SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It is hard to think straight when violently slapped across the face by a spouse’s infidelity. To me, it just doesn’t make sense. How could anyone, especially the one person I loved and trusted most in this world, ever conclude that cheating was a legitimate option.

In my case, in trying to fill in the voids of all the "whys" and "hows" I started to tell myself stories based on my imaginations and reasonings.

I told myself things like:

She mustn’t love me!
Her partner must be smarter than me!
He clearly must be a better lover than me!
And most undoubtably he must be more attractive than me!
My wife must secretly despise me! Maybe, even hate me!
I am a failure as a husband!
I am a failure of a man!
In the eyes of my wife, I have no value!
In my eyes I have no value!
I’ve been kicked to the curb!
I will never trust again!
I will never love or be loved again!

The list goes far beyond the few listed above. It all made perfect sense to me for if those things were not true, she would not have sought out the sexual affections of two other men.

For those who are unfamiliar with my situation I’ll keep it simple. This all happened 43 years ago and then again 33 years ago. Though my wife and I did reconcile to the point of having a very successful and loving marriage, those stories I told myself snuggled themselves dormant, into the creases of my mind. Then, without incident, a little less than a year ago, burst out of their lairs and crushed me.

Why now?

Because a new story formed that had not crossed my mind in previous years: My two children that I love with my entire being and raised to be kind, thoughtful and loving adults may not be genetically mine! (Either way, they will always be my kids.) But it still stung me to the core.

Okay, okay, I know, what is the point of this post? It is to say that all the previous stories I had made up and told myself as if true, have proven to be false. So, though extremely unfair, suffering cannot be avoided, but in my case, I suffered far deeper and longer than I needed to because of the stories I had told myself.

(The newest story, however, is the only one that I will never fully be confident that I know the truth. My only option is to accept what is, is. Even in the darkness of not knowing, I can live happily for I know either way my love for children will not suffer.)

So, to my point. My suggestion is to be as suspicious of the stories you might be telling yourself as you are suspicious of your wayward spouse. What I learned was that I got over the affairs decades ago but am only now working through and dismissing the stories I told myself.

Asterisk

Asterisk, my friend, please talk to your wife. I'm begging you. She is the key to all of these issues. I know you believe this is all on you to resolve on your own, that she doesn't want to talk about any of this, that you respect her silence, but it's eating you alive and it's painful to watch.

Talk to her.

Peace

Asterisk, I think that your feelings are normal given 2 aspects of the situation.

1st is, how can you be reassured by someone who tore you down? They are hard to believe and they don't carry the kind of authority for their opinion to matter enough anyway. That seems to be a common price to pay for staying with a cheater who's affair combined with their attitude was a serious attack on one's self esteem. I can attest that there is no easier fix then someone better then your cheater being obsessed with you. This is likely not a path for you, but nevertheless it's good to understand it. This is a sacrifice that you have made for her.

2nd you have a strong desire to shelter your wife and keep her on the pedestal, which is lovely and can make love life much richer, especially if it goes both ways, but also has some drawbacks, including your recognition of how deeply inadequate your wife was. I won't make a comprehensive list out of respect for your feelings (read 2nd point), but I think that objectively, if you go down that path of reasoning, you had more reasons to cheat then her. Everyone is capable of everything, no matter how much you want to see a halo around them. Some more assertiveness in thinking would help you to look from under the rose colored glasses, at least when needed. And this is something that you actually can learn. I don't believe it will heal you completely, but perhaps help you remain grounded when the dark thoughts hit.

[This message edited by Itiswhatitis000 at 12:58 AM, Sunday, March 29th]

Unhinged and ItIsWhatItIs000,

It appears that I have a fundamentally different approach in achieving the goal of healing my injured and grieving heart. We also seem to disagree in the process I should be going about giving my wife her space to heal her equally broken heart. I maintain that there is no "one way" in how all parties involved in the incredibly painful and disorienting issue of infidelity find healing.

I understand that my approach is not alien with some here and I honor those differences. And I have shown repeatedly that I appreciate everyone’s input. Yes, I have had my brief moments of annoyances, but I have attempted to set that reactive part of me aside when I spot it. Unfortunately, sometimes, after I’ve posted. And for that, I ask for forgiveness.

What I am asking for is that you guys set aside the story of my journey and of my wife’s character that you have told yourselves and then have convinced yourselves of its factually and attempt to hear me. I’m not asking for agreement. I am asking to be heard.

There is a very strong and loud, collective voice here at SI that has proven itself to be wise and supportive. But it also feels to me that this collective might also have created its own rigidity.

All I am attempting to do is to give voice to alternative methods of weaving oneself through this terrible situation that both the betrayed spouse and the wayward spouse have found themselves.

I find it very difficult to believe that I am, as suggested, the "only one" attempting to find healing and reconciliation with the understanding that I am responsible for my own healing. Not my wife, she has her own work cut out for her.

Asterisk

She mustn’t love me!
Her partner must be smarter than me!
He clearly must be a better lover than me!
And most undoubtably he must be more attractive than me!
My wife must secretly despise me! Maybe, even hate me!
I am a failure as a husband!
I am a failure of a man!
In the eyes of my wife, I have no value!
In my eyes I have no value!
I’ve been kicked to the curb!
I will never trust again!
I will never love or be loved again!

Been there, done that

Underlying all of that is the idea that she defines me. She is like a mirror that reflects who I am back to me. I allow other people to define who I am. They established my value in my worth. Why? Because I don’t know myself.

If you can attack that, then all of the things listed above don’t matter. You will have moved beyond healing, you will have grown.

And you don’t need to talk to your wife to do it. In fact, talking to your wife can actually result in you getting sucked back into the vortex.

She tells you she never loved him, that they only did it three times, that it was a mistake, that you are actually special, Hysterical bonding, and so on. Because what they are saying about you is now good, you let it define you again. And so you are back to square one.

please talk to your wife. I'm begging you.

Far better to just watch her, forget forget each day all the stories you’ve told yourself and see her as she is right now.

[This message edited by HouseOfPlane at 1:45 PM, Sunday, March 29th]

HouseOfPlane,

Oh my goodness, thank you for adding the dimension of how I so easily allow others, especially my wife, (And I’ll add my religion) to define who I was and how I saw myself. As you so cleverly laid it out in bold print, I was not taking responsibility for knowing or valuing myself. And in doing so, for the past 33 years, I was not taking the responsibility of healing myself.

And that is exactly what I am attempting to rectify and share.

Thank you HouseOfPlane for hearing and inserting more depth to my voice.

Far better to just watch her, forget forget each day all the stories you’ve told yourself and see her as she is right now.

Yes, this is a new idea I learned here and have since researched elsewhere. I have, over the past few months, come to the understanding of the idea of seeing and treating my wife as she conducts herself today. Not as she did in the past or might in the future. The light shown from that simple concept has been illuminating.

Asterisk

My working hypothesis is that all psychotherapy that involves talking, and maybe all psychotherapy, is about hearing one's self-talk and changing that which is inaccurate and/or which the subject wants to change.

You've got some self-talk that can be tested for validity. It actually might be important to your kids' health to find out if they are yours genetically, but I can understand that uncertainty may be less uncomfortable than truth on this question. After all, if genetics turn out to be important to your kids' health, you can deal with it when it happens.

In any case, it's probably possible to change the self-talk without knowing the reality. In general, I believe nurture has more impact than nature, and I believe the bonds that are built with infants and kids are very strong.

At the same time, if it were me, I'd have a hard time accepting myself if I consciously avoided finding out the truth. The truth can hurt, but I believe an illusion is even more painful.

So, great insight on what to do with attack-self self talk, and I wish you success in your struggle to shut down this latest nasty message you are dealing with.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 3:59 PM, Sunday, March 29th]

Interesting article in The Atlantic today about Marc Anderson and something he said, but really about introspection and self talk.

The past 30 years of cognitive sciences have underlined the extent to which we are often strangers to ourselves. When we try to understand our own personalities, our own decisions, our own motives, we are highly unreliable. As Will Storr put it in his book The Science of Storytelling, "We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us."

Because of this, many therapists no longer ask why questions. Asking a patient "Why did you do that?" serves little purpose when the answer will largely be a piece of fiction.

…So what’s the difference between bad and good introspection?

One distinction is akin to the difference between archeology and journalism. Bad introspection consists of trying to dig down deeper in search of your "true self"—excavating one stratum after another in search of the answers that lie buried within. Good introspection, by contrast, requires achieving some distance from yourself. It’s done by observing your behavior (not just your thoughts) from the outside, as if you were a reporter watching another person. Talk to yourself in the second or third person, Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan suggests. Establish some temporal distance from yourself by asking, say, "What would I feel about this experience if I looked at it 10 years from now?" If you’ve experienced something traumatic, don’t write about it right away. Give yourself some distance.

People who are good at introspection tend not to ask themselves why questions. Instead, they ask themselves what, where, and when questions: What’s going on? What am I feeling? When was the last time somebody made me feel these feelings of inferiority?

Good introspectors are skilled at noticing their own behavior patterns without succumbing to excessive self-absorption. They don’t ruminate or let their own thoughts spiral around and around in dark, depressing doom loops. They get in, get on with it, and get out.

Sisson,

You've got some self-talk that can be tested for validity. It actually might be important to your kids' health to find out if they are yours genetically, but I can understand that uncertainty may be less uncomfortable than truth on this question. After all, if genetics turn out to be important to your kids' health, you can deal with it when it happens.

The potential damage to my adult children far out weights the possibility they may need their parental medical information. Besides, they still would be missing half of the genetics.

At the same time, if it were me, I'd have a hard time accepting myself if I consciously avoided finding out the truth.

Do you honestly believe that that is what I am doing or advocating for? Sigh.

The truth can hurt, but I believe an illusion is even more painful.

Accepting what is, is, is not living in an illusion. I claim that thinking I might get the whole, unpolluted truth 33 years postdate, that is an illusion I had been living and it was severing no purpose but to cause further suffering.

Asterisk

Yikers!!! HouseOfPlane,

This article really gets to the meat of what I have been working at trying to understand myself and implement.

Especially poignant to me was the fallacy have asking oneself the "why" questions. Doing that and then thinking I could discover or uncover the reasons why then it would make sense and I could finally come to peace. That why journey only served to lead me into rumination. The why question was what my wife needed to be asking herself, not me. It was her job to figure it out in her way and then fix it in her way. Not in my way or my timetable.

Now that does not mean to imply that I had a responsibility to stick around if I found her way or her timetable unworkable for my healing. That is a whole different discussion to be had for reconciliation is a hard, grueling trip down a road filled with end stops that turn out not to be the journeys end.

For me, my mistake was waiting for my wife to fix me by fully leveling with me. But the problem was, would I ever believe she had "fully leveled" with me? I found that the questions would always be hanging in the rafters gathering dust until I would reenter the attic looking for more answers.

The above approach was me giving my power to heal away.

Asterisk

The concept of the stories we tell ourselves is so true and so important! We tell ourselves stories all the time, I think it’s a human thing to do. It’s what makes trickle truth so deadly, a person starts to piece together a story based on the information they have and then bam! That story gets blown apart, the foundations on which it rests crumble ("at least she didn’t …") and the BS is in much worse shape than before.

As a wayward I also needed to confront the stories I tell myself, first to be clear about what they were and second to test them against reality. I can, sometimes, keep my head above the water by reminding myself over and over that the thing I feel must be true is not true, that I understand why I think that, it makes sense, bring in mindfulness, etc. But by far the most effective remedy is asking my husband if it’s true and seeing the incredulous look on his face, as if how can that possibly be true. And he says it is the same for him, that he can cope with his fears (though it is exhausting), but talking to me about them makes them poof! Away. This is probably because we have done extensive, endless, repeated talking and trying to figure out the truth, supported by IC and at a few points MC, and we both trust that the truth is our ally, even if it’s sometimes hard to see how.

It is possible that your wife didn’t want to communicate decades ago and now she does. I definitely could not endure my husband’s negative emotions early in our marriage, and he heard and respected that, protecting me from them. That was what was needed early in our marriage and immediately after the affair, and it was because of his protectiveness and strength that we stayed married - probably like you and your wife. As I became stronger through IC and prayer, and time and distance, I wanted him to be more real with me. The old ways were blocking intimacy, blocking our growth together. His saintly endurance became more alienating than anger, because it refused real engagement. Whether or not he intended, it positioned me permanently as the failure, as weak, as incapable. I wanted to stretch into my new skills and i wanted more intimacy, I wanted to be closer to him. I could engage with anger - tho it was a learning curve for me and unpleasant and messy at times - but I could not endure his infinite sorrowful forgiveness and feel like an equal partner.

Of the things you listed the one thing you COULD do is DNA test the kids. You could pay for 23 and me as a family history thing. I remember when my husband had this same fear. I immediately offered the test, so easy to give him peace of mind. I also gently joked about each kid and why they were obviously his, their funny character traits that are unmistakable, and a funny circumstance about the youngest. He didn’t ultimately want to do it but the offer stands.

Pippen,

I want to thank you for sharing this portion of you and your husband’s process to find reconciliation. I particularly appreciated that you shared of the similarities and how at the time when you needed his patience and protectiveness he gave it to you and that it worked for you both. I also am pleased that you shared that at a point when You were ready, you turned to him and thankfully he was open to you. I am in full support of both those times.

The key, as I understand it, reason this worked so well for your intimacy and reconciliation is that you were allowed to process in your own way and on your own timetable. And that is all I am doing.

Digging, prying, praying, and demanding answers wasn’t working for either of us. I will say, waiting anxiously patiently for answers that I felt I deserved and was being deprived of didn’t work as well. Looking inside of myself instead of outside of myself to find my healing and a sense of personal value had been there the whole time and I missed it. And I maintain that miss is what led to my recent collapse, not my wife.

I would be remiss if I didn’t restate that my wife made huge changes and has become an amazing, life partner. Our intimacy, warmth and connection is far beyond what it was pre affair and D-day.

Asterisk

[This message edited by Asterisk at 12:05 PM, Monday, March 30th]

Hmm. . . I had to think about this for a while. On the one hand, I never felt forced or manipulated by my husband. I was never given a timetable of any sort. So it is kind of true that I progressed on my own timetable. But it's also true that it was by seeing and knowing about his experience that I was motivated or driven toward doing better. If I was entirely comfortable I might have avoided anything difficult, but seeing him troubled was troubling to me and then I would have to face things I otherwise might not have had the fortitude or courage to face. And there was definitely no rules about it, at the very beginning he was so decidedly "on my team" that the main thing I felt was hopeful that life could be good again, when it seemed so very awful. But after time he withdrew his support which was devastating, and I needed to figure out how I could manage without his good opinion of me . . . and just when I did begin to manage well, he began to be more open. I always tense a little when I read the WS heals WS BS heals BS together they heal the marriage, because while it's technically true that no one can reach in and heal me, the entire process of healing, each of us separately and together, was so relational and dynamic. I called it Rereconcovciliationery. Recovery reconciliation, all mushed up together. I really must find time to work on part 2 of my novella :)

Pippin,

Rereconcovciliationery

Yes, I like that word and your attached meaning, "mushing together healing and reconciliation". It is a mouthful to try to say though. LOL

I went back and reread your original comment to give me some more insight into the process that you and your husband went through to arrive at "rereconcovciliationery". In doing so I came across something you wrote that didn’t strike me like it did on my 1st reading. I’ve quoted it below.

His saintly endurance became more alienating than anger, because it refused real engagement. Whether or not he intended, it positioned me permanently as the failure, as weak, as incapable. I wanted to stretch into my new skills and i wanted more intimacy, I wanted to be closer to him. I could engage with anger - tho it was a learning curve for me and unpleasant and messy at times - but I could not endure his infinite sorrowful forgiveness and feel like an equal partner.

Those words are one of the clearest, intelligent phrases I have ever read about how a good and needed approach at one stage of the process of healing eventually became a handicap at another stage. It is a strong reminder that both individuals and couples need to be fluid in their efforts to heal, reconcile or separate.

I have an ask of you that I hope you will give consideration. And that is that you think about taking that paragraph, expanding on it and then posting it as its own thread in the reconciliation forum. (I want to know more.) It really is quite brilliant and I believe so many people who would benefit by reading this but will miss it with it being buried in the comments of my post.

Just a thought that I hope you will consider. I know, after reading it for the second time, that you have convinced me to ask my wife if this became her situation and if so, is it still now, and if it is, what do we do as a caring couple do to fix it. Superiority of position has no place in a couple’s marriage.

Asterisk

Sure thing Asterisk, I will ponder it for a few days and see if there is anything else to add. One thing I can say now - one of the stories he told himself was that he was being strong for my sake. That was partly true, but like many truths it obscured another less convenient truth, which was that he was being strong to avoid vulnerability and to avoid the immediate disappointment of asking for my help and not receiving it. He didn't want to express a need and see me put my own needs first. It was *really* hard for him to let go of the story that he was a strong, compassionate, devoted, faithful, patient, loving husband. Once he let go of that story, and what he thought it looked like (invulnerable and impervious), he could ask for my help and work together with me as I figured out how to help him. That was messy and uncomfortable for both of us. But then he was a deeper version of the strong, compassionate, devoted, faithful, patient, loving husband.

Also I am now friendly enough with you that you get to be scolded.

3 Ps
2 Is
1 N

NO E!!

Not the sweaty basketball player! The mischievous little hobbit who betrays his friends.

TY for your kind attention to this matter.

Pippin,

One thing I can say now - one of the stories he told himself was that he was being strong for my sake. That was partly true, but like many truths it obscured another less convenient truth, which was that he was being strong to avoid vulnerability and to avoid the immediate disappointment of asking for my help and not receiving it. He didn't want to express a need and see me put my own needs first. It was *really* hard for him to let go of the story that he was a strong, compassionate, devoted, faithful, patient, loving husband. Once he let go of that story, and what he thought it looked like (invulnerable and impervious), he could ask for my help and work together with me as I figured out how to help him.

Now that was very poignant, perhaps a mirror. I’m going to be taking my time with it. (The stories we tell ourselves…..)

Also I am now friendly enough with you that you get to be scolded.
3 Ps
2 Is
1 N
NO E!!

I welcome your "scolding" for you have proven to be coming from a place of care not judgement. However, I am too dense to have even an inkling of an understanding of what you are trying to "scold" me about. Which makes it less painful for sure, but then not helpful as well. Care to Share?

Asterisk