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earlier today, my W told me she doesn't think she can ever believe anything I say to her again... I completely understand why she said it, I have TT'd for YEARS regarding my sins against her, keeping them bottled up until she found them out, then I would "come clean", rather than just confess to begin with... so my question to all of you is this:

Is there anything I can do to make her see that I can be believable again?

[This message edited by Razorbyrd at 8:12 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

Is there anything I can do to make her see that I can be believable again?

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

If she believed you 100% again after years of TT, she'd be a fool. Can you live with someone constantly doubting your actions? With having to be accountable for where you are and where your money's being spent from now until you die? Can she?

IMO you may or may not work your way into being believed by your BS. The ability to Inentionally and methodically TT for years has made the problem so much bigger.

You can work on it. It’s not a choice or switch that is thrown. It’s a process. And the best thing I can tell you is to do the work on yourself and your marriage without trying to measure your status along the way. So much easier said than done.

If you are doing the right things for yourself and the marriage, you’ll get there. But know that if your focus is where you are at and how much longer it will be until you cross the finish line of being believed, then that’s a great milestone for you to put you head back down and keep working.

You won’t get back to normal. You work your way to a new normal.

[This message edited by redrock at 8:39 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

I do not believe that she will truly 100% believe you again. Someone once said make the truth your new religion. For me this looked like; telling my bs the worst shit possible about myself and how i treated her. About her and how in felt about her. This was in total disregard as to how painful it was to her or me.

Currently struggling with this. WH had a EA with a coworker that lasted a few months. I found the text, he tricked truthed and lied about continued contact. The worst of it all was that he was honest when he told me he had a crush on her at the beginning (he said she didn't know about it which was a huge lie because they had already admitted feelings for one another). While I busted my ass trying to save the marriage, he was getting deeper and deeper into his EA. I'm finding it super hard to come back from.

It's actually a simple process. It's called 100% honesty and time.

My wife has TT'd me for 2 solid years. There is absolutely 0 trust for what continues to come out of her mouth. She will say that nothing other than X happened...until the guilt overtakes her 4 or 5 weeks later and admits that it was actually Y that happened. That kind of consistent lying over time takes it's toll.

The only way to rebuild the trust is radical, 100% honesty. Does that mean that you have to admit every single thought you have? No, those should be discussed with an IC who can help you through them.

But it does mean that you need to give her as much of the history as possible. Anything that has not been revealed MUST be revealed.

And don't wait for her to ask. Initiate the honesty. That is also a key component. Answer every question to the best of your ability and don't say "That's all" or "There's nothing else" or "You have the whole story". Tell her that's what you remember right now and that as more details come back to you, you will share them with her.

What she doesn't trust is that you have her back, that you are willing to sacrifice your comfort for her good. Even when it seems that being fully truthful only serves to hurt her more, the reality is that it begins to rebuild the foundation little by little.

You cannot rebuild the relationship without rebuilding the foundation. And that foundation MUST be honesty. Any continues lies and deception by hiding things only destroys any of the foundation that had started being rebuilt. You have to build the foundation with complete and total disclosure. Stop hiding things. It only hurts the relationship further and serves to "prove" to your wife that you cannot be trusted.

I do pray the best for you. But you have to take the steps on your own. Talk to your IC about how to approach your wife is you need to. Ask folks around here. But don't just stop with asking "how" to do it. Action has to follow or none of it makes a hill of beans difference.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Don't simply have the good intentions. Act on them.

Consistency over time RB. Consistently be honest and authentic and don’t stop. BS’s would be fools to believe again without evidence that it’s safe to again. Allow your BW to protect herself. Just demonstrate over and over again for the rest of your marriage that you are being authentic.

RB,

As the others said, it is time and consistency. One of the biggest issues is that you're used to lying to her, and everything is being scrutinized.

The only thing I will add is that you will need to accept that this is where you are and where you will be for a long time. Accepting that this is what your life is and staying positive is q bitch but it's what you have to do. The minute you become salty that she doesn't believe you, that resets the clock. The minute you lie about the smallest thing, that's when you reset the clock. Every BS is going to be different on what they accept, so you have to watch your behavior and make long term corrections now so that as time goes on, she starts to believe you. Make promises and keep them. When she asks questions, answer them thoroughly and truthfully. It takes years of truth to undo years of lies.

My WH lied about a lot of things during the affair and even TT for a bit after as well and even though it’s been almost 5 years since DD and we are reconciled, I will never 100% believe and trust him. The actions alone to me showed me he had no problem lying and keeping things away from me without me having had zero clue. But I encourage you to keep trying and being authentic to her and eventually it’ll get better.

As a BS, 17+ years out from D-day, I never completely trusted my husband ability to tell the truth again. For me, essentially infidelity proved he was capable of lying on an incredible scale. You just don’t come back from that. We successfully reconciled. However, he lost the ability for me to give him the benefit of the doubt when it was important to me. In those cases I needed proof.

Yearsgoneby~

She probably won't 100% trust you again but you can work on building more trust than what you have now.

I know for me WH TTed for years and it destroyed all trust. But it also made me into a walking lie detector. Now if he lies about anything, doesn't even need to be A related I know he is lying and it keeps adding on damage.

Your BW knows when you are lying even if she doesn't call you out on it, so if you want to build trust back up again you need to be honest about everything, even the things that aren't A related.

I like the 'make truth your new religion' idea. If you want to be believable again then you need to change who you are.

You need to become a trustworthy person. You need to BE the person she can always completely trust, even while knowing that she likely will never fully trust you again.

Understand?

Yeah... and I want my WH not to have cheated, or at least once he was caught, not to have lied through his teeth and put me through 4 months of gaslighting and believing I was crazy by keeping in contact with his AP. But hey we can’t change that, can we?

It will be a long long time before she’ll believe a word you say. What you want in the light of your actions is not compatible. Unless she’s completely naive and frankly... stupid. Knowing your BW’s from her posts she’s neither. So I’d say you just need to learn to live with the consequences of your actions.

Will she one day believe you again? Well... maybe. I personally doubt that I’ll ever believe my WH the same way I used to. I mean I was so... trusting (or replace this with stupid if you wish) that when I got an out of office from my WH’s email I texted him “are you cheating on me?” with a laughing emoji, he obviously denied it and I believed him. Not only I believed him but it didn’t even cross my mind to check location services and noticed that it was turned off. He took that day off to spend with the ow. So yeah... I’ll never be that person again. And I miss it. I will always miss trusting my WH to be where he says he is. Trusting that when he says he ceased all contact with his AP it is true. Trusting that if he says “I love you” and “i miss you” to me he isn’t having an affair at the same time. And the list can go on.

You see, the sad part is that your wife not only will always find it hard to believe you but she’ll find it hard to believe anybody so much again.

So back to you: consistency is key. How long will it take for her to believe you to a certain extent at least? Hmmm... that depends on how traumatised she is by your lies. But you can’t put a time limit on it. You just have to hope that one day she will believe you more than she does now.

Well I think also that it's not just about consistency and honesty alone.

From my own personal standpoint the whole point behind trickle truth has to do with control.

People don't just lie for the sake and the fun of lying usually. They lie for another reason.

They use the lies as a cover-up or a means to another end.

And that end is typically to have a sense of controlling things where trickle truth is involved.

There is an inherent lack of empathy and even possibly a lack of brain or at least "💓" the way I see it where trickle truth is concerned.

The ridiculously guilty person who has been so selfish as to violate trust and the marriage by betraying everything and bringing other people into that trust, is still doing the same kind of thing they were doing before...IMHO, at least from the standpoint of motives anyhow.

They are at odds with their spouse. They are still wanting to call the shots. They are still wanting to be the one holding the wheel and the one making the decisions.

The only difference is that it's all done in the mind and with words and the omission thereof (not telling the whole truth, or distorting it significantly)... instead of physically and bodily in person with another person in bed.

[This message edited by Cephastion at 11:23 AM, January 2nd (Wednesday)]

...anything I can do to make her see...

Here's the thing Razorbyrd... even in the question that you ask, there is a sense of manipulation, self-serving, and blame-shifting. I know this can be hard to see (I speak from tons of experience, unfortunately) but I'll try to explain.

First, you want TO MAKE her see. In other words, you want to control the outcome. That is about YOU, it is not about her. Your sentiment is not one of concern for her needs or what is best for her, it is about what you want and what is best for you. From her perspective, this is 100% the same as your thinking during the affair. It was about what you needed and wanted, and at her expense. I understand that your vision and emotions probably reason that being with you and saving the marriage are "good things", unlike the affair. But the motivation is the same. It is what YOU want. This is really important to understand. In order for her to even consider trusting you again to any degree (it will never be 100%) she needs to see that the guy who betrayed and lied to her has changed at his core. This statement alone shows that you have not.

Next, you are implying that her not seeing your viewpoint or wanting what you want is the problem. To her it will probably feel as if you are blaming her for the state your marriage is in. "If only she would see how I..." What she understands is that you cheated and lied and didn't give a damn about how much it hurt her, you just did what you wanted and wiped your feet on her afterward. She is not to blame for the distance between you and the damage done. That is 100% on you. Her not trusting you, or any negative feelings she has towards you, are the direct result of your actions. It is not her job to fix the marriage, she is the victim here. It is your job. If only YOU could see how much damage has been done and how alone, hurt and decimated she feels, it would go a lot farther towards your goal than trying to change her mind.

Finally, her trust in you will likely never change because of what you do or what you don't do. It will change based on who you are. She will believe you when you are someone who is believable. Think of it this way... first, I want you to imagine some people you would be likely to trust, such as maybe your doctor, a spiritual leader, your best friend, a relative. Now, think of some people you are likely to NOT trust, such as a prisoner in jail, a shady contractor, a politician, a guy in a dark alley. Why do you trust some people and not others? It is because of WHO they are inside, how they conduct themselves, especially when faced with obstacles and opportunities. You trust people because they have self respect and dignity in everything they do. You don't trust people who seem like they are only out for themselves and their next opportunity. All your wife sees right now is the latter. Sure, she sees the good in your too, and it is SUPER IMPORTANT to remember that! She DOES see the good in you, but it is buried under a very selfish and entitled attitude right now. She doesn't trust you because you are not trustworthy. Being trustworthy is not about what you do but who you are, so you need to worry about yourself first. Become a self-respecting, self-loving, honest and empathetic guy, and her trust in your will return faster than you may think it could, but that won't happen until you make the necessary changes.

Stop worrying about yourself. I'm not saying you are aren't important or worthy, I'm just saying that it is you that fucked up, and so any discomfort and pain you feel right now is due to your own choosing and actions. Your wife is hurting too, but NOT because of her own actions and choices, because of what is and has been thrust upon her. Just go be compassionate and loving and lose the agenda. Maybe you'll reconcile? Maybe you'll divorce? Whichever happens, she still loses because she got fucked over either way, and that's on you. So go be remorseful and really mean it.

My advice? If you aren't already, find a good IC and then go do some work on who you are and why you are the way you are right now. Work on your FOO, dig, figure out what you were really trying to do by having an affair, and then learn how to handle that problem in a healthy way. Were you looking to feel good about yourself, to feel special and loved and wanted and attractive and powerful? Find a way to make that happen that involves self-respect and the ability to make yourself feel special. When you do, it removes the need to have an affair, or to have anyone else fill holes in your soul.

I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh or attacking, it is not meant to be, not at all. I'm just trying to hit you up with some truth, speaking as someone who has walked in your shoes and struggled with the same topics. When you let go of all the shame and guilt and neediness, it will all become very clear and simple. Right now you are just too buried in fear to see past it.

^^^Great post by DaddyDom.

Mine was meant to make you think, DD's laid it all out. If/when you have accepted what he has to say my post will be immediately

obvious to you.

Change your outlook. Change yourself. Make yourself into a better man.

Or not.

great posts!! thank you everyone for taking the time to offer your wisdom and experience... I'll be reading them several times over to be sure and take away everything I can from them...

thank you again

BS here. Yearsgoneby made a good post, specifically:

For me, essentially infidelity proved he was capable of lying on an incredible scale. You just don’t come back from that. We successfully reconciled. However, he lost the ability for me to give him the benefit of the doubt when it was important to me. In those cases I needed proof.

There may come a time when, after you've successfully put your money where your mouth is and backed up your assertions with solid, consistent trustworthy behavior, that your wife will get to a place where she doesn't question everything you say.

However, I agree that there may never be a day when she trusts you 100% again - not like she did before the betrayal. So if that's your goal, I'd let go of it.

If you truly want to reconcile, just resign yourself to the idea that even ten, twenty years from now, there will be times when her old insecurity gets the better of her and she asks to see your phone, or to check your email, or even just asks some pointed, probing questions about where you were or when you're coming home. And don't take those things personally, or get defensive, or start to berate her and tell her that 'it's been XXX years, you should be over this by now' - because it's not something people 'get over'. Take instances like that in stride, with grace and understanding, and don't make her feel bad or stupid for them. Because they will happen.

I hope that makes sense. Good luck to you.

It's actually been 23 years for us since it all happened.

On the one hand, we both rug swept everything so effectively that I did actually trust her for the most part almost the way I did before hand.

But on the other hand, I rugsweeped it all so hard, that the pain hadn't really hit me full force and consequently I had never really been healed from it either. It all just lay there like an unburied corpse under the rug. After a while those unresolved issues cropped up in other ways.

Since we started going through a kind of rediscovery from late 2015 until now, my trust is very strongly affected.

However with 23 years out of 25 of faithfulness on her part without a hint of anything less, I can say that I do trust her to a very high degree in many ways and in many areas.

I guess one way of putting it would be to say that at this point she is innocent until proven guilty pretty much at all times. And by that I'm referring to my own feelings and my own Outlook, since she has actually been innocent of any further wrongdoing in the adultery department for about 23 years now.

But when a red flag or even one with a shade of pink or a very small polka dot of rouge crosses my field of vision... Well that's when the mistrust hits or the feeling of mistrust rather. You could also possibly just call it a trigger.

I didn't have triggers before she betrayed the marriage and me. Well only one technically I guess and that turned out to be a pre-emptive one where the shoe absolutely fit, since it was a premonition about her first AP and he was stalking her and actively preying on my wife and actually threatening my marriage by being alone with her at my house when i wasn't there. The actual physical adultery itself didn't happen at that moment on the day of that "prophetic trigger", but they both saw fit to remedy that just a few days later.

In any case, I trigger weekly and sometimes daily now but I'm kind of in my third year after a fashion. There are areas in which I trust her very deeply and areas which I flatly do NOT.

I don't know that I could ever allow myself or forgive myself to be that stupid and trusting in those particular areas ever again.

And yet when I say that, I'm referring more to my gut feelings, certain vibes, and scenarios rather than to day-to-day life monitoring or micromanaging as such.

I am often gone for days on end leaving her behind at home and at work free to come and go at least as far as her ability is concerned.

I don't worry about her...I'm not paralyzed with fear over what she's doing or not doing. But of course we're talking about when I have no vibes or red flags or internal alarms going off.

I think the heightened sensitivity never goes away for the BS any more than for a person who has been in war who flinches or hits the deck when they hear something like a bullet or a bomb coming.

As long as I don't hear bullets zipping by or the whistling of a bomb falling from the sky... Or feel the shadow of that thing closing in around me or over me... Then we're both relatively okay. But it doesn't take much. At least not at this stage in my recovery. And again, in one sense with respect to the trust we are 23 years adultery free out and away from it... And yet in another way I'm about 3 years into my recovery because I only started really digging into the details and facing it in the fall of 2015.

So I guess you could say that with my particular situation and advice, you get both a long-time veteran reconciled perspective and also a three year version with a lot of ongoing triggers and trauma processing over the last 3 years and seemingly ongoing into the near future as well.

[This message edited by Cephastion at 10:59 AM, January 4th (Friday)]

I like that you used the word "believe" instead of "trust" as they are two very different things. I think you can be believable very quickly - trustworthy involves what CR said:

It's actually a simple process. It's called 100% honesty and time.

I think to become trusted you must be believed over and over and over again. Each time you are believable builds towards trust - and this goes for anything, not just infidelity. When I tell my WH that I believe him, he knows and understands it means I believe what he is telling me about a specific action. When he came home and told me that the AP had tried to contact him at work and he told her "no" and walked away, I told him I believed him, and I did. The fact that AP sent him like 3 crazy messages the next day complaining he refused to talk to her at work reinforced it - so it was a bonus that she actually communicated for once - but regardless, that just confirmed my belief. He now phrases things in terms of belief and not trust - and I think it's a good way to think about it as it's not so insurmountable that way.

Will she ever trust you 100%? Probably not. Granted I don't think I will ever trust anyone romantically 100% again - my WH stole that level of trust from me forever I think...so don't expect to get that back with your BS either.