriage. Second she has earned my trust by continuing to ask about my W and display a deep sense of caring and concern for her. Third, over the past few months I have been working with her she has helped me slowly break this log jam in my head. While I often can’t believe the words that come out of my mouth, she has done an amazing job of showing me what I’ve done to all involved. Fourth, she has called me out on my bullshit and been very upfront with me when I backtrack. I’m looking for help, guidance and answers, not a buddy. Finally, she has shown me several tools I did not know existed (CBT, meditation, journaling, mindfulness, others) to help gain clarity. She too speaks frequently about teaching myself to slowdown and forgive myself, something I have been hesitant to do. I want to FIX IT NOW. But I realize it took me years to get here, and I can’t unravel this overnight.

Secondly, I have not had any contact with the OW for several months now. I have sworn to myself that I will never connect with her ever again. I do understand the risk of her possibly reaching out to me or my wife sometime in the future. This is part of the reason my family and I are moving 2,000 miles back to our home. It’s not the only reason for the move, but being so far removed from the OW will make me feel more confident that we’ll never cross paths again. The OW is excessively paranoid and does not use social media of any kind. I will say that she is HIGHLY disorganized and unable to perform the minimum level of basic research, but nevertheless the risk stands.

All I can say is that I’ve never experienced anything close to what I am experiencing now. I’ve read extensively about limerence and the fog, from the marriage helper site, now this site and many others. The symptoms described mirror my feelings exactly. I am increasingly shocked at my own actions and beliefs, and I’m not sure I trust myself. If I could do what I’ve done, what else am I doing? I know how I danced ever closer and closer to the flame of doing what I knew was wrong. But I always thought I could pull back. I reveled in the admiration of this OW, and came to become dependent upon it. But I always thought I could pull away and we would both just drift apart like ships at sea. What a horrible way to use someone….

I have spent a large part of today reading through the betrayed posts. In fact, I’ve done this for the past several months on the MH site. Their stories are what keep me grounded and highlight for me the true damage I have done. When I read the stories of the betrayed, the devastation brought on them and their families I realize that I have done the same. I can only imagine the internal destruction, pain and agony. I often think about what I would feel like if the tables were turned - how would I feel if my wife revealed the same to me?

Thank you for the warning on Esther Perel - in going back through the book I do indeed see undercurrents of blame shifting. I’ll trash that book and go pick up some of the others that have been recommended like the Linda MacDonald book - thank you for that.

I really don’t know how else to say this, but I blame no one but myself for this. Could my wife and I done a better job of communicating years ago? Of course, but that’s no excuse for what I did. I’ve never blamed her for when she suffered her traumatic mental episodes and I certainly don’t blame her now.

I’m absolutely thirsting for knowledge and truth, and I didn’t come here to simply reinforce my assumed beliefs. Please know I’m reading every response on here and I’m trying to do the right thing. Thank you….