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From the Guideline:

GENERAL STATEMENTS: Please refrain from making statements that generalize gender, WS/OP/BS, race, religion or political alignment. Also do not presume to speak on behalf of other people.

it sounds like you believe that is true of all WS, is that what you believe?

No. I have always acknowledged outliers. I do not dismiss an individual's experience. Anecdotal stories are exactly that. There are albino lions and black swans... but that doesn't change the reality for lions or swans.

An example of what I mean... a WS leaves to invest/spend their time, money, love, affection, energy, etc etc et neglecting their family and choosing to prioritize the AP. Then, the WS returns home pretending nothing is wrong, lying to their BS's face and children PRETENDING to be a committed, virtuous, loving, doting, faithful, loyal wife/mother... husband/father. A WS who can do that without remorse, without sympathy, without knowing it's wrong, without understanding the destruction involved... would be a deemed a sociopath or have sociopath traits.

I do not believe WSs are sociopaths but to claim they compartmentalize, never allowing the two worlds to collide is simply untrue. That defies everything who know about human behavior.

And... let me be clear, I believe WSs fully believe what they claim. I'm just pushing back against their narrative, which some clearly do not like.

[This message edited by Apollos at 9:20 PM, Tuesday, March 12th]

I have seen more than a few infidelity cases here where the WS is as satisfied as most with their marriage but their poor boundaries and inner need for validation combine and cross with an opportune moment for infidelity. In that moment, they succumb despite having no large degree of discontent with their spouse.

And I think there is also a hybrid. Because I am that hybrid. Which, there was no conscious discontent with my spouse.

I grew up witnessing a marriage where there was a large amount of criticism and anger. And it was done towards my dad who I just plainly liked better than my mom.

I didn’t ever want to be that way in my marriage but over corrected by never allowing myself to feel critical or angry. I talked myself out of it all the time and then had all these unconscious resentments.

At the time of my affair beginning, I would have told you our marriage was great and satisfying.

It probably could have been fully if I could have just stopped self abandoning my needs for no reason other than I wanted total love 24/7.

I can’t say I fully compartmentalized, but I think with women especially we have trouble feeling like we love two people and in that scenario I had to cancel one out. )I define love differently these days) I fully detached from my husband and all the sudden began considering leaving him. Though, not in the context of being with the ap. I didn’t ever really think the ap and I would be together either, I knew on some level that he was a worse choice for me.

So in in some ways that might have been my way of compartmentalizing- but to me it felt like an awakening towards wanting to start understanding what I wanted and needed after pushing that down so long. Nothing wrong with that except the part where I blamed it all on my husband and then cheated on him.

So I think there is this whole gradient of human behavior that is never an absolute.

My husband fucked his ap in our house day in and day out. His level of compartmentalization for that to happen is one that I will never understand. In the other hand, I can see how any good feelings he ever had for me were eclipses in the aftermath of dday. It’s not hard to understand how he was so disconnected from me. I have read women generally as a whole compete better in multitasking, while men are better at compartmentalization. Something about women having an additional bridge in their brain that lets them deal with more things at once. I am not saying that is true for everyone but more of a fascinating study I have seen on those things.

[This message edited by hikingout at 9:03 PM, Tuesday, March 12th]

I went to edit the message and deleted... my apologies.

Summary: I presented a different perspective on the "compartmentalization" narrative... nothing more. I do not agree with it and it defies what we know about human behavior. It absolutely appears some have taken offense... I understand it's an unpopular opinion.

It's an awkward forum to reply and edit... not being able to reply directly to a post can be cumbersome (at least for me).

[This message edited by Apollos at 9:57 PM, Tuesday, March 12th]

What's interesting is you are not the typical WS... and yet you seem offended I have presented a different perspective

If you read offense, that’s not at all how I feel. I don’t actually think I could be offended around here. I own what I did, I have had it done to me. I feel like I have healed probably to the extent that I will. Healed people do not take offense to an opinion.

I have been here a long time. It is rare for me to look at a perspective without thinking it’s valid. Where I push back is when there is this feeling of talking in absolutes or that someone’s experience couldn’t possibly have been valid.

I don’t think of myself as a winning lottery ticket. I have met many other ws here at a time when the site was more active that grew very much a healthy way of being and full accountability. There is daddy dom, evolving soul, walking on eggshells, forgettable dad, Mrs. Walloped, someone who used to call herself Iamtrash but I can’t remember her new name, brave sir Robin, foreverlabeled, and I know I am missing so many other names. I can think of their scenario but don’t remember their screen names.

This accountability and healing that I have done include understanding these concepts that you are rallying against.

And in the time I have been here there have been many caped crusaders whose mission is to tell every bs here they should not reconcile because these results and concepts are not true, don’t work, etc. i just don’t agree, if you think not agreeing is offended I think that you are mixing up my tone.

I am not sure why you deleted your response? I think the reason i kind of responded in a way that you thought I was offended because I once posted an answer in the forum where bs ask questions. You responded to my post and then deleted it. When I see that combined with you posting absolutes but nothing of your own story it makes me feel like your intent in being here is different than most. So maybe defensive is a better word than offended.

However, I am sure you earned your perspective. It’s just hard to feel where you are coming from without understanding you as a poster better.

I'm not sure why you deleted your response

It was accidental... I reposted a summary

I am sure you earned your perspective. It’s just hard to feel where you are coming from without understanding you as a poster better.

You claim I'm not interested in learning. I have concluded it's because I have a different perspective.

To your point, my perspective is learned and earned. I don't post often and thus it's difficult to know someone better when there is limited interaction. No one's fault.

It's been 3+ years since my life and my children's lives were utterly obliterated. I worked through most of my trauma and BETTER understand why my WW did what she did... ultimately she was deeply insecure and broken before I even met her (she suffered from complex trauma.

[This message edited by Apollos at 9:43 PM, Tuesday, March 12th]

Yes, I understand what you are saying. I do apologize if you feel my statement about someone not interested in learning was inaccurate.

When I see things written in absolutes that is my assumption. But it’s not meant as an attack on your character.

However, I still do not see how you think I am a winning lotto ticket yet these concepts you say are not true contributes greatly to my learning about myself and healing. I think it’s a contradiction. But I do think I assumed too much about you and I do apologize for that.

I think instead of a winning lotto ticket, you are just seeing a ws who is way further out. I have been working on myself for seven years, you can’t compare that to a ws who has been at it for a year, or even two or three years. I was probably one of the most foggiest ws who ever entered this forum when I first got here.

I am pretty sure you could say anything and I would think it was valid even if I didn’t agree with it.

[This message edited by hikingout at 10:04 PM, Tuesday, March 12th]

A WS must rationalize their cheating by dehumanizing, belittling, demeaning, degrading, insulting, portraying their spouse in a extremely negative frame, an extremely negative light, etc etc etc lying to themselves, convincing themselves they're entitled to cheat (again all prior to meeting their AP).

Yeah, no. The tl;dr version of my story is that my H wanted more sex than he was getting. He wasn't getting it because he had withdrawn emotionally from me during an unplanned pregnancy early in our marriage, and I subsequently withdrew emotionally from him. He thought that he deserved more sex, and he didn't intend to shake up the family to get it. He didn't portray me in "an extremely negative light" to anyone. Sure, he told the AP that he wasn't getting enough at home and asked if she'd be interested in a NSA FWB situation, but he never denigrated me to her.

I agree with some of what you're saying, but the extreme absolutes about "most WSs" are, IMO, incorrect.

It was accidental... I reposted a summary

Sort of but your deleted response was directly to me. I don’t mind that it’s gone but I need to pint it out because I wrote a whole response that wouldn’t make sense because they don’t understand what I was responding to.

Again, no issue, you did it accidentally. But for continuity of the conversation for those following that’s what happened.

hikingout, I can see it before the edit:

It’s just my experience is sometimes there is no interest in learning or identifying with a ws’s internal world.

What's interesting is you are not the typical WS... and yet you seem offended I have presented a different perspective. From what I've read, you are a winning lottery ticket, Winning lottery tickets are not common. Your anecdotal story is effective at giving hope to those who want to reconcile. Most people cheat for similar reasons... identical in many cases.

I have thought whether I should counter the "compartmentalization" narrative. I have spent hours upon hours reading about this topic, studied human behavior, and decided to simply offer one perspective, rejecting the "compartmentalization" narrative because it defies what we know about human behavior.

Thanks sacred. I did get to read it before. And there is nothing inflammatory there, I just pointed it out because it looks like I am saying things that are unrelated to what remained in the thread.

To the OP:

To respond to someone directly the best thing to do is highlight what they said that you want to respond to and then click the quote button. This will allow you to directly state your rebutted or agreements.

I am hopeful you will keep posting and one day you will be comfortable talking more about your experience.

It’s just my experience is sometimes there is no interest in learning or identifying with a ws’s internal world. And I am not saying that’s bad or wrong, it’s just not their goal. Some come here hoping to save all the bs’s by giving them reasons not to reconcile.

Yes, this is a good point. This is definitely a component of this in some of the pushback I've seen. Not so much in this thread from what i can tell, but certainly elsewhere.

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Apollos - I don't dismiss sociological/psychological factors at all. In fact, one of my degrees is in the latter and it's probably a starting point for a lot of my intellectual framework on this. If you care to look into it, a fair bit of ink has been spilled in the realm of psychology - both generally and in the 'affair' world - about compartmentalization as a defense mechanism/avoidance strategy for avoiding cognitive dissonance or negative feelings/anxiety. I'm pretty sure Sigmund Freud, who is often referred to as the "father of modern" psychology, even talked about it.

So to say that the "compartmentalization narrative" defies to what we know about human nature, is patently untrue. We all understand and exercise "out of sight, out of mind" to some degree in our regular lives. Most of us try to leave our work problems at work when we head home at the end of the day. Like someone else described on the previous page, compartmentalization can be a useful and adaptive strategy much of the time - the surgeon who puts aside the fight he had with his wife so he can focus on the patient, for example. But there can be downsides too - while it might be productive to avoid your negative feelings about the death of a loved one in order to finish the big project at work, it necessarily involves emotional suppression, avoidance of underlying issues (this was a big one for my husbands), and can result in relationship strain, etc. Most of us have heard stories of kids who suffered abuse in childhood blocking out their feelings about what happened, and in some cases, even their memories of it all, as a trauma response. (Before someone jumps on this, I'm in no way suggesting that the WS is victim of their own A the way a CSA survivor is, I'm just describing this as an extreme manifestation of compartmentalization).

Like I mentioned in my previous post, "justification" (which you seem to acknowledge) is one way that Wayward reconciles the 'guilt' they feel in having an A, "minimization" is another way that you seem to not have an issue with, "compartmentalization" is another. From what I have read in the various stories I have seen here over the past 7 years, its' pretty typical for Waywards to use some combination of the above to avoid being the villain in their own story.

Apollos, although it certainly wasn't my experience, I actually thinkyou've done a reasonably good job of describing the profile of a certain type of wayward, that I've certainly seen others describe here. Like Trdd however, where you lose me is when you seem to suggest that just because this profile is not uncommon, it is necessarily universal.

Although there are certainly commonalities between different A stories, not all affairs are the same. I don't think it's controversial to say that a serial cheater that only cheats using paid escorts, is likely to have the exact same psychological profile as someone who reconnects with an old girlfriend on facebook and engages in an emotional affair from afar for many years. Neither of those people are the same as the woman who has a one-night stand with the guy they met at the bar while at an out-of-town work conference and comes home and immediately confesses, or the guy who plays knight-in-shining armor to the chronically distressed young receptionist at his office and refuses to cut off contact on discover because "she NEEDS him".

My point is, there are a lot of different types of affairs. There are absolutely common themes. The ones I've just listed are a few archetypes but its by no means an exhaustive list. It's normal to seek out stories and themes that mimic your own (to the exclusion of others) when you're reading/learning after D-day, but I wonder if perhaps in doing so, you have incorrectly come to the conclusion that the characteristics that you see in your own partner's affair (which I agree are not uncommon!), are typical of ALL cheaters.

I say this because I don't think that HikingOut, whose posts I have been reading for years and whose story I know reasonably well, is the outlier you seem to think she is, at least in terms of her own A. I agree that she is an outlier/extraordinary in the steps she has taken since then. Most Waywards, or most people generally, have not put half as much effort in learning, reflecting, and growth as she has. But please trust me when I say that the Hikingout you see today is not the same person she was when she was a fresh wayward (Hiking - please know, I mean no offense!). If you focus on her affair alone though, it certainly wasn't unicorn territory. Over the years of reading her posts here, I have seen a huge number of betrayed and wayward spouses - men and women alike - resonate with the themes, emotions and feelings she has described in her experience there so I know that even though her A doesn't match up entirely with my husbands, the things she is talking about are not rare - in fact, they are probably pretty common.

Speaking of rare, and you can call him a unicorn or an albino lion (I actually love this ) all you want, but I can assure you that my husband has virtually zero cluster B traits. I don't say this to defend him, or because I'm offended at your suggestion. He just doesn't match up at with the profile of a cheater you've described. I don't know your story, and I am not questioning the work you've done in understanding who your spouse is/was and the things that enabled her A - like I said, it rings true to me. I know my story is not universal. It's common enough that I see bits and pieces of it in the stories of many other posters here over the years, but your truth doesn't discount mine. Does that make sense?

*** Rambling after wine disclosure, lol.

I think the tone of many posts here at SI is one of utter dismissivness of WS. If you've been betrayed anytime recently I hold no grudge against you for feeling this way. However, at some point it does not sit right with me. D? Sure, do it posthaste if that is what you need to heal. But we are all fallen in my eyes. I may not have carried on an A but after many decades here circling the sun I realize I am broken. Maybe just as much as a WS. No one, including my wife and kids, would describe me that way. But I still feel it.

I look upon Hikingout, BSR, Mrs Walloped and others as heroes of reflection, learning and spiritual development. Beautiful, truly. Every now and then mysterious SI moderator pipes in and cautions about generalizations and I usually wonder which post triggered that? But Apollos, I feel your point of view, perhaps earned through the fire of betrayal, is too one sided. Too stereotyping. I am ok with you keeping it just as it is. But I don't think you have fully grasped the complexity and diversity of how and why WS betray their spouse.

Hikingout you see today is not the same person she was when she was a fresh wayward (Hiking - please know, I mean no offense!).

No offense taken! I think I did already say in this thread I was probably one of the foggiest ws. I had my head so far up my own butt I probably didn’t know if it was daylight out.

I don’t think I am a unicorn in any category though. I listed several ws who did a lot of work on themselves and who have taught me a lot about my self.

Fundamentally a lot of this work has to do with the concepts that are being spoken against. I have to say that understanding myself was more important to me than having anyone else understand me. I wanted my marriage and fought for it, but it was important to ME that I did the work, and that meant not cutting corners, and it meant being brutally honest with myself. I might not have recognized it at the start of the post but maybe I did take offense to this original post because of that? To be told seven years of my work landed me in a place that I believe but isn’t true is not something I can easily believe.

But I would like to hear a stronger argument on this because I am not afraid to find more morsels of truth.

[This message edited by hikingout at 12:42 AM, Wednesday, March 13th]

WW can’t remember many details

Compartmentalization

Cognitive issues

Drugs

Alcohol

Depression

FOO issues

All the above relate to my wife and her affair/life/marriage.

As a BS, I read the books, I lived the experience, I spent years in MC, but I struggle to understand or believe the experience, thinking, and behaviors of a WS before, during, and after their affair.

I have a hard time believing it, because I simply cannot truly relate. I've never been in their shoes.

My brain has never been there.

I couldn't even relate to a BS...until I was one. I THOUGHT I knew what it would be like.

Before all my shit happened, a brother betrayed his wife, she called me, I couldn't imagine him doing that, I could tell she was stressed. But. I. Had. No. Clue.

Becoming a BS, that was an eye opener, but only to the BS side.

The terminology can be argued about, but we know a lot more about brain activity than we used to. People don't even see colors the same way, and they even experience colors differently when exposed to them.

I know my wife could do what she did, she told me she did it. She remembers the sexual actions in detail. But she can't remember the discussions leading up to the affair. I simply cannot relate.

I might not have recognized it at the start of the post but maybe I did take offense to this original post because of that? To be told seven years of my work landed me in a place that I believe but isn’t true is not something I can easily believe.

I mean, the premise of the post was essentially "I know more than you. Anyone who claims that their spouse compartmentalized/didn't talk shit about them is either a liar or a unicorn (by definition: not real/make believe) and is so atypical that they should not share their story here because it's more likely to do more harm than good by giving new BSs false hope." I don't know whether Apollos necessarily intended for it to be offensive/dismissive but that was the gist. Its understandable to take offense to something that is dismissive of your hard-earned experience.

Having been through R myself and knowing how much work you have done, I can also see why someone dismissing your R a "winning lottery ticket" (as though it was dumb luck that got you through it), would also be insulting.

I mean, the premise of the post was essentially "I know more than you. Anyone who claims that their spouse compartmentalized/didn't talk shit about them is either a liar or a unicorn (by definition: not real/make believe) and is so atypical that they should not share their story here because it's more likely to do more harm than good by giving new BSs false hope."

Speaking as the person who's comment spurred this thread....thank you. Because that's exactly how it felt.

I'm very black and white. No nonsense. Blunt. Too honest for my own good,at times. I've been told I'm too blunt. I've been trying to change that. However, I'm not a liar,nor a unicorn. I did mention that I read all of their messages,and felt I was given a "there there," as if I'm a fool.

As if.

You're a lot of things Hellfire, but neither "liar" nor "fool" belongs on that list.