SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I think I do understand betrayal trauma.

We’re in a tricky spot, I think, because of the trauma that I’ve experienced for much of my childhood. I had a parent— someone who was supposed to care for me and be safe and want the best for me— emotionally abuse me, twist my words, push me towards outbursts and then punish me for them, never let me feel like I was "good enough," manipulate me and my other parent and our family therapist and everyone else who could have interceded on my behalf… A lot of messed up shit.

Now that I’m an adult, I’m still in hyper-vigilance mode: I expect that everyone I meet might possibly want to hurt me in the same ways. I often interpret being misunderstood as other people intentionally misrepresenting what I’m saying in order to steer the conversation to their benefit. I get triggered when I’m not believed for any reason, or when people tell me what my feelings and motivation are as if they know me better than I do… and that’s my brain trying to protect me from further trauma.

Naturally that’s not gelling well at all, to say the least, with what BH’s brain is doing to try to protect him from further betrayal from me. He loved and trusted me, and in doing so, made himself vulnerable. I violated that trust, and now nothing I’m saying has credibility. He hears the words that I say when I explain myself, my feelings, and the situation before/during/after the A. But his brain has put this filter in place that paints everything in the most negative light possible, sometimes to the point of twisting them to have the exact opposite meaning. This is the basis for his untrue beliefs. In effect, they prevents him from returning to being close with me, and from being vulnerable to betrayal again. If he already believes the worst— that I’m using him for lifestyle benefits and secretly want to be with someone else, that I’m going to leave at the first chance if I find someone "better," that if we should even slightly miscommunicate in the future, then I’m likely to betray him again— then he won’t be as hurt if they do happen.

And I understand why that’s going on, the same way I understand why my brain is doing something similar. I understand that often times our feelings don’t make sense, and that we can’t always logick ourselves or other people out of them… But isn’t that kind of what therapy is? Recognizing the thought patterns that are keeping us in that hyper vigilant, "protective" state that doesn’t actually serve us, especially if the goal is to rebuild that trust and closeness, and interrupting them. Replacing them with something that, yes, may make us vulnerable to hurt again… but that allows us to move towards actually feeling safe and better and "normal" again.

I’m embarrassed of this, but I was getting really frustrated with BH last night. I was rehashing that even while the A was going on, I still wanted the things I was getting from the AP from BH. That I still loved him dearly and wanted to be with him, but that going back to loneliness and silence and feeling sexually burdensome instead of desired was terrifying to me, and so I behaved selfishly and continued the affair…I was trying to explain to him that he was twisting things and seeing them through that negative filter, and wouldn’t it feel so much better to just believe what it was I was saying? That our M is not totally fucked up and as hopeless as he’s making it seem?

But he’s in denial that he’s even doing that, so of course he can’t choose to interrupt the thought process that’s keeping him feeling hurt, devastated, sad, angry betrayed… all of those negative feelings that his brain is holding onto so desperately in attempt to protect him. He thinks I’m getting frustrate with him expressing those feelings, rather than the fact he won’t recognize or challenge the thought process that’s perpetuating them, which was also frustrating…It was very much a clusterfuck of a conversation. I am not proud of my emotional reactions at all.

I knoooow I need to give it time. That I need to be patient with him, and let him get to a point where he feels safe enough to trust me and take down those belief-barriers. But like I said, it’s really hard with my own triggers because my trauma brain is saying "he’s twisting what you’re saying on purpose to make you look even worse. He doesn’t want to reconcile and he’s going to abandon you, the same way your mother did when this was happening to you as a child… You’ll spend years with him and never make any progress only for you to end up alone and broken." I need to break that thought pattern myself in order to be properly supportive. I’m praying my IC can help with that.

At the end of the conversation, we focused on his belief that he deserves poor treatment and betrayal from his loved ones. I told him it wasn’t true. I asked him to think about what life would be like, and how he would behave differently, if he believed he deserved to be treated well, with love and kindness and respect. He said he would put down boundaries and stick by them, instead of doing the pick me dance for people that hurt him. We agreed that that would be more protective than believing he deserved it... I’m proud of him for even answering the question and challenging that belief, even just briefly. He asked me what I thought of him and I got to tell him all the amazing, wonderful, lovely qualities I see in him, and he tried to believe me. It gave me some hope.

[This message edited by DayByDay96 at 10:05 PM, Thursday, September 18th]

That our M is not totally fucked up and as hopeless as he’s making it seem?

That’s your perspective, not his. You're minimizing Infidelity.

I am fully aware of how awful infidelity is and I’m not minimizing it in the least. But our marriage isn’t over, nor is it a bad or hopeless one.

We communicate well, we share responsibilities well, we parent… well, decently, together. (Our kid is a tough one for sure, but I wouldn’t want to raise her with anyone else.)

I’m not going anywhere; I never was.
This marriage to him is where I want to be, because I love him to death, not because I need someone to fund my lifestyle. (I certainly wouldn’t be chatting up some dude who makes 35k a year if I was planning on leaving, either. It just doesn’t make sense to think that.)

To believe otherwise is to tell himself lies, like I said, in order to keep his distance. But I think we can come back together eventually.

You are minimizing your infidelity. You are telling him that he should just believe that what you are saying is true. What reason does he have to believe you? You lied and cheated. You likely lied right to his face many times to hide and keep the affair going. Yet you want him to believe that you loved him the whole time while you were lying and cheating? That you never meant to leave him, you wanted to stay with him even though you were lying and cheating? Read what you write, it sounds ridiculous and unbelievable. You don’t love him. You got caught and want to convince yourself you aren’t a bad person. You don’t want your life and family blown up because of your selfishness but that doesn’t mean you love him. I feel bad for him, he is in a lot of pain right now and you are just making it worse rather than trying to make it better for him. The way you want to sweep your infidelity under the rug and minimize if he actually does reconcile with you, he committing himself to a life of being married to someone he can’t trust and who will likely cheat again the next time she gets bored. I don’t mean to be harsh but you aren’t a safe partner and lack of accountability and constant justifying shows you won’t do the work to become a safe partner for him.

Just responding to the initial post. It's going to take as long as it takes. How long does it take to recover from being knifed in the gut? I don't know. It might take one person a few days, it might take someone months, and it might take someone else years, depending on how much damage was done to them. The BS experiences the damage as they do, you can't hurry it, you can't do anything - once the affair is revealed, what happens is really out of your hands. You can apologize and try to show you love them, for what that's worth, you can try to convince them you're trustworthy, you can try to abide by the rules they put in place.....you can do all of these things and more and it still takes as long as it takes. You did the damage, you're not able to set the recovery time. Even after the BS appears to have healed, there can still be set backs and triggers. This is the damage that is done to someone from adultery. It takes as long as it takes and only the BS can decide what that is. If you get sick of waiting, you might want to leave, I can understand that. Maybe you two should set some time limit to how long the recon process should last - a year perhaps? 2 years? How much time are you willing to wait with things as they are?

Any hurrying you do will be seen as....why don't you just get over it?....and it's not gonna work, so if you don't have the patience, I'd say put a time limit on it for yourself and consider how much you actually want to stay married to BS. Not everyone - BS or WS is cut out for recon.

[This message edited by BondJaneBond at 2:12 AM, Friday, September 19th]

DayByDay96 - you're pushing it. You're trying to push him into spackling because this recon is too uncomfortable for YOU and you just....want him to get over it. You tell him all this stuff about how much you love him, blah, blah, but that's not what it feels like after an affair and frankly....he may not really want to stay in this marriage anyway. Because when something like this happens, a BS may simply not want to continue. You do it mechanically one foot after the other, but is his heart in it? I don't know. You're trying to bully him into spackling and that doesn't work. To me, it seems like you don't really care about the pain you caused him, you care about the discomfort you're going through now.

Recovering from an affair takes as long as it takes as long as it takes. It can't be hurried, rushed, changed, forced, bullied, cajoled, you can't love someone into it, you can't convince them.....it's like a stab wound to the heart - FROM YOU. The person he trusted most. He has to not only recover from the shock that you would do something like this, and believe me, there is no shock like this. CANCER is not as bad as adultery and I KNOW THIS. You don't know how much you've hurt him and he's not going to open up to you because you don't give him the space too. THIS IS GOING TO TAKE A LONG TIME. Either you want to wait it out, doing and saying the right things, or you don't and you should just stop considering recon. He's not your pet dog.

[This message edited by BondJaneBond at 2:18 AM, Friday, September 19th]

(I certainly wouldn’t be chatting up some dude who makes 35k a year if I was planning on leaving, either. It just doesn’t make sense to think that.)

You really have a long way to go if you think this is an appropriate thing to say in your situation. Again, the age difference alone has to be weighing on him regardless of your A. This kind of painfully insensitive comment could cost you your marriage. Rather, it's the clear lack of empathy behind this comment that will do the job.
And, yes, I expect you'll say it was a joke. It's not funny. It's hurtful and risks derailing everything.

You know, some betrayed spouses never give reconciliation a second thought. They head straight to divorce and never look back. It doesn't seem to matter how they described the state of their marriage or their degree of happiness within it, whether they had children, were rich or poor, whatever.

Infidelity devastates marriages.

You seem so very determined to evade this simple truth.

Of course, I don't know anything about your husband aside from what you've written. I do, however, have a solid understanding of what it's like to have been betrayed as a husband, from personal experience and from some great friends I've met here. So, I cannot say with certainty that your BH feels the same. The odds are, however, that he's only just beginning to assess the damage himself and hasn't yet reached a conclusion.

I think if you understand why you are reacting the way you do that is what you should be focused on. You do not understand what he is going through the way you believe you do because what you have written tells me differently. I am not saying that to shame you, you sound like someone with intelligence so I am not trying to talk down to you either. I am trying to say what I see because I think you need to be more patient and focus on working on your issues.

Ws heals ws.

Bs heals bs.

Together they heal the marriage.

You do need to provide him with the environment to heal, to build trust slowly again over time, and you have to respect where he is in the process while it’s unfolding.

Look, when I got here I thought I knew. I thought I was remorseful. There is a lot of shit to dig through, and you will benefit greatly from that work. Focus on fixing you and rebuilding the relationship at a reasonable rate. Insisting he just believe you is really just asking him an impossible thing.

He needs to feel negative and make steps towards the positive over time. He needs freedom to feel what he feels so that it can all heal. And you need to start practicing away from your patterns that you have identified and realize that if you do the work you will identify more and more like layers of an onion. The knowing is important because nothing change without it. However, no one changes overnight. It will take a dedication to reversing your patterns and showing up differently.

I am only saying these things because what you are telling him and expecting of him will be counterproductive. And if you understand betrayal trauma more deeply you will learn he can’t even help where he is right now. You want him to be somewhere different and that’s normal and understandable but unless you put that away you will push him away further. Let him be where he is. In fact, I hope someone comes along and says this next part better than I can because it’s not my material- years ago a fellow we explained in here that you need to get down in the floor with him. Hurt with him. It’s not your job to fix him, it’s your job to show him you are in it together while you fix yourselves. Humbling myself with that advice changed my whole trajectory and probably saved my marriage as well.

What you are saying is not matching your declarations of understanding and I am telling you this because I think you are capable to walk the path. I think you are capable of growing from this. And I think if you truly want reconciliation you need to slow down and be curious and learn. You have gotten to where you are now in faulty wiring, you need to think more about the rewiring rather than trying to convince someone of something they are incapable of believing at this point. You are doing more dqmage without understanding that you are.

Ask me how I know- I have been there and done exactly the same things.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:52 PM, Friday, September 19th]

^ I think you said it pretty well, the only other way I know to say the same thing is, instead of viewing his pain from where you are at, you would instead join him in his pain.

** Member to Member **

You and your H are 2 different people, with different thoughts, different feelings, and different processes for thinking and feeling. Those differences can lead to different evaluations of the same sitch. You're entitled to see things differently. If you want to R, though, your best bet is to see the sitch as your H sees it. You can't read his mind, so ask him how he sees things, and remember that he's not wrong. He may be uninformed, and you can inform him if he wants that, but he's not wrong.

I can accept that you're telling the truth. But my W started to tell the truth on d-day, and it took me at least 2 years to accept that she told no more lies. I think I can accept that you're telling the truth because I will won't be hurt if you are lying now or if you lie again. But the result of believing MY wife prematurely would have hurt a lot. If your H asked SI how to treat your words, the virtually unanimous rec would be: treat everything as a lie unless it' verified independently of her words.

Once trust is lost, it takes thousands of trust-building actions to rebuild a decent amount of trust IMO - and it takes many months to effect 1000s of actions.

And if people interpret what you write in ways you don't like, listen to them. They may be more perceptive about specific points than you are. They may be right.

I do not agree with all the feedback you've been given here, but I do agree that you're not recognizing the magnitude of the damage you've done. And if you tell yourself that we're wrong, you may never understand the magnitude, or you'll understand too late.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 11:11 PM, Friday, September 19th]

It’s clear to me that my meaning is not understood here. That is okay. I am choosing to believe that this is not a result of malicious intent, and I’m exiting this conversation because it is the opposite of a productive one.

Some people just don’t really want the help. She just came here wanting people to tell her what she did wasn’t that bad and that her husband should just forgive her and things should go back to normal between them. Then she leaves when people are telling her the truth rather than what she wants to hear. If she really wants to save the marriage hopefully after some reflection she realizes what people told her here was right and she does the work to change and become a better person.

Isn’t there a rule against call-outs? Or is that only enforced against WSs?

Perhaps you should consider that there are people telling you things that you just don't want to hear. I understand you don't like what many of us have said, including me, but that's how you come across to me, and I gave you my honest reaction. Maybe you just don't want to listen to other people perhaps including your husband. Sometimes we have to at least consider negative things about ourselves because they might give us insight. You're not gonna like this either, but I think you cut things off when they become uncomfortable and that's probably what you're doing now in your marriage, and that doesn't work. If I were you, I would consider whether there is truth in some of the comments in this thread and if they apply to your marriage....if there is, then it's useful. If there isn't, well, we gave you our honest opinions, and I hope you find what works for you.

DBD

For what it’s worth, I get it. As a fellow WS, some of what is said cuts deep but most come from a good place. Much of it is tough to hear, especially in the beginning. Try and open your mind a bit and really examine what is being said. Try not to get defensive and examine things with an open mind.

Consider this, you came here for help as every other member before you. Most here want you and your BH to succeed in whatever form that may be.

All the best.

I know I said I was exiting this conversation, but I keep getting emails.

I know you don’t understand what I am saying because you are summarizing things wrong and replying as if I’ve said things I haven’t. It is difficult to engage in productive conversation and to offer advice to someone you’re not understanding properly.

But notice… Instead of asking "What did we not understand?" The response is "You just don’t like what we’re saying!" I don’t feel one way or the other about you’re saying because it doesn’t apply to my situation. And it doesn’t apply to my situation… because you don’t understand what I’m saying.

I suppose it would be frustrating if you spent a lot of time on your replies and it feels like they’re being rejected. That’s the same way I feel when I take time to explain something and it’s not understood. I am choosing not to try over and over again if it’s just not getting through to this particular group of people.

DaybyDay,

You’re telling us how you feel, and how you think he feels.

But you don’t know how he feels; you can’t.

And none of us can, either.

But some of us have been where he is, and think that gives us some insight that might be helpful.

I’m glad you’re hurting; there’s hope.

When my WW went through our marriage ceremony, there were some words that were very important to me: love, honor, respect, caring, commitment, fidelity.

I thought those words were important to my bride, as well, but soon found, not so much.

Beyond measure, the biggest disappointment of my life.

Will your husband ever again believe those words mean something to you?

I don’t know.

How long did you two date before you decided to get married? Before you were ready to make those commitments, those vows?

You’re starting over now, but from a hole that you put your relationship in. It’s going to take longer this time, a lot longer, for him to trust you this time, to make himself vulnerable again.

If a dog bites you, how many times does it have to wag its tail before you put your hand out again?

You say you understand his pain. You don’t have a clue.

I understand your frustration as I'm clearly not getting through to you.

Correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to me that you think your husband is overreacting and unnecessarily "pulling away."

I’m not trying to be hard on you or trying to call you out but actually trying to help you. I genuinely hope you can reconcile with your husband but you are going about it the wrong way. You want him to sweep your betrayal under the rug and love you the way he used to. That will never allow him to heal or your marriage to heal. It could take years for him to get to a point where he feels he can trust you and be vulnerable with you again and that is only if you are willing to do the hard work to rebuild the trust that you destroyed and to feel safe with you again. Sweeping it under the rug may seem good on the surface but by never facing the reality and destructiveness of the affair and just going on like it didn’t happen will lead to two things. The first one is you are likely to do it again because you faced no real consequences, the second is that the trust will never be rebuilt so your husband will live a life where he is constantly checking up on you, constantly wondering where you are and who you are with. That is no way to live for either of you. That’s why everyone is telling you that rather than be upset with him for pulling away, you need to be patient with him, allow him to have his feelings. There are studies that show the betrayed can have a form of PTSD, the pain and destruction an affair can do are real. It’s up to you to show him over time that you are a safe partner and someone he can trust. That’s not something you can rush if you want your marriage to last. It’s going to be hard on you and force you to really face the damage your affair has done to him and to your marriage and if you don’t have the patience or desire to do that then don’t waste his time, get a divorce and let him move on.

[This message edited by Rfv3311 at 12:08 AM, Sunday, September 21st]