I recently received a request to share this with all of you here. I'm not familiar with the production company but the woman I e-mailed seemed okay (for what it's worth). Think carefully about putting your story forward. Make sure it's something you're really comfortable with. We are particularly vulnerable, of course, when we're healing from this. But, as the woman I spoke with about this said, too often our culture overlooks the stories of forgiveness and healing. This is a chance to share that:
CASTING NOTICE:
Have you been cheated on, but decided to stay with your partner?
Was it important to both of you to work at your relationship and not give up?
Have you forgiven your partner, but are still working on forgetting his/her indiscretion?
A new television series, that will be educational and entertaining, will be sharing an open and honest discussion about relationships.
If you are interested in being considered and believe that other people may benefit from hearing your story please email
casting@eduvisiontv.com
Please include your name, age, location, the best number to reach you, a few recent photos and a little about you.
To be considered you must be a female, living in the tri-state area and appear to be between the ages of 45 – 65.
We look forward to hearing from you!
The kickass survival site for anyone who's ever been lied to, cheated on and left for dead.
Says one must be living in the tri-state area. Is that the NY-NJ-CT tristate area?
ReplyDeleteMBS, I thought the same thing...
Delete"... appear to be between the ages of 45 – 65."
ReplyDeleteThis made me laugh. Because I'm only 41 ... but after the past 2 years I look like I'm 50! Stress will do that to you I guess.
;)
I know I thought about that too. My husband did not have a mid life crisis affair or due to lack of success. He was young and successful.
DeleteI hear you, Kimberly. My already fragile self-esteem doesn’t need anyone overestimating my age. ;-)
DeleteI’m 8 months into finding out about my husband cheating. We were engaged at the time, and got married only two months after (obviously before I found out) we just had our 3 year wedding anniversary (5 years together) and I still feel like
ReplyDeleteThere’s nothing to celebrate. We’re both trying to move past his infidelity and he’s been literally the ideal offender in most ways. He reaffirms his love for me daily, apologizes whenever I feel sad, he seems to pickup on it when something triggers a negative feeling, and I know from all the research I’ve done these are all positive signs that we can work it out, but why do I still feel so betrayed? Why do I feel like I’m falling away from
Him? The trust is still gone, not just because of the cheating but because of lies he told when we were dating. I feel constantly worried and question him, although I haven’t found anything else. Marriage counseling didn’t seem to help, and Therapy just made it feel like any healing I had done was reopened, like pulling off a scab. I’m torn because somewhere in me I still love him, and I value how good he treats me, but I cannot get over the hurt and feeling like I can’t trust him. I was so happy with him and now I feel like our whole marriage was a lie. How could he look at me and say our vows knowing what he had done? I’ve stopped looking at his phone, emails, texts. Mostly because I feel like it’s not helping to rebuild the trust, to keep checking, but also because I have lost the feeling of caring. I’m torn between staying and leaving. I feel very much like I will never love him again the way I once did, I will never see him as the same man I once did. And that is slowly killing any desire I have to work on this. I feel depressed like I’ve lost motivation to do anything, cook, clean, work. I don’t enjoy time with him anymore. Is this normal? Will this fade in time? Do I keep trying to rebuild with him or cut my losses and just leave. If anyone else is at this point or has been here please offer any advice you have. I have the opportunity to start over alone, and he says he’s afraid he will come home and I’ll be gone, I try to reassure him I’m staying but I can’t help but admit I do think about it, will I ever love him again like I did before I knew the truth?
Lisa3,
DeleteOh, honey. I'm so sorry you're going through this. Being in that place of questioning and pain is just awful.
You asked some specific questions so I'm going to go through them and give you specific responses. Hopefully this is a helpful way of structuring it for you. When I'm feeling emotionally all over the place and my thoughts are spinning, structure helps bring me back.
1. "Why do I still feel so betrayed?"
You still feel so betrayed because (a) you WERE so betrayed, and (b) because you are still very, very early into the process of healing.
(a) You WERE so betrayed because your husband had an affair after he had made it clear to you that he wanted to be with you and only you for the rest of his life, and after the two of you made a commitment to enter into that kind of life together (i.e., monogamy). You also feel so betrayed because when you two got married, you thought you were marrying a man who was as deeply committed to monogamy as you were, but who, it turns out, wasn't. A friend of mine would describe this as a "bait-and-switch".
Lots of factors go into whether an affair is easier or harder to forgive, including:
- what your feelings about monogamy are
- what your personal and family history surrounding infidelity is
- what your faith says about it
- how long the affair lasted
- who it was with
- whether it was emotional and/or physical and/or sexual
- importantly, what was going on in your life at the time the affair happened.
I don't know about anything other than that last one, but some of the other factors may be making this extra tough, too.
(b) You are so early in the recovery process, Lisa3! It hasn't even been a year! Elle and other experts caution that it takes 3-5 years (yes, YEARS) to recover from the lion's share of the pain and distrust of an affair. The fact that you are able to have such a clear view of your situation after just 8 months means that you are doing very well indeed. I am 13 months out from catching my husband in an affair and 11 months out from getting the whole truth about the extent of the affair. When I was eight months out, I felt just as much ambivalence as you do, and I still feel a fair amount. But I feel infinitely more solid than I did when I first discovered the affair because my focus is very firmly on myself now.
2. "Why do I feel like I’m falling away from him?"
Healing a relationship is an active process. The passage of time alone will do nothing. What kind of active steps are the two of you taking to foster closeness and rebuilt trust?
The experts I've read encourage the betrayed person to seek comfort from the cheater, giving him a chance to prove that he can be there for her in her pain. So, when I'm triggered, I tell my husband. I ask him to hold me and reassure me. I'm specific. It's not easy for him because these experiences cause him to feel so much shame. Like learning anything new, there's a lot of mistakes but the overall trend is towards togetherness.
3. "How could he look at me and say our vows knowing what he had done?"
Have you asked him? This is something that he should know and be able to answer.
Is your husband good at compartmentalizing? You mentioned that what broke your trust is not just the affair but the lies he told when you were dating. Leading a double-life requires compartmentalization.
My husband was a MASTER at compartmentalization. (I say "was" because he is changing so much through therapy.) He learned it as a defense mechanism when he was a little kid to help him survive a horrible childhood. I have compassion for his compartmentalization for that reason.
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4. "I feel very much like I will never love him again the way I once did, I will never see him as the same man I once did. And that is slowly killing any desire I have to work on this. I feel depressed like I’ve lost motivation to do anything, cook, clean, work. I don’t enjoy time with him anymore. Is this normal? Will this fade in time?"
DeleteFor the first part: Yes, it does sound very normal to think you will never love him the way you once did, because the truth is that you won't, Lisa3. Now that you have crossed over into this new place, you cannot cross back. You cannot ever love him the way you once did. But this new place is not a bad place, and there is plenty of love here, maybe even love for your husband. It is a harsher place but it is the place where strength and wisdom live. All marriages will, at some point, involve being disappointed in your partner, disappointing your partner, and coming to understand that the person you got married to is not the person you stay married to. This would be true whether the affair happened or not. It's just the size of the disappointment (in this case, an affair that happened while you were engaged) that determines whether you want to stay with the person or leave.
For the middle part of your question, about whether it's normal for you to have lost motivation to do anything, like cook, clean, work, I think normalcy is irrelevant: You are depressed and you need to find a way to enjoy life again. By eight months I was highly functional on all fronts (work, parenting, exercise, socially), more so than I had been in years because the injustice of the affair forced me to see that I had been putting myself last for years, and I said "eff that!" and made myself a priority again. I strongly recommend setting your marriage aside for a little while and simply asking: what will give YOU the energy you need right now? What will YOU enjoy doing? Then do those self-care things. Cut out the things that lower your mood and cause you to feel unmotivated (e.g., alcohol, foods that are bad for you, spending time with toxic people) and make yourself do things that are good for your body (e.g., high intensity exercise, journalling, gratitude practice, breathing, socializing with friends who make you feel good about yourself).
Last part: Is it normal that you don't enjoy time with him anymore? This is a really tough one because I feel like 6-8 months is around that tipping point where I went from totally not enjoying spending time with him to every once in a while feeling like he's not so bad. For me, it was seeing him be a fantastic father with our boys that made me start to have the feeling of enjoying time with him. Also, I did this thing were at the end of the day, I forced myself to list and spend time thinking about all the good things he had done for me all day. The kind words, the kind gestures. For example, we were separated but he was coming over daily so that we could co-parent in the house together (we chose not to move the kids until we had a better idea of what we wanted to do) and I noticed one night that he had filled the pepper grinder. It was just a very small thing but it showed me that he was really paying attention to all of the household needs and making them his responsibility without being asked or reminded, even though he didn't live there anymore.
(continued below)
I had to force myself to meditate on these kind gestures of his in order to re-create neural pathways of appreciation for my husband -- the cheating had severed them somehow, making me unable to see almost ANYTHING good he did. Lisa3, I'll be honest: it felt like brainwashing myself for the first few weeks -- it felt deeply unsafe (and I would NOT recommend it if you suspect you haven't gotten the whole truth yet). But after about a month, I started to feel a shift. I could see clearly again. That was the turning point for me of starting to enjoy time with him again. I already had a lot of respect for how he was stepping up after being caught cheating. At that point I started to feel tenderness, too. And as Glennon Doyle writes, the combination of tenderness and respect feels a lot like love.
Delete5. "Do I keep trying to rebuild with him or cut my losses and just leave?"
Oh, honey, if I knew the answer, I'd give it to you, I promise.
When I reached the point where I was going crazy with this question (which was about 4-5 months after I got the whole truth), I was directed to two resources by our marriage counsellor. The first was the book "What Makes Love Last?" by John Gottman and the second is "Too Good To Leave, Too Bad To Stay" by Mira Kirshenbaum. Both of these books have questionnaires you can use to lead you to an answer. I found it very, very useful to have these objective questionnaires. The ones in the Gottman book are validated, the one in the Kirshenbaum book is based on decades of clinical practice. (What I'm trying to say is, they are highly reliable.) I also found Mira Kirshenbaum's book "I love you but I don't trust you" to be very useful with its direct advice.
You asked for advice, so here's mine: When I was in the period of asking this question most intensely, I came to realize that I wanted to have the right answer so that I could make the right choice... because I thought that the right choice would protect me from feeling any more pain. Which is impossible. No matter what, I'm going to feel more pain in life. And that's okay. That's rocket fuel of our growth.
Personally, I wouldn't have stayed if we didn't have kids together. But that's because our marriage was in terrible shape prior to his affair, despite all the effort I was making to bring us closer together and make him feel valued and desired and loved.
Have you considered giving yourself a secret deadline for making it work? Like a year?
Have you considered separating and seeing how that feels? Basically, going back to dating? My husband and I separated and it was completely essential for us.
I hope all of this helps, Lisa3.
Write again any time. You are among friends.