Multiple Sex Partners: "I just don't understand"

I'm re-posting this recent comment from Breathe, over on the Share Your Story thread so that more of you can read it. I think "Breathe" speaks for a lot of us, who come to terms with one affair, only to realize that there's so much to the story. How, we wonder, can we heal from even more pain? I'm also including my response after Breathe's letter.

My D-Day was six month ago. He had an affair with a coworker.
The last months were more than tough, but we were doing so great, I was doing so great.

I just experienced a big milestone on my healing journey. I reached a point where I realized that I cannot fight the whole thing anymore. I understood that it was his choice. And I also understood that I need to accept that he did this because otherwise I keep myself from living in the presence and be happy again. It was time to be kind to myself again.

My husband's affair felt like there was a battle and I wasn't there to fight it. The battle was over. But I was still fighting it. It just felt so unfair that I did not get a chance to fight it. To stop him from going to see her, to be with her.

However, the moment I realized that I cannot fight a losing battle I was somehow free again. I was able to stop all those mind movies, to stop reliving things to the fullest, I stopped having all those fantasies about doing bad things to them, to her, you know what I mean. I could ease this excruciating pain that sometimes – frankly spoken – I would inflict on me on purpose.

Learning about the “loss cycle” from my therapist, I understood that I surrendered.
And with it came this wonderful peace of mind that I hadn't felt since ages. I felt so so good. My friends even said I look so relaxed and so young again.

But one week ago, something terrible happened. Out of the blue, there was D-Day 2.
We were about moving houses and while packing boxes I found an old bank statement showing that he withdrew a lot of money in a dodgy part of the city in December 2018. And suddenly there was this thought I wanted to deny but I couldn´t.

Long story short: He also betrayed me with prostitutes. He visited brothels and sensual massage places. Basically, since we are together. He has done it since 20 years.

Today I still feel numb. And I am so so confused! How can you live and love someone and not see that he is acting out like this. Even though, looking back, it now all makes sense. It´s like I finally found the missing puzzle piece.

After the revelation of the affair, he kept saying that he feels so relieved that everything is out and that I know everything now. I should have known better!

We both are committed to make our relationship all it can be.I see that he wants to become a better man. He still tries hard. Every day.

But now I wonder if we can? I understood the “why” of the affair. I did not approve but accepted that emotional betrayal. But can I accept all the other betrayals as well?

He says that he only did it for the excitement, for the thrill of doing something forbidden. Less for sexual satisfaction. He says that this part of his life belonged only to him. He also says that he did not like it, but he could not stop it.

I don't understand. I just don't understand.

Any first aid advice out there?

I didn't understand either when I learned, first, that my husband was having an affair and, then six months later, that he had had multiple sexual encounters. But there I was, trying to make sense of it all. And what I've learned is this: I will never understand how he was able to conduct this double life. But I can accept that he did. I can accept that his compulsion was powerful enough to override his own value system and his love of his family. I can accept that he believed the stories he told himself, that nobody was getting hurt, that he was just "different" than other people with a stronger sex drive. But I couldn't accept any of that until he sought help. In my case, he had reached out for help before I learned about the sex addiction. The exposure of his affair opened the door for him to admit he had a serious problem that threatened everything that mattered to him. It was up to him to discover what drove his behaviour. My job was only to accept it had happened and move on. It was my choice, also, whether to move on with him in my life or without. But the accepting was, for me, not optional. Because not accepting was a denial of reality. He had cheated on me with many many people. All the wishing in the world wasn't going to change that. And like you discovered, accepting offers us the chance for peace.  

This is the job in front of you now. To accept that his behaviour is his to understand. To recognize that hurt people hurt people. That they behave in ways that harm themselves as well as those they love. That they behave in ways that exploits others as well as exploiting their own values.

Oddly, I think understanding has come for me, if slightly. I understand that my husband had never learned how to manage deeply painful feelings from growing up in an oppressive, abusive home. Sex was an escape for him. It took him out of his day-to-day life into something of a trance – he was either seeking it, arranging it, or engaging in it. Immediately following, he was filled with shame and regret and would tell himself, 'not again'. Until the next time. It was addictive behaviour. And addictive behaviour rarely makes sense to those of us who aren't addicts. 

I wish you peace, again. I think you'll find it. 

Who Do We Think We Are? Let's Answer That Honestly

I built my ego on never needing help. I fed on others' praise for being so "together". Asking for help felt akin to walking out my door completely naked. Exposed. If I didn't have it all together, why would anyone want to be my friend?
Dysfunctional families teach us that the world exists on a binary. We are either good or bad. Right or wrong. Valuable or worthless. We are either doing great or falling apart. We matter only or we don't matter at all.
Enter betrayal and the ridiculous binary that our culture imposes onto it – women who get cheated on are nags, frigid, homely; men who cheat are dogs, players, cads.
If we tell anyone, we face judgement: "You're not going to stay with him, are you? or "Think about what leaving will do to your children." Or, as a friend who'd been betrayed herself said to me, "Well, I certainly wouldn't stay."
And what that judgement does – whether experienced outright or perceived – is stir up the rot of our old stuff. My old stuff included a conviction that staying with a husband who cheated was what pathetic women did. It included a sense of non-surprise. Of course, he cheated on me. After all, I was all those things that I'd heard for years that I was: too sensitive, too demanding, too selfish, spoken in my mother's drunken slur. 
I'd suited myself up in armour over the years. I'd made sure that I was fit (two marathons!), a good mother (plenty of fresh air and no processed sugar for MY children!), successful (ten books written while my children napped). That I thought that armour of faux perfection could protect me is laughable in hindsight. At the time, however, it offered the only protection I had.
Then D-Day, the metaphorical bomb that blows up our worlds.
And suddenly my armour was revealed to be as useless as it always had been. Being "perfect" hadn't saved me from heartbreak. It had only lent the illusion of protection. As Liz Gilbert puts it, "perfect is just fear in good shoes."
And my rot was stirred.
Those old messages might as well have been written on my bathroom mirror. I couldn't see past them to the woman standing there. 
"You're not sexy enough."
"You're too demanding."
"You don't make enough money."
"You don't dress up enough."
And on. And on.
It felt akin to walking out the door completely naked. Even with very few people knowing about my husband's betrayal, I felt utterly exposed as a fraud. One of saddest, most vivid memories I have about that time is my sense that everyone was laughing at me, delighting in my humiliation. 
Who the hell had I thought I was?
Which is the question that has underscored every other lesson I've learned through this.
Who the hell did I think I was?
It's the shackle that binds so many of us who grow up in dysfunction. Hell, it's a shackle that binds pretty much any woman who expects to be seen, to be treated fairly. Any time we think we've transcended the shame of our childhoods, or shed the low expectations, it's there. Just who the hell do we think we are?
Who do we think we are to imagine someone could love us?
Who do we think we are to believe ourselves worthy of a good education?
Who do we think we are to apply for that job, that promotion, that opportunity? To be allowed in the room?
Who do we think we are to deserve fidelity? To be able to age? To go grey? To grow soft?
Who do we think we are?
Who I think I am is someone who is human. Who is worthy of love and belonging, despite – even because of – my shortcomings. Who deserves a seat at the table.
Just who the hell do you think you are? That's a question for you to answer based on the truth of you, not the old stories you've been told. 
But here's a start: You are someone who did not deserve to be cheated on. After all, just who the hell does he think he is? 

Just One Thing

"When we're under the weight of anxiety and shame and depression, it's so difficult to act. So it is a challenge to do one new thing...."
~Harriet Lerner, from Dear Sugars: Moving On Part II 

So many of you are stuck. You're torn between leaving a marriage to a man unwilling to humble himself and seek help and protecting your children from heartbreak. You're torn about whether to believe in this better man and his promises, even though he's broken plenty before.  You're paralyzed by the changes that leaving will bring – less income, moving, loneliness.
I was there. I've been stuck. On the one hand, I wanted to flee and never look back. On the other, I didn't have the energy to pack a suitcase let alone settle three children into a new home and, possibly, new school.
And, of course, on this site, we always give each other permission to rest. To just sit with things. To digest this new reality before making any big decisions. We don't always have to do. Sometimes we need to just be.
But when we feel as though we're stuck in concrete and it's hardening with every second, then action is a wise course. It's life-affirming.
It's also daunting.
Because we're so bloody afraid. What if we change our minds? What if we can't get a job? What if we die, destitute and living in a refrigerator box and he goes on to win the lottery? What if... What if... What if...
Breathe.
What if you just focused on your next right step. Or as Lerner puts it, "one new thing."
It can take the pressure off while still moving you forward. It's like reconnaissance. Gathering information, gaining momentum.
"One new thing" could be joining a running club. It could be browsing some course calendars at your local college. It might be seeing a therapist and admitting how depressed you are.
Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be having a college degree, having a new job, running a marathon. We get away ahead of ourselves. Think of it this way, we can't climb a mountain without first getting off the damn couch. And maybe getting off the couch is your "one new thing".
Set them up for success not failure, is something a parenting expert told me once when I was writing a story on potty-training your kids (my life is nothing but glamour!). And that's what I'm telling you here. You don't need to know how your story is going to turn. In fact, you can't know because none of us has a crystal ball.
But you can take a single step, a "next right thing", "a one new thing" toward creating a life that's better than the one you have right now. You cannot control whether he becomes a better man but you can insist that he seek counselling. You cannot determine whether divorce will mean selling the house and downsizing but you can have a consultation with a lawyer to find out. You cannot wish away the depression you're feeling but you can call a therapist, begin medication, make a pact with a neighbour to get out and walk each day for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour.
You can do this.
Just one thing.

Acknowledging His Pain Too

"Being half anywhere is the true definition of loneliness."
~Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

It's tough to stomach when you're sitting in a therapist's office, your guts spilling out onto the floor, your heart shattered, your life in ruins, and your husband suggests that he's hurting too.
HE'S hurting? Well, cry me a goddamned river. He's the one who lobbed this grenade into your life. He's the one who lied and cheated and stomped all over your heart. You wouldn't be in this bloody mess if it wasn't for him.
He hurts too? Well, too damn bad. He's not going to get any sympathy from you. No way. Never. 
Never came sooner than I thought it would.
Never came when I had triaged my own wounds enough to be able to look around and notice that he was bleeding too. At first, there was some satisfaction in this. I kinda enjoyed knowing he was in pain. In fact, I thought I could use that pain to keep him in check. As long as I kept reminding him of what he'd done to me – to us, including our children – I could assure myself that he'd be less likely to do it again. I wanted that pain to feel fresh, to sting. To act as a check on any impulses he might have to cheat again.
That was a mistake. 
My husband didn't cheat because he wasn't hurting enough, he cheated because he was hurting too much and didn't know how to deal with it. He cheated because the only way he knew how to manage the constant ache of loneliness he felt was to distract himself from it.  Sort of like how we dig our fingernails into our palm to distract from dental work. 
It took time before I could listen to his pain without trying to trump it with my own. In the early days post D-Day, I couldn't. I was drowning in my own pain and didn't much care if the water was rising for him too. And that's fair. At first, it's all we can do to keep our heads above the waves. We absolutely must tend to our own wounds first. 
But the time comes, especially if you want to rebuild your marriage but even if you don't, when it matters that you notice his pain too. It matters because it's in that compassion that your healing accelerates. By realizing that others hurt too, our own pain becomes less isolating. It becomes part of the human condition. Others' pain doesn't eclipse our own, it makes our own a bit more bearable. But only when we're each able to hold the others' pain as well. Minimizing, dismissing or playing the pain olympics just keeps us locked in our own silos. 
And remember this. His pain isn't an excuse for cheating. It doesn't, for even a micro-second, mean that what he did was okay. But it does point us toward understanding. And it further makes clear that his cheating wasn't about us. My husband was lonely. An existential loneliness that defined much of his time. It was a loneliness he'd felt much of his life, courtesy of a cold demanding mother. But his loneliness wasn't my fault nor was it my responsibility to fix, even if I'd known he was feeling it.
When our marriage hit a rough patch – young kids, stressful career, competing ambitions – he responded the way he'd learned as a kid. Focus on something else. Get involved in risky behaviour. Seek out sex to self-medicate. 
By understanding that he was in pain too I'm able to empathize. We were both hurting. I responded differently – not by cheating but by stewing in my resentment and treating him like an annoying child. But I came into our marriage with a different set of coping skills, with a different history. The day I was able to accept that if I was him, I might have chosen a similar path, was the day that my own heart began to feel whole again. And, incidentally, when we're able to have compassion for others, it's so much easier to have it for ourselves.
There's no rule that you ever have to acknowledge your husband's pain too. And lots of guys make it even harder by dragging us through further humiliation and pain, by continuing to lie and call our own sanity into question. Without genuine remorse and sincere determination to come clean and figure out how to move forward with honesty and integrity, lots of these guys don't deserve a second chance. But whether or not you make the choice to rebuild a marriage with someone who does deserve that second chance or move on without him, recognizing that hurt people hurt people can light your way forward. 
It can soften your heart enough to realize that compassion is not a finite resource. The more we offer, the more that's available to us. 

Having each other's backs

I was pulled aside at my son's preschool one day because of something he had said. His teacher wanted to talk with me about his language. I gulped.
Apparently he had called some boys in the schoolyard a "bunch of idiots". I asked for context. She told me that these boys refused to allow a friend of my son's to play soccer with them. While my son was included, this friend was not. And so my son threw an arm around his friend and told him that they didn't care about these other boys because they were just "a bunch of idiots."
I assured the teacher I would have a chat with him about his language but that I would also tell him how proud I was of him for standing by his friend, for being loyal and for having the courage to stand up to a "bunch of idiots".
Now 15 years old, he's still that kid.
I was that kid.
Which is why, I think, my husband's betrayal was such a shock. I thought he was that kid. I thought that, no matter what, he had my back. After all, I had his.
That, I figure, is what marriage is. After the crazy can't-live-without-you phase is over, after the why-can't-you-put-the-toilet-seat-down arguments are settled, after kids and mortgages and sick parents, marriage is about always having each other's backs. It's our safe place.
Or should have been. But wasn't.
Those of us choosing to try and rebuild our marriages are really trying to create that safe space. And it's hard when one of the partners doesn't feel safe. It's hard when one of the partners doesn't seem to have our back at all. When he's working so hard to protect his own back that he forgets he's the one who put the knife in ours.
But I'm wondering if the husbands who also want to rebuild their marriages might understand that we need them to have our backs, no matter what. Might they understand that better than rules of "no contact" or rules of disclosure? Can they commit to trying to always protect us from pain? Can they understand that we were hurt because they let their guard down. Because they didn't have our backs.
It might seem like semantics. Or it might seem like minimizing the devastation of betrayal.
But then again, it might work.
If they can wrap their minds around this idea that marriage is about watching each other's backs. Like guard dogs watching for threats and being conscious of any time they are the dangerous person in our lives. Then maybe they can feel less daunted by what's needed of them. Maybe they can step up and be the man they want to be. The one they should have been.
Back then.