I want to share an older post with you that I think is relevant to your situation. I had similar issues in MC, but not to the same degree. I'd let the MC know that pre-Affair issues are *off the table* until the affair is dealt with.
It sounds like you're getting the right mindset after initially being bombarded with tons of bad advice. Which is not to say that it's *completely* horrible advice, because giving your WS space to feel safe enough to share the truth (as they see it, not to be confused with objective truth) is a valuable tool in, you know, getting information you can work with and base practical decisions on. It's akin, in my mind, to telling an average looking girl how gorgeous she is so she'll take off her pants. She gets a little of what she wants so you ultimately get what you want. If you keep telling her, "Eh, you're sort of average and I've had better, but it's not like my weiner will rot off from touching you."...that's probably going to end in a romantic fail. Same way if you blow up at your WW every time she says something stupid, insensitive, self-serving or Lake District caliber foggy. You can take all of those gems, put them in your journal and use them as excuses to forget your anniversary or her birthday next year. It all comes out square in the end.
I've heard on lots of other forums that you can't punish and reconcile at the same time. It's a popular theme, especially from WW's on those sorts of forums who want to blame their husbands' failures or the state of the marriage for their out-of-character behavior. I happen to disagree. You just make sure you don't call it punishment. Call it "acting from hurt" or "triggering about x", where x just happens to occur at convenient times for you. There's a driving need in a great many BH's to obtain some sort of equity out of this process, to level the playing field. This is usually dismissed with a trite "nothing is ever going to make you even, so get over it" sort of expression.
I disagree. Even is whatever you say it is. Some guys pursue that sense of justice with RA's. The outcome is rarely what they expect it to be in terms of satisfaction, so it is considered a fail. I think RA's are more a failure of imagination on the justice/vengeance scale, and that's why people tend to be disappointed by them. They don't truly address the need for equity. A big part of what galls BH's over time is the sense that their wife got one over on them, that she has access to all of this secret information, and he can never have it. He's supposed to become Mr. Emotional Transparency and a surrogate female BFF so she never feels unfulfilled again and gets the Best. Marriage. Evar., and thus be content because she's not going to cheat on *that*. LOOK AT HOW MUCH HAPPIER WE R NOW THAT YOU DO EVERYTHING I WANT AND R SO AFRAID OF MY WILD SNOG-SEEKING VAGINA THAT YOU WILL NEVER DARE FAIL!!!!
Which, of course, ignores the fact that most of us were pretty decent husbands in the first place. This is one of the major issues I have with most infidelity recovery philosophies. They imply that the BH must clean up all of his shit, every mean thing he ever said, every insensitive thing he ever did and convert himself into the emotional version of Fabio in a way that precisely fits his wife's taste...and her job is to stop fucking other people. As if her fucking other people was the only thing she ever did wrong in the marriage, while *everything* he did was wrong. People conveniently forget that for every WS out there with a list of grievances for their spouse's failures, there is a BS who has been married to that WS who has a list of grievances JUST AS LONG that we accepted, tolerated and loved them through in exactly the way they did not accept, tolerate and love us. Instead, our shit became the legitimate fuel to justify their behavior.
Hello goose, meet gander. If you make me pay (which you have, by fucking other people as a way of dealing with it) for everything I've done wrong, then you've stated definitively that the way relationships should work is that people make others pay for their failures. No double standards. Either that, or we have to agree that I have now paid in full for everything I've ever done wrong, and for the rest of our married life, you have to shut the fuck up about it, because I've paid. It's not my fault if your method of exacting payment didn't work for you. You can't expect me to pay twice.
Which is a really long way around of saying by focusing on you, on what makes you happy and what gives your life meaning outside of the marriage, is a really good start. I was so sick of reading about relationships, about marriage repair, about understanding love-fucking languages, knowing your wife's menstrual cycle, understanding her FOO, blah, blah, blah, by about a year out, I was ready to join a monastery. Or get an 18 y.o. girlfriend who wasn't old enough yet to realize how fucked up she was by being human. Toss up, there.
Instead, I went back to grad school for fun. Wrote a couple of novels. Decided I could play video games if I wanted. Finally bought MLB Extra Innings so I could watch all the baseball I wanted. In other words, I invested my energy in finding out what brought me happiness instead of burning myself out trying to figure what would make her happy, and thus make my marriage a safe place.
Because one thing I learned: when you like yourself and you like your life, one part of it (like your marriage) going into the shitter doesn't take away your joy from the rest of it. It gives you the objectivity to decide what you want to keep in your life and what you can excise because it's become more trouble than it's worth.
It is infinitely better to be married because you want to be there but don't have to be than to feel like you can't imagine a future where you're not married to this person. Working on you is a way of preventing those sorts of failures of imagination.
And working on you is not fixing those things your wife has identified as problems with you. What the fuck does she know? This is a woman who handles life's curveballs by doing impersonations of the Holland Tunnel with her vagina. She is not qualified to diagnose other people's dysfunctions, let alone yours, whom she has identified as someone who is worth, or deserves, to be traumatized and punished for all the things she doesn't like about you.
You work on the shit *you* want to make better about yourself. Maybe you want to learn how to shoot automatic weapons. Maybe you want to study knife fighting or get some cool ninja-hacking skills. Maybe you realize that you're not assertive enough in the workplace and need to work on speaking up for yourself. We've all got a list of things we'd like to try out, to see if the destinies fit, but we put them on the back burner once we got married, because we didn't think our spouse could handle something so radically different. Guess what? Now is your time to explore those things. What's she going to say? "Who you're becoming makes me feel scared and helpless, like I don't know (how to control) you anymore?"
Guess what, I had all of those feelings from you fucking other men, and I had to grow up and deal. Welcome to the adulthood club. You should be getting a beanie and vest in the mail shortly.
So that's what part of my process looked like. We're six years out. Happily married. My wife has done a ton of work on herself. I might get into that later.
You heal. Life goes on.