Its really starting to wear me down. I keep giving her some trust back, and then she lies to me about something stupid. Its really hard now with me being in Iraq. I am pretty sure she is not with OM, she says she's lying because she is scared of my reaction (hurt myself, hurt her. . .).
Talked to my Chaplain after talking to her for two hours on the phone (thats $40 worth of phone calls just today!!! but worht it all if we get through this). He had some really good advice.
One thing was to purchase 2 copies of a relationship book and reading one chapter a week, and then talking about what we read. But there are two problems with that. One, my wife is not a big reader. She associates reading with studying, and her school age life was not very pleasant. She will do it if i ask, but then i'd feel like im being demanding. . . Next is that her native language is german. She is conversationally fluent in english, but some of the sentence structure and vocabulary still loses her, so Id need a book thats available in german for her, and english for me.
Can anyone offer any suggestions? Or other ideas are welcome as well. We need something to help us in recovery while Im so far away.

You might send her here (German mirror site for Amazon.com):

http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/08...4939120-6110937

This link is to His Needs Her Needs in German.

Ray is your w going to come on this site??

She posted on this site, renee44 is her screen name. Im worried about her. She sent me an e-mail today, i cut and paste it here :



Im really worried. I replied to her, and told her to get on this site because you guys will understand, and help, I just hope she reads my e-mail when she wakes up.

When I call her in the morning, Im gonna tell her again, but untill then, please, as many poeple as can, please post a reply to her post, so she knows you guys are there to help.

Thank you for your help.

Ray,

I can highly recommend the German translation of Dr. Harley's book His Need, Her Needs posted in the link provided above by Aphelion. Its a very good book, very constructive and the translation is excellent. It will give your wife some hope.

i thought that HN/HN was more along the lines of preventing A's, Im looking for like and emergency coping type book like SAA. Does anyone know if that one is available in german? Im gonna go to amazon and look.

Ray,

Unfortunately, SAA is not translated into German.

HNHN is the hardware for building or re-buidling a great marriage. It offers a lot of hope and understanding for wayward spouses and the tools for recovery a marriage after an affair.

I find SAA better for BS that are dealing with a WS that refuses to end contact with the OP.

Hi Ray,

I was deployed to Kosovo right in the middle of our marriage counseling in 2001-02, and I've been back from Afghanistan for 5 months. Thankfully, we'd gotten to a point where we'd dealt with all of the 'major stuff' before I deployed this last time.

From my own experiences in Kosovo, I found that it's really hard to work on relational type stuff when you're apart. That's not to say that you can't work on your marriage - just that we tried the book reading together, and for us, it didn't work. I'd read and read then we'd try to either talk about it on the phone or by e-mail... and she hadn't read her chapter.

We still had many issues when I was in Kosovo - I still had tons of questions, she still hadn't opened up with me and I felt that she was still hiding things from the past... I found that it was much easier to deal with the deployment by putting all of our affair issues on the back burner until I got home. Being deployed and trying to sort through the mess of an A is, in my opinion, almost impossible.

Continue to stay in contact with your W, but try to limit your phone and e-mail time with her discussing non-affair things. Ask her if she'd be willing to start MC while you're away and you can continue to visit with the chaplain. Take this time to look inward and see what areas of your M you can improve... hopefully, she will do the same thing. When you are finally reunited, you can then start dealing with the affair stuff.

If you have any specific questions you can e-mail me at rif902000@yahoo.com

Semper Fi,
RIF

she is going to MC right now, and individual and group counseling. We try to not talk about the affair directly, but we do talk about rebuilding our marriage alot.
My brother who is also in Iraq is going through the same thing except he's not home to deal with it, i reccomended this site to him, i hope he uses it

Hey Ray,

How's it going today? Just wanted to bump your post up...

Semper Fi,
RIF