Is it possible for a BS to recover if the FWS is unwilling to discuss the A and/or unwilling to give any details about the A?

What can a BS do if he/she doesn’t receive any details/help/support from the FWS to help him/her recover from the betrayal?

Has there been any BS’s on these forums who could recover in spite of lack of details and total honesty and openness about the A from their FWS?

I’m corresponding with another MBer for a while now who can still not post here since the new forum is up. Her H betrayed her and had a PA with a much younger woman. The A ended approximately one and a half year ago and after all this time, her H still refuses to discuss the A and help her heal from his betrayal. As a result she still experience major depressive episodes (suicidal feelings) from time to time and find it almost impossible to move past the A and betrayal.

She made it clear to her H so many times in the past that she needs his truthful answers and willingness to discuss the A but he just refuses to discuss anything about the A at all…. She also printed out some articles on how to recover after infidelity but after all the info she gave him, he still doesn’t “get” it. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

However, in spite of all this she still loves her H very much (they are marreid for 38 years now) and wants to stay in the M (she isn’t willing or have the financial resources at this stage to move to plan B) but personally I can’t see how she can ever get past this and how things can ever get better in this M until her H start giving his full support and honesty/openness. Her H just want to continue on in the M like nothing happened and a while ago he told her she “take to long to get offer this”. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" /> Is it possible that his shame/guilt is still so great after all this time that he can’t start to focus on his W and help her heal?

I feel concerned for her and this situation and that’s why I’ve asked the questions above. I want to know if there is any hope for her situation if things stay like this and if there is anything else she can do to help her H "get it"...

Thanks in advance,
Suzet

Depends on what you mean by 'recovery'. If you are talking about marital recovery the answer is no but if you are talking about personal recovery after the decision to divorce has been made, then the answer is yes.

Your friend must make peace with the possibility that her marriage may/may not be salvageable. Only until that happens, can she regain a sense of control and power over her life, and can make the correct and tough choices that must be made.

TMCM

What will be the tough and correct choices for her to make in this sitaution? Divorce? Separation?

Edited to add:
Will it be possible for her to have personal recovery without divorcing or separating from her H?

Sure.

It's called acceptance.

Her choice is to accept the situation or not.

If she accepts the situation, she lets go of her desire to know more about the affair. And with this, she decides EVERY DAY to make peace and find happiness with her decision.

If she cannot accept the situation she will never find peace and happiness and she will live much like 2Long ... unaccepting and unwilling to move away from the unacceptable.

It's an honest choice. If you accept something, then you make your peace with it and stop trying to change it.

Pep <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

I agree with Pep. I still occasionally feel the need to try to talk about things centered around my wife's EA from a year ago. My wife almost always responds with tears and anger, saying "this will NEVER end". It's not that she's not accepted the responsibility for what she did, it's that she feels so guilty over the whole thing that it's almost impossible for her to face it. She wants it to be gone, done, and past.

I have no doubts that she won't fall into this trap again. She's learned a lot about herself, and what lead up to the EA. She's made boundaries, and we've made a lot of changes in our M that are just awesome. So I'm not really worried about it happening again. My only issue is that it DID happen once. I've forgiven her, but if something brings it up, it still hurts to think about. Talking about that may help me, but just hurts her. So, I ACCEPT that things are better now, that it won't happen again, and that's where I leave it at.

If your friend can do this, that would be great. If she can't, then she's going to have to find something that she CAN accept. Life without her H may be her only alternative. She can't change him...she can only change how she reacts to him.

For help with this matter please have her email Tempest.

I also agree with Pepperband. I wrote this reply to you on Recovery, but figured I might as well copy it here too. You never know.

As C2 said, there is more than one way to skin the recovery cat. Dr Phil's paradigm is different from Dr Harley's, etc. And it sort of depends on what your aim is in "recovery." There are a lot of different specific goals that people combine together to define "recovered."

Complete openness and honesty isn't necessarily a "recovered marriage" criteria. But it is a criteria for a successful "Marriage Builders marriage" paradigm. Going into recovery, my end goal was a marriage based on MB principles, one of which is Radical Honesty. Not everyone agrees that Radical Honesty is the best or only way to have a successful marriage.

Obviously, your friend has met a stalemate in getting her husband to go along with RH in regards to the affair. It may be that it is simply too painful for him, either the memories themselves, or the prospect of seeing the pain the information will inevitably inflict on your friend. For whatever reason he is simply not strong enough to be willing to do that, no matter how much she asks for it. It also sounds like, from your description, that she is not willing to sacrifice her current marriage, whatever it's state, in an attempt to get her husband to comply with RH.

Obviously, there are a LOT of variables involved here that come into play. Was her husband an honest, trustworthy person in general outside and excluding the affair, or was he a habitual liar? In my case, my husband was a habitual liar about many things over the duration of our relationship. So feeling safe in the marriage made RH a requirement to meet my personal goals for recovery. If her husband was a generally honest person outside the affair, their relationship may work just fine at a level of honesty and openness that is less than "radical and complete."

A lot also depends on the specific nature of the details she wants and her reasons for wanting them. Some details provide answers, others provide only painful memories and imagery. Is there another way for her to obtain the answers to the real questions she is seeking through divulgence of these details? I know in my case, many of my questions were "trojan horses." The face-value question wasn't really the deeper question I was getting at.

Here is the best experience I can personally share on that. I believed that H had had sex with the last OW just prior to going out of town. There was a lot of incriminating circumstantial evidence that pointed to it. Logic lead to that conclusion. But he firmly denied it, and still does. What I have realized with the perspective of three years time is that the deeper question hiding in the repeated Trojan horse question of "Did you have sex with her that time?" was "Why should I trust what you say above what logic and evidence shows me?" As long as I stayed stuck inside that Trojan horse, his answer ("No.") didn't satisfy my and allow me to move on. But when I actually went a step further and asked the deeper question, I got a very different answer.

"There is no reason for you to believe me over the evidence. I know what the truth is. The fact that I can't ever prove it to you is something I just have to accept. If you don't ever believe me, that's understandable. It's because of what I did, and I have to accept that consequence."

After that, I gained a measure of peace. Because we weren't fighting over whether he did or didn't have sex that time. We were fighting over whether or not he would accept that I may always choose to believe the circumstances or my own gut over what he tells me. His answer was, in a sense, telling me it was okay with him that I put my trust in myself and my senses and not in him. He wasn't going to demand a level of trust that I couldn't give. He recognized that he'd given up all rights to my absolute trust.

Did he actually have sex that time? WTH does it really matter? If he did, does it matter that he never came clean about it? No, not really. Three years has shown me that he is now as consistently honest about everything as any person I know, and moreso than most. His caring actions over three years have shown that he consistently puts my best interests ahead of his selfish wants. Not always, of course, but consistently. So whatever his reasons for lying, I have to think that he honestly did it to avoid pain. Objectively, both his and mine.

I consider myself "recovered" because I have met my personal goals for recovery. I consider our marriage "recovered" and "successful" because we have POJA'd our boundaries and expectations to a place of mutual satisfaction. That may look different for us than for others.

Pep, Owl and JavaPrincess

Thanks for your responses. I informed my friend about this thread and she will read the responses. I’m sure it will be helpful to her. I also asked her to e-mail Tempest and I hope she will be able to post here soon.

In the meantime I want to share the following regarding her situation:

I think she has already started to accept and make peace with the fact that she will probably NEVER get the truth and support from her H, but she still struggles to get pass the uncertainty and “images” in her head of NOT knowing the truth. She posted the following to me a while ago:

” I know that without my H’s input it’s a much harder struggle but I have resigned myself to the fact that he is just unable to talk about the A. He has always had a problem with intimacy and has always struggled to show his feelings.”

AND

“My imagination runs riot. The truth is better than knowing nothing and constantly living with these “images” in your head. I know that I will never get the truth from my H. Even when he does answer an odd question, I know he is lying and minimizing the whole A.”

I understand she has to make the choice to accept the situation but how does she move past the feelings of uncertainty etc.?

From what she has told me, her H was a habitual liar and he is STILL lying to her about some things and this cause her to feel suspicious about him. As a result AND because of the absence of Radical Honesty from her H, she doesn’t have the reassurance and peace within herself that her H won’t cheat on her again... Her H has assured her once that it won’t happen again, but from what she has told me, it doesn’t sound if her H has took the necessary steps to dig deep into himself to found out WHY he did what he did and to work on those weaknesses that caused him to stray in the first place and put proper boundaries in place. And IF he has done that and took the necessary steps, he haven’t shared those things with his W and helped her to understand WHY he did what he did.

If anyone has more input, advice or opinions to give, please share.

Suzet

Well, that obviously makes things a lot more difficult, yes.

First, in regards to the images, she needs to understand that those who got the details have to deal with precisely the same thing. I can say with conviction that the truth is no "better" in that regard. At a certain point, you have to simply learn to redirect your mind and stop obsessing.

Her feelings of insecurity are another matter, however. Affair or no affair, details or no details, living with a habitual liar is stressful, and not especially conducive to peace of mind about anything.

Think of it this way. In my personal opinion, you'd have to be nuts to be the wife of a firefighter. That is a situation that by it's very nature breeds fear and insecurity. But a lot of women fall in love with firefighters, and marry them. In that situation, you've got to accept that you made a choice, and have a realistic understanding of the consequences of that choice. You have to understand that you're going to be under more stress than the average wife when your husband goes to work. So, if you're smart, you take extra good care of yourself. You build up a strong support network of friends and family. You make preparations and have a plan in place in the event that the worst happens. You live in the moment and enjoy your husband when you can.

I suspect, your friends situation is much the same. If she is not willing to risk the relationship ending with Plan B, then she needs to accept that she's made a choice, look at the consequences of that choice realistically, and plan and act accordingly. She can't rely on her husband for her security. She's going to have to provide her own security.

JavaPrincess, thanks again.


It makes sense and I liked the analogy you used of the “firefighter”. The only difference is that my friend didn’t know her H was a habitual liar before she got married to him… And most of their married life, she didn’t know he had such a big tendency to lie… She was too trusting of him and not so sensitive and aware of lies. She only learned what an accomplished liar he was over the 10 months that she was finding out about his A and this was a very big shock and disappointment to her… I think this is the thing she find most difficult to overcome – the disappointment and knowledge that the man she is married to, isn’t so wonderful as she thought he was all those years.

Therefore, (from what you’ve posted) it seems that she needs to accept that she’s made the choice to stay married to him NOW, (after she has learned of his lying nature) and that she have to look at the consequences of this choice on the long term and act accordingly… I just think it’s very difficult to be married to a man for 30+ years, thought you could rely on him and after all those years, suddenly discover it was all a big lie and that you can NOT really rely on him and have to provide for yourself. Change is not easy and especially not after such a long time of marriage I think. We all have our little comfort zones and it takes commitment, courage and knowledge to break through them.

Suzet