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After a great week or so I'm having a terrible day.

We're four months from d-day and attempting R. Only recently have I started seeing flashes of remorse from WW, which is positive.

I struggle or feel strong about different things each day. Today, it's humiliation.

I feel humiliated by the A and especially by the fact that she brought the OM to our home.

How do others deal with that? Yes, I'm in IC and plan to bring it up during my session later this week.

In our home....that was a big one for me. I couldn't step foot in our living room for months. I would lay on the floor of the next room and look through the door to watch our kids play.

Thinking of what his thoughts were as he was pulling in my driveway.

The home that I provided for our family. The home she was supposed to be protecting while I was working out of town.

I hear you. I get you.....Time helps. Realizing how broken and fucked up she must have been to do those things helps. But most importantly watching the work and the growth and the change in my fWS helps.

this is something i can relate to...i have felt humilated from day one. i am glad that you are in ic...that is the only thing that helps. what i have learned after a very long, painful road...is that i should not be the one who is humilated. i didnt do anything wrong. if anyone should be humiliated, or embarrassed, it should be them. he was the one out cheating, lying, and putting our lives at risk...and people know that about him, and his behavior. he should be ashamed...not me. this is something that my ic tells me all the time..but i still feel it. it is getting better...a little when i think of it this way.

but you know what i feel the most humilated about? it is how i acted...how pathetic i was on dday1. i was trying to convince him to come home, almost begging...he didnt want transparency..and i put up with it...i was so desparate to save the m...and i went through 9 months of false r because i allowed him to treat me like crap. that is humiliating. it wasnt until i got strong...that i put some firm boundaries in place...threw him out...and didnt even entertain r until he did all i needed him to do. i was will and ready to let him go. but the way i acted initally is humiliating to me. but again, my ic tells me that i was in a weak spot...and not ready to be strong...but the important thing is that i did get strong and was able to kick him to the curb. "if you want to get him back, kick his ass to the curb" is what my mother told me. i didnt listen then...but i see the wise words in that now. and as time goes on, and he is "doing all he can"...that feeling of humiliation becomes less and less.

now, when i think about all the cheating behavior....i just think he is an idiot...not me.

your wife brought her trash in your home. yes that would make me feel the same way. but she is the one who should feel ashamed, not you. as her remorse starts to sink in....she will see how stupid that was...how foolish. i am sure she will be the one who is embarrassed.

You are so close to dday, it requires some distance, and hard work, to get the understanding that this is not about you.

Even is the AP and WS both think it is at the time.

In my case, I thought it was about me, and that was encouraged to some degree by my wife's thinking as well. But when the truth came out, it was so fucked up that it was crystal clear that this had absolutely nothing to do with me.

Give yourself time, to heal, to learn, and to understand. Those awful feelings will fade if you work at it.

Yes, the humiliation. I still feel it 14 months later.

WH also brought her to my house. She was also my friend. Her husband knew several weeks before the A ended. Apparently everyone decided I was too weak to find out. Apparently I was too stupid to see what was going on under my nose. So many ways I was humiliated.

My WH is oblivious to it. He says I have no reason to feel humiliated. He just doesn't get it.

I can very much relate to your feelings. I remember feeling the same way, especially at 4 months out.

How do others deal with that?

I finally realized that her affair had nothing to do with me and there was nothing I could have done to control the choices my FWW made. In fact, it is not possible to control the actions of anyone, except yourself.

So sorry for what you are going through.

How do others deal with that?

This one was all about internal messages for me.

I did not cheat, my W did.

I didn't do anything wrong, OM and my W did? Tell me, why again I should feel bad about that other than loss of respect for my W?

What exactly am I embarrassed about? That I'm a cuckold? Or because I couldn't control my W? Truth is I never wanted to control my W and what others think of me, well opinions vary. I know who I am, and I will determine that thank you.

When I started answering those questions for myself I started to feel better. I found some things I wanted to change, but they had nothing to do with my W.

It's a process. I felt humiliation for a while also. It's doesn't have to stay that way.

take care...

I too have feelings of humiliation. My WH brought OW into our bedroom. I feel your pain.

how have i dealt with it? IC/MC was a start. glad to hear you go.

Having a good friend to share my feelings with has been critical for me. WH and i have another couple who are absolute incredible friends of our marriage. They have been a rock for us, and being able to talk things thru with them, and share our feelings has helped me to feel less humiliated. They know a lot of the gory details, and yet, they remain supportive not only to me but to WH as well.

It is still hard, and i still feel humiliated at times, but i keep reminding myself that it was my WH that was broken, not me. He humiliated himself. I did nothing to make him do this, he did it. He has to own those actions and live with them every single day. He has to look at me every single day and live with the pain he caused. he has to hold me when i cry, he has to carry the guilt, shame and burden of what he did to me and our family. As your WW continues to progress, feels more remorse and begins to take ownership of her actions, your feelings of humiliation will diminish. Time. ugh. hate that word. time.

hugs to you. you are not alone!

What wert said, and...

Early on, I was able to attribute my own sense of humiliation to pride, and pride is sort of a mishmash of healthy and unhealthy feelings - fear, anger, maybe some grief, some sense of Victimhood, maybe some sense of over-entitlement, etc. I honored the healthy feelings, self-talked my way around the unhealthy stuff, and refused to let my pride keep me from getting what I wanted. After putting pride aside, I focused on healing myself and figuring out what I wanted.

After that, when I felt humiliation, I made sure I gave myself positive messages - one of which was, 'You know what you want. It's reasonable and attainable and entirely respectable. Don't let pride get in your way - focus on how you're progressing toward your goal.'

The positive self-talk worked wonders. Why, I haven't felt humiliated for weeks now....

Yup - IME, it's another one of those things that takes work and a lot of time.

Also, it looks to me like most of the people we deal with really care about what we've done lately. M troubles and As become yesterday's news pretty quickly, except to the folks who have to recover from them. The public 'forgives' WSes and BSes pretty quickly - Mark and Jenny Sanford, for example.

[This message edited by sisoon at 11:31 AM, June 25th (Tuesday)]

Well, as far as the "in the home" thing goes: I made him/us move. I would have left if he'd stayed too. I just couldn't live there anymore.

I struggle with self-loathing more than humiliation. I'm of the mind that anyone can get cheated on (Heidi Klum, Hallie Berry, Christie Brinkley, Jennifer Aniston...) for me it's more of a "what the hell is wrong with me that I would stay with someone who behaved this way?"

I deal with it mostly by drinking and contemplating suicide (for about 2 glasses of wine) and then slapping myself upside the head, taking a long bath and moving on with my life.

sisoon -

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Thank you.

I feel humiliated and ashamed some days too when I was not the one who committed the act. WH says I have nothing to be ashamed of bc its all on him and her. But living in a small town doesn't help. Also, in my home is a huge thing for me as well. I had to redecorated and recreate the space to feel save and like mine again. Hopefully time will help.

Yeah I have felt the shame too. It was rooted in the insecurities that I felt "If I was a better husband, she would not have . . ."

It took me awhile to grasp that her choices are her choices. They were made with a warped mind that was out of touch with reality. I can't get my mind in that place because my head was/is much more salient. It like trying to read words in language you don't know. It appears as something you can't make sense of.

Of course having a WS that shows you remorse, guilt, et al. My W wrote me a very sincere letter once and it really helped. I read it every now and then. The part that helped me I will share it in the hopes that it explains that staying is not for the weak and we should not let society judge us when most of them have never had to deal with this up close.

"...You have nothing to be ashamed of. You are using a male-centric, socially-indoctrinated mindset to assume how others perceive you. It is difficult for the less enlightened to understand it. People and/or society fears what they don’t understand. So to feign understanding they categorize it into neat rigidly defined boxes. Little do they know this short cut in thinking robs them from witnessing a truly remarkable testament to the good and decent core of people in this world. It takes hope to put effort into a, “lost cause, ” and nourish it. It takes understanding and an appreciation for what makes us all human to witness flaws in others and love them anyway."

At first, I was terribly humiliated by my FWW's A with a co-worker ("Ashamed" in SI's parlance), made worse by the fact that although her AP promised "total discretion", he was bragging about his conquest all over the company.

It was bad enough when his BW outed them on my front porch and I found out that there were three other people in the world that knew intimate details about my M that I didn't, but small company, small town, and pretty soon I heard it from three other guys, one of which was my best friend.

Of course, the Code of Guys being what it is, they all took the opportunity to use the info to take shots at my manhood rather than comfort me like women do with each other.

Of course, wasn't too long before my best friend came looking for a little comfort when he discovered his WW's subversive activities.

So, how did I get over it?

Well, you never really do, and I still have occasional PTSD attacks over 30 years later, but after 5 years or so I stopped thinking about it every day.

In addition to feeling humiliated, I just felt so alone and singled out for special punishment. But, of the five guys I'm close enough to talk to about this kind of thing, I discovered that every one of them had been betrayed by their WW.

So, I finally decided that I was still in love with my FWW, and if I traded her in for a new model, chances were pretty good I was just going to get one that had fucked around on somebody else. Better to stay with the devil I know.

And then I figured out that she was the one that fucked up, and I didn't have anything to be ashamed about. So, I went out and fucked up too. Not recommended, didn't help one bit, and gave FWW an excuse to play the old "I don't care what you did, so you can't ask me anything more about what I did." Now that didn't help at all.

But, we're still married, still in love, and glad we're still together all these years later. Hardest fucking road of my life.

ETA to remove nasty acronyms regarding AP. My bad, sorry.

[This message edited by MoreWould at 7:41 PM, June 25th (Tuesday)]

More Would,

Thank you.

That's what disgusted me the most. That she was in MY house.

She drove up my driveway and looked at our family and children's pictures and the proceeded to mess around with my husband.

Really? Who does that? First of all - shame n my WH for allowing it to occur. Ugh

The humiliation is on them. On them for not having an ounce of integrity and moral fiber.

They were so far gone that everything else was separate.

Don't feel humiliated. Feel betrayed. Humiliation is reserved for something you've done. You didn't do this.

No one can make you feel bad without your permission.

Head up. Anger - yes. Hurt - yes. Sadness - yes. Humiliation - NO

It's funny, but the ONE thing that almost comforted me was FWW's admission that they used our guest room for some of their encounters, the rest were at his house.

A couple of my buddies had their WW borrowing friend's houses and apartments for their trysts, vastly expanding the number of people "in the know", which in their case added to the humiliation.

I had a big enough population of folks looking at me sideways without that.

But back to FMS. Three things got us through it. I really did love my wife, even after I found out. We actually had (and still have) a pretty good marriage to work with. And last, I came to accept that her A wasn't about me.

Hold on tight to yourself brother. It will be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end.

Over time you learn that it has nothing to you, is no reflection on you, and is not your shame to bear. But it takes a long time and a lot of therapy.

My two cents? Move. As soon as possible, if you can. Even though I did not have all the info for some time, I decided I had to move, he had to get rid of his car, and he changed offices - because I didn't need any triggers, real or imagined. Best thing I ever did, because when the shit hit the fan, I already had a plan.

A lot of good advice here.

Keep in mind that your recovery from the affair, which is a long process, is a separate issue from survival of the marriage, or even your wife's recovery from what she did. It is your work that will get you there.

That is the hardest place I've ever been...and it was my own misperceptions that made it that way.

Correcting those miss perceptions, learning the truth about affairs, and about why people do this to other people, was hard work.

I do not feel humiliated, I never did. However, the affair was intended to do that to me, although my wife was so messed up that she can't remember thinking with that intention.

Even our counselor, a very nice lady, said "like a dog going around an pissing on every special place". She did to, with him, in our bed, our shop, where we met for our first date, another spot where we went on another early date, and so on.

I live in a smaller town, three towns in close proximity amount up to around 100,000 people, we have one mall, and I simply cannot go anywhere significant without being close to one of their rendezvous. Over a 100 square mile area, they had sex 9 times, and I can't go anywhere without being close to a place.

However, I did nothing to be ashamed of. It is not my shame that is hidden, it is theirs.

I had a choice, move, run away, or just stay and continue living my life. I was able to choose the latter. My wife was willing to move. She asked me about it. I told her at she could move if she wanted, but I wasn't letting anything or anyone run me out of my home or my town. I like it here, I always have, and I'm raising my kids here (two are now adults).

Perhaps it was easier for me, what my wife did was so fucked up that it was easy to see that it was fucked up when she really confessed...although not so easy to feel in the middle of the night after hearing it.

The AP, he's a nonentity, always will be. My wife fears seeing him again, I don't.

My wife, she has owned her shit and works on it instead of blaming me like she used to.

Me, I'm standinghere.

Humiliation was the hardest part for me. I am a big respect person and it felt like not only did he tell everyone he had no respect for me by cheating but he also made me feel like I was inadequate in bed because he obviously went else where. This alone crushed me daily.

Then I realized something. He humiliated himself. It wasn't me at all. I can satisfy my lover just fine it was his problem. He was broken inside. He just told the world he is broken inside by cheating on me. Yes I'm sure his affair partners felt I was inadequate and or that they were better then myself but they surely can't think that now. Now that they are alone and shunned by him and I am here with him standing strong.

In the end it is not you who was humiliated it was them.