SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It feels like not much moves on this side, so I thought I’d post my update and invite y’all to post yours as well

I am 5 months out from DDay#2, 17 years out from the actual affair. It was a 5 month PA with a coworker who was from head office to help get the restaurant I worked at in order. Trigger train left for my husband in July and it took my dense ass until late August to figure out what was wrong

In the initial months it was just about going through BHs feelings and thoughts on the affair. I picked up a lot of empathy during that time. Read how to heal your partner, got a book on sexual disjunction since some issues came up. And alternated between hysterical bonding, yelling and shutting down.

I also did the timeline from 17 years ago which was very difficult given the time that has passed and the brain injury I got in the mean time. BH found old work schedules which were extremely helpful in figuring out when things occurred.

Picked up "Not just friends" in December and am working my way through that one. Late December I started IC. I did it after DDay1 but failed to actually address the childhood sexual assault and didn’t even bring up the attempted rape from later on. My new therapist is working on desensitizing me. We are working up through my trauma ladder so that I don’t immediately go to freeze when trying to discuss anything. Right now we are working on my imposter syndrome. I feel like I fail as a wife about 85% of the time because I don’t even know what a good wife is.

Things have gotten better with BH. We are no longer hysterical bonding but keeping a healthy sex life. We talk about the affair at least once a week as well as after my therapy. Things are slowly moving forward on me letting him in instead of keeping him at arms length and everyone else at 10ft. We are not healed by any means nor does either of us expect to be at this point. But forward motion continues

Would love to hear how y’all are doing

WS only

[This message edited by SI Staff at 2:06 PM, Sunday, February 11th]

Thanks Makina

That really explains why waywards don’t really post here

WS only

[This message edited by SI Staff at 2:07 PM, Sunday, February 11th]

Hi CR-
WW here. Thank you for sharing your post.
I haven’t posted on this site for quite some time.
It takes a lot to put your story out there and to expose your sense of failure, so I feel compelled to share mine with you.
I’m also a CSA survivor. My BH and I are almost 5 out from DDAY 1 and 4 years out from DDAY 2.
I had an LTA with a married coworker. I minimized, deflected l, and essentially tried to "wait it out", before my BH would just let it drop. It tortured him for almost a year with my lies and minimizing. I tried to craft a story based on what I thought he knew. After finding this site, he contacted the OBS. Once he did, that’s when the work started.
I have been in IC for almost 4 years and we have been in MC for the same amount of time. He was finally able to find IC about a year ago. Last September we found an infidelity specialist and have found that we both feel that our recovery and healing has been gaining momentum.
In working with her and my IC, we discovered that I have been trying to distance myself from the idea that the CSA in any way related to the affair. While it did not cause me to get involved in the affair, the behaviors and coping mechanisms that I had developed as a result contributed to my lack of boundaries, a need for validation and attention had come about as a result.
So, where are we now? Still married, happy, better communicators, open, honest, and respectful to each other, and planning to stay together.
I can relate to your comment about why this section can be quiet. It can be difficult to put yourself out there and admit that you feel like a failure 85% of the time or have someone say that a BH should leave a WW. It takes strength and courage to admit that you were wrong, but remember this: you have support from your BH and you are working on you. Best of luck in your work and recovery.

Makina, you have a pm.

Champion,

I encourage you to keep posting. I think this place saved me in so many ways and I truly wonder if I would still be married without this place. You just have to learn to ignore when someone is rude. I do t see it happening nearly as often as it did.

We are 7 years past my affair, 4 years past his. We consider ourselves reconciled, mostly healed. (It takes time for a good scar to form) What you are describing is the path. Keep being mindful, present, thoughtful, and keep inching it forward. You still have hard days Agra’s but the more introspective you can get the better. Don’t let anything stop you. You are worth it.

Currently working with my wife trying to make our marriage better. It all started when I lost my job and started down a path I never wanted to be on. (The path of lack of confidence, self esteem, not loving myself.) After having 3 ea and one with a coworker. My wife found out, I lied multiple times to her. I made a timeline, lied on the first one, made a second one, that one is truthful. We both are in ic. We both are working at making this work. I know I need to do the work and make her feel safe. I hurt her in so many ways and broke her trust in me. I have never had a day go by that I haven't thought about how I damaged her and her trust she had in me. I also wonder how our kids feel. They know about my affairs. I would talk with them after I told them, but never would get much from them about it. They say they don't have anything to tell me, but I always wonder. Things have been going better between my wife and myself, I know it takes time and work.

[This message edited by Wolfpack1 at 1:31 AM, Monday, February 12th]

I am trying so hard and can not stop messing up with the way I approach things. We both keep thinking I am making strides and then I will undo all of it with a stupid comment, like last night, defending my AP. I know I can't expect kudos for the work I've put in when I continue to hurt him that way but what do I do if I am truly, truly trying?

I said at one point that maybe if I am finally looking out for him that looks like protecting him from me. We both want this. It seems unbearable that we could both want it so much. I do not feel capable of letting him go knowing we both WANT to repair.

Hi pleasebefixable,

First, take a breath. Unfortunately for some period of time you must accept failure as apart of learning/trying. Yes, some of the lessons are devastating.

However, what your husband needs is assurance. That you will keep fighting and not give up easily. We as ws are avoidant and the whole "maybe I should let him go" is just your avoidance talking. I do understand you desperately don’t want to hurt him any further.

The best way to succeed is to try and see things from his angle. And, deeply examine yourself at the same time. It’s difficult, painful, and sometimes maddening but I will tell you that it’s 150 percent worth it. You don’t want to be this person ever again so learning how it came to pass and fixing those things are crucial.

So step one: how would you feel if your husband cheated on you and then defended his ap? Know right now ap is enemy number 1 now in your house.

Step two: figure out why you find anything about the ap redeemable. Yes, I get that it’s hard to change your feelings in a blink of an eye. Recognize that your AP was an escape for you, someone you projected what you wanted to see.

What did you want to see? There is likely no evidence he was actually that way. If you are honest with yourself you will find that likely your husband actually has those qualities, or even that the needs you had from the ap were ones you never gave your husband an opportunity to fulfill because you didn’t ask.

Understand that by seeing your ap for who they are you have to see some of that in yourself. That’s so painful to admit how low you have been. But to heal and be who your husband deserves, and maybe even more importantly to live the life you deserve, you must find your path to self compassion, self love, creating your own happiness in healthy ways. That’s a tall order from where you are right now, I totally get that. But in the bigger picture that’s where you are trying to go.

So it’s one foot in front of the other and it’s about being more mindful than you have ever been:

Put yourself in your husbands shoes as much as possible. Be on his side always. Provide him with an environment in which he can heal. Refrain from being defensive, own what you have done, and recognize all of this will take practice and time.

Take time for self care and be mindful of your internal dialogue. Try and get sleep, exercise, and eat well. I know that sounds irrelevant but this journey is just getting started and you need to be in good condition to be a rock for yourself and your husband.

Do your best every day and a new recent history will eventually appear that you can be proud of.
Try and read about thinking: like making things a huge catastrophe in your mind - they are called cognitive distortions. Google them and become familiar when you are identifying so much with your thoughts.

Keep posting. I know the pain you are in. Your husband is in. But this is a marathon, not a sprint. It will not always be like this. Try and focus on your healing (I see you are reading and I can see your despair) if you can heal yourself you will be more likely to be able to heal your relationship.

Are you in therapy?

Thank you for your response, and yes, I am in despair. I feel hopeless and desperate. I know in my heart I am trying and I also know I am failing. I know that abusers can not expect kudos for their attempts if they do not completely change their behaviors. I know I have been emotionally abusive for years and he deserves better. I also know I want to repair things. I also know my behaviors don't show him and so I immediately get defensive, trying to bring up the ways I have made progress.

I have thought a lot about how awful my AP actually is, how awful I am, and how, like you said, I just put a completely made up image onto him and turned him into the person I wanted for my narrative. You are absolutely correct that that image is a lot of what my husband ACTUALLY is. I see that now. My BH says I have always known who he is and it is manipulative to say otherwise, but I also know I was genuinely in a fog where I believed my stories about him much of the time.

What happened last night:
A big discussion point (fairly) has been my lack of integrity in marriage, obviously, and other areas. AP had political beliefs different from mine and BH's. BH brought this up again, but said that AP's were even more extremely different than I rememebered them being. I said this, defensively, with the intent of showing that my lack of integrity was not AS bad as it would have been. I understand this isntinct was wrong and I should have just said again that I was sorry for my lack of integrity. BH sees this as 1)me pretending not to remember a conversation that we both had with AP about how his beliefs were more extreme 2)an inability to get over the AP and 3)an inability to but my BH first.

I know it is number 3 and I know that trying is not good enough here. But 1 is genuinely not true (I have started to believe there is actually something disfunctional about my memory) and 2 is not either (I meant it as defending my integrity not AP's). So then we get into the mess of it seeming like I am lying and being manipulative about THOSE two points. I just don't know what to do when these kinds of things come up because it feels like I can't stop doing it.

I am in therapy. I am going to Misery and Self Sabotagers Anonymous meetings. I am attending twice weekly DBT intensive psychoeducation to address my underlying abandonment issues. I am meditating and journaling every day. I am reading and writing here. And yet I know it is not enough because this keeps happening. For BH, it is all performative because my mess ups show I have not made actual change. The difference is he thinks this failure is my intentional choice and I know it is not.

This is completely normal. He is in a lot of pain and wants for you to get this all right. But in reality, no one changes overnight.

So what you must do is keep trying but give yourself some grace. It sounds like you are working overtime to try and come to terms with yourself. By giving yourself grace, you will learn not to panic. The panic is also normal, you want to help him and save your marriage. I get it. But it’s counterproductive for you to panic because it impedes being present with him.

So try and remain calm and of course apologize. But don’t beat yourself up, just keep trying. He needs to feel you are stable and are not going anywhere, son don’t allow yourself to get in the mindset of letting him go for his best interest. His best interest right now is seeing you will not waver in what you want, it’s part of earning trust and being reliable.

I know the amount of pain you are in. It’s hands down the worst period of my life. But you are redeemable, and the more you practice and learn you will naturally get better at fielding his questions and meeting his needs. Right now it’s even harder because he is still dealing with a lot of fresh shock and grief and he is naturally going to oscillate in how he feels by each minute. Even if you were doing everything perfectly it would not change that.

You need to find a way to ground yourself so that you can be his shock absorber. Be present, try and remain calm. If you need a minute or some time to answer thoughtfully, be transparent and say "you deserve an answer to that, sometimes my mind is shutting down out of panic and I just need a moment to collect myself and absorb what you are asking me."

Also maybe move the rest of your responses under your own thread since we might be kind of taking this other posters thread in a different direction than what they were hoping.

I have been in your shoes. I know what you are juggling. Try and relax into it and be mindful. It’s hard when your emotions are spiraling. You may not believe me but everything, everything, is going to be alright despite the outcome of your marriage. I know what the hope and goal is here but you need to learn to soothe yourself and be calm so you can have strength for both of you. That too will take practice. I will watch for more on your thread. You are not alone, and I can see you are really trying to grasp what is needed as quickly as you can.

[This message edited by hikingout at 7:18 PM, Monday, February 12th]

I'm in year 7 or so... also a CSA survivor among other childhood traumas. I don't drop by SI as often as I used to, but I dropped by today and figured I'd share a short update.

Our marriage is doing well. The affair is now something that we can (and do) discuss freely and without massive triggers for either of us. At this point it's more "a part of our story" and that was many chapters ago. We've both done a lot of work on ourselves, and have accomplished a lot of personal growth. Intimacy is our last great hurdle, but if there is one thing I've learned throughout this, it is that sometimes we have to grow personally before we can grow together, and I'm still working on some things, as is she. We talk about retiring together all the time and make plans to do something we both love. We encourage each other to be our best. At this point in time, we are together 24x7 and we enjoy that, although we should get out of the house more often. Covid changed a lot of our habits and we're still working through that to some degree.

This has been a really tough year, nothing related to the marriage however. We both have worked in IT our entire careers, and like many people in the field, we both recently lost our jobs due to workforce reductions. With tens of thousands of super talented people on the market and very few jobs to be had, we've both come to the conclusion that we have to reinvent ourselves, and just the same way that we had to rebuild the marriage from scratch, we now have to rebuild our lives and careers from scratch. It is both exciting and terrifying. We're looking for retirement friendly places to live that matches our lifestyle and that is more affordable than where we are now.

On the positive side of things, my wife has been working out with a VR headset daily with an app called Supernatural. I play sometimes too, but it's mostly her right now. It's super fun and you play to a large selection of music, so she actually enjoys the workouts. It's having really positive affects on her mood, her energy levels, everything really. After the shock of losing her job wore off, she's found that she really enjoys NOT having to work with crazy hours and crazy pressure anymore. She's started crocheting again, and has been really enjoying cooking and trying out new recipes. She hates shopping and I don't enjoy cooking as much as she does, so our deal is that I shop and she cooks, and that works out well for us.

As for me, I recently started a new treatment of microdosing Ketamine in order to help my severe depression and PTSD. It's the first thing that has EVER shown me some real results. My mood has improved, my wife says my sense of humor is coming back, and I'm even starting to dream again. It's been a real game changer for me. As for work, my wife keeps telling me to go do what I love, so currently I'm working on two online games that I'm hoping will take off at least enough to help pay some bills. Again, something both exciting and terrifying. I hope it works out, not only because I need to make a living, but because it's a career path that can be mobile. That way, we can live anywhere in the world, and my income won't be affected. That would be a huge boon.

The only advice I have for the new folks is this. Getting through this takes an incredible amount of courage and determination. It takes courage because you have to be willing to take a brutally hard look at yourself and tear down all those lies and justifications you told yourself along the way. You have to be willing and able to face the ugliness of what you did, and worse yet, who that makes you. That's where the determination comes in. Once you have a healthy disgust for the person who thought it was okay to tear others lives apart, you need to decide what you are going to do about it, and then, go make the monumental effort of changing who you are into who you want to be. We can never undo what we did, but we can control every second moving forward. Live a life of honesty, integrity, authenticity... and that is who you will be. If there is to be any chance whatsoever of reconciliation, then this change needs to happen first. And it is still needed even if the marriage fails, because otherwise, this pattern will just continue to drag you down and make your life, and the lives of everyone you love, miserable. If it helps, the tl/dr; version is this - go find someone you really admire more than anyone else in the world, then go do your damnedest to be just like them.

For those of you still lost in the pain, bear in mind that shame is only useful as a motivator. Far too many WS's (myself included) end up allowing the shame to take them over. It becomes an indentity rather than a motivator. Shame is a great catalyst for change, but it is not a life sentence, and it does NOTHING for your BS and family. Shame is about YOU, just like the affair was about YOU. You conquer the shame by taking action, by making changes. Clear, conscious changes towards being a person of honesty and integrity. You get out of the shame spiral by purposely living a life that you can respect yourself for. WS's ask how they can help their BS's all the time, and the answer is simple.

1) Be 100% honest about everything and do the work you need to in order to not be defensive. If you truly accept responsibility for what you did, then there is nothing to be defensive about.

2) You help their recovery most simply by not hindering it. Evey time something happens and triggers fire, their trauma clocks reset to zero. By working on yourself and becoming someone capable of truly owning their actions, you become a safer person to be around, and it is easier for a BS to recover when they aren't constantly waiting for some other shoe to drop.

Love to everyone.

At this point in time, we are together 24x7 and we enjoy that, although we should get out of the house more often. Covid changed a lot of our habits and we're still working through that to some degree.

This is us, too. We're in a really good place together, dreaming dreams for the future, talking about what that will look like, having already rebuilt a life where the A is neither rugswept nor centralized. It's amazing to have enough time and energy to make those plans.

We're happy, compatible, passionate, and in love. It took so much effort from both of us to get there, so I'm proud of the work and deeply grateful for the luck.

Posting the latest update. This month is the month my wife found out about my EA. This month is also both of our birthdays. Besides our birthdays there a couple of trigger dates for my wife. This year it has gone a lot better during this month for my wife. We exchanged birthday cards, we have had really good talks. Lately, in the last week, I haven't had talks with my wife. I was sick with the flu for 2 to 3 days. I did check in with my wife and just asked her if she was doing ok with the days that could trigger her. She said she was doing ok. She would still have thoughts at times, but said this year has been better. After reading DaddyDoms post a couple of times, his advice is very true. I appreciate all the positive posts I read and advice I have seen in this thread and on this site. I do believe this site is very helpful to a WS.

We're in a really good place together, dreaming dreams for the future, talking about what that will look like, having already rebuilt a life where the A is neither rugswept nor centralized.

Our MC asked us to make individual goals to bring to our session today and this is a huge one for me. I want us to have a shared vision of the future together.

Today is the first day in a while since I've logged in. May 2024 will be 5 years since DD and with a lot of hard work, we are in a good place now. My BW has shown me so much grace and forgiveness that I am eternally grateful for.

It's been a bumpy ride for sure. Having to finally confront the real me was anything but a walk in the park to a people-pleasing conflict-avoider like myself. I am still very much a work in progress and probably will be until the day I die. Still with the same therapist and I only see him once a month now for a check-in.

No secrets. No stewing. Still working on my "natural" (read: learned) pessimism and unfortunately the remnants of passive-agressive behavior. Thankfully, I'm aware of that bullshit now and can catch it quickly most of the time and be upfront with my BW about it. One of her favorite questions is "Whatcha thinkin'?" and I answer her honestly. The phrases "Nothing", "Whatever", and "I'm fine" have largely disappeared from my vocabulary (but not entirely ).

I still lurk here a lot without logging in. The wisdom on SI is invaluable. To all the new WS, please don't give up. Keep posting, especially on the days when looking in the mirror is the hardest thing you do. Folks here are genuine, honest, straight-forward, and willing to help. And every time you post, we all benefit in some way.

fWH here. I cheated on my ex-W 47+ years ago. She divorced me. She was smarter than a lot of BS. Best thing she could have done for us.

7+ Years since D day. We have recovered (his words). Doesn't mean I'm complacent. As a WS, making sure your partner feels safe with you is life-long. Consistency really saved us.

I have changed a lot. The way I see things around me has changed. The way I treat people has changed. The way I conduct myself has changed.

He could do much better than me, but he chose me again when I didn't at all deserve it and I never took that for granted since day one of recovery. Made many mistakes, but my intentions for R were clear.

The love I have for him cannot be described in words. I make a conscious effort every day to let him know how thankful I am he didn't give up on me. And I make an effort everyday to show him just how much I appreciate him.

Our sex life has changed also. To be frank, it was boring before the A (doesn't make what I did okay). Nowadays, we're literally all over each whenever we have the opportunity, with me being much more the aggressor and he loves it. And it makes me extremely happy seeing how happy he is feeling loved and desired.

Hi Mrs. South Africa,

Class of 2017. I remember you guys. Did you all remarry?

Great update!