SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’ve read a lot about this, and Helping Couple’s Heal has an entire episode about it. Yet I still feel it! I don’t tell people my WH cheated. Not because I want to protect him, but because I don’t want anyone to know that he cheated on me and I didn’t walk away. I feel that shame! I also feel the shame of having had it happen to me. I know logically that it had nothing to do with me. But then, why does he still cling to the “I take full responsibility for what I did, you aren’t to blame…but…there were contributing factors.” Contributing factors which include him feeling lonely and alone, thinking that I didn’t love him anymore, not feeling intimacy, no sex, etc etc etc…

This is my story although I am in limbo. I have been before in limbo and where. did it get me?

And shame for the fact that right now, I am a confused mess, just hanging on and unable to take decisive action. Waking up angry, going to bed sad. Shame that he hugs me when I cry and I need the hug. Even while I wrap my head around the lying, stealing, cheating.

Edited to add: Ellie, I still haven't told most people about the cheating. He had drug issues and that was the reason I used. I still feel shame that I was with someone who did that to me.

TBH tho, I think wayward/cheating behaviors and addictions are pretty chummy neighbors.

My mom is a recovering alcoholic - to whit: she is very active in AA, she cherishes and nurtures her sobriety, she keeps tackling the steps and learning new things. In short, she has 'done the work' to get sober.

My xwh was an addict too. He had drug issues before we ever got together. You would think that those dots would have connected for me since I know what real sobriety looks like but it came as something of a shock to me 6 months after dday when I realized that he was an active addict (he had just traded cocaine for random vaginas) and I was once again falling into the familiar patterns of enabling it. That dot connecting is what changed the R-tune for me bigtime.

The shame I felt at staying connected to my mom in her active addiction and the shame I felt in staying with my cheating xwh were eerily similar.

My xwh was an addict too. He had drug issues before we ever got together. You would think that those dots would have connected for me since I know what real sobriety looks like but it came as something of a shock to me 6 months after dday when I realized that he was an active addict (he had just traded cocaine for random vaginas) and I was once again falling into the familiar patterns of enabling it. That dot connecting is what changed the R-tune for me bigtime.

So similar. Mine traded drug issues that he had before I met him for porn and prostitutes and then let that lead him right back to drugs, which blew the cover of the prostitute addiction. I didn't know I was enabling when I was enabling because I didn't know he actually had a problem. Which makes me feel dumb, which led to the shame.

Eventually, I left. I stayed and stayed and the shame was a major factor in my eventual leaving.

I was in a support group shortly before I decided to go. I had been in this group for over a year and had decided to give my lead. I started with confidence describing my story. With each revelation and description of a new day I lost more and more steam. Eventually, I began trailing off and decided to move onto the next section of the lead without finishing my story. I was ashamed... embarrassed... felt worthless... stretched out. I kept from them some of the most poignant parts of the story... a support group designed for this!

The shame moved me into action. I don't know. My reflex is to say that you should not feel shame. My experience says you will anyway. I am deeply sorry, but I think that it is part of the process in some awful way that I don't understand yet...

Note: i have not read through all of the responses.

I get shamed for my choice to stay....but...i don't "feel" shame for staying. People do their best to make me feel bad but my response to that is simply (if not f-off lol) then "this is my life and ill live it they way I want to". Better yet a short "I'm sorry you feel that way " works too.

I don't care what anyone thinks. Had i left wh after dday1 i would only have dd. If i had left him after dday2 i would only have dd and ds. I couldn't imagine life without my twins.

So let's be blunt. The "contributing factors" were: lust, entitlement, brokenness, lack of empathy.

I don't disagree exactly. But, where do you think those things are derived from? I was callous, I had a lack of empathy. I was entitled. And I was lustful. Yes, I check all these boxes as correct. Most of those came from my forms of coping, all of which were unhealthy. I was unhappy not because of my marriage. I was lonely too. Very lonely. Also my fault. That doesn't excuse the cheating by any stretch of the imagination. I didn't cope with any of it correctly. I could have told my husband that I didn't feel seen. We would have explored it and maybe I would have made some changes to my own vulnerability, allowing him to see me. Not sure how that would have played out to be honest, it wasn't as if I hadn't tried to have some of those conversations. I probably ultimately would have had to go to IC either way to see the patterns, break through them, and have some plans to change them. I don't think I could have come up with that on my own and saying anything out loud to my husband wouldn't have just sounded like complaining.

How do we know this? We can ask some easy questions to test it.

1. If it wasn't this AP, would it have been another? More than likely the answer is yes.

I don't know the answer to this question quite frankly. I really don't. I had never been tempted to cheat, had no history of bad boundaries. I would say my cheating was the intersection of not feeling like I had any control to effect change in my life (the vulnerability) and someone coming along in my depression making me feel better. That doesn't make what I did right, but it's honestly what happened. Someone seeking an affair on purpose would have kept trying until it did happen.

I think the answer is more if you don't figure out how to make yourself happy, you will blame others when you are not, and look for others who will. That's not a good, healthy person with normal coping patterns.

2. You were in the same marriage the WS has identified as having all of these "contributing factors." Did you cheat? No.

Okay, for the sake of answering this as a WS, let's pretend my husband didn't cheat. I would contend we were never having the same marriage because we are two people with two different reactions to things. He couldn't have known I was where I was (even though he did know I was having a nervous breakdown), and I couldn't know that the way I think isn't the way he thinks. Well, we could have but really that would have required that I had communication skills I didn't have or a self awareness that was also absent.

It's a straw man argument though, because the marriage is not the reason I cheated. We can't say in one breath that noone cheats because of the spouse or the marriage, and then say you didn't cheat and you were in the same marriage. Those are at odds with one another. Cheating is something that some people can do and some people can't, it's all internal world stuff. (I guess in some ways maybe I am making your point, just differently)

3. If it was such a bad marriage, why didn't you cheat?

My husband didn't cheat because he was better integrity/morals (well, at least for a long time it looked like he did, again I am trying to answer this as pure WS). Also likely some of the things that made me comfortable with cheating were absent for him. He didn't grow up in chaos, therefore he didn't gravitate towards it. He wasn't in a depression or unhappy and blaming anyone else for it. Those things were not part of his coping. (Well, until they were)

4. If it was such a bad marriage, why didn't he separate from you?

No balls. I had no balls. I felt there was no changing patterns of 20 some years. It was easier to me to blow things up than actually deal with them. So stupid! But, again, this is strawman because it's NOT ABOUT THE MARRIAGE (which yes, Thumos, I get that's probably what you are mostly trying to get across.

Saying I felt lonely, I was unhappy, etc. Those things were not my husbands responsibility. They were mine and I didn't take the responsibility as a good steward to myself.

5. Do you notice how his list of "contributing factors" are all subjective, relativistic notions twirling around in his own head? He projected "thinking I didn't love him anymore." He didn't "feel" intimacy. He "felt" lonely and alone.

We agree here. I was unhappy due to my own constructs, my own shortcomings, my own lack of awareness. I went forward for so long that it resulted in pent up resentments to the point I was blaming him and being married on why I was so unhappy. I had the power all along.

Some people are an egg, and some people are a potato. Boil them both, one stays soft, the other becomes hard. I was the egg. I became very calloused and harder to get through to.

I am now a potato due to my work. I am softer due to this journey and the compassion I have gained for myself and eventually even for him. Expecting people to respond to the same stimuli would require us to be the same.

That being said, nothing excuses the decisions I made. I could have truly been lonely and it could have been all his fault. The answer would not have been to cheat. The WS has to both become the potato (get to self compassion, you will have compassion/empathy towards others, also it's the road to self love where you are also safer towards others), and to turn into the black and white thinker. Cheating is wrong in all circumstances, doesn't matter what is happening.

TBH tho, I think wayward/cheating behaviors and addictions are pretty chummy neighbors.

Agree, because by and large both are escapist behaviors. Not being able to cope with life people drink, do drugs, have sex with people they shouldn't, cheat on their spouse, and the list goes on. Affairs are often situations where the person isn't coping well and someone comes along and it feels good. The addiction to that feeling is where everything goes downhill. That other person is a crack pipe. That's not a statement I am making with no accountability. The person with the crack pipe at some point was sober and made the decision to smoke it even though they knew it was wrong, harmful, etc.

I have a lot of shame that I attempted R with a person who was just delaying and deceiving me until they could find the right exit A.

My shame looks like this -

"What is wrong with me that I could be so attached to a person that held me in such low regard for so long? Why couldn't I see it clearly?"

I'm working on it. Haven't made a ton of progress yet, but I am out of the situation at least. No progress could be made for me until I got that shiny D.

There is so much in this thread that is resonating and actually making me feel better in an odd sort of way. Some is commiseration (I am not alone), some is a different perspective and a different way to look at it, and some is allowing myself to not feel bad about m choice (I can always change my mind at any point).

Please know that most of us (here, at least) don't say stuff to shame you.

I appreciate this. And although I know intellectually it to be the case, sometimes my perception is skewed because of the shame.

I fully own that if I didn't have a son, I would not have given him a chance. That was my primary reason for staying, also finances, etc. I can't remember who it was now, but somebody went so far as to suggest I should be ok with an open marriage since my reasons for staying were something other than undying love.

I’m in this boat too. Financially I could not support myself. I have been a stay at home mom most of the marriage and my resume sucks, even though I have a BA in English. The kids are not a reason, they are mostly all grown up and would completely understand if I were to leave. They have been incredibly supportive through this.

It's really that but that kills it. There should be no but. If there's still a but for him, it's no wonder you're feeling that way.

No matter how I explain it he just doesn’t “get it”. He keeps asserting that he HAS taken responsibility and point blank says that I was not to blame for his decision. But then says something like “…but we can’t be naïve enough to think that this all happened in a vacuum.” Utter bullshit in my opinion but…

That's the thing about being betrayed - it's always no win. The only way to win is to take control of one's response.

This is a real sticking point and it sucks sucks sucks! Because you’re right. There are no winners in infidelity only losers. If you R, then what do you get? A cheater. Yay me! Well, hopefully a remorseful cheater who works hard on themselves and becomes a better person. But we will not know for sure until the end of our lives.

fornlau, I can't know where you are. You may really want R and are just in the process of working R out for yourself. You may really not want R, and it's taking time to figure that out. Where do you think you are?

TBH I can’t really answer that question. I’m not “all in” for R and I know I should be if I want it to really succeed. But I’m still having trust issues, not because he has done anything that I see as a red flag, but because he has always had boundary issues and I just don’t believe that can just magically go away simply because oh now he realizes that he should have had stronger boundaries when it came to other women. I get triggered when his phone pings. I get triggered when he plays an online video game (many of those boundary crossings happened in in-game chats with other women). I feel this is going to be an ongoing issue with me and I’m not sure how to resolve it.

I've been able to reframe the staying part a little bit better. I'm CHOOSING to stay.

I hope I can get to this point. I’m just not there yet. Choosing to stay, or choosing to go. So I’m in a holding pattern. But I don’t feel I have healed sufficiently to make that choice for myself yet.

One thing that I found helpful was writing down the reasons I want to R.

I will try this. My mother said I should write out the Pro’s and Con’s of staying. The thing is, no matter how many Pro’s there are, Infidelity in the Con column always voids them all out. IDK, maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way.

Then what is there to be ashamed of?

I fully realize the shame is not my burden to bear, but it’s there nonetheless. I know in my head I shouldn’t feel it, but feelings aren’t rational. Like TX1995 I was excited to talk about my M and my H. The only thing remotely negative I would ever say about him was that he liked to spend money, but it was never in a complaining kind of way. I would always brag that he was a family man, family came first before work. That he was always at home whenever I needed him, blah blah blah…Now, I don’t talk about my M, or my WH at all.

I want to go in more depth with this but I’m needed elsewhere so I’ll stop here for now. Thank you all for the discssion! Keep it up please.

It's real.

It screams, "I don't believe I deserve better and you should know I think so little of myself" to everyone that learns of it.

It also screams "I'll tolerate abuse if I think it will help me kids not have the awful childhood I had" in some cases.

"What is wrong with me that I could be so attached to a person that held me in such low regard for so long? Why couldn't I see it clearly?"

That's a doozy, and I totally get it. For me, exacerbated by a WH who I truly think just cannot see/comprehend how his present actions show disrespect and disregard... in his eyes, he's still a wonderful spouse, who "does" all kinds of wonderful things. What I'd call lovebombing, he calls "support". But the truth is the things he "does" are things I am perfectly capable of doing for myself (I can make my own damn dinner, thank you very much). Like, why would anyone stay in a M with cheater who doesn't "get it" in order to not have to make their own dinner?

The ONE thing I -and all humans - need and cannot do alone is have connection with another person.

And if you really think about it (and I know that doesn't mean we can also FEEL it), there is no shame in wanting that connection. It's a real need for humans (and other animals). So when we find/make the connection (or "attach" to our partner), it makes sense that we would twist into quite the strange pretzel to avoid losing it.

I feel no shame.

Not for reconciling. Not for my H’s affair. Not for my H wanting a D.

We all make some pretty poor choices in life - obviously not choosing to cheat but things we regret. If a cheater changes, reforms, feels remorse and commits to the marriage - and the betrayed chooses to reconcile, IMO the cheater should feel shame.

It’s not fair the betrayed has to suffer any more pain from being cheated on.

Remember this, though: cheating shames the BS, whether the outcome is D or R.

I have to disagree with this. I feel no shame in D. I have seen TikToks get thousands of likes on women saying they left after their significant other was cheating. I was able to freely discuss it. No one shames me.

Rare is the woman who says, "If my husband cheated on me, I'd take him back." Of course not. Who stays with a cheater? Well, statistically, a lot of women do—most, in fact.

With my D I was focused on building my career, my finances, enjoying my son and when I was ready....I dated again. I had broad support with my friends and family. Shame wasn’t really part of the process. I did have to heal and come to terms with the failure of my marriage and my role in that.

[This message edited by CaliforniaNative at 11:12 PM, May 4th (Tuesday)]

I definitely needed to read this thread.

I think lately I've been experiencing a lot of the shame. But it's not so much what everyone else will think of me.

It's what I think of myself.

It's the questions of "how could he have been doing this so long and I never knew about it". And feeling like I should have known better. Feeling like I was wrong to have just blindly trusted.

It's the questioning of my values and my integrity to stay, because before this happened, I was so sure that it was a deal Breaker for me.

It's the feeling like I have betrayed my own morals and values for not leaving. I definitely feel shame over that.

Thats what sits with me, and what I struggle with the most I think.

It's what I think of myself.

That's the heart of the shame problem.

I think it's Brene Brown that says

"I did a bad thing" is guilt, but

"I am a bad PERSON" is shame.

But I’m still having trust issues

2.5 years after d-day, I raised the issue of my lack of trust in an MC session. Our C wouldn't talk about it - 'It's too early,' she said.

Rebuilding trust takes a long, long time. If 2.5 years was too early for me, it's probably too early for you, too.

Be kind to yourself, fornlau.

I have debated this now that everyone know, my adult kids, his family and some friends, most of his work... if I went back I think I would be looked at as, "you idiot, why would you put yourself back in that?"

and for the most part that is true.

Im not sure my bf will come back. with our long history I would hope he would mend it, even if just to be kind and remorseful. But I have thought about R, cause I thought I was in it last week and there will be shame. embarrassment for me about him. he would have his own shame for life, I would hope.

But yeah I cant see how you can get around this. You cant be shouting from the rooftops proud even if in the end you make it. it still happened. we were all dooped/conned.

I don’t tell people my WH cheated. Not because I want to protect him, but because I don’t want anyone to know that he cheated on me and I didn’t walk away.

This is no one's business but you and your WH's. I don't mention it to protect me. I don't mention it because it would complicate our marriage. I don't need my family and friends judging and opinionating on what i "should" do. Telling me what they would do if their spouse cheated on them. Don't you remember all those convos you had with friends about what you would do if your SO cheated on you? Yeah, I didn't do any of that shit I claimed I would do "if", either.

they will forever be a trigger for you.

Nope, he is not a trigger. Pet peeve. How can someone know that? They don't. It is a general statement and an opinion only.

you NEVER forget!

How could I forget? I was traumatized. Do you forget other traumatizing events in your life? Do you think of them every moment of every day? Nope. I barely ever think of his infidelity and if I do there is no pain, or shame, associated with it. I think most about his infidelity when I am reading SI. Like today. Mister Sister and I have been reconciled for 11 years. It is good. We are happy, even though he has terminal stage 4 cancer. Infidelity doesn't rule us, love does. We love each other so much. We are there for each other.

I don’t want to be shamed for staying

This is another one of my pet peeves here at SI. The members who are so pro divorce and can't understand anyone who wants to give reconciliation a chance. They are the ones who need to feel shame for imposing and projecting their feelings on anyone else, especially a fellow BS. Black and white thinkers.

It’s not mine to bear, but it seems like he only feels it when I “talk about the A”, which he would happily never talk about EVER!

MisterSister feels shame for all the bad choices he made, for the all the pain and trauma he caused me. Now, I had to talk to my WH a lot about the affair in the beginning. He was reluctant, of course, for many reasons, selfish mostly. But, we talked about it. A lot. We did many things to heal. Went to counseling together, read books together and discussed weekly what we read, and went to the Retrouvaille retreat (one of the best things we did). Until I didn't need to talk about it anymore. But, it was hard to let that go. After years of talking about it to "let it go", so to speak, felt scary. Talking about the affair became somewhat of a security blanket for me. If we constantly talk about my pain and keep you in shame, I will be safe. Nope. We have to move forward to the future and stop dwelling in the past. Live in the present. I don't want MisterSister to feel shame for the rest of his life. I love him, why would I wish shame on him?

How do you guys feel about BS shame?

I understand it, but feel it is a waste of time and feelings. Throw it away. Don't accept it. Don't even try to make sense of it. Just refuse to feel shame. I know I did have some feelings of shame at first, but not for long. I feel it is a natural and normal feeling to have. But, we can't let it win. We are better than that. We are strong and brave. We are compassionate and empathetic. We are human. There is no shame.

When I was a newbie here at SI (8 months post d-day) I became a very black and white thinker. Before I knew of his infidelity, I was more of a gray thinker. It made things difficult for me, more than it needed it to be, to be so black and white. But, I was afraid. I thought I had to have much, much stricter boundaries and thought processing than I used to have to keep better control, to keep myself from being hurt. Than I could reconcile with MisterSister. However, my natural gray thinking came back and it was better. Because there are so many shades of gray, at least 50 I hear. It gave me back my ability to have a lot more grace and mercy for myself. I had a lot for everyone else, not so much for myself, I realized.

Sooooo, thats how I feel about shame.

Wishing peace and serenity to you, fournlau.

I am so ashamed I stayed even the first time.

I had a lot of factors I had to consider. I was seriously sick.

None the less, I am deeply ashamed at the person I was. I don't know how I will forgive myself for trusting him and allowing him tmanipulate me. I am appalled I danced pick me. I don't even know who the wwoman who did that was.

I don't even know who the woman who did that was.

She was a profoundly traumatized human being who could not function at 100% because parts of her had been destroyed. I don't know who that woman I became for a while was either. She was a shadow of me. A beaten hollowed-out shadow who mostly wanted to die. Have empathy for that woman, Shehawk. That version of you deserves nothing but empathy. It's like blaming yourself for being unable to walk after being run over by a car.