SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi everyone. I am almost 3 months post D-Day. Before the affair happened, and while it was happening, we were already in couples therapy. My husband really bottled up a LOT of feelings and resentment for years, so when it came out all of a sudden it has been wave after wave of pain and surprise for me, on top of the affair.

Needless to say I am not doing great. I just started on antidepressants this week, so I am hoping that helps. But right now, I feel so overwhelmed. I cry all the time. This is all I can think about. We are doing couples therapy once a week, and I am doing individual therapy every other week, and group every other week. Lots of therapy! Even with that, I feel an almost obsessive need to think and analyze my feelings. I have read probably 15 books in the past three months about betrayal, relationships, and trauma. And still it feels like not enough. I recently have started talking with AI (Claude), just to have someone to talk with, and it helps but also makes me feel like I am developing AI psychosis haha.

Any other betrayed folks go through this? How did you get through it?

You are describing a lot of what I went through in those first months.

I am about ten months out now, and at three months I was still very much living inside the blast zone. I could function, work, parent, have conversations, but underneath all of it my brain was constantly running. What happened? Why did it happen? What did I miss? What else don't I know? What was real? What does this mean about our marriage? Can this be fixed? Do I even want it fixed?

I read books. I read forums. I analyzed conversations to death. I asked questions over and over from slightly different angles.

For me, a big realization was that I was trying to think my way out of something that couldn't be solved entirely by thinking. Listen to the people here that have been here for a while.

There is absolutely value in understanding the affair, understanding yourself, understanding the marriage, and understanding what was happening inside your husband. But there came a point where I realized I was subconsciously searching for the one missing piece of information that would suddenly make all of this make sense and stop hurting.

I never found that magic piece.

What I did slowly find was perspective.

Three months is so incredibly early. I know that probably isn't comforting when every day feels about six weeks long, but you do not need to have your marriage figured out right now. You don't need to know whether you are going to reconcile forever. You don't need to know exactly how much of his resentment was legitimate, how much was distorted, or what every revelation means for your future.

You can just deal with today.

Also, please be careful not to let his bottled up resentment become an explanation that somehow turns into responsibility being placed on you for his affair. There may have been real problems in your marriage. There may be things you eventually look back on and wish you had done differently. I certainly found things in myself and in my marriage that I needed to examine. But marital problems are shared problems. An affair is a decision made by the person who has it. Both things can be true at the same time.

One of the hardest things I have had to learn is that healing is not linear at all. I have had days where I thought, "okay, I am finally getting somewhere," followed almost immediately by days where something tiny knocked me flat again. Then gradually the terrible days became terrible hours. Sometimes now they are terrible days followed by better days.

That is progress, even when it doesn't feel like it.

And all of the reading, therapy and introspection can be valuable, but give yourself permission to occasionally stop studying your own trauma. You don't have to spend every available hour becoming the world's foremost expert on betrayal. Watch something stupid, go outside, have coffee with somebody. Do something with your hands, give your brain an hour where its only job is to exist.

You are not failing because you are still crying at three months. You are not supposed to have metabolized something this enormous already.

Take what you can from therapy, books, forums, AI and people who have walked this road before you, but don't feel like you have to discover the entire answer immediately.

Sometimes the most honest answer really is:

I don't know yet.

I have become much more comfortable with that answer than I was in the beginning.

Take it a day at a time. Sometimes an hour at a time if that is all you've got. Eventually you will look back and realize that somewhere along the way you stopped drowning and started swimming, even if you cannot identify the exact day it happened.

I first described the pain to my wife as if someone had carved my chest open, dropped in a grenade that shredded my heart into a million pieces, but I somehow, I was still breathing.

That was a decade ago.

I got up to 31-books on relationships and infidelity and while they tend to talk about what works, they rarely discuss how long it takes to heal from the trauma of infidelity.

Members here told me 2-5 years!

I sure hated to hear that, but it was frighteningly accurate.

So, give yourself time and space and kindness.

I didn’t do AI or antidepressants, but therapy was helpful (to an extent). All the best advice in therapy doesn’t speed things up.

Feel all the feels, process it all — just don’t bury it.

Buried feelings become resentments and that’s no way to heal.

After processing it all, I started to feel what I felt, but eventually learned I can focus on more positive things as I processed pain.

For now, take all the time you need to get your feet back underneath you!

Both of these last two posts nailed it.
When I was in the thick of it, feeling like I was going crazy, I found that taking long walks helped tremendously. It helped take my mind off everything that was going on. It made me concentrate on my feet and my surroundings, etc. something so simple, was like the biggest thing to help my brain stop and relax some.

The first year was brutal. The second year was miserable. The third year was tolerable. This year (fourth) is pretty good.

The only through it is by taking one day at a time, doing what you can to stay healthy, and being patient with yourself. That last one is hard. The emotional rollercoaster is exhausting! You want to get off, but you can't.

The aftermath of infidelity (dis)colored everything in my life, as if I was living under a constant shadow. As others have said, 3 months is still very early in the journey. There's no quick or easy fix, I'm sorry to say. Keep doing what you're doing. Find healthy outlets for your emotions - journaling, exercise, therapy, rage rooms, punching bags - whatever works best for you. You are going through an immense amount of grief (over an ambiguous loss), and grief is not convenient or predictable. Give yourself endless amounts of grace.

At some point, you might start to feel numb. This is also normal. We get so tired of all the strong feelings that our bodies give up on feeling anything. It's a necessary break. Don't worry - something will reignite you when you least expect it.

Hang in there - one day at a time!