OP,
I'm sorry you're conflicted. I'm sorry your kids are acting out. One thing you can do that may change their behavior is to tell them something like:
"Kids, you can say, 'I'm angry' or 'I'm furious' or 'I'm beyond furious,' and you can show your anger when you say those things. But do not attack your mom in any way."
That allows them to communicate with your W honestly, and it gets the anger out of their bodies. (Lots of anger comes with being betrayed, so they'll probably want to express it a lot. It's far from 'one and done'.)
By all means, Nothere759, if you want to consider R, we can guide you WRT things to look for to help you make your decision, but if you are set on D, don't waste your effort - D is a reasonable response to being betrayed.
*****
Reconciliation means damaging your relationship with your kids.
That looks like an overgeneralization to me. From what I've seen, I suspect that true R does less damage to kids than D does. I haven't looked for any studies on this, because I can't imagine anyone devising a valid way of disproving that hypothesis.
My GS would almost definitely be better off if he lived in a loving intact family, but that wasn't one of his IRL options. IRL, his choice was an intact, hurtful family or a broken family, and I'm pretty sure he's way better off with the broken family than with an intact hurtful one. And my GS would have definitely been happier if his mom and dad had started on the road to D but in the end chose true R.
Besides, every thing a parent does may damage our kids. I was certainly surprised at some of the lessons my son took from the behavior of my W and me 
*****
Reconciliation is also a risk with no guarantees.
D isn't?
My point is:
We can't predict the future. Each of us has to figure out for themself what their best path is, start on that path, monitor results, and make appropriate adjustments if the results aren't unexpected.
Sometimes the best path is D, sometimes R, sometimes temporizing. In general, just about everything about one path pertains to the others. Some aspects of each path are unique to the path, but those differences are tradeoffs, not anything that can be used to argue that one course of action is in general better than another.
Generalizations don't govern individual cases. OP's kids are angry now, but we have no knowledge about how they'd respond to R - maybe these kids would be better off, maybe worse, maybe the same.
In this specific case, OP wants D, so D is probably the better option for him, unless he changes his own mind. In other specific cases R looks like the better choice. But it's better off if each BS lets the specific case, not generalizations, drive their choices.
Read the above carefully. I do not in any way make a claim that R is better than D. I do strongly imply that both have their difficulties and both have their positive payoffs, and that each individual BS has to make their own choices.
There's no one-size-fits-all in recovering from being betrayed.
*****
** Posting as a member whose been active for 11+ years **
I've never seen an administrative action post as a 'comment' on the topic of a thread. I'm surprised that anyone does.
If there's trouble, I'd like to see an attempt to head it off as soon as possible.
** Posting as a staff member **
As above.
[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:42 PM, Friday, April 29th]
