My WW has finally agreed to go to counseling as a couple.

After her first affair she refused to go -- vehemently refused. I went by myself for several sessions, but finally stopped when she refused to attend even if it was to "help me".

After her second affair was discovered, I raised the subject of counseling with the same result -- refusal. I never attended individual counseling since I didn't see the value at the time (I do now and would strongly recommend it for any BS out there even if couple counseling isn't going to happen).

Now that her recent emotional affair is out in the open, she has finally agreed to couple's counseling. She is still reluctant to go but I made the point that we've tried to fix the problems "on our own" with no success. We either need to try this option or give up entirely.

Here's my problem. I feel that the incredible pain of the betrayal, the resentment and anger are all things I'm going to have to "put on my big-boy pants" and get over. The counselor may be able to help with suggestions and tools to deal with these emotions, but in the end, it comes down to me deciding to not let them dominate my life.

Trust is the killer. I can't currently see a time or place in which I will ever trust her again. She used church and church activities, work and work-related travel, shopping, going to school (college), scrapbooking as "excuses" to give me when she was going to meet with her other men. She created numerous secret email accounts to talk with them and since I don't have access to her network at work I can't know that she's not doing the same from another computer at her work.

I'm dying over here and feel my marriage slip away because I don't know how to convince myself that instead of being faithful to me she's not just getting better at hiding her infidelity.

How do you rebuild/restore trust?

Hi Artor:

Well, Dr. Harley says that you SHOULDN'T regain trust. Here's a quote from one of his articles on recovering from infidelity:

"One topic is loss of trust. How can a spouse ever trust an unfaithful partner again? My answer is that the spouse should never have been trusted in the first place. I shouldn't be trusted by my wife, and I shouldn't trust her. The fact is that we are all wired for infidelity, and under certain conditions, we'll all do it. The way to protect your marriage from something that has been common to man (and women) for thousands of years is to recognize the threat, and do something to prevent it from happening. Basing a marriage on the Policy of Radical Honesty and the Policy of Joint Agreement goes a long way toward preventing an affair. Being each other's favorite leisure-time companions, and not being away from each other overnight are also important safety measures. Meeting each other's most important emotional needs, avoiding Love Busters and building an integrated lifestyle, free of secret second lives, are all ways to affair-proof your marriage. With these measures in place, we end up trusting our spouses because an affair becomes almost impossible to achieve."

I hope this helps. I'm glad to see your wife is willing to attend counseling with you.

Thanks for the excerpt -- I guess that I didn't pick up on it when reading through all the material. Rebuilding trust wasn't the priority at the time I read much of the site -- deciding if I should stay or not was.

I'm very excited and very nervous about the counseling session. I'm excited because I believe this could be a major step toward total recovery. I'm nervous because, to get her to go with me, I had to agree with my wife that if the counselor says too much damage has been done and we should divorce that I wouldn't contest it.

I've picked out a Christian counselor hoping that his bias will be toward saving the marriage.

I expect the trust issue to be a big one.

I recognize the wisdom in the quote from Dr. Harley, but I still have trouble seeing myself as fully accepting "I'm not cheating on you" without verifying it from time to time.

I guess I'm suspicious that she'd enter into the "have her cake and eat it too" mode where she gets attention, affection and companionship from me but also gets it from some other guy. If we're all wired for infidelity (as Dr. Harley suggests) then why not try and get as much of the emotional and physical things we like from as many people as we want?

How do I know I'm doing enough to make her want to be faithful to our marriage?