I feel you on this one. I don't have a lot of really sore spots left, but this one has history. My fWH spent my entire birthday holed up in a motel with the OW he had featured himself "in love" with. I later read in his emails how it had been such a "magical day" for them, and after he was done, he brought home a nasty container of store-bought cheesecake and a card which read "Hope you find your happy place". 
Some things are just so devastating and they stay with you for a long, long time. That said, the visceral nature of the trauma is long past. EMDR helped quite a bit with that, but so does reframing. My fWH's behavior wasn't about me. He was simply carried away by his own emotional state, wrapped up in an intoxicating cocoon of limerence. He wasn't trying to hurt me. I mean, it's so obvious that his actions were indeed harmful to me and it should have been obvious to him too. At the time, his belief was that I'd never know where he'd been that day and so it wouldn't matter. He had time off, the OW had made some plausible excuse to her husband, and it was a crisp and lovely winter day. That was as much thought as went into it. Meanwhile, his attitude toward me had become something like a surly teenager who blames his mother for everything gone wrong in his life and who sneaks out of the house after he's been put on restriction. It was a game, a fantasy. He would have said at the time with much puffed up bravado that he didn't care, but in actuality he very much DID care, hence the lies and subterfuge.
At the bottom line though, I deserved so much more from him. I deserved to be special in his mind and to be celebrated in his heart and in his life on the anniversary of my birth. While he was cheating though, I was NOT special to him. I was not worthy in his mind of celebration. I was not loved by him in the way that I deserved.
For years, I did exactly what you've described, Chaos. I turtled up into myself and made the appropriate and expected murmurings of acknowledgment toward family, friends, and coworkers. All the while, I was filled with some weird kind of horror at the prospect of being singled out for attention that only served to remind me of how utterly I had been betrayed. It felt like celebrating a murder, the murder of my innocence, my story. Such dramatic hyperbole, right?.. but that's how it feels.
Here's the thing though. Feelings aren't facts. My innocence might have perished, but it was NOT "murdered". That's me catastrophizing. In actuality, it was the collateral damage of my fWH's implosion, and while I very much DO have a right to say that his carelessness was a dealbreaker, I chose of my own free will to forego that particular consequence. Studies show that people who celebrate are happier people. I'm denying myself happiness that I deserve when I don't celebrate my own arrival into this world.
Birthdays are a time when we allow others to honor and fete us. We blush at the attention and modestly accept gifts and praise, and it's all very passive. We are a recipient, not a celebrator. But you know what? It doesn't have to be that way. We can be active. We can be proactive. We can plan our own birthday cake for a week and then bake it ourselves. We can gift ourselves with a lavish present or we can spend the whole day in serene contemplation of our life here on earth and everything it means in some beautiful setting that we have chosen for just this occasion. We don't have to wait around like bashful wallflowers at a middle school dance. We can be active celebrants and it can be a total game changer.
Anyway, that's my latest attack on the birthday conundrum. It's working pretty well so far, but that's not to say it doesn't still feel a little weird. I had so very many birthdays of the passive variety before now and people still expect it to be that way.
[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:26 PM, Tuesday, September 13th]
