Never had any affairs or even entertained an affair, but I visited prostitutes 4 times in the last 3 years of our relationship.
Gently, I think you are getting hung up on semantics here, or more likely, just minimizing. Claiming that you never had an affair, just had sex with prostitutes, is a little like saying that you never eat dinner, just supper sometimes. One of the first steps in making the changes that you are talking about here is in accepting and owning your actions and choices. You did not honor your vows to remain faithful to your marriage. No matter how that happened or what you call it, you had an affair. If your intent was to say, "I never had an affair UNTIL I visited prostitutes..." then that's something else. One of the things I'll share with you is that many of us (WS's) realize later on, after going to therapy and doing "the work", that we had a lot of little "warning signs" of infidelity before it occurred. But that's a topic for another day.
But my question is following. What if all this work - becoming more emotionally aware, learning to self-care, understanding the why's and the boundaries, working on improving relationships with important people in my life - touches only the surface?
This is fear talking. Fear of change. Fear of having to really look at yourself and who you are. Fear of failure. Fear of the unknown. Imagine someone saying, "What if I jump into the ocean, but I don't get wet? What then?" To be fair, if you've never been in the ocean before, never been to a beach, never learned to swim, then the thought of plunging into the unknown could be a really scary thing, and it is natural, and normal, and reasonable, to question what's going to happen once you take the plunge. But as someone who has jumped into the ocean before, I can tell you, that despite your fears, jumping into the ocean will make you wet, regardless of any fears or concerns you may have.
Jumping into an emotionally healthy version of yourself is the same. A person who is truly emotionally aware, self-caring and who understands themselves and their motivations on a deep level (by understanding their whys and other reasoning) is someone who, by definition, is already more than surface deep. In the same way that you can't be in the ocean and dry at the same time, you can't be emotionally healthy and yet... not. If you are still surface-level deep with your emotions, then you are still not self-aware and emotionally healthy.
Now, with new version of me i am afraid that i will be more emotionally aware = will end up with some stupid affair at some point.
Can you expand on this a little? I am just not understanding your line of thinking here. Affairs happen because of NOT being emotionally aware and from lacking things such as empathy for others, and more importantly, lacking respect for yourself.
Let me ask you something. Let's say you are walking down the street one day, and see someone eating a delicious ice cream cone that looks super yummy to you. Would it occur to you to run over to that person, beat the living snot out of them and take the ice cream cone for yourself while leaving them bleeding on the sidewalk?
Now, you might be thinking, "WTF DaddyDom? Why the hell would something like that even occur to me, let alone me doing it? I'm not a monster! I'm not violent! I'm not a thief! And I don't beat people up and leave them to die just to eat a damn ice cream cone I could just go buy for myself instead! I'M NOT THAT KIND OF PERSON!"
Right. You are not that kind of person. Notice that above, I didn't even mention the feelings, rights or experiences of the person eating the ice cream in my list of reasons for not attacking them... the whole premise for not attacking them is based on being the kind of person that, because of their own self-respect, their own dignity, their own sense of right and wrong... would never attack someone else, because doing so would feel horrific to them. I don't know about you, but if I attacked someone like that, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. I would hate who I am and what I did, and would do anything to make it right.
My long-winded point here is this... an emotionally healthy person doesn't have an affair, CANNOT have an affair, because doing so would violate their own sense of decency and integrity. Being more emotionally aware doesn't make you MORE susceptible to an affair, it makes you LESS susceptible. It prevents it entirely in fact.
Do yourself a favor. Stop worrying about who you might become and focus more on the fact that you are not who you want to be RIGHT NOW. Right now, you are a person who chose to NOT respect themselves or their partner. You are a person who chose to lie and hide and do the wrong thing. If that isn't who you want to be, then being someone better is the best choice you can possibly make.
