SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I may take a different angle than many - but I suggest you take the emphasis off of forgiveness, and focus instead on healing yourself.

What allowed you to make the decision to cheat - and continue making it for the length of your affair? What was the mental gymnastic that you used to give yourself permission to destroy your husband and marriage? Work on fixing YOU.

You can't fix your husband, he has to do that. BUT what you can do is make yourself at least somewhat safe again - and become someone he might decide is worth the gamble of staying with. You have to win your way back into the marriage - just ending the affair (oops, sorry, my bad) isn't enough. Work on being the person you want to be.

It will help if you can find empathy. Can you imagine your husband's pain? You'll never really get the full extent of it, but TRY to see and feel the result of your actions through his eyes.

Forgiveness, if it ever comes, would be great. But IMO that isn't the real destination. A lot of people want to forgive and forget - that's NOT a good thing. Forgive maybe (if you earn it), but forget? Never - from a BH perspective, that would be a really dumb thing to do. A saying among the betrayed is: When someone shows you who they really are, PAY ATTENTION. You showed your BH who you are - now it's up to you to fix yourself so that behavior never repeats.

Yes, you need to forgive yourself. I carried my guilt for EIGHTEEN YEARS. With blinders on. It wasn't until my WH had his OEA that I was forced to deal with it. Hindsight is 20/20. I can see so clearly now that we were just sleepwalking through our marriage all these years. His A forced me to take off the blinders. I won't say I'm glad either one (A) happened, but I will say we are connecting on a deeper and more honest level than we EVER have. But why couldn't I see this 18 years ago, 19 years ago? Why did it take almost losing our marriage for us to even begin to have one?

I don't think that most of us are suggesting that you should beat yourself up but we are saying that what the BS needs is not for you to "forgive yourself" and move on, but for you to be able to really look hard and honestly at what it is about you and your thinking that got you to a place where you were willing to hurt people you love and to risk losing relationships that you value. My WH moved from "I was really lonely" to "I was really selfish and self absorbed" but it took a year and a willingness to step away from the justifications that allow a person who isn't a psychopath to engage in behavior that they know is wrong and still get up in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror. It is a willingness to be truly an honest person. It may be that you had the A because you wanted out of the marriage, but didn't have the decency or strength to be honest, it may be that you wanted to have your cake and eat it too. But you need to figure that out. Saying oops I made a mistake but I'm a good person and it won't happen again isn't enough.