SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Wounded Healer,

So grateful for the continuing conversation here and the genuine assistance and real compassion evident in it.

I know! I am astonished at the combined wisdom that exists on this site. The genuine kindness shown me gives me a faith lost, so hope of a faith found.

I, like Hiking

I do as well. I live in the desert where it is easy to walk out my front door into what most people only see as a dry, barren landscape inhabited only with rattlers and scorpions. Me, I see the enormous beauty and color that tucks itself into every shaded crease and furrow. Plus, I love snakes and scorpions, they are really cool creatures.
Anyway, back to the purpose at hand.

My wife apologized to her AP for *attempting* to have sex with me the ONE time we *tried* during her 6 month PA

My GOD! How infidelity twists a betrayers mind and values to a point where up is down and down is up. To hear that coming from the lips of your wife must have been enraging!!!

After full disclosure in 2021 is when I discovered that she had spoken to her AP about this...and...one, she apologized to him for attempting to be sexual with...her damn husband. And two...she told him I couldn't get it up.
So there.
You are no longer out there alone flopping in the wind running through that crowd. I'm out there too...all bare ass and hunting the shadows with you.

The grief of your words are overriding my senses. The slice of a wayward’s justification is a razor blade to a betrayed’s heart and mind. How we absorb and recover from such statements is a wonder and a testament to human’s ability to rise above their pain and turn injustices into something of value.

The nice guy inside of me wants to say you didn’t need to join me "flopping in the wind running through the crowed". But the terrible part of me is glad not to feel alone in my nakedness and wanting to thank you for being here, not only for me, but with me.

And I guess, to bring this around to some of my original messaging in this thread...I am not sure there is enough therapy, forgiveness, self talk, reframing, aiming, choosing, focusing, healing, reconciling, hysterical bonding (98 days straight following 2021 disclosure), or maybe even TIME...for this to scrub for me.

As much as I have fought against this notion, my experience has shown me no other conclusion. So, as you state further in, sometimes acceptance is all we have and, I’ll add, that it is possibly all we need.

All I can share is my own journey, and in my own journey, the most seemingly upside down liberating notion I have embraced is the notion that...

You say that as if sharing your own journey is somehow negligeable. OMG, nothing could be further from the truth. Your journey shared, and vulnerability shown is powerful. It allows me and others to rethink and discover missed approaches so we may bring ourselves out from the shadows of loneliness, giving, through your story, relief from false shame and self-doubt. And this goes from everyone else here who has been gracious in sharing their stops and starts, success and failures in their journeys through this muck.

This was, odd as it may seem, a tremendous light for me. Now, for some, a statement like this might be a freaking gauntlet across the face. Thrown down. A challenge of NO! I WILL NOT ACCEPT THAT THIS IS IT. Not for me. And, if I may, I am not one to shrink from great challenge

My comrade in arms, I do not see the gauntlet throne nor a challenge of some kind of one-way truth of approach. We are brothers and sisters who have found ourselves drafted into a long, hard unwarranted war we could never have envisioned we’d be engaged. A surprise attack that has pitted us against our spouses. A battle against ourselves. A battle against society. A battle against our memories. A battle against shame. A battle against failure and possibly a battle lost.

Maybe our best hopes are that the day will come when each one of us are no longer warriors, rather veterans, discussing a long-ago domestic war won. Yes, some with visible or invisible scars, some carrying shrapnel benight the scars, some with missing limbs, others seemingly unscathed. But all with medals of valor earned while in the trenches of infidelity.

Asterisk

Hikingout,

And for asterisk, it may be a way of surrendering that grappling. I was trying to find ways that his current thoughts might be holding him back, but you have offered it’s about a new way of thinking and that resonates with me deeply. I think I can see the same in my arc.

Exactly! What I have been so wonderfully offered has been a variety of approaches.

It is like sitting at a wonderful dinner table where many gifted chefs have prepared a banquet of ideas. The taste of the words spoken are wonderfully varied, each having their unique flavors and aromas . I have received nourishment while savoring every nibble, knowing there is a desert in my future. One day, I hope to be as an accomplished chief as so many of you.

"False narrative." Is it really? I’m not so sure. As to figuring out "what I want and why moving forward",

And does she feel unsafe in your marriage?

Not unsafe as if I may do the same or that I might physically injure her. I’m not prone to anger or violence. She also knows that I go through great lengths to not injure her emotionally as well. I know yshe did feel "unsafe" for many years in that I might abandon her. I do not believe that she worries about this anymore but then again, if she did, she would not share that information with me. Which has been a source of great difficulty for me that I had to "learn to accept".

So if you read through this, you challenge it’s not a false narrative but you actually confirm it.

Your wife does not feel unsafe. I didn’t think in terms of abusive actions when I wrote, btw. I never had any such impressions. But you are shaming yourself for giving her an unsafe marriage because you haven’t gotten over the pain of her affair. Yet, she feels safe.

So using some sort of moral shaming here just doesn’t fit. And somewhere deep inside, maybe beyond where logic lies knows that isn’t true. The problem with shame is that is says there is something wrong with you, and I know no one who ever recovered by using shame to propel them into a different way of being.

Guilt, maybe sometimes to get one started. Shame actually builds a wall. What makes things flow and heal is having self compassion. Being able to see that you are doing the best that you can- you always have and when you know better you do better and that’s what life is, a continual progression of evolution. And we all get stuck in cycles of that evolution that if we stay too long we suffer. If we stay beyond that others suffer. Yet, your wife feels safe. You have built that wall of protection around her, but maybe to the point of your own detriment.

The real narrative? You would have given up this pain if you could logic your way out. You would have chosen not to feel it. You want a peaceful marriage you can see it’s all there logically. But you do jot have peace. That’s not something you turn and blame yourself for especially when it’s so evident you have been working so hard to put it down. Nothing about you is at fault.

help me separated the difference of what I am about to write. My wife decided what she wanted, another man, and moved forward with it. To allow herself to do this she had to have begun to see herself as "an individual" with her individual wants. She must have begun to see us as not in a sacred union anymore. Right? So, it feels like you are asking me to do the same. Are you? I’m not challenging the possible truth here I simply do not understand how that works and am seeking enlightenment for, admittedly, what I’ve been doing hasn’t worked out as well as I had predicted.

So sort of but not how you state it here.

I do not see an affair as a healthy decision towards individualism. An affair is often an unhealthy choice geared towards receiving external validation which is the opposite of knowing you can stand on your own and meet your own needs if that’s warranted.

I would say that most successful reconciliations that I have read about on here and having gone through it two ways myself- it always seems to have this period of detachment where the bs (actually the ws too) sort of surrenders to the idea the marriage may not work and they start to think deeply about independence. It’s a reckoning of sorts in which you take responsibility for your own feelings and happiness, with or without them. There is this feeling that they know they will be okay if they divorce. I do not think you could possibly go back and do it in that way, no part of me senses a divorce is what you want.

But you can start to accept that this marriage is what you want despite the pain and despite her affair. And you can accept that you do have choices if you want to exercise them. And you can take your power back by thinking about your needs and being open in your communication and letting her in on all these things you probably don’t share much at all with her.

You simply won’t find your power by finding fault in how you have handled it, or by shaming yourself for not being a safer partner. These things will not resonate with your soul. What will resonate is that you are strong in your choices and are satisfied with them. The reason I mentioned a renewal is if you met your wife today and started dating her, do you think you would be overjoyed to put a ring on it? That’s sort of the spirit of the topic- as we were/as we are.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:31 PM, Wednesday, November 19th]

I read other references to "stoicism" and googled it to try to understand it. Honestly, I don’t think I want to view life through the stoic’s lens. But maybe that is my problem and that I should. But, until then, I will resist it. That is not a statement of what I think others perspectives and methods should or shouldn’t be.

Asterisk

I get it. I took pieces of the approach from a book I read that really boiled it down to: You can control: Your character, How you treat people and How you react to situations. I recognize Stoicism is much more than that but throughout this I've tried to remind myself of these three things when I spiral into the dark spots we all have. I can choose to be a decent, happy person. I can treat people respectfully and I can react to situations accordingly. That last one is THE toughest when it comes to infidelity in my opinion because you're now stepping into the grieving process which I'm not sure how the Stoics would approach. I guess the grieving process is the appropriate reaction but within that, I've found it very complicated (see my earlier example about my vacation last week). I'm not sure they'd find that reaction appropriate. In fact they'd probably find it a waste of energy and tell me to put my "big boy" pants on and move on. That's not what modern day IC's tell us to do (at least what mine have). That part I agree with you 100%.

I love the discussion and perspective from all of you. It really serves as our own version of IC.

Straddling the past/present line.

I wrestle with that daily. Our relationship has finally reached a depth I thought would never happen and yet I struggle with embracing the moment. Appreciating the present. That damn asterisk * :). I find myself mourning what could have been. Time wasted. I know it's not helpful, but as someone else said, I feel like it's somehow letting him off the hook. I know he thinks daily about the damage he's done, so I need to get on with it and stop clinging to my resentment.

We have been together 49 yrs. We'll be lucky to have another 25. I need to focus on making these the best. Thank you for this thread and the excellent conversations.

As Elsa the famous ice princess says: LET IT GO!

TW

I need to get on with it and stop clinging to my resentment.

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the emotional juice that gets clung to. The fact that the emotions attached to it are so powerful that it’s almost hard to look away.

When I look at modern social media and things like TikTok or Facebook, they get paid to generate clicks and they do it well. How do they generate those clicks? They put out content that drives your emotions. It could be cute kitten videos to pull up those heart strings, or it could be things that enrage you. Either way… Big emotions.

Memories of the affair also have big emotions attached to them. Huge emotions. It makes it super hard to look away. Hard to not stare in the rearview mirror while driving forward. They can be attached to a specific traumatic incident, or attached to that general phase. Which ever way, those emotions are generating "clicks" in your brain.

I experimented with some of the modern techniques for dealing with these emotional attachments, to include trying "free spotting" and RTM therapy (specifically for traumatic events). They are not talk therapy, trying to logic your way through it, nor are they exposure therapy, trying to build up a mental callous. They work on the idea of memory reconsolidation, and how our brains just work.Things like this are designed to separate the emotional impact from the memory. What I found is that they actually work.

They’ve done two things, first they allow me to think about the memory without generating the huge emotion that goes with it. Second is that oddly enough they’ve made the memory kind of boring. I find myself not really caring to think about it because the topic is now not so interesting. It doesn’t generate the emotional fix positive or negative.

Somebody else upthread mentioned that you really can’t "logic" your way out of this. I 100% agree. The core is to establish a healthy relationship with those memories.

I think what makes it difficult to LET IT GO for me is something I'm not sure I've shared previously. We were parents at 18 before we were married (not planned obviously). We took our time with this surprise (I've told my oldest that she was the best "surprise" a person could ask for ...challenging at the time but wonderful nonetheless) and did not get married immediately eventually realizing we truly did love one another, marrying 5 years later. 3 more children and 30 years of marriage later, we get comments all the time when folks hear our story of what an amazing story that is (i.e. most couples with that story don't get married, if they do it doesn't last blah, blah, blah). We continue to hear that to this day. With the fact that we've kept the PA to ourselves and having to still hear this periodically it stings quite a bit..."What a cute couple", "Fairy tail", "Perfect Couple", etc...I'm not discounting everyone else's marriage and how many of you may hear the same but I'm guessing our story is probably in the minority which I think does cause folks to comment maybe more so then they might vs. a couple who went the traditional route. Hearing that stuff more frequently and knowing what's happened behind the curtain does make it sting and tough to let go. This was a recent revelation after hearing it for probably the thousandth time over the course of our marriage (again, no disrespect to others who hear it as well...our frequency is probably a bit more). One way to look at it, is if we survived a teen pregnancy, inconsistent support from family during that situation, not being in the best financial position when that happened, you could say we should survive this. The difference is we had to go through those things and feel them equally. In the case of infidelity, my problem is, the BS has to shoulder most of the burden and I get too focused on why the pain can't be distributed evenly. I'm probably rambling again but it's an interesting variable that, until recently, I hadn't considered all that much. Again, I really appreciate all of you and the support and perspective you provide is immense.

HikingOut,

So using some sort of moral shaming here just doesn’t fit. And somewhere deep inside, maybe beyond where logic lies knows that isn’t true. The problem with shame is that is says there is something wrong with you, and I know no one who ever recovered by using shame to propel them into a different way of being.

I know I have struggled with separating myself from shame. Your point, along with many here, is cracking through my wall. I don’t know why it is so hard to let go of shame. It is ridiculous, because even the thought of it causes me to tear up. Why am I not thrilled to receive your message? Geeze, the tangle of my old thoughts are a mess. But, thank you and to everyone else that has been attempting to undo my cluster of tangled rope that I call my logic.

Yet, your wife feels safe. You have built that wall of protection around her, but maybe to the point of your own detriment.

She is safe but is it because I built a wall around her to protect her from me and my inability to "get over it"? As to my own detriment, I need to give this some deep thought.

But you can start to accept that this marriage is what you want despite the pain and despite her affair. And you can accept that you do have choices if you want to exercise them. And you can take your power back by thinking about your needs and being open in your communication and letting her in on all these things you probably don’t share much at all with her.

It is what I want. Being that I am probably seen as being ancient, we spend 7 days a week, 24 hours a day with each other and every minute spent with her is a joy and gift I hold dear.

She is not the singular dimension woman that I seem to paint her out to be. She screwed up and that is on her. However, there are reasons why people do what they do and in her case I lay a huge amount of blame at the altar with its religious pressure to do so. Good girls don’t get angry, women are to be demure, and wives are to obey their husbands…that type of crude! I never demanded any of that, but from the pulpit it was commanded of her, and I didn’t push back or see the damage being done to my wife. And that is on me!

The reason I mentioned a renewal is if you met your wife today and started dating her, do you think you would be overjoyed to put a ring on it?

In a heartbeat! Thank you for reminding me.

Asterisk

Bos,

I can choose to be a decent, happy person. I can treat people respectfully and I can react to situations accordingly.

I don’t see that as Stoic just being a decent human. I know I probably sound like I’m old, bitter dude, but I am not, not even close. I live a privileged life and I try to bring joy when or wherever I cross paths with anyone. Except here, I guess. ☹

Thank you for taking a moment and explaining your adaptation of the stoics.

I love the discussion and perspective from all of you. It really serves as our own version of IC.

I know, the depth and variants of perspectives here are mindboggling. A true gift to the suffering, which includes betrayeds and waywards.

Asterisk

Trumansworld,

I wrestle with that daily. Our relationship has finally reached a depth I thought would never happen and yet I struggle with embracing the moment.

Bravo on the 1st part and I sure understand the difficulty of fully embracing it as it is NOW. (I didn’t think of that. This place has drilled the message into the bones that support me.) 😊

We have been together 49 yrs. We'll be lucky to have another 25. I need to focus on making these the best.

Congrads on the 49 years you are in a rare club. Yep, like you, our time forward is shorter than our time had, so we need to do as princess Elsa so famously said: LET IT GO!
(by the way, whose princess Elsa?)

Asterisk

HouseOfPlane,

It just thrills my tiny, tiny heart when people respond to others in threads they did not start. It is a show of true community. Love It!

I experimented with some of the modern techniques for dealing with these emotional attachments, to include trying "free spotting" and RTM therapy (specifically for traumatic events). They are not talk therapy, trying to logic your way through it, nor are they exposure therapy, trying to build up a mental callous. They work on the idea of memory reconsolidation, and how our brains just work.Things like this are designed to separate the emotional impact from the memory. What I found is that they actually work.

Hey, Trumansworld, HouseOfPlane suggested several of these techniques to me and they really did help me to begin the process of reframing and staying in the moment. Good Stuff!

Asterisk

Oh my goodness Bos,

What a wonderful story. Remarkable actually! Thank you for sharing this intimate history. I can understand the sting, That is why figuring out how to live in the moment with the woman your wife is today is so dang important to do. Not saying I'm there but it is a new way of thinking that had eluded me until people here encouraged me to take a different look at how I was approaching stuff.

Asterisk

Asterisk

No grandkids yet? It's from Disney's children's movie Frozen. :)

HOP

Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into them. Much appreciated.

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the emotional juice that gets clung to.

There's no possible way to explain my thoughts on this notion in a short, or even a long, post. But, I will try.

"It hit me in my DNA," was a comment I read in the Menz thread many years ago. It was a "light bulb" moment for me. Since then, I've been able to put it all into a perspective that allowed me to heal, to move beyond the shitstorm, to replace my hinges.

Organisms, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, are survival machines for DNA, the entire purpose of which is replication. All of evolution is driven by this one singular goal. Resilience, senses, physical attributes, emotions, intellegence, adaptability, etc., all evolved to increase the chances of replication.

We hit puberty and our brains change. Our DNA is now "commanding" us to replicate. We choose a mate, fall in love, have sex, and all the while our DNA constructed brains reward us with drugs. We feel happiness, security, pride, etc., because we have successfully fulfilled our sole purpose in life; our DNA has been successfully replicated.

Humans are definitely unique among organisms in that our intelligence evolved beyond these basic, primal needs. We question everything and seek answers. This is source of all philosophy, a quest to seek meaning and purpose beyond the primordial, simply because we can.

My DNA is the best DNA. You can see this disposition in just about every animal on the planet. Males and/or females fight for dominance for this reason.

I believe this is why infidelity hits us as hard as it does. It calls into question our "fitness" to replicate, triggering a myriad of physiological, emotional, and psychological reactions; from dejection to rage and everything in between - a fragmentation of oneself.

Once I realized just how upset my DNA was... I found peace with my less primordial self.

I've spent a lifetime studying philosophy. I've read the Bible (okay, maybe half), some of the Koran, a little Taoism, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Kant, Rand... none of that prepared me for the depths of betrayal.

Understanding my dumbass DNA... priceless.

[This message edited by Unhinged at 4:42 AM, Thursday, November 20th]

Trumansworld,

I have 3 grandkids, so that is not a good excuse for my ignorance about Frozen charactors. All the grandkids know that I’m the granddad that takes them hiking, climbing, surfing, rough-housing, birding, photography, boardgames, and drawing, but passively watching TV not me. The few times that I have tried, I fall asleep ten minutes in. 😊

Asterisk

Unhinged,

I’m with you on the DNA concept. I’d like to add that the only time I got really angry, I mean REALLY ANGRY, was when I realized that I no longer had full confidence that my two children were genetically my two kids because my wife had unprotected sex with a man whose wife was pregnant and my wife was not on any kind of birth control. It took me a lot of self-discipline to not implode. To be honest, it was the 1st issue that I had to just accept that I will never know (for sure) that the kids I love with every fiber of my being may not be mine genetically. I had to just remind myself one truth in all of this that I was confident about, and that was even if they are not, I love them and they are my kids, even if their DNA is not.

Asterisk

[This message edited by Asterisk at 8:48 AM, Thursday, November 20th]