SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Sorry...I hit the wrong key!

Anyway, to continue my story, she has come clean on everything, the sexting did continue until September 10th when his wife confronted my wife in a phone c all. The AP's wife blocked him from every device/app/social media platform and he has not been heard from since. She called the phone number she had for him, in front of me, to tell him there is to be no more contact from her TO him, but the number was disconnected.

She has also given me all access to her contact apps, devices and such. She did see her gyno for STD test and came back negative. She answers all my questions diectly, and repeatedly, and is willing to stay up with me for hours upon hours to talk about what has happened. She is a good person who has done a terrible thing, still there is no excuse for the A.

That's the long and short of it. There are many other details that I don't want to share at this point but we are both getting IC as awell as MT. First meeting was today and it was as expected...tell the Coundselor our stories as a starting point. I go for IC Monday and she on Wednesday.

I really appreciate those who answered my question and offered ideas on how to ease the pain. I play the drums, workout and love to draw. I know it takes time, and I am going to take as much time as needed and take care of myself first and foremost. I will keep reading and updating or posting as things develop.
Thank you, again, for your support.

If you play drums, then get out and join a band. Doesn’t have to be an A List arena band. Anything that you enjoy. I’m a rock guitarist and can say 100 % that nothing will be more fulfilling for you and take your head out of your pain than getting out, learning new stuff and honing your skills, and honoring your talent. The energy feed between your band and the audience will take you places that can’t be found anywhere else.

You get away from your problems, most especially your ultimate source of pain, if even for a few hours. And you build your self esteem.

Please trust me

Thanks for more detailed backdrop.

To this:

I really appreciate those who answered my question and offered ideas on how to ease the pain.

I would add, do you have a someone you can confide in? Trusted family member(s) or friend(s) you can talk with on a regular basis? I know you are venting to your WW but that has limited efficacy for obvious reasons.

Involving yourself in your passions, interests and hobbies are helpful to an extent certainly. Exercise mitigates built up stress. The fact that you are in IC is very positive.

Recovery from this betrayal is a marathon regardless of whether you decide on R or D.

Another practical thing you can do beyond reading in the healing library here is to read the threads of some of the more prolific (and respected) posters over in the Wayward Side forum like HikingOut, DaddyDom, BraveSirRobin, MrsWalloped and others. It can both broaden and focus your perspective. It has mine.

For me, IC started me on mindfulness activities. I started doing meditation, which really helped me with my spiralling thoughts. My employer provides access to Headspace, a meditation app. There are some that are free.

Use this analogy. Someone shot you in the back. When you turned around she was holding the gun. Would you be healed by now? Believe it or not the same damage a bullet could cause is equal to the shock your body is going through. That is why these posters are telling you to slow down. You have to heal first. Trauma makes it nearly impossible to process much of anything useful. Getting IC is so important so you can vent, cry, yell or just be silent. Don’t think of it as putting the pain away. It will linger. You will go through all the stages of grief several times. Give yourself permission to be selfish. And just give yourself time. You will find people on here who have reconciled, some who tried, some who separated immediately. You won’t know until you know. Again, give yourself time.

So sorry you found your way here.

I want to second everyone telling you to Slow Down.

I understand that President Lincoln had a saying during the War Between the States. He would tell himself, "This Too Shall Pass". When I learned about this many years ago, I began saying that to myself when things were not going my way. It really helped my mental state. In all likelihood right now your subconscious is feeling this is the end of the world. Because of the trauma you are now going though, the Self Talk you use from here on out is most important. Just tell yourself things like "I can get through this"... "I am strong and can handle whatever comes my way"... "This Too Shall Pass".

You know that you can get through this and come out stronger, because you have already proven to yourself for the last 23 years that you don't need to gamble to exist and survive. You can handle anything that comes your way... Right?

Now then, about slowing down. Someone mentioned you will go through the stages of grief many times and they are correct. From one minute to the next you will soon go through hating the sight of her to loving her with all your heart. Just tell yourself that I will make no decisions about staying or going, forgiving, etc. for the Next 30 Days. When the 30 days are up do that again until you are 100% sure exactly what you want to do. Then you can formulate a plan and follow through.

The SI veterans here suggest holding off on any marriage or couples counseling until both you and your wife have done some serious healing. This individual healing usually consists of each of you getting individual counseling. Your counselor should be experienced in treating trauma and infidelity victims. Even though you weren't the best husband in the world (who is among us?), the Marriage Did Not Cheat... Your Wife is the One Who Cheated. You two need to heal yourselves before trying to heal the marriage.

Just remember to try as hard as you can to use positive Self Talk.

Do not make any decisions one way or another for the next 30 days... and then the next 30 days after that... etc.

Whatever you are feeling now remember that "This Too Shall Pass".

It's been a few days and I've received more responses than I thought I would...thank you all so much.
I'll continue to monitor and read ALL suggestions and utilize what relates to me the most. I'm also going to read from the library and other topics/forums as the information being shared here is invaluable.

First, I would like to say, I'm sorry you were here, like all the rest of us, I would never want to go through that first month again. It will take time, time and processing, in the meantime, work, exercise, hobbies, talk, counseling, etc., may help distract you from the pain. I was in a situation where I had an extremely busy job, I was running a private business when the day occurred. 100% of our income came from my work in the business. I could not stop working, in some ways that may have helped. Weekends were horrible. Holidays were horrible. Vacation days were horrible.

Counseling probably helps as long as you have a good counselor. Good luck finding one, you will need one that has experience with managing betrayed spouses.

The behavior of your wayward spouse also affects this. My wife confessed, but confessed with a whole host of lies, refusals to disclose, false disclosures, etc. etc., and it went on for six months. Some things just didn't make any sense, gaslighting is extraordinarily painful as you try to make sense out of discordant things. Trickle truth is extraordinarily painful as well. After my wife truly confessed, it was actually easier to deal with because it made sense.

Honestly, it's probably easier to just say "fuck it" and divorce, but that's not always the best choice.

I might also suggest when seeking a good IC, while some not excelling in betrayal, or trauma can be helpful to just be there as good listeners and to give you a general sense of calmness, I'm learning that the good ones who do specialize in trauma, will help to dig you out of the dark places we all find ourselves in. I wish I'd have found my current therapist in the beginning, I feel I'd be much farther along now than I am. Oh well, better late than never. Tons a great advice you've received already, keep coming back for support.

I’m sorry you are going through this, healing is a journey with no short cuts, unfortunately you have to feel and process all the emotions and right now, this early, it’s like drinking from a fire hose.
I changed my diet and started exercising, that worked best for me, at about a year I started to get my self esteem back at the same time I was in the anger phase. The anger phase is coming, it has to be controlled, but was very beneficial for me because I saw everything with clarity and how truly devastating infidelity is. I also saw my W with a clear lens and took her off the pedestal I had her on. All of that to say don’t make any decisions on D or R right now, take time to sort it out and process it.
Please don’t do MC right now, she cheated not you, it will put half the blame on you. If you were in serious debt and your W decided to rob a bank, would you take half the blame for it? No the debt was half yours but the decision to throw away integrity to solve it falls 100 on her. I wish you the best, you are safe here, welcome to SI.

SheNotHe,

I feel this point, which has been alluded to in previous responses, is critically important, and I haven't seen it summarized in a way that I'm sure makes the point crystal clear:

1. There are various reasons your wife may have been unhappy in your marriage. If we were able to objectively analyze all of the factors that contributed to her unhappiness, and with perfect accuracy determine how much 'fault' for each of those factors belonged to her, and to you, and to external forces, we don't have any idea what results we would get. Maybe she's responsible for 25%, you're responsible for 50%, and her AP is responsible for 25%. Maybe she's responsible for 20%, you're responsible for 20%, and coworkers/friends are responsible for 60%. Maybe you're responsible for 90% and she's responsible for 10%. We just don't know. The important thing to realize is that yes, you're most likely responsible for at least some of the reason she's unhappy with the marriage-- and it's also quite likely that she's responsible for some of that unhappiness itself.

2. Then there is how she chose to respond to being unhappy in the marriage. She had a lot of choices. She could have relentlessly tried to get you to work on things. She could have divorced you. She could have given you an ultimatum to improve things by a certain date or else she would divorce you. She could have self-medicated to numb herself to the unhappiness using drugs or alcohol. She could have dedicated herself to finding new sources of happiness and meaning in her life, and then re-evaluated how unhappy she was after that. She could have had a purely emotional affair, or a purely sexual affair, or a regular affair. The point is, given that she was unhappy with the marriage, she chose, unilaterally, what to do about that unhappiness, and having an affair was by no means the only option she had available. Many, many people who are unhappy in marriages choose different options, rather than having affairs. Unlike when we examined the fact that she was unhappy in the marriage, her reaction to being unhappy is 100% her responsibility. Zero of the responsibility for her decision lies on you, or her parents, or her friends, or society. She had a lot of options, and this is the one she chose, and she chose it without consulting with you or informing you.

The reason I single out this concept as being so crucial is because you've said you're going to give marriage counseling/therapy a try, and unfortunately there are a lot of bad marriage counselors in the world. I don't mean 'bad' in the sense that I happen to disagree with them; I mean objectively bad, in that their success rate with obtaining good outcomes (whether that be a truly healthy, sustainable reconciliation or a reasonably amicable divorce) is low, and they don't follow any of the accepted models taught in graduate school. Many of these counselors will not distinguish between what led to the state of the marriage-- for which you need to be willing to shoulder some of the blame, conceivably in some cases even most of the blame-- and the fact that your wife had an affair, for which you should not tolerate being assigned any portion of the blame for even a single second. This is vitally important. It gives you the best chance of succeeding, because it allows your wife to talk about how she wants you to behave differently, or why she's upset with something about you, and for you to acknowledge those points and constructively talk about what changes need to be made, within the proper context of making her happier within the marriage. At the same time, it allows you to express your heartbreak, your insecurity, your sense of betrayal, your difficulty regaining trust, etc., without being asked to share any portion of the blame, while she needs to acknowledge that all of that damage is 100% on her shoulders, and that therefore she needs to be the one putting in a ton of work to hep repair things, she needs to be willing to patiently accept the many episodes of insecurity or pain that will come out of nowhere over the next few years, etc.

When you don't clearly distinguish between the cause of unhappiness and the reaction to that unhappiness, therapy becomes a true mess, people's defenses kick in and they deflect or defend by bringing up events or patterns that are not relevant to what's currently being discussed (e.g. bringing up something you did that caused her to be unhappy, when the topic at the time is you finding it difficult to regain trust as the result of all the lying she did to cover up her affair). More insidiously, unless she's forced to acknowledge that she's 100% responsible for having the affair, she's given an out to take less responsibility for repairing the damage of the affair.

Finally, I'm going to offer an opinion. I want you to understand that I'm not an expert, I have no qualifications in this field; I've participated in a couple of infidelity communities since 2015, but that hardly makes me an authority. In any event, my opinion is that you are a candidate for reconciliation. I know a number of respected members of this community will either entirely or mostly disagree with me, but I believe that I've seen a trend over the last five years or so of marriages that have lasted a long time, where one of the spouses winds up in contact with a past crush or partner due to social media, and winds up having an affair; yet, with the right work, and avoiding rug-sweeping, the length of the marriage and the roots that have been put down are strong enough, and give enough reasons to rebuild trust (which is usually the hardest part), that the marriage winds up surviving. I don't know what percentage of the time that is, but I do feel there's something about the unique combination of a long-duration relationship, and getting together with the affair partner due to the utter ease of finding one another and communicating secretly over the internet (which lowers the bar for how much effort the cheater needs to put in to deceive their spouse), that makes the chances of recovery higher than we normally think they are when we find out that someone had a six month affair. I am NOT urging you to reconcile; I'm just giving you an opinion that I think it wouldn't be stupid or naive of you to try, as long as she's doing the right things and you're making progress, if that's what you decide to do.

Good luck!