Hi SerJR, thank you for taking the time to read my story and taking the time to respond so kindly.
I also firmly believe that we have to embrace our grief and to feel in the moment to help process through our emotions on the way to recovery. Feeling the pain, questioning, self doubt is all part of the grieving process - but you have the right rational mindset to know where you need to be. I have no doubts that you will heal - it is a matter of time and energy to work through the process. I shared a story here (https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums/?tid=661689), that perhaps might help shed some insights into yourself.
I took the time to go and read your post with the campfire and wolves. I am going to go a little off topic here but my point is that dreams are very important to me. I rarely dream. I have dreams that are typical, pedestrian, but I also have had a handful of dreams that foreshadowed (in my interpretation) events that would happen very soon. Usually within a few days.
Late night Thursday March 12th 2009 (or early am Friday Match 13th 2009.) At this time my wife and I were not close (rarely having sex at that point) but I really did not know she had been in a very serious 6 month affair with a woman, a colleague, also a casual acquaintance of mine as well. In my dream I was being chased by a pack of wolves. The wolf that was closest to me and gaining ground was a black wolf with really bright yellowish / amber eyes. I remember the eyes so vividly. I was terrified, panting (I could really feel the terror, the fear, the physical exhaustion.) I could not run any further. I decided to yield, to stop running, to allow myself to be devoured by the wolves. I woke up sweating in a panic. I woke up and decided to commit this dream to memory because it was NOT just a dream (in my opinion.) This was the weekend her AP went on a vacation with her "boyfriend (he was just a "beard" because she could not come out to her traditional family.) I remember telling my W about the dream (but honestly back in those days she may have been courteous but she neither actually listened nor cared.) I remember seeing my wife get dressed. She looked great and I noticed that she lost weight. I put the dream on the back burner and was thinking about how good my w looked all day at work. I began sexting here and she responded very passionately. I could not wait to get back home after work. We pretty much stayed in bed all weekend. The kids were away for the weekend (me one from my prev marriage, here 2 from her previous marriage) with their respective other bio parents. -- That Sunday night (actually 1:16am Monday) was when my wife was distracted and must have accidentally left her cell phone on vibrate. The vibration from her AP text woke me up. Now I tend to dabble into fantastical thinking and in my mind the dream with the wolves was either my guardian angel preparing me for something or my intelligent body (my gut) telling me that it had enough information to prompt such an intervention. This sounds crazy probably but it is what it is.
SerJR, I also want to address the pain that I felt in the days, weeks, and months after I found out about this affair. I remember feeling like such a fool, a buffoon, so insignificant, a poor excuse for a man, a zero. The self talk was absolutely brutal. It was just as brutal to her also, and justly. I did not sleep for 3 or 4 days. I stopped eating (also stopped drinking water and got a kidney stone which hurt less than the pain of the affair.) I remember driving our youngest to school 2 days post D Day. I desperately wanted to just start rage crying. I do not know how I did it but maintained my composure until she was out of the car and into the school yard. I started crying as I drove, but it wasn't the "real cry" that I needed. I knew of a private wooded area in the middle of nowhere and just felt the need to go there and cry. I parked the car and just started screaming, wailing, crying for 20 minutes maybe longer. I ran out of tears. I remember calling my mom and balling, sobbing, shaking, as if I was a little boy. My mom could barely understand my words and she just said just come home. I drove to my mom's home, about an hour away. I slept all day. I drove back to my apartment and ww that night. For the next several nights I would go to the most private place I could find and just scream, cry, moan, self-sooth by rocking my body back and forth. None of us can aptly put words to what we all felt at that time, and we do not need to. We all understand this pain.
But I do think it is worth your time to reframe the situation in terms of your needs and your wellbeing, instead of a singular focus on the marriage. You can only be responsible for your healing, she can only be responsible for hers, and it takes both of you to make a marriage work, no matter how much effort one partner puts into it.
Well here I am thinking we were in recovery, my ww had all these opportunities to come clean yet she never told me about the first affair with this un-named professor while we were living together and engaged to be married. And now all of these feelings are back with a vengeance, and yet it's worse because I no longer have the illusion of a honeymoon. I trust her less than ever. I am angrier at her than I have ever been. I have put in my time and effort, of course I could have done better because I did not know about the techniques I have recently read about here. We did MC and she did IC. I should have done IC, but we were in an incredible amount of debt at the time and felt she needed it more than me (totally wrong assumption I understand now.) My needs and well being may require me to heal without having to worry about her. I have been poor for so long and we finally got out of debt (college, grad school loans almost paid in full without any gov bailouts, proudly.)
I keep hearing about the pain she was in that drove her into the arms of others, the pain that caused her to self harm (cutting), the pain that made her overeat and gain 60 pounds at one point in time. But I also understand that she had all of these things to temporarily relieve her from her pain. I had no such outlets other than to sit and deal with my thoughts and somatic pain (or so I thought at the time.) So what does my recovery look like? My therapist tells me that being a kind, sincere, honest, and ethical human is my nature. He said this because I said at one point "I am going to cheat on her, I am going to have an affair." He immediately said, maybe instead you should look at what your life may look like leaving her and being alone, starting over, being poor and living in my trailer on some vacant land despite being almost 60 years old. He said that nearly anytime you (meaning anyone) need to go against your deeply help moral values just to fit within the framework of a relationship it can and usually will lead to more unhappiness.
New news this morning. I just found out she had Whatsapp installed on her iphone even though we agreed 2 years ago to never download such apps onto any of our phones. Our middle child (her oldest from 1st marriage, I do not have much contact bc he has always been loyal to his bio dad) lives overseas. She claims she needed Whatsapp because it's the only way she could communicate with him. I called BS and said she can email him or call long distance.
So today, I begin to explore what my life will look like moving on. I came from a middle class family and was never really poor until I went to college (at 36 years old) and she went to grad school. We were still paying child support to my ex wife. It is tough being poor and I hated it it. But how much worse can it be than what I am feeling now?