SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

"it’s hard to compute that their emotional wellbeing isn’t down to us anymore"

yes, this x100.

every vape break at work the face hugging worry takes over "i hope she isn't TOO much of a wreck, I hope she is stable and looking forward to life. I hope she isn't unsafe"

a weird form of clinging. no real love, no attraction really left any more from me to her, but damn it i still worry about her welfare, emotional or otherwise.

AG's critical analysis of hte relationship suggestion has really helped with all this. i need to keep doing it. seeing things for how they really WERE now i don't have to rest on denial to make it through.

just googled "feeling sorry for your abuser" and this came up. fuck me it nails it perfectly:

“There is still a great loss even when leaving an abusive partner. There’s a loss of that traditional family and the good times. I think we can project our feelings about those losses and put them on the abuser, also, and wonder if he or she is feeling the same way, and wonder if he or she is grieving, too,” says Matuszczak.

yeah, that is exactly what i have been cycling through this past week. projection.

Puff I'm the same way. I've been destroyed over and over again but I still worry about my wife. It's hard not to when you've loved them for so long totally and completely to just shut off those feelings.

It's also hard not to worry when you see them choosing things that you know will ultimately bite them in the arse. Most people would say screw the WP because they've hurt me and I want them to hurt. But it's not in me to be like that. I don't want her to hurt. I don't want myself to hurt either but I have chosen over the last year and a half to keep putting myself in a position to believe things can change because I still believe my wife is going through some kind of midlife crisis and is using alcohol and an AP to get through it. And if I just show her that I'm here she'll wake up. So a lot of the hurt I've felt is self induced because I haven't let go of my feelings of love for her. I have no other choice at this point.

I don't know how many times I've started an email or text to her just to delete it because I know I shouldn't. Makes me feel week and stupid.

My sister put on Facebook a meme that said something about horrible situations bring out the true color of someone and then said...except my sister who is obviously color blind and stupid. I know she did it out of love but damn. I know my friends and family are so tired of hearing me cry as much as I'm tired of crying. And I WISH I didn't love my wife. In fact I wish I NEVER met my wife at this point because this has been the worst pain I think I've ever felt.

It definitely feels weird, almost dirty, when you have any kind of non-negative feelings toward the discarding cheater. They just showed you that to them you're nothing but scum, yet here you are, feeling like a fool, unable to simply despise them and write them off in return. I imagine if you have to see that person on a regular basis, it's harder to move past these feelings. The hard no contact, for all its faults, has its value. It's like continuing to patch up a festering hand wound vs. just cutting the damn thing off and sewing up the nub. Sure, you can't use that hand anymore, but what use was it to you anyway when it was weak and rotting and at risk of infecting the rest of your arm with its corruption?

[This message edited by AbandonedGuy at 12:26 PM, September 11th (Wednesday)]

interesting analogy

This is exactly what has been going on with me I think.

“There is still a great loss even when leaving an abusive partner. There’s a loss of that traditional family and the good times. I think we can project our feelings about those losses and put them on the abuser, also, and wonder if he or she is feeling the same way, and wonder if he or she is grieving, too,”

To start with I felt so sad at the loss of the family unit that I couldn’t believe that he was unaffected. I even felt bad for how much he had thrown away. Today my kids weren’t keen to see him or go out with him and I felt really sorry for him 🙄😂 it’s ridiculous when I think about what he has done to me and the choices he made. It’s completely laughable and I need to stop

AG the festering hand analogy fits perfectly

It's just passed the year mark since numbnuts fecked off with his serial home wrecking whore.

They are still together so it must be true lurve.

Im at the angry stage now, was starting to lose hope of it ever appearing and it helps a wee bit but not as much as I was hoping for.

I hate him with a passion and don't care if i never see him again, I hope that never changes as I'm OK with that. He still thinks he's one of life's good guys.

Going no contact though hard in the beginning was the best thing I've ever done.

I still have some struggles with what he did and I know I'm probably going to carry some of those scars for life and I'll never forgive him for that.

Mostly I'm keeping busy getting on with life but I'll admit I'm stuck.

All I do is work (2 jobs) and take care of my family. I don't seem to have the time, energy or the desire to do anything else.

I got out more in the beginning of all this shit than I do now.

How do I get any motivation back.? I don't know how to do it.

I'm fed up with people telling me to just get up and get on with it. WTF.

You'd think I was sitting in a corner bawling my eyes out all day. I'M NOT.

I'm not even the one who brings it up in conversation, other people do when asking how me and the kids are getting on.

I do the day to day stuff that I'm supposed to do but don't have the energy for anything else. I'm just so tired all the time.

Some people seem to think I should be out partying (getting a life ?).

They don't understand that the life (I thought) I had actually meant something to me and its not something like the feckin cold that you get over with no damage done.

He'd been in my life for 40 years in some form or another and we'd been married for 22 of them and that history is not something you can just shrug off unless of course you are the lying cheating backstabbing bastard (did I mention I was at the angry stage).

It makes me mad when people tell me to get over it and move on.

I'm doing that whether I want to or not but just not at the pace they want me to.

I accept my marriage is over and have done for a long while now.

I accept that he's gone and won't be back but more importantly I accept I don't want him back but none of that is going to turn me into the middle aged party animal that some people seem to expect me to be.

Wassheworthit, I’m the same. I’m really busy working and doing everything and looking after my kids. I am genuinely really tired. I think the emotional shite takes its toll too. I think we are doing really well to function and people this hasn’t happened to, will never truly understand. Even amazing friends can only imagine the pain. We felt it. Other people always ask me how the kids are coping, which basically is their way of returning to the subject. How do they think the kids are coping 🤦‍♀️ Their dad got off with no warning and left. The fact they’ve gone doesn’t cancel out all the years the relationship was real and intrinsic to our everyday lives. My ex is still with his new girlfriend too and still thinks he had to do it and that I will thank him eventually. He also thinks he is one of life’s good guys 😂🙄 he behaves like the main character in a Shakespearean play or Morrissey song. I’m past the anger to a certain degree and feel more worried that he has made choices that are irreversible and ridiculous. What a dick 🙄

Thank you Bookgirl.

I really needed someone to hear me today.

You'd think after a year I'd be by this stage but somedays are just crap for no apparent reason. I can go weeks feeling fine then BOOM , back down I go.

I think we married the same 'man'. My ex was up and off without any warnings too. Thought the kids would be happy that he was happy and that as he is such a top guy I would let him stay in my life as a friend.

The delusional self centered self serving up his own arse prick that he is.

HOW'S THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU ARSEHOLE. His kids barely see him. He is too much of a coward to actually talk to them because they didn't fall into the nice wee fantasy life he had planned for us all.

In his fucked up thinking I'd be eternally grateful and my cup would runneth over with joy that I'd meet up with him every other week for coffee and a 'catch up'. FUCK THAT and the kids would not mind playing happy families with the whore who is so willing to love them as her own.

The kids have no interest whatsoever in meeting her. She must be so crushed. .

We are sadly having the same experience wasSheworthit. 🤦‍♀️

My biggest problem is that the STBEW won't just LEAVE for her APs. She sticks around because leaving would damage her reputation as SuperMom, and she cares more about that than actually being a mother and wife.

Incarnate.

When I read some of the stories of people on here I realise I'm quite lucky with numbnuts.

He knows I want nothing to do with him and apart from a couple of things he pretty much leaves me alone. If I accidently see him I just blank him and he's too much of a coward to say anything.

I don't know how I would cope if he hung around.

My youngest is 16 so I don't need to engage with him at all.

Hats off to all of you who still have to have contact with their cheating bastards. I couldn't do it.

I agree, the people who have to continue seeing, for one reason or another, these check-out-and-cheat artists have a whole other bag of problems to sort through. I feel blessed that this situation is like a rip of the bandaid and a shove into the deep end. It beats a war of attrition as far as I'm concerned, but at the expense of a second chance. But our type of WS doesn't really deserve a second chance, sooooo...

[This message edited by AbandonedGuy at 4:01 PM, September 14th (Saturday)]

AbandonedGuy

Time and distance have been our friends.

You feel blessed and I feel lucky with our cheating bastards - something neither of us thought would ever be possible when our lives were blown up.

How weird it is from going from - "take me back, take me back" bullshit that first week to...choosing no contact because she's chosen him...and then slowly seeing "yeah, she's sick" and now actually terrified that things will not work out with her piece of shit other man.

I actually want them to get married now. It will take her off my hands for at least a decade probably

Seeing how cruel this woman is and how deceptively she undertakes her cruelty, seeing now the years of emotional manipulation she put me under (always with a smirk on her face), I am actually scared of that first hoover. Please god let it never come.

I also hope and pray that although she is a character with an empathy black hole, she manages to be a good mother to my beloved children. Thank god I see them so much through the week so I can hope to balance out any dysfunction they might be getting from her. Looking back she did manage the motherhood side of things. She saved all her coldness and deception for me.

I get a thrill looking at new flats and planning social events through meetup.cm. I am starting to enjoy flirting again and i think i still have a lot to offer a partner. should be on far better money next year too.

But as the mourning process is weakening, as i see that I can still have a fantastic loving bonded relationship with my kids (perhaps even better than before), as I see her dead fish eyes and that smirk, and her attempts to make me feel guilty (this happened over the weekend resulting in my losing most of my sleep that night), I see a new life opening infront of me. It really is largely down to this board. I feel the last great hurdle to overcome is shaking off the worry i have for her. I sit and process it. But sometimes it grabs me and actually terrifies me - "what if she has a total collapse and moves the kids away...what if she has a total collapse and turns the kids against me...what if she becomes depressed and miserable and lives a life of constant misery", what ifs, what ifs. it's like I have accepted MY outcomes and now i have to accept HER outcomes.

as someone said on her "she's big and old enough to look after herself", so true. if she does feel unrelenting life destroying pain, let her feel it and she might learn from it.

if my kids were not involved and this woman was not unavoidably entwined in my life through coparenting, I would be praying for hte karma bus. she deserves pain, she really does. but i am too close to her through parenting practicalities to want it to happen whilst i am in the vicinity. she'll make sure that some of the shrapnel falls my way, i am sure. there's a wickedness in her that now actually gives me the creeps.

weird thing to go from loving someone to actually being scared of them. scared of that blackness that i can see now is in her soul.

i do recommend anyone who has been discarded like a piece of old furniture to google "narcissistic discard" and go from there.

AG - will defo watch those videos soon, thanks for the message.

Puffstuff.

It's hard to imagine in the beginning when you are paralysed by pain fear and grief that you will survive this.

You don't think you will ever be able to live without them and convincing yourself that they will 'wake up' soon and realise what they have done and come home.

They must be depressed or having a midlife crisis or blah blah blah.

I separated him into two different people. There was the decent upstanding man who loved and cared for his family then there was this cold hearted stranger who invaded his body.

I realised that I was doing myself no favours and accepted that it WAS my husband and friend who was doing this horrible stuff to me AND our kids. It wasn't some alien who invaded his body when no-one was looking.

Even now I still have people saying he must be ill, he's such a family man. He will realise some day yada yada yada.

Once I accepted who he truly is and that he chose this path then I started detaching from him.

At this point in my life I can honesty say that I don't care what happens to him. That may change when the anger leaves me who knows.

I hope he suffers even in a small way the same devastation he caused us. I want him to struggle to breathe with the trauma of it all the way I did. Some people might think that's me being bitter but I don't think so. It's just being human.

He sacrificed his wife and children on the alter of his 'happiness' and I hope he pays for it one day.

[This message edited by WasSheWorthIt at 9:05 AM, September 16th (Monday)]

thanks Wassheworth it. i think i will stop caring about her and worrying about her when she has a new source she can suck dry. i am still very much in her targets she will put me through the emotional wringer without a blink of an eye.

all through my marriage, even during the early days, i had this nagging sense that something wasn't quite right. being me, i blamed myself and tried harder. she got so cold at times that i would be damn right needy which i hated. but yeah, i often got taht quiet voice "something is not quite right with her" and i would shut it down by thinking "you're not good enough, that's why she acts taht way".

but when she done what she finally done, that final discard, and smirked all teh way through it and gave almost zero shits about the trauma i was feeling, it was like seeing her clearly for the first time. i went through, like AG says, the memories with a fine tootcombe but with a critical perspective this time instead of one of self blame and denial, and holy shit, what was wrong was HER. there was NOTHING there where bonding and compassion and empathy usually is.

you may think i am saying this to make myself feel better, but i was there and jesus crist now i can see she was a cold, empty person who never really connected with anything.

this actually makes me sad for her, worried even.

but have her back? no chance.

they are the biggest WTF people ever.

you sacrificed security, your family, the well being of your children for this? what the actual fuck. you're gone, you're a freak and that's the end of it.

Gaslighting and deception are the gifts that keep on giving. You blame yourself at first, then realize that youre just trying to rationalize the cheaters shitty behavior. Then after detachment you gain clarity and reflect on their rich history of being a creature of deceit hiding right under your nose...but still you don't know if you're thinking more accurately, or if it's more rationalization to explain why you just didn't see it. And as time skews your memory, the relationship becomes an enigma that you can't even crack anymore. At some point, you've got to land on a narrative and stick with it lest you get lost up your own ass trying to "disentangle the skein of fuckedupness" as I believe it's been referred to as. There's no winning for us.

I feel the last great hurdle to overcome is shaking off the worry i have for her. I sit and process it. But sometimes it grabs me and actually terrifies me - "what if she has a total collapse and moves the kids away...what if she has a total collapse and turns the kids against me...what if she becomes depressed and miserable and lives a life of constant misery", what ifs, what ifs. it's like I have accepted MY outcomes and now i have to accept HER outcomes.

as someone said on her "she's big and old enough to look after herself", so true. if she does feel unrelenting life destroying pain, let her feel it and she might learn from it.

Rest assured on this matter. She's very capable. Made a gamble, and is doing just fine. Things have turned out well for her. You are the one struggling right now. Same with my ex. Her life is going great by all counts. We project over morality on these people. As I said earlier, they are very happy with their shallow existence. And as you said, she's a scientist making decent money. Don't worry about her.