The reason for exposure is

1. To end the affair
2. To ensure affair does not re-start
3. To be sure both partners in both marriages involved (if both parties married) have full information about their own lives so they can protect themselves.

The purpose of exposure is NEVER shame or humiliation or vengence.

ItWon'tRainAlways - I appreciate your compliment.

I think 99% of the folks on this forum are good people.

(The other 1% are zooming us, trolling us, not being sincere.)

But being good people doesn't have to mean we always agree or don't make mistakes from time to time. That's the value of a forum - especially this one where the moderators give us a lot of latitude to express ourselves.

A few words about exposure.

Despite disagreement from others, I believe exposure IS all about shame. That's why it works.

This is not rocket surgery.

We should not be surprised that just about 100% of WSs in their stupor regard exposure as vengence. That's just their perspective and from a standpoint of ignorance, defiance, defensiveness, and blame shifting, it's an understandable conclusion.

Even third party observers will conclude that exposure is nothing but retribution. Again, ignorance of the dynamics of infidelity.

I'll go so far as to say that many ignorant BSs (uninformed on the dynamics of infidelity) conduct exposure SPECIFICALLY FOR retribution! - never knowing that when applied surgically, it's the very best thing they can do to save their marriages.

I and everybody else on this forum advocates exposure in expanding circles - no more than is necessary to upset the affair. If after that, the WS doesn't seem to care, oh well. They must not care either for their reputations.

So, all that said, it's been a while since ANYBODY made any contributions to the sub-threads in my Affair Exposure 101 linked below. With all these opinions, surely someone has something to add. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

I have only been NC for two weeks. So, as you can see, I have a long road to go. But I am committed to NC; my husband and I wrote a letter together. My H likewise wishes us to raise the OC as our own. I am indeed blessed. I know this is only the beginning of the road. And I didn't realize I would begin such a firestorm about exposure, but so many of your comments express it quite well. Exposure is not a cut-and-dried issue. Certainly, my husband in his pain, would have been justified in sharing his pain with others. But he too chose not to cause me any shame with others, as he knew those relationships would be difficult to recover as he and I work through our M recovery. I hope all of you will help to guide me along the way. I have been so touched by your expressions of encouragement; what amazing people you are. Above all, I am blessed with a NOBLE H with a tremendously forgiving spirit

***Despite disagreement from others, I believe exposure IS all about shame. That's why it works.***

Thank you. The point is, shame is not the GOAL of exposure. If it could be done without inflicting "shame" and "vengeance" on the WS, and would still bust up the affair, then most BS would prefer that.

My point has always been that if the WS feels shame upon having their affair exposed, that is NOT the BS's fault. You make bad choices, you get bad results. I canna change the laws of physics!

And here is another word about shame that does not seem to have occurred to any WS or FWS here:

You want to talk about shame?

You want to talk about humilation?

Try having to pick up the phone and tell your parents, your grown children, your in-laws, your friends and your co-workers that your WS has chosen somebody else and basically told YOU to get lost and go to h*ll if you don't like it.

And some BS even get the joy and pride of informing all these people that their WS has moved out and abandoned the family for somebody else.

This is something that I rarely see discussed here. There is much concern over protecting the WS's feelings from "humilation" and "shame," but by the gods, you don't know what humilation is until you are forced to watch your marriage partner carry on with somebody else.

It's a fact that people who know little about the dynamics of infidelity (and that's most of the world) automatically blame the BS if the WS has an affair. "Well, they must notta been gettin' what they wanted at home, so they had to look around. Whadja expect?"

A tremendous part of the BS's pain is the shame, rejection and very public humilation that they are forced to swallow when their spouse chooses to have an affair -- the automatic blame, the whispers, the looks.

If nothing else, exposure gives the BS a chance to:

1)tell their side of the story instead of hiding in shame at home while everyone sees only the WS's side, and

2) IT GIVES THE BS A CHANCE TO ASK FOR SUPPORT FROM FAMILY, FRIENDS AND CO-WORKERS. HOW CAN WE DO THAT IF WE HAVE KEEP ALL THIS A SECRET, HIDE THE TRUTH AND STUFF DOWN OUR OWN PAIN AND HUMILIATION IN ORDER TO "PROTECT" THE WS??????????????

I guess I'm real tired of having to walk on eggshells so the WS and FWS don't have to feel bad about what they did.

You can bet the BS will feel plenty bad about it for a long, long, long, time -- and we never got a choice. The WS did.
Mulan (so sue me)

sfjaj,

If it is not imposing could you offer a time line of the events in your marriage. You mentioned that the A lasted two years, and that you have a child from this affair. You also mentioned that you have been in NC for only two weeks.

I guess I am asking this question or these questions because I foresee some major issues coming up in the future, based on my experience on this site and experience with people I have known in my life. It would help to have a better idea of the situation, so that proper help/advice/opinions can be offered.

Do you have other children? How old is your child from the A? How long has your H known of the A and of your childs parentage? Finally, how old are you and your H?

I know the last question may puzzle you but I do have a method to my madness. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> You see a woman posting a situation somewhat similar to yours is what caused me to register after 6 months of just reading here. Her situation just got to me, that I had to register and post here.

Unfortunately, many of her posts were lost in the "great disk crash" of 2000. But, there are many still left. You should read them particularly her last one just a year or two ago. Here name was Facing Choices. You can search for her posts. At the time this site was not divided up into the categories it is now, it was one forum.

I look forward to hearing from you. Also, there are a few ladies that still post here from time to time, that have been in your situation. They may be able to offer you some insight if you are interested.

God Bless,

JL

Thank YOU, Mulan. That needed to be said.

FOR THE RECORD - because SOMEBODY will get the wrong impression - I don't know of ANYBODY here who advocates exposure for retribution. Sorry. It ain't here. We don't support it. Go piss up a rope.

<img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />
WAT
------------------
Never silence criticism from a fool.

JL - not to speak for her, see my initial post to her, To: sfjaj.

Interested in a Pale Ale?

WAT

Pale Ale You say?

Oh Yeah, after the day I have had, a FEW pale faces ( I mean Ales) would go just fine. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Hope to get out your way sometime soon, so we can tip a few again.

JL

PS: I'll go looking for that thread. I have a feeling her situation will become complex as recovery begins and it will be useful to have some idea of the background.

JL, you are the best advocate for FWW's around. I have to say sfjaj turned around very quickly from being adament about NOT telling her H the truth to where she is now. She must have an incredible husband.

Mulan, awesome and well said.

JL, you are correct in that I still have MUCH left to encounter in my M recovery. I will answer your questions, but if I miss any, let me know: I will try to fill in the blanks. My H is 39, and I am 36. Our two children with each other are a girl, 10, and a boy, 4. The OC is 7 months. My H and I have been married 14 years. My H has only known about the parentage for 2 weeks; I confessed to all at the same time

Mulan I agree 100% with everything you said. I am a BS and I did experience EVERYTHING you listed in your post.

My exposure of my Wife's affair was to people who could INFLUENCE her behaviour. That was MY motivation.

For the record, she didn't feel any SHAME or GUILT whatsoever until she came home and de-fogged for a few weeks.

A wise person on here once said "never forget that your pain means nothing to a WS!"

sfjaj,

You answered
Thank you for the information. I have a much better sense of where you are and why you responded to some things as you did. I hope you have done a lot of reading here. There are a variety of stages in recovery, the first and biggest step is NC and radical honesty. You seem to have taken those so congratulations.

Further, your H seems to want to remain in this marriage and raise the other man's child. This is huge and I hope you understand how big this is. Yet, as you know there are many hurdles for you two to overcome. Right now you are focused on yourself, and the fact that you miss your OM. If you progress like many here before you that will gradually change.

I realize you don't really appreciate your H much, and probably feel little love for him. That is normal given that you had to justify what you were doing with OM for 2 years. Have patience with your H and yourself. It takes awhile for these things to change.

Are you two in counseling?? If not you should really consider it with a good pro-marriage counselor. You will hear and find that there are counselors and there are good counselors, find a good one. You and your H have much to talk about and you will need a third party to guide you.

Next, I would like to point out that you can expect anger out of your H in a few months. Oddly it will come as you are coming around to really wanting this marriage to work. Expect it, understand it, and it will pass.

I am sure you do not realize this yet, and you may never because you are a female, but you have created for your H every H's worst nightmare. Women KNOW if the child is their's because they carry it for 9 months. Men don't know (until recently with DNA testing) if the child is theirs and leads to insecurities that lead to behaviors that are very territorial and have been for many many thousands of years.

While you may not appreciate or feel his nightmare, be aware that it is there. If you are interested I can direct you to old posts and even current posters that can give you many different perspectives on your situation having been in it from one side or another. I don't want to bury you in information or threads to read, so I will let you tell me what you want.

One thing you can do here that will help you is ask questions. Lots and lots of questions. Of course you will get a variety of answers some you will like and others you wont'. That is the point. It will give you options to consider.

I would also like to suggest that you start to frame questions about dealing with your H in addition to your feelings for OM.

I must go, but I look forward to hearing from you.

God Bless,

JL

Owl,

Thank you so much for sharing that. I didn't know your story, and it literally brought tears to my eyes (in a good way).

I couldn't agree more that reaching out -- WITH LOVE AND COMPASSION --- to people who are struggling is the right thing to do. It benefits EVERYBODY involved. As your family demonstrated, it's possible to love and support the WS without supporting or condoning the affair.

Please let me clarify something. I NEVER meant to imply that BS's should 'keep the secret' at the expense of their own mental health. I think BS's have every right to reach out to family and friends for support. But I have seen some posters encourage BS's to tell their family and friends -- not for the purpose of gaining support -- but for the purpose of shaming the cheating spouse into ending the affair.

As you can see from subsequent posts on this thread, there's a lot of disagreement about the purpose of exposure. I personally think your way, Owl, is noble and beneficial. I think doing it to shame a WS is petty and destructive.


WAT,

You wrote...


You've been around here a lot longer than I have, and you're certainly in a better position to say what "works" than I. But do you have any hard statistics to back this up? Have any surveys been done to determine the long term impact of exposure/shame (as opposed to no exposure, or the type of exposure that owl described -- exposure/support)? Have there been any polls done to determine what percentage of marriages in which exposure/shame was used to bust up an affair go on to be happily recovered? Or are you going by anecdotal evidence?

Because I have to say, I don't see a lot of FW's -- whose spounses and families tried to humiliate them into ending their affairs -- on here writing glowing descriptions of their happily recovered marriages. By contrast, I've seen quite a few FWs who were NOT exposed, who are very grateful to their spouses for that. I see lots of BS's who have followed the exposure/shame route, and are still struggling. And I have to wonder... even for those who consider their marriages 'recovered' if there is some lingering resentment for the exposure/shame.



Mulan,

you wrote...


Hmmmm. Seems to me the BS has a CHOICE to tell or not to tell. Therefore, it's not a simple "bad choice = bad results" equation. It is more like: affair + exposure = shame. Without adding A and B together, you don't get C. Or at least, you don't get any EXTRA shame from outside sources. I think there are plenty of us FW's around here who deal with our own inner shame.

I've seen so many posters write that if the WS didn't do anything to be ashamed of, there would be no problem. That's true. But let's apply that line of reasoning to a similar situation...

My H happens to have a bad porn habit. So bad, it has driven quite a wedge between us. He has promised to stop many times, but so far, hasn't been able to keep that promise for any extended period of time. So... the next time I find out that he's used porn, should I tell all of our friends and family, hoping they'll humiliate him into stopping? After all, if he'd just stop on his own, he wouldn't have anything to be ashamed of right? Or maybe I should have some compassion for him, and look for ways to SUPPORT him to do the right thing. Yeah, I like that idea a lot better.



First of all, what makes you think that this has not occured to any of us FW's? Just because we express our desire NOT to be humilated means we are incapable of recognizing your pain????

This is not a contest, Mulan, of who hurts more. There are a few posters here who have been both the WS and the BS. But for the vast majority of us, we will never fully understand what our spouses went through during the affair, during the months and years leading up to the affair, or after D-day. And it goes both ways. There was a similar arguement on a thread here recently -- comparing the pain of the WS who was neglected for years leading up to the affair, to the pain of the BS after the affair. To me, it was a mute point. It's all pain. It's like asking someone, "How would you rather die -- starve to death over the course of several months, or have hungry tigers rip you to shreds?"

That said, my heart goes out to BS's who feel humiliated by their WS's poor choices. I hope you know -- at least intellectually -- that your spouse's decision to cheat is NO reflection on you. And I hope someday you will be able to feel that in your heart and soul as well.... and hold your head up high. It makes no more sense for a BS to feel ashamed over the actions of their WS... than it does for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to feel ashamed about what happened to them. It does happen -- as a victim of ChSA myself, I know all about that kind of shame -- but it's not logical.




That's a fact? Can you back it up with statistics? If this was your experience, that's horribly unfortunate and obviously unfair. This certainly hasn't been my experience.

I know one woman (who's now divorced) who cheated on her husband a lot. "Everybody" in town knew about it. Nobody blamed him. When he finally caught her and they got divorced, everyone felt relieved that he finally knew the truth. When he got remarried, everyone was very happy for him, and expressed the sentiment that they hoped his new wife treated him better. (But I will also add that nobody, including him, has ostricized his ex-wife either)

Another counter-example: Last summer, soon after my affair started, we were at my MIL's stitting around the pool, and my BIL's and SIL's were talking about various people they know who were having or had affairs. Not once did any of them express any sympathy for the cheaters, only for their spouses.




If everyone sees the WS's side, that means they already know about the affair, so there's nothing to expose.




Yes. Yes. Yes. We are in total agreement here. As I wrote earlier in response to OWL, telling your close family and friends about your S's affair in order to ask for support is a whole lot different than doing so in an effort to shame the WS. I'm not saying you're obligated to "protect" the WS. I'm saying it's hateful and counterproductive to try to get others to tear the WS down.

Personally, I have encouraged my H, who has stopped going to counseling, to confide in someone... anyone... in order to have some support for himself. I do this knowing that the person he would most likely choose to tell is his brother, and that his brother would most likely hate me forever for it. Knowing that my H has someone there for them who really understands what he's going through is more important to me than saving face with his brother, whom I love.

See, we're not all unfeeling monsters.

I know of no hard research produced stats, so as far a I'm concerned, it's anecdotal. But it seems to be widely accepted among infidelity "professionals". Further, I think it makes a lot of intuitive sense.

But I propose I haven't communicated well enough for you to understand that it's not about "humiliate them into ending their affairs." - at least the way I see exposure.

IMHO, they way it ought to be done is with loving intent. Not with a vengeful delivery.

That said, the WS will see it and feel it only one way - the way they want to see it and that's the BS taking revenge.

The "shame" is the operative motivation for the WS. You will agree, I bet, that many affairs undiscoverred by the BS are halted by the WS solely because they're afraid of being found out. Why would they do this if not for the avoidance of shame and/or advoidance of the consequences?


Dern right they are! Their betrayed spouses managed somehow to take the risk of NOT exposing (or not knowing exposure was a good idea) and still be in a position for recovery.

Let's face some intuitive facts:

Since monogamy came into existence in our species or into practice in human civilization - I won't pretend to know when that was - affairs have been happening, have been either discovered or not, have been revealed thru exposure or not, have led to divorce or not, have been dealt with, swept under the rug, resulted in scarlet letters - and any number of combinations of these reactions. I imagine there's a lot of randomness with the outcomes. I'll bet the eventual outcome has more to do with the involved individuals than with what took place along the course of the affair.

So, we shouldn't be surprised that some marriages recovered w/o exposure. Good for them.

On this forum, we've seen a LOT of affairs ended via exposure. We've seen a lot persist despite exposure.

But when you think about the dynamics of affairs and what makes them occur and persist one thing seems to be predominant - secrecy. They thrive on secrecy. How does one break through secrecy? Reveal the secret. This is not rocket surgery. Does one size fit all? Of course not.

Which brings up your specific question > should you expose porn. I don't know the answer to that. Porn issues aren't garden variety infidelity issues, IMHO. Exposure seems to work as advertised in the garden variety infidelity cases. So drawing parallels to porn or other "maladies" may not be appropriate. But, some here have described exposure of sorts with regard to alcoholism in the form of mass intervention - families circling the wagons around an addicted loved one. I have no direct knowledge of this, I just bring it up as possibly a closer fit to porn issues.

For good reading on this, I recommend "Private Lies" by Frank Pittman.

WAT

I placed this on another post but felt the need to post here also.I am sfjaj spouse. I was not going to read much less post to this website. she had mentioned the site to me a few days ago, and my point of view was that my pain was my own private hurt and I did not relish an audience for that. As she was upset by comments made on the site, I spent much of last night reading several posts on the site and decided I needed to break my silence. Let me begin by saying I am in such a state of pain that some may say I'm in no position to offer any advice but I don't agree. It occurred to me while reading that each stage of recovery offers a unique point of view that can be helpful to people, whether it is the spouse who had the affair or the spouse who was betrayed or whether an individual is 2 hours out of recovery or 2 years out of recovery.

It seems to me that there are direct conflicts between those spouses that have been betrayed and those who had the A. The betrayed spouses seem to believe that their hurt is so profound and deep that those who have had affairs, particularly those just out of the mire, can offer no logic. Or as one poster said, "in a fog." As one who was betrayed, I certainly understand where you are coming from but that view is wrong! Those views can offer much to us.

I am not excusing my wife's (nor anyone else's) affair; it is the ultimate betrayal of wedding vows. But as I remember, I also vowed to treat my wife as Christ would treat the church and I most assuredly have broken that vow. How can any of us believe that we alone have All the answers?

We stumble, we fall. We help one another up. we do not help by using epithets, pointing blame or distorting the view.please think before you speak

committedtoher - welcome and my admiration to you for wanting to salvage your marriage.

In time I hope for you to be able to see the value the forum places on the insights of folks on both sides of infidelity. It is here. I promise.