SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I'm 5 months post DDay and am finding myself waking up in the night with thoughts of leaving. Most of the time I feel committed to R but at night-time I have pretty horrid dreams and question whether I am with someone who deserves me. I feel so deeply betrayed. We came through such a rough period (many miscarriages and the sadness that brings) for him to start cheating just when we were about to be a family. I ask myself if I ever really knew im, if we actually share values or it is all an illusion. How can I know who this man really is when what he did for so long was so unthinkable for me? During the daytime he is loving and a great father and i see glimpses of the man I fell in love with again. At night-time all my fears come out and I wonder if something else will happen just when I relax and start trusting again....like when I started to think our lives had turned and my son's birth marked a new chapter for us we'd both get to enjoy. I don't trust myself or any of my instincts any more. I wonder whether I should leave every day because I feel such profound loss. I had a cheating father and I feel like I unwittingly picked a man like my dad when that was the furthest thing from my mind. I watched him make my mother's life hell and I have no doubt it helped kill her. Yet I stay....and I feel so weak for staying. This is the tougher option in many ways. To try to rebuild on such shaky foundations. Does anyone else struggle like this? While I love to hear of the successes I wonder if other BSs share this horrid anxiety that they may be throwing their lives away on someone who will never love them the way they deserve to be loved....

Mjane, I could have written your post. I am also struggling. I had a father who was an unremorseful serial cheater and as a child, I knew this, by age 10. It was horrible. I feel like, hard as I tried to avoid it, I have given my children the same pain I had as a child. I am still in disbelief that my WH knew how much pain I had in my childhood, and adulthood, from my father's cheating, and then he chose to cheat on me and on our children. How could he be so selfish so cruel; who is this man, really? The man who shared the births of my babies, who I have been with for 22 years...the man I thought he was, is not real. So then, who the heck is he? And I feel so stupid for staying, sometimes; in my dark times I feel like there is nothing that could ever make up for what he put me through. Maybe I am just prolonging the inevitable and I should just leave now, save myself a lot of time and painful effort.

Then those feelings pass and they back up to a corner of my mind and I can see all the ways he is trying, changing, showing me what I need to see with his actions. So here I am. I can't know it is truly the wrong choice to stay, unless I stay, and try R and see what the outcome is.

I think all the doubts just come with the territory of being vulnerable to more pain from the WS. It's a conscious decision to take a chance on someone we know to be capable of betrayal. How could we not doubt?

(((MJane)))

I have had those dreams,....those restless nights....those "what the hell am I doing trying to R?" thoughts.

I believe this is part of the "growing through" process.

Process = time + action.

Your dreams, introspection, observation....all of your choices are the actions in this formula.

From 3 months post-DD till about 1O months out......this post of yours WAS my post.

I broke the complex issues down into manageable pieces. I started with the singular goal of regular sleep. I starting using over the counter sleep aides ....goal of 6 straight hours..... Get at least 1 REM cycle in, which is the point the brain repairs nerve damage. Nerve damage happens everyday from normal brain use...... Post-DD our brains, as you are all too aware , are working over-time.

17 months out now.....it gets better, a lot better.

I still have daily pain , I still have disturbing dream, but I am healing..... You are too . I submit to you that if, at 5 months out, you felt really good or even just OK,,,,, the odds of you rug-sweeping and NOT healing and processing would be extremely high.

This is pain at the trauma level. You have been traumatized.....you have been victimized (you had no say in what has happened to you) but you are not a victim. you have power and you are showing this.

The process of healing is painful, but you are doing it. This healing is crucial to your future.... With or without your husband, you need to heal. He can help, and his choices will need to be considered as you move towards a decision to R or not....but you can heal all on your own.

God be with you.

[This message edited by blakesteele at 5:50 AM, January 21st (Tuesday)]

Thanks both - helps to know this isn't insanity - your last line blakesteele make me almost cry:

He can help, and his choices will need to be considered as you move towards a decision to R or not....but you can heal all on your own.

I have days when I wonder if this wound ever heals. You're right though that now I am in a much better place than I was in the first weeks. Now, though, I have more time to absorb what has happened. For the first time I actually thought about the very first time they slept together and asked him what excuse he'd used to get away that evening as I was on couch on bed-rest in last weeks of a high-risk pregnancy. The callousness of the timing never stops hurting. I question who I am a lot as I would have expected to leave someone capable of this. Life is more complicated than we imagine it to be I guess. I am also haunted by OW - the strongest desire to intrude in life as she has in mind (she harassed by phone/mails over Christmas vacation -using different numbers - but seems to have stopped). It helps to share all these doubts here and hear I'm not the only one struggling to decide and move forward.