SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Until recently, I hadn't considered that I might be choosing suffering over healing. Before I explain my emerging thoughts, for your collective insights, I feel it important that I clarify something that could easily be misunderstood. I did not choose the pain my wife brought into our marriage. I am not responsible for her choice to cheat and the pain that her poor decision caused both of us. My pain was real, and it was 100% caused by my wife. Her pain was real, and she brought it 100% upon herself.

But what about long-term suffering? Short-term suffering, sure, that is to be expected. But in my case, I’m talking about 3 decades of suffering. I just shake my head in bewilderment that I’ve spent the last 32 years reminiscing, dragging into the current moment, bedroom images and non-understood reasons for the affair.

I agree with what many of you might say: that in the early stages, nearly every betrayed spouse deals with these traumatic events. I’d even go so far as to say, if a betrayed does not go through this stage, they are probably trying to hide a dead, stinking fish. However, at what point should I have taken responsibility for what I was allowing? Was my suffering due to my clinging which was bringing new, unnecessary pain into our lives?

My gurgling thoughts around suffering verses pain is a direct result from some helpful advice I have received from several individuals here. Thoughtful women and men who found their path to healing faster and healthier than I did. I’m not diminishing their pain or struggles just acknowledging they figured a few things out that I failed to recognize.

The advice? Be mindful, accept what was, and focus on living-in-the-now.

"OVERSIMPLIFICATION!" I thought to myself when I read the numerous versions of the same idea that was being graciously offered for my consideration. I’d push back, not because I did not value new thoughts but, I am suspicious, rather because I’d be force to let go of the pain that I saw as keeping me alert and safe. GOD DAMNIT! I WASN’T GOING TO BE BLINDSIGHTED AND MADE A FOOL AGAIN! (That is my stinking, dead fish that needs burying.)

Because of you guys, I have found myself, more than usual, sitting alone in the dark quizzing within the blackness I seek at times like these.

Are the memories that I am shadow boxing today, things of yesterday? Am I being perfectly accurate about those "burned-in-the-mind memories" or has my imagination over the years of replay expanded and enhanced those memories into something far worse? Am I remembering a lie? Is the woman in front of me the same woman that betrayed me? Am I the same man I was before the infidelity? Do I like who my wife is better today than she was then? Do I like myself better post D-day? Is my marriage today more honest, heathier and mutually of greater satisfaction than yesteryear? And the big one. Do I really want the woman and marriage I thought I had, or would I rather have the woman and marriage I have today?

These questions are important for me to weigh against each other because shouldn't how I conduct myself going forward be based on what is real now not what was real then?

Thank you, my new friends, for opening my thoughts to new ways of thinking and processing. It is extraordinarily important for my healing. Yes, how I was going about it did bring about reconciliation, (I see reconciliation as an on going process.) it was falling far short of something even more important – healing. Healing for myself and my wife.

Which brings me to a new, connected thought that is banging around in my elderly brain. Did I confuse reconciliation with healing seeing them as one-in-the-same?

Asterisk

I think you should give yourself some grace. We are only about 12,000 years away from being hunter gatherers. That was the time of humanity when men got to carry around big clubs and yank their wives by their hair back into their caves. We are now civilized…supposedly. I do question whether that’s really true based on the behaviors I’ve seen recently on TV. But if you just go back in history, human beings have been killing, mutilating, lying to, cheating on, other humans for as long as we’ve been writing down our histories. Your very strong, prefrontal cortex tells you to behave yourself. You have another part of your brain that said it’s time to get revenge. They’ve been arguing with each other since you found out you had been cheated on. Because we are now civilized you can’t take revenge into your own hands so you’ve been stewing about it. Acceptance is the last part of the grief cycle. It seems to be that you are nearly there. It’s time to let yourself off the hook. You and your wife have had a profound explosion into the middle of your marriage. She caused it. It might be that you have difficulty actually even thinking about forgiveness, although you might say it out loud. The reason I think you need to let yourself off the hook is because you do not need to forgive her. You just need to move on, accepting what was unacceptable.
I study history and often ponder about Germany after WWI. It was laid waste to and a lot of gloating might have been done by the victors. Into that rage arose Hitler. After WWI we used some newfound ideas and provided a leg up for Japan and Germany. Revenge is usually way worse that the event that caused it.

shouldn't how I conduct myself going forward be based on what is real now not what was real then?

Amen, brother

Godspeed on your search for the truth, wherever that takes you.

Asterisk, I have no words of wisdom to offer.

I wont judge you either.

All I can say is I understand and can relate.

I wish you well.

I’ve spent the last 32 years reminiscing, dragging into the current moment, bedroom images and non-understood reasons for the affair.

I've noticed this tendency among some betrayed husbands that I cannot explain. Maybe you can shed some light.

What stopped you from "holding her feet to the fire?"

[This message edited by Unhinged at 4:01 PM, Saturday, November 1st]

I am one who has also chosen a fair amount of suffering in life, so I can relate. Rumination is a thief of joy, and here I round my fiftieth year and am just now learning to let go of it.

Generally, it certainly doesn’t seem fair for one to punish themselves for another persons choices. Who they are, what they choose and why, those are things that have nothing to do with us.

Yes, even in our closest most intimate relationships.

However, some of us deep analytical thinkers we try and put logic where often there isn’t any.

I think you are asking yourself great questions. Personally many things in my past some to do with my marriage and some nothing to do with my marriage have had me hold back from fully loving. That place of being vulnerable is being held back. (for me being abandoned or rejected- maybe for you the idea you may be fooled again or all along? )

ICertainly, I can be held back by fear of asking these questions to our spouse to reopen it. Figuring out that fear to check ourselves on validity can be helpful. Are you afarid to rock the boat? Are you protecting her from further pain? Is the idea of not ever getting an honest answer, and what happens when your spidey senses tell you that she is holding back something? Even then it may only be perceived to be untrue.

I think in most reconciliation there is a sense of burning down that old marriage and starting again. It sounds like that didn’t happen, and you are trying to maybe think, what if I left the idea of that marriage of yesterday and started again with this woman that has spent the last 3 decades being more of who you hoped or more of show she promised?

It took some different techniques from a therpist, reading, and expanding my faith in order to greatly reduce rumination. If you do not plan to change your marital status, it seems like it would be good for you to try to see what you could do to move forward without these empty feelings nagging you anytime you start to feel happy or peaceful. You very well could be afraid to go back to peace, or maybe never had it and don’t know what it feels like. I am just now feeling it, and sometimes it’s still uncomfortable to me, but I am learning to embrace it and welcome it to stay longer all the time.

Best wishes, sir.