People can and do truly recover after infidelity. That's not to say recovery just falls into one's lap. It doesn't. We have to work for it. We have to be proactive in our healing. We have to reach a state of acceptance for what happened and we have to also accept that it was never about us. For me, somewhere between year four and year five, I realized I was okay. As hard as my WH's betrayal had been (and man, I was wrecked, bug meets windshield wrecked), but still, it just came to me one day that the pain of infidelity wasn't a part of my daily life any more. I had other problems, but they were garden-variety, everyday, solvable, life problems.
I'm going to re-post something I wrote for another member and maybe tweak it a bit, but it'll give you a bit of a look into some things which helped me...
Typical healing from this kind of intimate betrayal is two to five YEARS, and actually, I found the second year a bit harder because by then, the limerence of HB begins to fade and depression can settle in. The grieving process is very much akin to grieving a death, almost like your spouse had died. The person you knew is gone, at least in terms of how your brain recognized her. Now there's this new person, still the same but different too. It's weird and hard to describe, but the Five Stages of Grief demand their due... denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They don't always come in order and they repeat themselves over and over until finally some stage of acceptance will stick.
In terms of the relationship, you'll most likely find yourself back on the fence at odd times, wondering what your life might be like if you just pulled the plug on the marriage. Ride that out. Give it its due. You CAN still change your mind, and there's FREEDOM in knowing that. It's important that you take ownership of the space you choose to live in. Whether that be R or D, or simply "trying" to accomplish one or the other, you can let go of that horrible sense of victimization by realizing that right now... YOU have agency. You are in charge of your choices. You've planted your feet where you want to be (at least for the moment) and that choice was a CONSCIOUS one. When you own it, you feel your freedom.
Nothing you did (or didn't do) could cause your WW to cheat on you. This truth MUST be accepted. A cheater cheats because she has a defect in character, a hole where her stated values don't align with her actual deeds. Not everyone can throw their values aside and say "yes" to that kind of perfidy. That's on her. It has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Part of a healthy reconciliation is allowing your WS to take full ownership of their transgressions. They can't fix what they won't accept, right? Makes sense?
So why are YOU internalizing something you had no control over? You didn't do it. You didn't cause it. It was ALREADY there, always lurking, because the beliefs she thought she had in her core values were weak and permeable. You have no influence on whether another person truly accepts and protects the things they claim to believe in. If she truly valued her beliefs in things like honesty, fidelity, friendship, she would have built boundaries around those things. When a person really honors their own core values, you can't make them cheat with a gun to their head.
Here's the thing though, by continuing to try and take ownership of someone else's choices, we are subconsciously attempting to control them. If we can make it about us instead of them, we have sway over it and can maybe prevent the hurt from happening again. We can make changes which will guarantee outcomes, right? Wrong. It's just a subconscious control mechanism that our brains default to when things are truly beyond our ability to manipulate. We can't MAKE other people honor their own values.
I kept asking myself, "Why now? You threw me away before, so what's changed?"
For the truly repentant cheater, it's because they FINALLY understood that they could really lose us. This goes back to earlier in the post where we accept that it's not about us. Nothing we did, nothing we said, caused the cheating. It wasn't in response to us. We're non-entities in the cheating choice. And THAT is what's so hard for us to contemplate. How can they look us in the face every day and not be reminded that we exist? How can they twist up their thinking until we're merely an impediment, or worse, someone who doesn't deserve better treatment? And the answer of course, is that there is nothing in their character which disallows mental gymnastics and compartmentalization to get what they want. It always tracks back to character, hers and not yours.
Of course, the unrepentant cheater is just crying crocodile tears to keep their home sitch going. The difference can be hard to spot, but ultimately is revealed by what exactly the WS is willing to do to remediate that broken character and whether they get it done. Time reveals the truth.
People will argue this point, but I think the truth of the matter is that when we take our WS back, they do indeed "get away with it"... and we have to let them, because that's part and parcel with the decision to take them back. Some will say that the difficult, introspective work a WS must accomplish, the pain of carrying the weight of their sins, knowing the anguish they've caused, means they aren't "getting away with it". But nothing they go through equals the pain they've caused to their BS. This is often an existential crisis, an abandonment which makes us question EVERYTHING in lives, the nature of love, the strength of relationship, even the existence of a caring God. They aren't traumatized by their own chosen actions. Maybe they experience some kind of partial trauma at the realization they aren't who they thought they were, but it's NOT the same.
The WS has no ability to pay us back for what we've gone through. No coin with value to equal the cost of their transgression. The best that we can do, once we've determined that the WS is truly repentant and willing (as well as capable) of remediating their broken character.. is to "write off" the balance of the damages. We can treat it like an accounting problem. Some of the WS's actions will mitigate their debt, things like accountability and character remediation, and those things can knock down the balance. But because NOTHING they can ever do will eliminate the debt, we MUST eventually release it in order to normalize the marriage. In marriage, we want two healthy, EQUAL partners. That's the goal... but it's a long time in coming. This concept of "writing off the debt" is for later, once you're sure of the personal healing she's accomplished and the changes in character she's made... and also once you're sure that you really want to stay. You're still early days. Right now you're still at the "trying for reconciliation" stage. It's not here yet.
Anyway, there are some things to think about. Again, not so much for influencing as educating, so you know what worked for someone else and can make determinations about what might work for you.
