Hi everyone, I just found MB and am wondering if it would help my situation. I'm just going to lay it all out there, and take what I get.

First, I am the WW- well, FWW (F means former, right- not forever???) I had an EA with an old old old boyfriend, who is far far away. I did not meet up with him at all, but I did have phone sex. BH (betrayed husband) caught me in early March 06, demanded that I stop, but I did not and he caught me again about a week later. I did stop at that point, confessed all to him and to our pastor. He (BH and pastor) knows about the phone sex, emails and phone calls. I have left nothing out and fear for nothing else coming to light- there is nothing else. I think the biggest thing besides the EA itself is that I did not immediately stop when I said I would when first discovered. I totally understand why he would feel that way- reading MB and looking back, I can definitely see fog and cake-eating in my behavior.

So- it's about 18 months later and I can't stop wondering if BH is going to divorce me. I'm totally not in fog, totally in NC since the end of March 06, have no desire for OM. BUT- I also have no desire for my BH. And this is why. I feel like the other shoe is going to drop, that he is just going to divorce me. Why would I feel that way? Well, because this is what he tells me. That he isn't going to divorce me, but that I really cant' trust him.

He wants me to never talk about our marriage, to have sex with him when, where and how he wants (and it's getting pretty nasty), and to be a perfect housewife. I work full time, and we have an almost 4 y.o. I get up early with him (the baby, not BH, lol), and then if I"m not willing to have sex until the wee hours of the morning, then I'm a w***e and obviously not worthy of being married to him, obviously not sorry for what I did.

I feel like he is just pushing and pushing until I leave him, and if I did, he wouldn't care one iota. Unfortunatley, I have nowhere to go. My parents are gone and I have one sister in CA- clear across the country. Plus, I have a good job here that I don't want to leave... he told me today he neither wants me or needs me. So I left for work crying...

It's been 18 months!! I know I cant' tell him how fast it takes to recover from this, but I"m just not sure how much longer *I* can take. I try to put myself in his shoes, but honestly, I wouldnt' have done ANY of the things to him that he's done to me. So I just don't really understand him. I was reading some of Lil Sis's thread, and somehting that Schoolbus wrote made me wonder- she said that some people can't forgive at all and some can easily, and some (most) are in between- the "little" stuff is easy, but the big stuff hard. I think my BH is one that can't forgive at all. He said in March 06 that if it weren't for our 4 y.o (then 2.5 y.o.) that he'd have divorced me, no question.

I feel like maybe I should plan A him, but honestly, I'm at my wit's end, especially about the sex. I just can't do all the things he wants all the times he wants, and I feel like if that's the criteria, why would I want to be in this marriage anyways? Like, what is wrong with me that I would want to stay in this marriage? Don't worry, I realize the irony of that statement, of course, he's probably thinking the same thing about me and the EA.

I really feel hopeless. Our marriage was pretty crummy before this, now I feel like why bother anymore?

It sounds as though your H is using the affair as a reason to be abusive to you. That is not okay.
I think marital counseling is in order...or better yet, a call to the Harley's.
You should seek individual counseling also. YOu obviously need some help setting appropriate boundaries.
While I can understand your H's pain...in no way does it excuse his behavior right now.
Yes, MB can help you...and we can help your H if he is willing to come here.

He wont' do counseling, I've asked him at various times previous to the EA and of course since the EA-our pastor even recommended someone he said was pro-marriage. He won't come here. I accused him of being abusive and he said, "so what? Tell everyone that I'm abusive and controlling. That will make you feel better."

So even though how our marriage was before is no excuse for what I did, is the choice now to just put up with what I have for the sake of our family? I can't expect him to change, right?

you can hope he will change...you can KNOW that your boundaries will not allow you to be treated that way.

As long as you put up with this...he will do it.

Call the Harley's radio show or write them an email if you cal't afford a session. Find a good IC for yourself.

and I guess if he divorces me because I'm enforcing a boundary, I'm better off without him. It's just hard- he's making it seem like I'm getting what I "deserve" because of what I did to him-

He makes me seem sooooo unreasonable if I even state a boundary, he makes me seem like I"m just stupid for even setting one, like, "what a dumb thing to care about, it's all your fault anyways."

HtH,

He should not be doing this to you.

Yes, you had an EA. But he's using it against you.

Are you both Christians?

If he is, he needs to read up on Forgiveness. It's not easy, but he simply doesn't get to abuse you and treat you so ghastly.

Perhaps you should both re-visit your pastor?

HTH,

I would seek out the Pastor's take on this. Your H and the Pastor are close? See if the Pastor can talk to the guy.

Your H is TAKING ADVANTAGE of the sitch. Maybe he sees it as punishing you, but down deep the guy is a PERV!

You are his sex slave and if things are getting nasty now, they will only get worse.

You will have to take a stand at some point and tell him to p!$$ up a rope, then let the chips fall where they may.

IMHO

""previous to the EA and of course since the EA-""

If I may threadjack here for one second...an A with phone sex, to me seems pretty physical.

To me I think this EA should fall more in the PA category.

After saying that leads me to think that in you H's mind, if you were getting SF from the OM over the phone, then he is justified in forcing his sexual fantasies on you. Plus he shows no respect for you now, so it is easier to do.

I don't see this getting any better without some outside help.

IMHO

Krusht, you are right about how he feels- "you got some other guy off, you should be willing to degrade yourself for me." He doesnt' say it out loud, but it's obviously what is going on.

What I did is never right

But what he is doing is not right either, though he is using my wrong to justify his wrong. and saying I have to put up with it becasue of what I did and not caring.

He will not go back to our pastor, he is actually a different one than the one I confessed to...he feels like it's shaming to go over it all again with someone else.

So without outside help I"m doomed? Because outside help is not an option.

So should I just divorce him before he divorces me?

He wants me to stop talking to him about our marriage and stop talking about divorce- but then he just wants me to put up with his s**t and not mind since I deserve it. He says he'll *probaby* get over it, but I have no right to set any time frame. I'm okay with not setting a time frame, but I dont' see any improvement. He says it's because I bring up things....

I feel like not having any SF with him at all- he doesnt' need or want me anyways...

"you got some other guy off, you should be willing to degrade yourself for me."

I have a different perspective on this. I have given up on Plan A and have not moved to Plan B, so I'm in a plan of my own.

Sex has been a big issue for me. I enjoy sex, very much, but when it is just physical pleasure it seems degrading. I have gone back and forth about having sex with my H. What I have figured out is that I need to have sex ONLY if it enjoyable for me as well as for him.

What you are doing by having sex with him, when he is explicitly saying you degrade yourself by having sex with him, is reinforcing his view that you should be degraded.

Don't go to right and wrong. I've learned my lesson that abuse and control are about arguing about what is right and what is wrong. Of course, my H's view about his affair was, "I didn't think I was doing anything wrong." He didn't have intercourse with her, just oral sex, so it wasn't clearly a mortal sin.

What you can do for yourself right now is to look up Harley's Policy of Joint Agreement, which is "never do anything without enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse." Right and wrong doesn't figure into this. If only one of you thinks something is right and the other thinks it is wrong, then there isn't agreement and you don't participate. If he makes your time together unpleasant, you remove yourself. You don't try to talk with him or reach agreement. You end the conversation.

Whatever he does, you are better off. You certainly aren't going to improve in your marriage if you think you deserve punishment. Yes, you hurt him, terribly. You can assure him that you care about him and want to do what works for both of you. Harley talks about just compensation as the task in front of the WS. That means that you do what you can to meet your husband's needs. If he is using sex to punish you, focus on needs that you can meet without hurting yourself. What are his complaints? Address them in a way that works for you.

There's a lot of pain in your posts. You need to focus on having enough self-respect to not engage in sex when his explicit intent is to degrade you. Let the chips fall where they may. Where you are headed now is to more and more degradation.

A good marriage is based on compassion -- caring about and responding to the other person's feelings, changing your behavior to meet that person's needs. Your husband said to you, " if I"m not willing to have sex until the wee hours of the morning, then I'm a w***e and obviously not worthy of being married to him, obviously not sorry for what I did." Ask yourself if, by having sex with him, you are moving towards a relationship where he cares about you and you care about him.

Cherishing

Cherishing, your post made me cry. And think. I hate to think...

and I should think that when I start to LB- is what I'm doing going to lead me to a more kind and loving marriage?

Howtoheal,
There is hope. Right now, he is torturing you, and you are allowing that torture because you think somehow if you get through it you will get to a happy marriage.

I've been through that. I was in the MB program. Here is something I wrote to Dr. Harley on 5/23/04:
“Overall, he has said several times that I am being a "bully" in forcing him through this program. He lets me know, too. He'll talk with me, but with eyes half-shut. On Wednesday, he lay with his head on my lap and started snoring while we were listening to the CD on affection. And, when we were practicing affection on Wednesday morning, just before he decided he wanted to have sex 10 minutes before getting up, he said, "I don't want to upset you, but Sophia kissed me to arouse me." …I am so used to talk of Sophia that it didn't upset me. Later that day, I went to talk with my counselor (who was marriage counselor #2), and she said she thinks he's just being cruel to bring up Sophia, especially when we are trying to show affection towards each other.”

Being Christian, having an unconditional commitment to marraige no matter what, I put up with an awful lot. Harley has the key to a happy marriage, and it is the Policy of Joint Agreement. The idea is that you do what works for both or you don't do. What if you have a husband who, like mine, has said, "I do not enthusiastically agree to the Policy of Joint Agreement."

I learned, and in a most circuitious way. I realized that, when my kids came home to complain about some friend mistreating them, I would say that you should not argue with them but just get away from them. If they want to be your friend, they'll find a way for both of you to be happy. With my husband, I realized I wasn't doing what I was advising my children to do.

My mother once gave me great advice: "If you're talking on the phone and he swears at you, HANG UP!" That's true, absolutely true.

You cannot do anything about your husband's behavior, only about your behavior. Right now, for the right reasons, you are doing the wrong thing. You want intimacy, so you are allowing yourself to be treated like a w****. Don't. Stop.

You'll feel better very quickly.

Even better, focus on what you can do that will be positive for both of you. I've been working on organizing the house, one room at a time. That started in May, and I've done one room per month. The cleanliness in the house is very evident. Pick something you can do that is positive, and focus on that.

If he says anything to you like you have quoted, end the conversation. No discussion. No arguing. If necessary, leave the room.

I want to encourage you. I want you to feel as though there is hope. I think he wouldn't have stayed with you if he hadn't intended to stay long-term. He may think that you have hurt him so much that he has to equalize the hurt in order for the marriage to work. My husband once said that to me. I told him that that's no how I think at all because, frankly, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to make up for what he has done by having an affair. Your husband may be trapped into thinking that he has to punish you over and over, and there will be no end to it.

If you remove yourself from the punishment he inflicts and show in concrete ways a willingness to care for him in a way that works for both of you, that could be a way to get to a happy marriage.

Your child is young. Be thankful for that. If it is a girl, you don't want that girl to think that marriage means torture. If it is a boy, you don't want -- someday -- to hear the same story from your daughter in law. You have time to be a witness to what marriage means -- mutual care, not even the score.

Cherishing

HTH:

Will MB Help you?

YES.

HAng around, read some more.

Your H has issues with you, some that HE needs to address.

He needs to grow as well.

If you hang around here, YOU will grow.

Stick around!

LG

Here is what Dr. Harley says about punishing a spouse for a past affair and I would agree that you should stop rewarding him for being a bully. Going along with his abuse, makes you a volunteer. You are not a victim. If you would stop rewarding him this behavior would no longer be beneficial to him:

Coping with Infidelity: Part 4
Overcoming Resentment


http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi5062_qa.html

One of the reasons I'm not so keen on dredging up the past as a part of therapy is that it brings up memories that carry resentment along with them. If I'm not careful, a single counseling session can open up such a can of worms that the presenting problem gets lost in a flood of new and painful memories. If the goal of therapy is to "resolve" every past issue, that seems to me to be a good way to keep people coming for therapy for the rest of their lives. That's because it's an insurmountable goal. We simply cannot resolve everything that's ever bothered us.

Instead, I tend to focus my attention on the present and the future, because they are what we can all do something about. The past is over and done with. Why waste our effort on the past when the future is upon us. Granted, it's useful to learn lessons from the past, but if we dwell on the past, we take our eyes off the future which can lead to disaster.

I personally believe that therapy should focus most attention, not on the past, but on ways to make the future sensational. And when a spouse comes to me with unresolved feelings of resentment about something their spouse did in the past, I tend to put it on hold and focus on issues that prevent mistakes of the past from recurring. I ask them to trust my judgment, and see what happens to the resentment when the marriage has a chance to become fulfilling. In almost every case, resentment fades, as I predicted. While the painful memories are not entirely forgotten, the most recent marital experiences which are fulfilling and enjoyable, dominate a person's thinking, and resentment becomes weak and infrequent.

Recovery may not be complete

Resentment usually appears when an experience of the present reminds us of a painful experience of the past. For example, if a wife had been abandoned by her husband after a fight on a vacation, left to find her way home alone from Jamaica, the resentment of that experience would pop up whenever her husband walks out the door during an argument. Very often, continuing resentment means that whatever it was that caused the painful experience is still lurking in the background. And it jumps out every once in a while when evidence of it's existence surfaces.

The procedure for recovery that I suggest usually eliminates the root causes of infidelity, and that makes it unlikely that present experiences will remind a spouse of experiences associated with an affair. If the only time you feel resentment about a spouse's past affair is when your needs have not been met, when your spouse is engaged in a Love Buster, or when the Policy of Joint Agreement or Policy of Radical Honesty has not been followed, then it's the completion of recovery that's your problem, not resentment.

Using resentment as a way to control and punish a spouse
I'm convinced that what's kept the resentment of S.R.'s husband alive for so many years is that he has found it to be an effective way to control and punish her whenever she doesn't do what he wants. Whenever they have a fight, he brings it up, and it causes her such guilt that it gives him a decided advantage in winning the argument.

By this time, I don't believe that her affair is the problem that she thinks it is. Instead, it is an issue that her husband is using to get the upper hand in his relationship with her. It probably shows up the most whenever she has been reluctant to have sex with him. It throws her off balance whenever he mentions it, and makes her feel guilty, wanting to make it up to him somehow. He may also bring it up whenever she is winning in a power struggle he is having with her.

What she describes to me in her letter is abuse, pure and simple. There is no excuse for the way her husband keeps bringing up her moment of weakness she experienced years ago. He is disrespectful and abusive.

I suggest that she look him right in the eye and say to him, "Listen Buster, do you love me? Do you want me to love you? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with me? If the answers to any of those questions is 'yes' you sure are going about it the wrong way. You are not doing things that I admire, you're doing things that I find disgusting!"

What if he says, "Fine, then lets just get a divorce and end it all."

To that I would say, "It's up to you. I married you for life, but if you want a divorce, it's your call. If you want to be in a love relationship with me, however, you're going to have to treat me much better than you have been treating me. You must never again bring up my affair, and if you are upset with me, you will have to treat me with respect until we can solve the problem. If you are upset with our sexual relationship, I want us to discuss it as adults and solve it with mutual respect. I refuse to be treated like this, especially by the man I love."

My advice to her husband is to never mention her affair again. It's a good example of one of the enemies of good conversation, dwelling on past mistakes. Whenever you keep bringing up your spouses past mistakes, you not only make your conversations incredibly unpleasant, but it cannot possibly lead to a resolution of a conflict you may be discussing. And as soon as his resentment doesn't pay him any dividends -- no longer helps him get his way -- he will find that it hardly ever occurs to him.

Hanging on to an unpleasant thought because it helps us somehow is what psychologists call "secondary gain." It means that even though the thought is unpleasant, it gets you something you need, so your mind keeps it around for its usefulness. There are many unpleasant thoughts that have this characteristic, and I have helped many people let them go by helping them destroy the usefulness of the thought. Making sure that S.K.'s husband never gets what he wants by bringing up her affair will help him overcome his resentment.

I think the idea of her being punished is out right evil...however..imo, in order for this M to survive...they will need to discuss her affair and deal with it in a healthy way...which was obvioulsy NOT what happened before.

Please go get some counseling on your own. If he doesn't want to go, his call. But you must get healthy yourself for your child. I can't imagine having sex with a man who treated me like your husband treats you.

How was the marriage BEFORE the affair?

MelodyLane- here's the problem, he, I"m sure, feels resentment. Of course he does after what I did. BUT- I feel SO MUCH resentment about what he did and does to me I'm not sure I want to continue in our marriage.

To also answer Believer's question, imho pre-A our marriage was not good. No other infidelity, just resentment and petty games- again imho, mostly on his part. ANd I do tend to become "psycho" (his word) at certain times of the month. I went to the Dr about that (and BH went with so he couldnt' say that I wasn't telling him the truth). The Dr recommended a low dose of antidepressant. BH flipped (outside the office) and would not even entertain the idea of me going on an AD. So we bought a treadmill and an exercise bike for the basement, and that has been better.

I feel like he is playing the classic high school game with me that ALL my boyfriends, bar none, played. The "have sex with me or I"ll break up with you" game. In high school I was broken up with every other week. Now, though he had said (pre-affair) that if I didn't have SF with him he'd leave, he says that is not true, he will not divorce me for that. But of course he flat out tells me I can't trust him.And of course, he says that now he has other, better reasons to divorce me. BUt that is a game too, just to keep me from feeling and having what I most want, which is security. I feel like my whole world is always in flux, no matter what. I feel like I should just move out and not deal with him just so I can feel sane again!!!! I hate coming home from work, I never know what I'll get, I hate him coming home from work cause I dont' know what I"ll get...and none of this is physical abuse, ever, it's just- "just" emotional...or at least it feels like it to me. If I say anything, he just discounts it becasue it's me...

Oh, and Believer, I went to counseling on my own and when BS found out he threatened to divorce me.

He doesnt' want anyone knowing what he is doing because he knows it's wrong but wants to do it anyways.

HH, did you read the entire article? Dr. Harley tells you how to deal with him. It is unacceptable for your H to treat you like this.

I don't blame you for not wanting to stay in the marriage. But my suggestion is that you STOP rewarding his abusive behavior. As long as he gets a PAYOFF, he will have no motivation to stop.

I wonder if you read the whole article though?

Yes, I did read it all and actually I did tell him something to the effect of "This is not how a good marriage is. This is not how a husband treats his wife and it's unacceptable. THis is something that needs to be changed." He said he didn't care and I was a w***e who deserved whatever it was he wanted to give me until he didn't want to behave that way anymore. That he knew that what he is doing is wrong, but he's okay with that for now and if he feels the need to ask for forgiveness later he will. BUt for now, too bad for me, I'm getting what I deserve.

He basically says, he didnt' deserve what he got from me but he got it anyway, even though I said I'd stop, and didn't, and now even though I don't deserve what I'm getting from him I'm getting it anyway, too bad for me. How does it feel...

And if I point out "Vengance is Mine, sayeth the Lord," he tells me that w***es have no right to be preaching.