After 4 years post D-Day, I think I have come to a turning point. I set in my mind by the time our youngest graduates I need a healthier happier marriage. Things have actually been going better, but I knew deep down the battle was not over. Tonight , I saw an email of my husband inviting some woman he worked with for a walk in the forest preserve. We have not seen any of our friends as we shelter in place. I don't know her and he made no mention of this to me. Tomorrow is the one day this week I go into the office to work. I was so hoping I would not ever feel betrayed again but now it seems clear what I feel I learned in IC, that I cannot trust him. Next week is our daughters virtual graduation. I need strength to not let this spoil this milestone for her in any way. I need wisdom how to proceed with this during a pandemic. You have all been out there for me many late nights that you have not realized. I appreciate being able to draw some strength from you.
Anonymous, I'm glad you've been among us. You have the strength you need. It's there. I promise. Doesn't mean you won't feel shaky. It does mean that you can do this. You are prioritizing your values and self-respect over his comfort. You are recognizing your worth. Sit tight but get your plan in place. And know that even if you get pushback from him or your kids, that doesn't make this the wrong choice. Your job is not to protect everyone from pain by sacrificing yourself. It is to be there for your kids as they experience pain, it is to trust that they, too, are strong enough to get through this. You are modelling to them self-respect and integrity. You can do this and you will have this silent army of women behind you, rooting you on.
I was too broken and ignorant to even think I had a relationship with myself. My relationship with myself was making others happy, bowing to others requests, pressured to do things I didn't want to do. My relationship with myself was one of reacting, always on the defense. React, react, react without a silly thought in my head. It took me 60 years to finally have a relationship with myself. I don't have a bad life, don't get me wrong but I didn't have one good relationship. My sister wants nothing to do with me. My mom treated me with no love. My first husband hit me. My second husband cheated on me. My kids love me so that is a plus. My daughter-in laws love me to the moon. Unfortunately my daughter is alot like me. I understand and love her. Now after I was shot down, mowed down, fell down, kicked down it forced me to have a relationship with myself. I looked around it was only me left on my side. I just didn't see ever how I let people treat me bad. I'm still learning alot about myself. Catch myself when I start to slip. Life is good, I can relax around myself. I have peace finally. Is life perfect. No but because I'm more solid in myself. Can't shoot me I wear my boundary armor. Can't mow me down, I can leave. Can't kick me down, I can kick you first. I don't wear a post it note on my forehead that says "use me."
You have come such a long way, LLP. And it's clear, in your relationships with your kids, that you have broken that cycle of pain in your family. Your kids will pass that love along too. That's amazing and it takes incredible strength. Your sister doesn't yet get that. I hope she will.
I never thought I would find myself here. My first marriage with three children ended in 2006 due to infidelity I was not able to get past. If infidelity was the only thing, we may have made it, but there were many other things. Fast forward to the present. I have been in a relationship for about 12 years with a man I felt was my soul mate. He always seemed to have this need to flirt with women, but he, to my knowledge, has never had an affair. I came home from work 3 hours early unannounced and found him in bed with a woman I had questioned him about a while ago. I am broken. I hurt. I have gut wrenching grief. I can’t sleep and I can’t get the image of him having sex with her out of my head. He says he was to fix things and will go to counseling with me, but will I ever fee while again. I’m so humiliated!
Crushed, I'm so sorry you had to find out like that, in your bed too. It is beyond words. Not much I can say since you have been there, done that. I can't imagine what is going through your mind. The mind movies will be monster movies. My H is a big flirt, he calls it just being friendly. I explained to him how much that hurts me. He toned it down. He knows you have been through this then he does it again in your house and bed! Please stay in touch, vent and go to therapy. I was a terrible judge of men. If Charles Manson walked to me and gave a simple compliment - off I go. I have been watching other women lately. My H said to my daughter-in-law, where did you get those pants? She said, I like them and that is all that matters. All that matters is you. All that matters is you. Hugs to you.
"When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself." Glennon Doyle I have been working to build a better relationship with myself since the start of the 2020. D-day for me will be 5 months ago this week. Three days before hosting family from out of town for Christmas 2019, I found out my H of 10 years had been cheating on me for almost 4 years (on & off he keeps insisting, like it makes a difference). His affair was with a new co-worker who he happened to go to high school with. Ironically, she's also a licensed therapist specializing in relationships and children's mental health (hypocrisy!). I found out when I saw a text he'd forgotten to delete while showing me the games he plays on his phone to explain why he was always in his phone so much. The text was from 2 days prior...he'd been with her having sex in her therapy office (she had left the company they worked for and started her own practice late summer 2019). He ended it the day I found out insisting that it was easy to drop her now that I knew. He didn't care for her like that, it was more for the sex and feeling wanted and admired. First he was very defensive saying I didn't make him feel valued enough and we weren't having enough sex. I'm finally comfortable saying his cheating was NOT my fault. Did our marriage have problems, absolutely. We were both bad at communicating and our lives were stressful. His defensiveness has shifted to feelings of guilt, shame, remorse, sadness for the pain he caused me. He said he felt horrible the entire time and was trying to find a way out without me finding out. He'd betrayed himself and says he was the worst version of himself again with this OW. My H is a recovering addict(13-years sober from drugs and alcohol). However, when faced with a difficult time in his marriage, he reverted right back to addict behavior of selfishness and getting a high from something easy and elicit, an affair with this whore (who is married with 4 children). Yes, we were not having much sex, because I was having many "female" issues (including a scare with ovarian cancer). And things were stressful (our young son born with a heart defect and is heart failure). I am still heart broken, angry, sad, distrustful and in shock. How does one lie for so long?? How do you come home every day and face your family knowing you're setting up hotel room rendezvous and texting and talking to another woman outside your marriage without feeling like a complete piece of shit. How do I learn to trust him again? How do I learn to trust myself again? How do I stop these horrible images of them together from pervading my thoughts? I go from having good days to having days where I'm still teary and distraught and furious. We are in couples therapy, individual therapy and he's also in sex-addiction therapy (he had an addiction to porn, which was ongoing while having his affair, but he's since stopped). In spite of everything, I've decided to try and work on creating a new marriage. He thanks me all the time for giving him a second chance. He is an addict and he vows to keep working on himself. This site has been a guiding light for me. Thank you Elle for sharing your story so many years ago - I am so grateful for you and the fierce tribe of women here. It helps to know that others have gone before me and come out the other side having grown stronger in-spite of, and at times because of, the infidelities of their H. Right now, I'm having a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, as the pain cuts so deep and I can't seem to shake the empty feeling of sadness that envelopes me on a daily basis. I don't know if I can ever really forgive him. For now I keep repeating to myself, "We can do hard things.". Hoping time and therapy will heal my wounds.
Your questions resonated with me. Here are some cheaters answers:
How does one lie for so long?? “One flaw in wayward thinking is that we take what we have for granted. We don't see that we're getting 80% of what we want/need out of our relationship, which is a pretty good deal. A healthy person who felt something really important was missing would work to build it within their marriage. Nor do we consider how our expectations may be selfish and unrealistic. Instead, we tell ourselves we're deprived, and we grab for that last 20% with someone else, and then we overvalue them. We act like just because we now feel up at 100%, the affair is supplying it all. Then D-Day hits. Our BS is furious and about to walk out the door with 80% of our lives. We realize that the 20% supplied by the AP is totally inadequate to make us happy. We scramble to salvage what we can.”
Next Question: How do you come home every day and face your family knowing you're setting up hotel room rendezvous and texting and talking to another woman outside your marriage without feeling like a complete piece of shit. “Many waywards, including me, are skillful at lying to themselves as well as to their spouses. As my BW says, "No one wants to be the villain in their own story." I didn't want to be the kind of person who crossed a line, and yet I also wanted the ego kibbles and physical pleasure of crossing that line, so I invented justifications for minimizing my behavior. And it happened by degrees. At the outset, I would have told you that I would never end up in bed with OW, and I would have meant it. By the end of four months, when my conscience tried to wake me up, I put my metaphorical hands over my ears. I had already broken so many interim boundaries that I knew I was in deep trouble and didn't want to face it.”
“For me...my whys really are rooted in a lack of self love for my affairs. Low self confidence and low self esteem. Attention seeking to fill that black hole. For most it always seemed the same.”
“I justified the A by saying I deserved it. I didn't even like my AP, but they were just there to feed a void of desire and sexual needs. I couldn't walk away - I don't know why but it was difficult to drop what I knew was a bad person that I felt ashamed of. But still - I would go back and get a "fix" when my life became too much for me to handle.”
“Can a lot of this be under the "escapism/avoidance" umbrella? Escaping different things (most often, I think, oneself), but still trying to mask and avoid. Perhaps it's not an issue of not knowing oneself, but not actually liking oneself and using avoidance to not confront or expose the person that they don't like. I know much of this can also be tied up in self-esteem issues--it's all a part of the same tangle, unfortunately.”
How do I learn to trust him again? The old innocent trust of the past is GONE. That's not to say that new trust can't be developed, but it will never be naive or innocent again. There are some things which are utterly destroyed by infidelity and this is one of them.
I'll give people many second chances. There only one chance with trust.
I'm asking my own questions now - How should he be gaining my trust?
“Waywards who are doing the work recognize that they are no longer in the driver's seat of R. They don't avoid answering questions, they don't resent being doubted, they don't conceal the facts of the A, and they don't demand to speed up the process. They don't focus on fixing the BS or the marriage to "get back to normal." They recognize that their version of normal was severely fucked up. They look inward with vulnerability, and they share what they find there.” “You don't trust yourself. Why in the Hell would they trust you or feel safe? You want them to open up to you. There is no reason why they would. It requires them to be vulnerable with someone that has prove to hurt them by choice and that doesn't even trust or love themselves. It makes no absolute sense for them to trust you. So, stop expecting it and do your best with work on yourself to earn it. It will take a long long time. Never if you never work on you and your whys. Never if you never learn to be enough for yourself.”
LLP Sorry it took my so long to reply; I'm just now getting hold of a laptop. For some reason i can't reply via cell phone. Thank you for sharing those answers from cheaters. And for your insightful questions and words. Many of the cheaters statement have been echoed in some of what my H has been saying. I was beginning to believe that he was making progress. In one of our first therapy sessions he'd promised he'd not spout anymore lies going forward. Well, fast forward 5 months and it turns out he was having 2 affairs simultaneously. I'm nauseated, saddened, and fearful that I can ever trust him. Over a month ago I'd mentioned to him that there were a lot of phone calls to one of his other co-workers and was he also having an affair with her? I calmly asked for the truth...we'd done too much work for him to keep lying. He pitched a wonderful story about how this woman (also a therapist) had found a text he'd forgotten to delete from the work cell phone that his co-workers share and that she was trying to help him stop his affair. I pressed on, but he stood firm. He did NOT sleep with this woman!! This time however, I did not ignore my intuition. I pressed forward saying that his calls with her started prior to the date he gave me of when she supposedly found this errant text from his other AP. He then admitted that he was talking to her alot and they were just flirting on the phone and that it was inappropriate. At this point I no longer believed a word coming out of his mouth. I found his work email open one day and dug through and found several emails that eluded to walks in the park, exchanging pictures, and laughs about "cardio" and the aftermath of "Us". Finally - the fourth time I confronted him...he finally gave up the truth that he was having an affair with her too. That was three days ago. I've not spoken to him since and have relegated him to the couch. I'm completely numb and unsure whether I want to move forward with him. He's insistent that he loves me and wants to do the work on building a new marriage. Do I give him a second change? Or does this get lumped into the first affair that I found out about? If I hadn't been insistent to find out if he was lying, I would never have known...but my gut would have always been nagging at me saying "something is not right here". I had to know if I could trust my gut instincts after all the years of gas lighting me. How in the world am I ever supposed to understand if he's doing the work now with honest conviction. He lied to protect himself as he still works with her. He says he cut AP2 off completely the same day I found out about AP1. And that he was going to tell me about AP2 after she leaves the company mid-July. He's shared he has a black hole of validation that needs to be filled. But believes that now that he's identified this void that caused him to cheat, that he no longer needs individual therapy...he's got this on his own. He says I make him a better person and I'm the love of his life and our marriage is the most important thing to him. Do I take another chance....
After 4 years post D-Day, I think I have come to a turning point. I set in my mind by the time our youngest graduates I need a healthier happier marriage. Things have actually been going better, but I knew deep down the battle was not over. Tonight , I saw an email of my husband inviting some woman he worked with for a walk in the forest preserve. We have not seen any of our friends as we shelter in place. I don't know her and he made no mention of this to me. Tomorrow is the one day this week I go into the office to work. I was so hoping I would not ever feel betrayed again but now it seems clear what I feel I learned in IC, that I cannot trust him. Next week is our daughters virtual graduation. I need strength to not let this spoil this milestone for her in any way. I need wisdom how to proceed with this during a pandemic. You have all been out there for me many late nights that you have not realized. I appreciate being able to draw some strength from you.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
DeleteI'm glad you've been among us.
You have the strength you need. It's there. I promise. Doesn't mean you won't feel shaky. It does mean that you can do this. You are prioritizing your values and self-respect over his comfort. You are recognizing your worth. Sit tight but get your plan in place. And know that even if you get pushback from him or your kids, that doesn't make this the wrong choice. Your job is not to protect everyone from pain by sacrificing yourself. It is to be there for your kids as they experience pain, it is to trust that they, too, are strong enough to get through this. You are modelling to them self-respect and integrity. You can do this and you will have this silent army of women behind you, rooting you on.
I was too broken and ignorant to even think I had a relationship with myself. My relationship with myself was making others happy, bowing to others requests, pressured to do things I didn't want to do. My relationship with myself was one of reacting, always on the defense. React, react, react without a silly thought in my head. It took me 60 years to finally have a relationship with myself. I don't have a bad life, don't get me wrong but I didn't have one good relationship. My sister wants nothing to do with me. My mom treated me with no love. My first husband hit me. My second husband cheated on me. My kids love me so that is a plus. My daughter-in laws love me to the moon. Unfortunately my daughter is alot like me. I understand and love her. Now after I was shot down, mowed down, fell down, kicked down it forced me to have a relationship with myself. I looked around it was only me left on my side. I just didn't see ever how I let people treat me bad. I'm still learning alot about myself. Catch myself when I start to slip. Life is good, I can relax around myself. I have peace finally. Is life perfect. No but because I'm more solid in myself. Can't shoot me I wear my boundary armor. Can't mow me down, I can leave. Can't kick me down, I can kick you first. I don't wear a post it note on my forehead that says "use me."
ReplyDeleteYou have come such a long way, LLP. And it's clear, in your relationships with your kids, that you have broken that cycle of pain in your family. Your kids will pass that love along too. That's amazing and it takes incredible strength. Your sister doesn't yet get that. I hope she will.
DeleteI never thought I would find myself here. My first marriage with three children ended in 2006 due to infidelity I was not able to get past. If infidelity was the only thing, we may have made it, but there were many other things. Fast forward to the present. I have been in a relationship for about 12 years with a man I felt was my soul mate. He always seemed to have this need to flirt with women, but he, to my knowledge, has never had an affair. I came home from work 3 hours early unannounced and found him in bed with a woman I had questioned him about a while ago. I am broken. I hurt. I have gut wrenching grief. I can’t sleep and I can’t get the image of him having sex with her out of my head. He says he was to fix things and will go to counseling with me, but will I ever fee while again. I’m so humiliated!
ReplyDeleteCrushed, I'm so sorry you had to find out like that, in your bed too. It is beyond words. Not much I can say since you have been there, done that. I can't imagine what is going through your mind. The mind movies will be monster movies. My H is a big flirt, he calls it just being friendly. I explained to him how much that hurts me. He toned it down. He knows you have been through this then he does it again in your house and bed! Please stay in touch, vent and go to therapy. I was a terrible judge of men. If Charles Manson walked to me and gave a simple compliment - off I go. I have been watching other women lately. My H said to my daughter-in-law, where did you get those pants? She said, I like them and that is all that matters. All that matters is you. All that matters is you. Hugs to you.
ReplyDelete"When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself." Glennon Doyle
ReplyDeleteI have been working to build a better relationship with myself since the start of the 2020. D-day for me will be 5 months ago this week. Three days before hosting family from out of town for Christmas 2019, I found out my H of 10 years had been cheating on me for almost 4 years (on & off he keeps insisting, like it makes a difference). His affair was with a new co-worker who he happened to go to high school with. Ironically, she's also a licensed therapist specializing in relationships and children's mental health (hypocrisy!). I found out when I saw a text he'd forgotten to delete while showing me the games he plays on his phone to explain why he was always in his phone so much. The text was from 2 days prior...he'd been with her having sex in her therapy office (she had left the company they worked for and started her own practice late summer 2019). He ended it the day I found out insisting that it was easy to drop her now that I knew. He didn't care for her like that, it was more for the sex and feeling wanted and admired. First he was very defensive saying I didn't make him feel valued enough and we weren't having enough sex. I'm finally comfortable saying his cheating was NOT my fault. Did our marriage have problems, absolutely. We were both bad at communicating and our lives were stressful. His defensiveness has shifted to feelings of guilt, shame, remorse, sadness for the pain he caused me. He said he felt horrible the entire time and was trying to find a way out without me finding out. He'd betrayed himself and says he was the worst version of himself again with this OW. My H is a recovering addict(13-years sober from drugs and alcohol). However, when faced with a difficult time in his marriage, he reverted right back to addict behavior of selfishness and getting a high from something easy and elicit, an affair with this whore (who is married with 4 children). Yes, we were not having much sex, because I was having many "female" issues (including a scare with ovarian cancer). And things were stressful (our young son born with a heart defect and is heart failure).
I am still heart broken, angry, sad, distrustful and in shock. How does one lie for so long?? How do you come home every day and face your family knowing you're setting up hotel room rendezvous and texting and talking to another woman outside your marriage without feeling like a complete piece of shit. How do I learn to trust him again? How do I learn to trust myself again? How do I stop these horrible images of them together from pervading my thoughts? I go from having good days to having days where I'm still teary and distraught and furious. We are in couples therapy, individual therapy and he's also in sex-addiction therapy (he had an addiction to porn, which was ongoing while having his affair, but he's since stopped). In spite of everything, I've decided to try and work on creating a new marriage. He thanks me all the time for giving him a second chance. He is an addict and he vows to keep working on himself.
This site has been a guiding light for me. Thank you Elle for sharing your story so many years ago - I am so grateful for you and the fierce tribe of women here. It helps to know that others have gone before me and come out the other side having grown stronger in-spite of, and at times because of, the infidelities of their H. Right now, I'm having a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, as the pain cuts so deep and I can't seem to shake the empty feeling of sadness that envelopes me on a daily basis. I don't know if I can ever really forgive him. For now I keep repeating to myself, "We can do hard things.". Hoping time and therapy will heal my wounds.
Your questions resonated with me. Here are some cheaters answers:
DeleteHow does one lie for so long??
“One flaw in wayward thinking is that we take what we have for granted. We don't see that we're getting 80% of what we want/need out of our relationship, which is a pretty good deal. A healthy person who felt something really important was missing would work to build it within their marriage. Nor do we consider how our expectations may be selfish and unrealistic. Instead, we tell ourselves we're deprived, and we grab for that last 20% with someone else, and then we overvalue them. We act like just because we now feel up at 100%, the affair is supplying it all. Then D-Day hits. Our BS is furious and about to walk out the door with 80% of our lives. We realize that the 20% supplied by the AP is totally inadequate to make us happy. We scramble to salvage what we can.”
Next Question: How do you come home every day and face your family knowing you're setting up hotel room rendezvous and texting and talking to another woman outside your marriage without feeling like a complete piece of shit.
Delete“Many waywards, including me, are skillful at lying to themselves as well as to their spouses. As my BW says, "No one wants to be the villain in their own story." I didn't want to be the kind of person who crossed a line, and yet I also wanted the ego kibbles and physical pleasure of crossing that line, so I invented justifications for minimizing my behavior. And it happened by degrees. At the outset, I would have told you that I would never end up in bed with OW, and I would have meant it. By the end of four months, when my conscience tried to wake me up, I put my metaphorical hands over my ears. I had already broken so many interim boundaries that I knew I was in deep trouble and didn't want to face it.”
“For me...my whys really are rooted in a lack of self love for my affairs. Low self confidence and low self esteem. Attention seeking to fill that black hole. For most it always seemed the same.”
“I justified the A by saying I deserved it. I didn't even like my AP, but they were just there to feed a void of desire and sexual needs. I couldn't walk away - I don't know why but it was difficult to drop what I knew was a bad person that I felt ashamed of. But still - I would go back and get a "fix" when my life became too much for me to handle.”
“Can a lot of this be under the "escapism/avoidance" umbrella? Escaping different things (most often, I think, oneself), but still trying to mask and avoid. Perhaps it's not an issue of not knowing oneself, but not actually liking oneself and using avoidance to not confront or expose the person that they don't like. I know much of this can also be tied up in self-esteem issues--it's all a part of the same tangle, unfortunately.”
Question 4 - this is strictly my own opinion.
DeleteHow do I learn to trust him again?
The old innocent trust of the past is GONE. That's not to say that new trust can't be developed, but it will never be naive or innocent again. There are some things which are utterly destroyed by infidelity and this is one of them.
I'll give people many second chances. There only one chance with trust.
I'm asking my own questions now - How should he be gaining my trust?
Delete“Waywards who are doing the work recognize that they are no longer in the driver's seat of R. They don't avoid answering questions, they don't resent being doubted, they don't conceal the facts of the A, and they don't demand to speed up the process. They don't focus on fixing the BS or the marriage to "get back to normal." They recognize that their version of normal was severely fucked up. They look inward with vulnerability, and they share what they find there.”
“You don't trust yourself. Why in the Hell would they trust you or feel safe? You want them to open up to you. There is no reason why they would. It requires them to be vulnerable with someone that has prove to hurt them by choice and that doesn't even trust or love themselves. It makes no absolute sense for them to trust you. So, stop expecting it and do your best with work on yourself to earn it. It will take a long long time. Never if you never work on you and your whys. Never if you never learn to be enough for yourself.”
LLP
ReplyDeleteSorry it took my so long to reply; I'm just now getting hold of a laptop. For some reason i can't reply via cell phone.
Thank you for sharing those answers from cheaters. And for your insightful questions and words. Many of the cheaters statement have been echoed in some of what my H has been saying. I was beginning to believe that he was making progress. In one of our first therapy sessions he'd promised he'd not spout anymore lies going forward. Well, fast forward 5 months and it turns out he was having 2 affairs simultaneously. I'm nauseated, saddened, and fearful that I can ever trust him. Over a month ago I'd mentioned to him that there were a lot of phone calls to one of his other co-workers and was he also having an affair with her? I calmly asked for the truth...we'd done too much work for him to keep lying. He pitched a wonderful story about how this woman (also a therapist) had found a text he'd forgotten to delete from the work cell phone that his co-workers share and that she was trying to help him stop his affair. I pressed on, but he stood firm. He did NOT sleep with this woman!! This time however, I did not ignore my intuition. I pressed forward saying that his calls with her started prior to the date he gave me of when she supposedly found this errant text from his other AP. He then admitted that he was talking to her alot and they were just flirting on the phone and that it was inappropriate. At this point I no longer believed a word coming out of his mouth. I found his work email open one day and dug through and found several emails that eluded to walks in the park, exchanging pictures, and laughs about "cardio" and the aftermath of "Us". Finally - the fourth time I confronted him...he finally gave up the truth that he was having an affair with her too. That was three days ago. I've not spoken to him since and have relegated him to the couch. I'm completely numb and unsure whether I want to move forward with him. He's insistent that he loves me and wants to do the work on building a new marriage. Do I give him a second change? Or does this get lumped into the first affair that I found out about? If I hadn't been insistent to find out if he was lying, I would never have known...but my gut would have always been nagging at me saying "something is not right here". I had to know if I could trust my gut instincts after all the years of gas lighting me.
How in the world am I ever supposed to understand if he's doing the work now with honest conviction. He lied to protect himself as he still works with her. He says he cut AP2 off completely the same day I found out about AP1. And that he was going to tell me about AP2 after she leaves the company mid-July. He's shared he has a black hole of validation that needs to be filled. But believes that now that he's identified this void that caused him to cheat, that he no longer needs individual therapy...he's got this on his own.
He says I make him a better person and I'm the love of his life and our marriage is the most important thing to him. Do I take another chance....