SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

There are alot of BS's on here who can NOT talk with their spouse about the infidelity because the WS gets angry when they try. And/or they are trying rugsweep and just want to move forward without talking about the issues the infidelity has brought about. Im one of those. My WS sees no point in discussing it,he is "not that person anymore," and gets angry or closes himself up when I try. If it weren't for SI,if I didn't have this outlet,I would go insane. I NEED to talk about it. I need to hear from other's who are going through the same things I am.

Not all BS's have a WS who is willing to listen.

My FWS has made many changes,and he did talk about it in the beginning. But he's gotten to a point where he feels "enough is enough." I,however,am not at that point.

My FWS does know I am here,it's not a secret. And he knows my username,and I have told him he can look at my posts or profile any time he wants. There is nothing I say on here that I would have a problem with him reading.

[This message edited by confused615 at 12:23 PM, May 25th (Friday)]

Howiheal, you sound just like my H used to.

He spent a lot of time blaming SI for the fact that I wouldn't just go along with his rugsweeping agenda.

In fact, he was right. SI showed me what rugsweeping looked like. It also showed me what gaslighting, justifying, blameshifting, and passive-aggressive baloney look like. It showed me how to stand up against my H's tide of unremorseful blather, and it showed me the difference between pretty words, and actions.

SI gave me the tools to know what real remorse looks like, what true reconciliation was about, and to not excuse crappy behavior.

Lots and lots of unremorseful WSs don't like SI. It's easy to see why: An empowered BS is a lot less likely to put up with a WS's crap.

The WS anger is of course misdirected. It's not SI that's the problem - it's the behavior of the WS.

Might be worth thinking about.

[This message edited by changed forever at 12:47 PM, May 25th (Friday)]

Posting as a member...

Wow, that's quite a stretch- comparing people who are looking for support for one of the most damaging and traumatic events in their lives to cheaters who betray and destroy their partners with their horrible choices.

Fact- the acts of betrayal strip our BSes of any sense of safety. It changes them, sometimes in a fundamental and permanent way. It's not fun, it's not healthy and has to be a soul-wrenchingly lonely place to be. So when a BS comes here looking for support it's because of the actions of cheaters like you and me.

Wow, that's quite a stretch- comparing people who are looking for support for one of the most damaging and traumatic events in their lives to cheaters who betray and destroy their partners with their horrible choices.

Fallen – I’m not sure I see it the same way as far as teh "stretch" part. I don’t think it is a stretch if you think about it from a different angle. Many of the things that are in that list are things that lead to EA’s when combined with wayward thinking. But…

Fact- the acts of betrayal strip our BSes of any sense of safety.

That makes it near impossible (at least for some time) for the WS to be the “go-to” person in the relationship.

I’m stretched for time and this might be simplified. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see this as a bad question or a stretch. It really opens up dialogue in an area that many (including me) have a hard time with - defining the line between the black and white in the grey aftermath of the A.

Foundoutlater, you answered your own "question", the interaction here could be not-so-innocent when combined with he wayward mindset. Perhaps, that's why some waywards find it uncomfortable: they're viewing it with their wayward mindset. While the betrayed is seeing it as the safe place they need.

It all boils down to intentions. What are the intentions of people in this club?

Most are in this club for support for healing their M and themselves. Even if the M ends up in D the intentions are to get clarity when lives are in chaos.

IRL a person, doing the list you gave, the intentions are seeking external validation BUT have poor coping skills.For example, venting to someone about all the stress in your life. You find a person you can talk to because you don't want to worry or upset your spouse. The person you confide in appears soooo understanding. AHHHH such an escape from everyday responsibilities. But you leave out your role in causing so much stress and worries. Which leads to clouded boundaries. Then leads to an EA,so on and so on.

We all need a shoulder to cry on every now and then. However, when it's relied on more to the stranger danger than the spouse, there's the intention.

I see this forum as being very different. For one, I don't keep it secret from my H. Two, most of the people are anonymous to me. I don't know them in IRL. Three, I do keep boundaries even on this site.

In order for it to be on a level of an EA, I would need to keep it a secret, it would need to be IRL and be with someone of the opposite sex that I was devoting quite a bit of time and emotional energy to instead of my marriage.

I consider this site as my group therapy. I get more here than I got when I was doing IC sometimes.

t/j

Not to quibble but I don't think an EA has to be IRL necessarily either...I have heard of EAs arising from chat room, craigslist, online gaming interactions, etc. where the OP is just as anonymous as anyone here on SI.

I agree that the intent is what separates things as support vs. EA.

That is a very good point. It would be very easy to create an EA here if the boundaries were not clear.

I am appreciative of all the responses and opinions. It gives me more understanding from each of your vantage points. It would be difficult to drum up statistics on how many of the affairs represented on this site related to a friend, co-worker or family associations. It would also be going out on a limb to say with certainty that all of those affairs did not begin with having sex. It would be fair to say that most of these types of affairs probably began with less divulging conversation and with poor boundaries, comfort and secrecy morphed into something else. And a BS, if no one else, would see the treachery to any relationship by the appearance of any of these warning signs, but that wasn’t the point of the post.

It is true as a non-BS, I may never know the exact feelings and impact this has had on my wife, sufficing to say, I can only emphasize as an apologetic, remorseful, loving husband, who is searching from my wife’s passion again.

As it’s been said here, there are a lot of grey areas and really gets down to the intentions. I don’t think many on here are intentionally trying to secretly deceive and/or exclude the partner from the conversation, or their marital reconciliation. However the real rehabilitation of the relationship relies on two individuals only.

Just my thoughts. I hope you will indulge me on a couple of more questions I have in later posts.

Now if you agree these are foundational elements that should never occur outside of the relationship, how do you rationalize their widespread occurrence of such interactions, open or PM conversations on this site? I could go down each number and reference how they apply here. Or is sharing details of yourself and your relationship to any other in time of pain just part of human nature?

Recovering from an A doesn't happen in a vacuum. "If we agree to principle A, then must always be true". That's a false argument. I'll post a quote from another member here that describes what a BS has to do to recover from an A.

"The guy who stabs you in an alley isn't the one you go to for stitches to patch you up. Same thing with infidelity. You can't look to your WW to heal you. She has an agenda of avoiding abandonment. That's going to be her motivation for a long time. How can she save the marriage, convince you that there are so many reasons to stay, that you'd be a fool to give up what you've got.

Shit.

The person who wields the knife should not have the privilege of healing the victim. They shouldn't be given the opportunity to claim pride and victory for patching you up and presenting a stronger, healed you to the world, as though the stabbing wasn't a big deal -- just a bump in the road. Achieving that victory over a campaign of intentionally aimed malice and emotional violence should be yours alone. You should be able to say at the end of it, "I did this. I healed me. I did it on my own and emerged unbowed. Whatever it took to become whole, I did it."

The primary contribution your WW makes to that process is to stop creating new hurts, stop fucking other people, and not doing things that hinder your recovery. She starts that process by getting her own shit straightened out, whatever that might be. She has to do that just to keep the possibility of R on the table, not to earn her way into it like it should be a foregone conclusion.

This is part of the reason that the critical questions you should be asking right now aren't "Can I/Should I try to save my marriage?" but "How can I heal myself? What do I need to recover from this?"

Enough said.

Now before you sharpen the 2 x 4, those aren’t my real questions. My question is: With all the accepted and desired care, trust and comfort given by outsiders on this site, what becomes the catalyst to return the emotional investment back into the relationship? Why would you revert back to seeking the support and trust from “that person” in your relationship if you already have it readily available in abundance here?

The catalyst would be knowledge of self. But why should SI be about turning back to your WS? It's about healing.

What do I want? Can my WS provide that? Do I even want my WS to provide anything for me anymore? SI can be a catalyst to leave your M. It is whatever we make it.

I can only emphasize as an apologetic, remorseful, loving husband, who is searching from my wife’s passion again.

I think this is where you need to focus more... and not so much on the other sources of support your BS is getting.

FWH's support and understanding about SI was help to me. It showed me that he understood the damage he did, and he wanted me to heal.

Trying to cut off avenues of support for your BS or control how she uses them will not help you R.

I don't see this as being about an EA. I see it as a BS who does not feel secure enough yet to reinvest in her M and a WH who doesn't fully grasp that his wife's hesitancy isn't about SI or another support group. It's about how much work he puts into making himself safe enough that she feels comfortable recommitting to the M.

Let me start with the setup. We can all agree, the any of the following could be construed as the warning flags for conversational or emotion movement outside of a relationship:

1) Your partner starts to say or share things to a person(s) that you wouldn’t if you were standing next to them.

For me, one big key is the (s) after the person.

A few years ago a male friend of mine told me a secret about his sexual past. (I’m female.) It could have been a very intimate moment.

What kept it from feeling intimate to me is that another friend was ALSO present. It wasn’t a 1-1 dynamic.

Now before you sharpen the 2 x 4, those aren’t my real questions. My question is: With all the accepted and desired care, trust and comfort given by outsiders on this site, what becomes the catalyst to return the emotional investment back into the relationship? Why would you revert back to seeking the support and trust from “that person” in your relationship if you already have it readily available in abundance here?

Because I want a 1-1 intimate relationship with a person who is my partner. I can't get that here.

As for MC and IC appointments, I’d say most, if not all, are known to occur by both parties. And even in some case, they are setup, if not scheduled and monitored for attendance, by the other person. Whereas some of the dialogue may be strictly confidential, here you have professionally trained individuals with the resources to evaluate, coach and monitor progress.

Don't count on it. YMMV, but I have only had bad experiences with MC and IC. Granted I believe that the last IC had some sort of agenda that drove all of her advice, and was looking at disciplinary actions over her behaviour. She was actually quite supportive of STBXW's A, and thought it was abusive of me to be upset.

What an IC does have is a professional obligation not to become involved with a patient, while here we promote a moral obligation not to become involved on the site. (Thats the reason NB is no longer called Dating.) Not everyone takes their professional or moral obligations seriously, but here or IC, the obligation is the same.

My own personal rule about threads and PM's while I was trying to R, or if I am talking to someone who is trying to R, is that if an exchange with one person goes on for too long, I will poof from the conversation. Not sure how to define too long, but I generally knew it when I saw it.

SI, same sex best friends (in heterosexual relationships) family members, IC... These are places we get support. They are not places we go where we risk destroying our marriage through infidelity. SI is not the same thing as IC. It is better than IC because people here understand infidelity better than anyone who is merely trained in theories regarding infidelity.

I just think that WSes need to be extremely careful complaining about where their BS gets support. As long as the support is appropriate, crosses no boundaries AND the BS is also making their feelings known to the WS, then there's nothing wrong with it.

They don't feel safe talking to us because we are the source of their pain and insecurity. Only with consistent action can a BS begin to trust again, and throwing out a wordy argument like this does little to support your cause, IMO. It just looks like a way for a WS to measure what they've done against the need their BS has to seek understanding from others who've suffered like they have.

Fallen,

If you look back at what I wrote I have not entered this dialogue with a combative tack or complaint. It was an open question involving emotional support from/with the WS. I thought I posted in the appropriate Wayward section, although I did admittedly know this section is heavily reviewed by the BS’s. I provided accolades for the support from this site in my subsequent responses. If a differing perspective or wayward question is unallowable on this site, please let me know.

Fallen- Both of your statements were written beautifully. My WH was very resentful of SI because he was used to being able to abuse me without the level of support I got from SI. I think it's a red flag when WSs put down SI. I understand that they may not see it this way but they should be grateful we have such a healthy venue for support and

encouragement. Short of abusive situations, R is supported. Even in abusive situations like my own, people were very supportive of my doing what I needed to do and were cautious about how they judged WH. Rarely is any BS encouraged to make quick or impulsive decisions. I believe SI saves lives, not only BS's

but I suspect a few WS's as well. I had every reason to leave WH but was given the support here I needed to give him a chance when he was actively working on sobriety. In no way should anyone be comparing the support of SI with the betrayal of infidelity. That is absurd.

[This message edited by Ladyogilvy at 9:18 PM, May 25th (Friday)]

I'm not a BS, and you posted without a stop sign so BSes are free to post on this thread.

I'll just go back to your original question and ignore the "setup" because that's what I think it was... a setup.

You said:

With all the accepted and desired care, trust and comfort given by outsiders on this site, what becomes the catalyst to return the emotional investment back into the relationship?

The catalyst, in spite of the pain we brought, is the love our BSes feel for us; the shared history and intimacy. Nobody on SI offers the same kind of love, support and intimacy that a spouse or SO does.

Why would you revert back to seeking the support and trust from “that person” in your relationship if you already have it readily available in abundance here?

Because what our BSes are seeking isn't the same thing we sought when we cheated. IMO, WSes seek escape. BSes seek understanding. That's a pretty significant difference.

Why would a BS revert back to seeking support from their cheating spouse? Because they deem us worthy of another chance. Because they love us enough to risk their broken hearts with us again.

as a BS had the A not been an exit A, and had we stayed together and tried to R, and I had still found si ... I would have still posted as I have and do ...

nothing I have said on here about the A, healing, triggers, venting, the D, and so on has been a lie ... and nothing I have written is anything I would be uncomfortable having Xh read ...

It's the truth, the one who should be uncomfortable with it is him ...

But we never R, his was an exit A, we D ... those facts do not change how I post or what I say ... still the truth ... just like it would have been if we were R'ing ...

that is where the difference is for me anyway ... that is the boundary ...