SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am shaking and I don't know where else to go.

My BH says I was cruel intentionally--that that was PART of the fun for me. I know I was cruel. I know what I did was fun while I was in it. I know I disregarded his experience--that I was able to turn off my compassion and that THAT was cruel. But in my head I was not enjoying the hurt I was causing him.

He says I was because of the choices I made:

I wrote an article about my AP on BH's birthday. This was because AP's concert was a few days before his birthday. Yes I was distracted and thinking about AP and trying to impress him on BH's birtnday. I did not pick his birthday to hurt him.

One of the lies I told AP was about mine and BH's anniverary--that I was using as a kind of test to see if I wanted to stay. BH says this was intentionally cruel because my texting affair also occured over our anniversary in 2020 and I saw how much it hurt him and was a sticking point. In my head I was in such a fog, all I could think about was how to get what I wanted with AP. I used our anniversary because I could. I KNOW this was cruel. I did not CARE about the hurt it could or would cause BH but I did not do it for the joy specifically OF being cruel.

I laughed at him and with my friends. When BH was suspicious and hurt because I kept texting AP on our anniversary I laughed at his jealousy and laughed off my texting him, saying he was just a friend and he reminded me of my friends back home. I did this so he would not suspect what I was actually doing and feeling. He says I wanted to be cruel because then I kept texting AP and made sure he saw it. I did this because I could not stop texting AP. It was all I could think about. I did not think about how BH would feel. I

When it got to the point I thought I might actually leave, a friend guessed what I was going on and I laughed at the fact that he had guessed it. I showed AP a screenshot of that conversation and laughed with him too. Yes, I know this was cruel. I did not do it for the fun of being cruel. I did it because all I could think about was the adrenaline and excitement. It was all consuming.

There are a bunch of other things like this--giving AP things that were special to me and BH like songs and places. I did this because I wanted to have those things. They were special to me and I wanted them to stay special so I tried to transfer them. This was cruel too. But I did them for me, and not explicitly to make it worse for BH. I know that this is cruel too.

He says I refuse to see things from his experience. That I am refusing to take accountability for the intentionality of the cruelty aspect itself. I am trying so hard. I KNOW this was all cruel and abusive. I know I did these things intentionally. I know had fun while I was doing them. But I also know what it was like in my head. I know that is impossible for him to see it other than me doing it with the purpose of being cruel. But I cannot get out of what I know it felt like in my head. Please either help me understand how to help him understand what was in my head or to understand what I am missing, to help me make the connection. Do all these things put together mean I was doing it to enjoy being cruel?

I need help. I seriously feel like I might have a heart attack right now. He went for a run and I don't know what to do with myself. I know it is probably a panic attack I'm fighting off but I feel like I am going to die and I don't know how to calm down. I am going to try my self soothing techniques from DBT but I feel like I need someone here for a week to keep me from having a breakdown and to walk us through these things one at a time and mediate but I know that isn't possible.

Okay, first of all: NOTHING BAD IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

My MC gave me that little phrase on a business card. I was supposed to take it out and look at it and really absorb it when I was getting on the crazy train. The house is not on fire, no one is in physical danger, this is all just thoughts and feelings and a physical reaction to stress. Breathe, friend. Breathe.

I can 100% relate to how you weren't being intentionally cruel; you were being selfish and callous. You wanted what you wanted when you wanted it, and to hell with the repercussions. I remember that feeling. I'll pay for that later, or maybe I won't, but right now this is what I want to do. It's emotional immaturity. It's a fix. It might even be a subconscious jab at the BS, but it's not a conscious "screw you."

I think the BS typically gets treated like the old, boring boyfriend with whom you're not quite ready to break up. Maybe he can relate to that. You've got this shiny new toy who's giving you big dopamine hits, so that's where all of your attention goes. Common sense and compassion for the BS is not a part of the equation.

I've been trying to reframe to see it from his perspective.

I knew it would hurt him. I chose to do it. I had fun doing it. That means I had fun doing something that hurt him and I did it on purpose. He is right.

I was hung up on not having chosen things specifically to hurt him but that was the wrong focus. I knew things would hurt him and I didn't choose not to do them. Even if I did them for selfish reasons, with only myself in mind, I still knew they were hurtful. I could have chosen not to do those things, or even to do them differently, in less hurtful ways, and I didn't. Therefore, I specifically chose things that would hurt him, instead of choosing things that I knew would hurt less. I'm not sure if this change in perspective makes sense to anyone else, but it is a different understanding for me.

So the question he's been asking me to answer is why and how I could have done these things that were so intentionally cruel. I'm still not sure, but the perspective shift is helping me get closer I think. The Michelle Mays book talks about how cheating gives the WS power over the BS. I think part of me wanted that power. I think maybe that is closer to my "why."

The whys I've been giving are excuses even if they are reasons--the things that made me feel powerless. I felt powerless over death and losing my grandmother. I felt powerless over the increase in anxiety and depression that followed. I felt powerless over aging and overwhelm and knowing I had never learned to be an adult on my own, without co-dependence. I felt powerles over the way most people saw me and powerless over my goals and dreams and how I could put everything into them and still not succeed in the ways I wanted to.

But lots of people feel these things and they don't cheat. But I did, because I wanted to have power over something, and I chose to do it by hurting my husband.

It's so unthinkable. Most normal people would turn to their spouse to deal with the powerlessness, but instead I chose to hurt him. I know there are things about me and my history that contributed to this decision, too, but these are excuses too. Ultimately I made the decision and I could have chosen not to. I don't want to think of myself as an abuser, but I imagine no abusive person does.

I am trying to focus on what hikingout posted in another thread:

1. You will learn subsets of that why.

2. You will find alternative behaviors to form new habits

3. You will lean why you don’t need it.

4. You will become more aware of the urge to do it and can mindfully address the motivation to change the behavior.

[This message edited by PleaseBeFixable at 1:24 AM, Saturday, March 16th]

I am sorry I didn’t see this post earlier. Like sacred soul said I can see your standpoint in how you were not intentionally being cruel in the specific actions contained within the affair, even though you can see the over arching cruelness of disregarding him.

The pain of the affair for the bs is in the details. He is outraged right now at the details. You want to give him what he wants to hear but admitting to intentional cruelty in some of the acts that you did, that isn’t honest either.

The hard part- and the true part- you didn’t consider him at all. I know that. You were in your own bubble. That’s the truth. And from my standpoint I don’t even think it’s the more palatable truth.

For me, I just never intended for him to know so I was very sloppy with my actions. I minimized him, ao disregarded him, and I betrayed him. All those things were cruel. But like you I wasn’t maliciously picking things to make it worse, I was too busy hiding it and riding the high. To me he was never going to know.

I think you have been honest here. And there is some chance your h might come to see that in time as well. But I would not admit to things to placate him. Right now your husband is trapped in pain. All you can do is tell him your truth. I don’t think this is part is about whys. I definitely think you need to find your whys, but I believe you that you weren’t thinking " I know what will make it worse for him is if I do x, and then carry it out". I don’t think many ws think in that manner.

Your husband is trying to process details, and betrayal feels sinister. It makes the bs feel like they never knew you and they play out all sorts of scenarios trying to struggle between not being a fool and trying to reorient themselves, and it’s torturous as you can clearly see.

It’s been a long time now since I was a new ws, yet I can remember the rawness. I hear it in. Your post. I did very bad at these "tests" early on. But if this were me today I would try and connect with him and how he is feeling and apologize for making him feel each of the ways he describes. I would be firmly accountable for things that are true and the false accusations I would probably say "I can see how you would think that of me, I have given you every reason to believe that. But that’s just not where my thoughts were at the time. What I did was not loving and I am so angry at myself for what I did. You clearly didn’t deserve it"

I think it’s important not to cave and just say he is right. When you get overwhelmed try to focus on your breathing. Ask your therapist for ways to cope in those moments. Sacred soul gave a good one her therpist gave her. Mine told me to think of an easy affirmation to calm down, and most of the time I would remind myself that I am safe and divinely loved. I think it could be anything. I had a friend that likes to count backwards and I tried that but it made it hard for me to focus on what he was saying.

Overall i think what helped me the most was to get comfortable with the idea that my marriage might be over. I was going to stay and fight of course, because I wanted us to stay together. But accepting that made me know life was going to go on and I was going to be okay. And having that feeling made me less desperate and overwhelmed in the moment. I kind of started to think that there was nothing left to lose, and everything to gain. Finding that courage made me stronger and my mind was able to stay more clear.

I don’t know if that will work for you. Everyone is different. But if you can picture this as rock bottom the. You can understand the only way you can now go is up. Fight the good fight, and know he won’t stay in this place forever either. I don’t know if you will reconcile, no one has that crystal ball but I do know on time you are going to be just fine. I believe you are gobsmacked by what you did, and are seeing all the pain in the aftermath and that is going to drive you to towards the work you need to do and you will come out better for having done the work. I believe in you. Keep walking into your courage.

I would be firmly accountable for things that are true and the false accusations I would probably say "I can see how you would think that of me, I have given you every reason to believe that. But that’s just not where my thoughts were at the time. What I did was not loving and I am so angry at myself for what I did. You clearly didn’t deserve it"

I see what hikingout is getting at. It's very difficult when a BS latches on to a version of the truth that is not, in fact, true. You should not try to solve the problem by lying your way out of it, even if that lie ostensibly helps the BS at your own expense. That being said, I'm wondering if we're getting hung up on a distinction that's too subjective for definitive "truth." At what point does gleeful indifference to someone's pain cross the line into enjoyment of that pain? How reliable a narrator can we be when one version of events makes us even more heinous than another?

We had a troll here for a while who kept cycling back under different usernames. He was utterly convinced that his WW's AP was better endowed than him and that they had freakier, more satisfying sex. Nothing she said (or we said) could convince him otherwise. He was hell bent on getting her to admit it. It's possible he was just a sick asshole who came here to yank our chains, because he always made up a different backstory, and it's obviously a very triggering topic. But assuming his trolling odyssey was driven by real trauma, both he and his WW were in a no win situation. He didn't believe a word she told him, and for good reason. Even if she was being absolutely honest, he was never going to accept that truth. They were permanently stuck.

In your situation, though, there's nothing objective to measure. It's not "he thinks Average AP had a ten inch schlong and won't let go until I admit it." It's much more subjective. You were openly and aggressively texting the AP in front of your husband and then laughing about his suspicions with AP and your friend. Is the distinction between "I did it to hurt him" and "I didn't care about hurting him" actually clear here? It's one thing to sneak around behind someone's back and turn off the thoughts of how they would be hurt if they knew. But when you see it in front of you, and you find it funny... is it actually untrue to say that you were getting a rush from your BH's pain?

IDK. I feel like if my H did what you did, and then told me "I can see why you would feel that way," I'd feel managed and sidestepped rather than validated. Maybe this exercise will help:

- Describe (to yourself) a few scenarios where you do something with AP to deliberately hurt your husband, as opposed to ignoring the hurt.

- How/why is the impact of that type of action and motivation any different from the impact of what you did?

- Why do you think that the actions in those imaginary scenarios would have been off limits in your moral code while you embraced the actions you describe in your post?

Final analogy, because this is getting very long. Sometimes, members here will observe that all WS are someone's AP. In my case, the OM was single, so I didn't create an OBS. However, I don't think I get any credit for that. If hurting my own spouse didn't stop me from cheating, I can't reasonably believe that I'd have hit the wall of my moral code at hurting someone else's wife. So if you didn't feel the slightest twinge at hurting your BH to escalate things with your AP, what would have happened if AP had wanted to escalate that deliberate humiliation? What, if anything, would have stopped you?

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 1:34 PM, Saturday, March 16th]

DK. I feel like if my H did what you did, and then told me "I can see why you would feel that way," I'd feel managed and sidestepped rather than validated. Maybe this exercise will help:

I agree with BSR,you should definitely dig and figure out if there was any malice. Sometimes it’s hard for me to think there was additional knife twisting, and I am not always good at spotting it. But there have definitely been cases of it in SI. I do want to make one tiny clarification here.

I wouldn’t just say "I can see how you feel this way." To anything ever. I agree that would be a sidestep. I feel that is not what I wrote and perhaps it wasn’t clear enough. I would always take accountability that my actions are calling every motivation into question. That everything he is feeling is valid because of what I did. That you have led him to not know how deep this goes, and have caused the distrust. To say “I can see how you feel this way” is very flimsy and not what I was trying to get at.

But if you didn’t do something or think it, I would not go along with an untruth to placate him. It will then be the only thing he will ever believe. I mean of course if it is true then you have to own up to it.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:14 PM, Saturday, March 16th]

I wouldn’t just say "I can see how you feel this way." To anything ever. I agree that would be a sidestep. I feel that is not what I wrote and perhaps it wasn’t clear enough. I would always take accountability that my actions are calling every motivation into question. That everything he is feeling is valid because of what I did. That you have led him to not know how deep this goes, and have caused the distrust. To say "I can see how you feel this way" is very flimsy and not what I was trying to get at.

Sorry, HO, I didn't mean to misquote you.

It's been a while since I've posted, but this one got to me. It seems to me that you are trying to lawyer your way through this. You seem to be parsing different kinds of cruelty and bad behavior in such a way that it looks like you are trying to weasel out of dealing with his reality.

I just saw Zone of Interest, and I'm sure the wife of the concentration camp leader didn't intend to be cruel while reaping the benefits of her husband's vile behavior. She just went along with it. But that made no difference to the victims whatsoever.

And for you to suggest to your husband you did not mean to be cruel while acting cruelly is the kind of crazy making statement that poisons reconciliation.

And I have to say that I disagree with the notion that being selfish and callous is not the same as being cruel. There is an old saying here that the opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. And that's what you acted like. So it feels like cruelty.

In many countries, willful blindness to the outcome of behavior is treated as equal to criminal intent. So you really need to think about this. It's like saying I never meant to hurt you, which reads I never thought I would get caught. Or I never gave you a second thought.

So stop arguing with him as to how he feels and start owning your behavior. You can say that your disregard was cruel and agree with him. And that you feel terrible and hate yourself for it. That is way better than saying to him that you were not intent upon hurting him. That is implying that he was second best to your AP.

etaoin,

I think what is is trying to say is that she knows her behavior was cruel. He is accusing her of purposefully doing things like the article in his birthday with additional malice to make sure the affair hurt her husband worse.

While he may feel that’s what she did, that doesn’t make it true.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that having an affair is not malicious or that all of it isn’t malicious. All she is saying is she didn’t time things like that especially to make sure when he found out it hurt worse.

BSR- I didn’t really feel like you misquoted me, I felt like maybe I hadn’t spelled it out enough. I didn’t intend for that to seem like I as miffed if that’s what it seemed like. I just thought if you didn’t see a difference in what I was saying that OP wouldn’t. I just wrote that a little stronger for clarity.

I felt powerless over death and losing my grandmother. I felt powerless over the increase in anxiety and depression that followed. I felt powerless over aging and overwhelm and knowing I had never learned to be an adult on my own, without co-dependence. I felt powerless over the way most people saw me and powerless over my goals and dreams and how I could put everything into them and still not succeed in the ways I wanted to.

Losing my father, unexpectedly and suddenly in October 2018 is what sparked my EA again, I found comfort in someone else’s words and it just took off from there. Affairs most often have a trigger, usually a significant trauma that when we try to pick up the pieces we feel something still hurting and missing, and we in a literal sense want to be someone else. An affair allows us to wear the mask of someone else and we seek out affairs as a sort of painkiller for our deep emotional pain that comes with the death of a loved one and some of other things you described. That is not to say that the affair was the right course of action, because it wasn’t, but seeking out a painkiller at a fundamental level is a rational behavior.

It becomes important as part of your work and healing journey to identify how you acted in those moments leading to the affair and analyzing your choices and boundaries. I hate to say it this way, but there is going to be further trauma in all our lives, including loss of loved ones, so it will be important that you figure out a plan for the next time, because we never truly know when that will be, but having that plan and sticking to it are major parts of a healthy recovery and reconciliation.

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful responses.

Overall i think what helped me the most was to get comfortable with the idea that my marriage might be over. I was going to stay and fight of course, because I wanted us to stay together. But accepting that made me know life was going to go on and I was going to be okay. And having that feeling made me less desperate and overwhelmed in the moment. I kind of started to think that there was nothing left to lose, and everything to gain. Finding that courage made me stronger and my mind was able to stay more clear.

We recently talked about Radical Acceptance in my DBT course, which is what this sounds like. I am working on it. I think a part I struggle with the most are to not let that acceptance have an agenda, i.e. "I will accept my marriage might be over in order to save my marriage. Like of course that is still the goal, but to accept it thinking that will change it isn't actual acceptance. I am also having trouble accepting that I can not change what I already did.

- Describe (to yourself) a few scenarios where you do something with AP to deliberately hurt your husband, as opposed to ignoring the hurt.

- How/why is the impact of that type of action and motivation any different from the impact of what you did?

- Why do you think that the actions in those imaginary scenarios would have been off limits in your moral code while you embraced the actions you describe in your post?

I need to think about this exercise more. I think it will be a good journaling prompt. Thank you.

And I have to say that I disagree with the notion that being selfish and callous is not the same as being cruel. There is an old saying here that the opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. And that's what you acted like. So it feels like cruelty.

I've come to understand this and have talked to him about this. But he is convinced that I intentionally did things to make things worse for him, like in a socio/psychopathic way, which is not true.

I hate to say it this way, but there is going to be further trauma in all our lives, including loss of loved ones, so it will be important that you figure out a plan for the next time, because we never truly know when that will be, but having that plan and sticking to it are major parts of a healthy recovery and reconciliation.

Thank you. You are right that coming up with an explicit plan for these circumstances will be important.