Today I'm feeling frustrated and confused about what to do about my relationship.
TLDR:
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I feel that recent progress my wife has shown might just be my wife stuffing her feelings again, and not doing genuine work to address what led her to betray in the first place.
I don't know the best way to handle this situation.
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For those who have not been following me, a little back story:
My wife confessed her infidelity to me in spring of 2024. A year long affair with another man that involved a pregnancy and an abortion. Soon after her revelation, like within a week, she started blaming me for things that happened in our marriage before the affair. She had a LOT of anger, resentment, and bitterness towards me, and every time we fought she redirected our conversations back to her complaints about "the marriage" before the affair and her criticisms of me - which are essentially the same thing. She was highly resistant to anything I suggested she do, and any "advice" I might have on how we could salvage our relationship. She hates this site, and strongly prefers normal marital counselors because they are "experts" which I strongly disagree with.
She would say things like "you need to take responsibility for your part in our bad marriage", and "you hurt me too!", and "affairs don't happen in a vacuum", and other things that I know now pretty much every wayward says, but I took them to heart back then. I doubled down on the pick me dance and did everything I could to make her happy, but of course the desolation and trauma that I was experiencing caused that to go off the rails on a regular basis.
Now don't get me wrong, these are the parts I complain about because they are what I view as a problem. However she has done a lot to help our relationship and to help me with this trauma. She is normally very kind to me and helps me when I'm having hard days. It's definitely not like she is all bad or not doing a lot. If that were the case I would have left long ago. Instead I've remained in this strange middle ground or limbo where I don't feel bad enough to pull the plug, but don't feel good enough to be able to convince myself that all is well.
This constant bringing up the past has been a real problem. Every time I did or said anything that caused her to feel defensive, bought up her shame or guilt, or highlighted the fear that I might leave, she would reflexively lash out with criticism. Since most of our conversations about the affair cause these feelings in her, most of them got redirected back to my faults somehow. It was extremely frustrating. So much so that I now refuse to discuss these issues at all since all of our conversations go in circles and those circles always seem to end with blame on me.
Anyway 6 months ago we started seeing my counselor as a couples counselor. Almost all of our sessions have resulted in continuous bickering and fighting. We have made some progress but it's been very small progress and very arduous. In between sessions, or arguments things are mostly good.
I still struggle with the affair, and she has been doing much better. Less anger towards me, less bringing up the past, more seeming to understand where I'm coming from etc. I was very hopeful until this week when we had a session go off the rails.
In our session I asked her to work on communication about finances because that is another issue we have argued about a fair amount. Essentially I asked her to be less defensive and to communicate with me more about it instead of it resulting in fighting.
This caused her to get extremely defensive, and we spent the next hour and a half arguing with her again bringing up all the things from the past, criticizing me for all sorts of things and essentially reverting to six months prior.
She said that she had essentially been setting her stuff aside to help me, and is not getting the same back from me.
We left the session and I felt lower about our chances of success than I had for those six months. I asked the therapist if it's normal for couples to fight as much as we do in sessions and he said that he does not see that normally.
The next morning I brought it up again complaining that I needed her to stop sabotaging our conversations and getting so defensive and things like that. Another huge fight. We each said things we weren't proud of and later that day we apologized to each other and made up.
But those two days has left me feeling like she is not really working on the core of why she betrayed me. These hard feelings from the past are a big part of why she was unhappy, and what eventually led to her betrayal, and she is over here doing what she has always done in our relationship - acting like a martyr and stuffing her feelings "for the sake of our relationship". I told her that this is not acceptable and that I need her to be working on resolving these things with her therapist.
Our relationship is still mostly good, and she is doing a lot, but this stuff is weighing on me.
Now I have conflicting ways I want to handle this situation:
- I want to insist that we see an affair specialist instead of a general relationship counselor.
- I want to insist that we go take an infidelity course at one of those places designed to help people recover from infidelity.
- I'm exhausted and I want to take a 6 month moratorium on discussing the affair, and stop seeing the couples counselor for that time. I have gotten a lot of advice on this site about not trying to force the outcome and stepping back and letting her do her thing. Maybe thats the right path.
- I want to tell her to find a new individual counselor because clearly they are not making progress on this issue and I suspect that her counselor is actually advising her to continue pushing this issue with me. This is likely a no go though as this is an off limits conversation topic for her.
I have had plenty of advice here and much of it says that this is her thing and not only can I not force her to change but that I need to allow her the space to do just that. But now I'm afraid that she is just stuffing her feelings again, and not really dealing with it. I'm also tired of going to therapy where we essentially pay to argue in front of a therapist.
How would you handle this situation?
P. S. Sorry for the very long post. I felt that I needed to give proper context.
[This message edited by Theevent at 7:28 PM, Sunday, May 31st]
