hiker

during our false recovery, my H was getting counseling to deal with these feelings

and i was getting counseling to deal with my feelings of anger

we also had counseling together

eventually, he felt that he was doing well enough to stop going....i still went as i still felt angry over what had happened

not long after that, he started seeing OW again (of course i didn't know that until over a year later)

that explains why he wouldn't go back to that counselor

we did go to another marraige counselor

i told her everything, including that my h said that he couldn't live with the guilt and shame and that ihad destroyed his love for me

at the end of that one 45 minute session where my H said almost nothing except that he wasn't in love with me anymore, wasn't happy, and didn't think he wanted to be married anymore....

the counselor told me that she would be happy to counsel me though the divorce process...she made no attempts to try to work anything out

i told her i DID NOT want a divorce and would not be back to see her

she then referred my h to a male counselr who she told him would help him deal with his feelings of guilt and help HIM though the process

before we met with her, my H hadn't actually used the "D" word but he then told everyone that the counselor recommended it because she saw no hope for us

the counselor that i went back to was the one we had originally seen when my H was really dealing with these issues. What he actually said is that my H's "self image is too poor" to be with me because he feels such guilt and shame (or something like that)

but honestly, i know how i acted and how i treated him when i was triggered and i feel guilt and shame myself

<because of what i did he "loathes me" and says he would never come back to me>

{{{Eaav}}}

Don't you think, though, that this just shows one more area where he is being selfish?

He was ready to come back and accept YOUR forgiveness, but he can't find it within himself to forgive YOU for not knowing how to deal with everything? That is not YOUR fault....it is his selfishness again.

You may not have done everything "right", so to speak, but the fact remains, you were still THERE TRYING....That should have told him something...

NOW

i DO think it's ironic that i am willing to forgive what he did and he isn't willing to forgive how i reacted to it

but then i remember how hard he tried to make ammends the first few months

and i know that the environment that allowed the affair to happen in the first place was greatly due to my not meeting his needs because i was seriously depressed for years

so he already had built up resentment towards me when he started the A...his lovebank was empty

so when we tried to reconcile, every time i made a few deposits, my lovebusting due to reacting to triggers withdrew the deposits i had just made

i feel like i had a chance at reconcilliation and i caused it to fail

as long as he resents me for making him feel such guilt and shame (feeling bad about himself), the OW is going to continue to be seen as a better option than i am

momtoAandZ, Mrs. Wondering or others please

as a FWS can you put yourself in my H place

if you came back after D-day, as he did, remorseful, so willing to make ammends, with no-contact in place

and you had NO understanding of how recovery is for other people

and your spouse reacted as i did...(and your love bank was empty from the feelings that led to the A and of course, during the A)

could you see how my H mightfeel the way he H did?

Eav, I understand what you're saying, and on the surface I guess I could understand your spouse reacting as he did, but that still doesn't mean it's your fault, that you failed.
I can think of a lot of instances where the BS did everything "right" and their WS still left. You see, sometimes the kindness and compassion a BS displays to their WS can have the same so-called "affect" on the WS...I know for ME, the guilt and shame increased as my DH's forgiveness increased, in the beginning. It was only my sense of entitlement that increased when he love-busted. You just can't assume your actions, good or bad, are the cause of someone else's behavior or decisions.
Causation is a tricky thing to measure.
My daughter was just reading in one of her textbooks about that...here's the example it gave:

A man wanted to find out what causes a person to become drunk, so on each of three consecutive nights he consumed a scotch and water, bourbon and water, then vodka and water.
His conclusion was that it was the WATER that caused drunkenness since this was the only common element!

He forgot, of course, to take into account that the other three beverages had a common element.

Think of yourself as the water, and your DH as the alcohol.

I don't know if that little anecdote really helps.

I don't want to see you years from now still somehow blaming yourself if your marriage never works out....my mom has done the same thing, always wondering if she did something "wrong", for my father to leave her for another woman. It kills me to see that.


NOW

Eav.
I really feel for as I am in a similar situation. I am willing to forgive my WH for this second affair (if he is willing to go NC).
But there are things that happened early in our M that I did that he still won't forgive me for. And I have a hard time understanding this. I forgave him for breaking our marital vows and he can't forgive me for rejecting him ocassionally sexually (while our kids were small), that I didn't want him to play softball because we worked every other weekend and off weekends would take away from our family time.
This really shows how selfish a WS can be. We need to focus that it's not our fault they have a weakness with boundries. I can tell you my WH was never really into recovery after the first affair.... I need to realise this just may be a pattern with him. He doesn't love me and probably hasn't for a long time. And it's not my fault... it's something missing within themselves. They want to take the easy way out.
Eav if our WH really wanted to work obn the R they would be there for us like other FWS are here. They would understand our grief and be wiling to help us thru this traumatic event. Just my 0.2 cents and i gues you can't buy much with that. I'll keep you in my prayers while I also pray for my recovery (hopefully it will be with my WH)

Still

NOW and STILL

after i realized that my actions were driving my H away, i went in search of something to help me do things differently
i recall that this was in Oct or Nov

i found SAA (but not this site)

i worked my tail end off from then on......to SHOW him that i was willing and able to meet his needs and that i was willing and able to see his side of things and i STOPPED reacting in anger and I STOPPED saying or doing things that would make him feel guilt and shame

and you are RIGHT

the kinder and more forgiving I became......the angrier he became and the more he talked about the guilt and shame that i was making him feel

the more i tired....the more he began to hate me....and hate HIMSELF too

NOW i know that this was because i was changing but it was too late....he was already involved with OW again and was refusing to let me make ammends or meet any of his needs

so his guilt and shame was now because he was again in the A and because he had no feelings left for me....no matter what i did

so now i am here, trying to figure out if that guilt and shame might ever be something that he is willing to try to get through

Jennifer Harley said that she can't figure out how an affair between two people with such baggage, such different lives and different emotional needs have made it this long....

from what OW SAYS her 4 children are her LIFE (family committment) and my H HATES kids

then again OW had left them all behind when she moved in with my H although that may have changed now since she had told him if he didn't get a houes big enough to have her kids with her she was going back to her H....so my H bought a HUD home

oh yes...my H says "he is s different person now"....so THAT must mean he LOVES kids all of the sudden

i'm thinking that he would have to be really, really unhappy in his life with her....to the point where he couldn't STAND IT....to be willing to consider facing all of the guilt and shame invoved in trying to reconcile

one thing that i try to holdin my heart is that for the first year after he left....before OW moved in with him...he was cake-walking

he talked often about the possibility of coming home

and each time they broke things off because OW had decidedto try to patch things up with her H.....my H turned to me

but he never made the committment to return because he still saw her as the better option and he waited...his waiting paid off each time because she came back to him

sadly, Jennifer Harley thinks that OW will be the one to leave the A to return to her family situation (she was living with her H and children in HER mother's home....her H and I think at least some of the children still live wtih her mother)

jennifer thinks then my H will consider me an option.....but she feels this may take time....and asked me if i would even be willing to wait another year if needed

i guess part of this thread is my seeking insight about this.....

i think about how far i've come in changing how i feel about what happened and i wonder if he might feel differently about me and about his feelings of guilt and shame or if that kind of reflection, changing, healing, and forgiveing only starts after the A ends


ps

still hope to hear from you Mrs. Wondering

Eav,

From what I have been reading on your threads you have done everything in your power to save your M. I feel like I have done everything I could also. We weren't perfect in our R process... but who is? We did what was in our hearts and continued to love after the most brutal betrayal any one could experience. Did we hurt... did we get angry... did we make mistakes yes but should it be considered a nail in the coffin if our WH were truley committed. No I don't think so. There is something missing in our WH were they don't want to face hurt or they just don't care. I wish I knew which it was from my WH. I bounce back and forth between this.
As BS's I don't think we can comprehend what it feels like to be a WS. That is what is so great about hearing from FWS. Do I wish that one of those FWS's were my Wh posting... with all my heart. But he just considers this stuff psyco babble.
I am also having a tough time letting go... am taking small baby steps every day. And in the back of mind I still have hope.. my IC cannot believe how long I have held on. She ADMIRES me (which I don't completely understand). My friends tell me that they could never hang on as long as I have. I tell them you never know until you are in this sucky situation.
Eav,
Right now I want to call my WH and tell him to please come home, I love him. Basically just grovel. And it is taking all my willpower not to. And it's 11am and I haven't. Baby steps.

Still

Still

when i read possts from FWS,it gives me such hope

if they were good people who changes so much, and were able to again become good people AND recovery the love they had for their spouse

then i see that it's possible for my H

thank you for admitting how hard it is to get through this

i changed all of my numbers because my h and OW were leaving such nasty, hurtful...even incoherently insane messages

but since then, i don't even care when the phone rings because i know it will never be him on the other end

sometimes it's one DAY at a time, sometimes it's one HOUR

I also get such hope from thier posts... sometimes it hurts also. It hurts because I wish my WH loved me that much to come back home.
My Wh was a good man and I still believe he is somewhere deep inside... I just think he is afraid to let him back out because it will hurt to much to do that self evaluation. Believe me I know how much it hurts to look within yourself and see things that I did wrong. I wish i could take it all back but I can't. At this time he is not willing to forgive. It's funny (not really) but all the times I have apoligised for my contribution to the state of our M he has never apoligised for his. My IC thinks he is still putting all the blame on me so he doesn't have to take resposibility. She actually thinks he my be borderline personality disorder. She was our MC so she know him somewhat.
Eav I am still struggling with this like you... sometimes it's minute to minute. All I know is I hope someday this pain does subside.
I can't imagine getting phaone calls like that it must of been even more heartbreaking. My WH mostly just calls for the kids. Once in a while it'll be for me. And the MOW and I only met a few years ago when I visited WH at work. We live in the same town. Since then I've had NC with her. I really don't even know what she looks like only that she is 16 years younger than me. Someday I would like to tell her what I think of her but I know it will fall on deaf ears because if she had any remorse she wouldn't of continued and also broken up her family.
Someday I hope to get an apology from her... but I will not hold my breath.

There has to be a rainbow at the end of all this... lets keep thinking that so we can get thru this. Love will come back to us.. hopefully from our Wh but maybe someone else out there we don't even know yet.

Still

what hurts me is when i read about people here who are reconciling

because i keep thinking

"why not me too?"

"what did i do wrong? i had a good plan A and plan B"

i think my h avoids me and thinking about this whole situation because he doesn't want to feel any of the guilt and shame

but maybe i'm wrong

maybe he's just put it all behind him and feels nothing at all now

Eav,

I feel the same way... I'm happy for them... but I also wonder why not me.
I guess it goes along with asking God why this is happening to us.
I also wonder why our R after the first affair didn't work. I literally worked my butt off and tried everything. Then I remeber wait I was doing it all by myself and then I would get angry which didn't help my situation.
I also know my WH is avoiding me because he knows I want to get back together... he found it easier at the beginnig when I was so angry at him.
I can tell you my WH doesn't want to feel and I kept telling hin this after the first affair... he needs to forgive himself and look within himself, that it was going to be painful. He didn't want to FEEL anything. In order to heal you needed to feel.

Eav, I feel like we are at the same place.

STILL

Why not us too? I am way too new to MBing to be an expert, but I would still say that it really has nothing to do with the BS, but rather the addict (WS) has not hit rock bottom yet and has not made the commitment to themselves to fix their life. The BS cannot help them hit rock bottom, but can set an example in their own self of how to live a happy, healthy life. BS just cannot be an addict of positive feedback from the WS. I was that kind of addict. Breaking that was (still is) the hardest thing for me to do.

I do understand. I didn't think my H could ever see me as anything but a sl*t. That somehow every argument/disagreement would turn into "yeah but you had an A!" I told him all this and he assured me that would not be the case. I didn't believe it, but he proved me wrong. I would have never figured we would have what we do today. I'm blessed and I got better than I deserved for a fact. Regardless...I knew at the time, whatever he threw at me, anger, whatever, I deserved it , I had caused it and I wouldn't have blamed him for it. Even if my DH had reacted that way, I was in so much guilt, I still would not have left, so your WH's reaction is still a mystery to me.

You hit it on the head when you said you can forgive him for having an A, but he can't forgive you for how you reacted. Well what exactly did he expect?? He can't cope with the fallout of the mess he created so he might as well stick with the OW...that's pretty sh*tty reasoning. You accepted his remorse and now he can't accept yours...

I don't know what I could tell you that might help you in your situation...I do know that I want to see you get rid of the guilt you are carrying around. What's done is done, your WH can either choose to move forward with you or not, but you do not own all this guilt alone.

Bonk, hit that one on the head! Yes, it is something that's broken in us. We do selfish, hurtful things because it makes us feel better, without little or no concern for the feelings of our spouse. At some point, some WS's snap out of it, while others never do. Unfortunately, I believe that for some WS's nothing the BS does will ever make a difference. It's a matter of the BS deciding how much time and emotion to invest and how long they can wait hoping their WS will snap out of it.

Why are some WS's truly remorseful and serious about recovery while others never are?

I don't know the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the underlying basic personality of the individual.

mom

i hate to say this, but it does seem that you may have a good point about the underlying basic personality of the WS.

i've said all along that my husband was a very good man.

in reality, my husband was a very good husband.

but i am beginning to realize that both of us were very selfish people.

we lived far from our families and real friends. we always wanted to move back home to be close to everyone again. we were alwasys in phone contact with our family and friends.we always wished that we could be home again so that we could be part of the family gatherings and cookouts etc.

we really didn't socialize with our neighbors and we kept mostly to ourselves. i did enjoy it that way. i enjoyed my work and my time with him. he said that he was happy that way but after the affair told me otherwise.

neither of us really went out of our way to be a part of our friends or families lives or activities unless we felt like it. ever since we dated, we agreed that neither of us would make the other take part in an famliy even if they didn't want to. when we went home, it was usually only for a weekend so we wanted to get the most out of our time.

even if we felt obligated to go to a family event, if we didn't want to go, we usually didn't. or one ofus would go and the other wouldn't.

I have to say that i spent every holiday with my husband's family and then i went to be with mine. i'd say that i gave his family more of my time than my own because i wanted to share those moments with him. i also went to many of his friednds and families events. he went to two family wedding with me. that's it.

neither of us really became invested in anything that was going on in our friends or families lives, good or bad.

a difference is that i did react emotionally to things going on with my family and i did try to help if i could. my husband NEVER did.

at one point when my husband and i were "discussing" reconciling, he was screaming and ranting. he said that he should have spent more time with my family....that it wasn't right that he had never wanted to get to know them.

that what we had been doing wasn't right. that we should have been doing all of these things together.

i told him that i didn't know that he felt that way (because i don't think he ever did before he spendt time with OW) and i told him that of course we could do that.

i understand that OW is very close with her family and friends. i guess that's easy for her. she lives where she grew up.

my husband took a job in another state before we got married and i left everyone behind to be with him.

now he gets to be part of this woman's family events and spent time hanging out with her friends. one of his best friends even moved near this woman and that's who he stayed with when he first moved out. so now he has someone to spend time with doing guy things AND another friend to do couple things with.

anyway, we lived a self centered life together and he acted selfishly by having the affair and leaving

but it seems that now he's getting so my husband is getting to have the life we wanted to have when we talked about moving home.

more reason for him not to come back to me

maybe another reason is that he is still only doing what he wants to do with no regard for others

however, the guilt and shame issue is still a huge factor

our counselor said that he believes my husband has very low self esteem and needs to be with someone who makes him feel good about himself so HE can feel good about himself.

silent

it DOES sound like we are in the "same place"

i've been thinking alot about my post above.

this is a pretty new realization for me

hope to hear some thoughts

Eav, I'm a little behind, my family has been passing around the yearly tummy bug so life has been "funner" than usual around here.

I think you may have caught on to an aspect of part of the allure of the OW. Without actually knowing your husband, it's hard for me to address to self esteem issue, but I do know in my case, it has been a lifelong problem/issue and certainly contributed to my vulnerability to attention outside my M.

I would say we too, were "selfish" when we were first married. I think a lot of that comes from being as young as we were when we met, 17 and 19, married at 20 and 22, both coming from somewhat dysfunctional families, although in different ways, so our expectations were quite skewed...

Our family life has been a lot like yours, we mostly focused on us and weren't really that close with either side for various reasons. However, at one point, we moved close to my sister (16yrs. older) who I never knew very well. We started to spend a fair amount of time together. We all good along well and had dinners quite often. My H said he enjoyed that because we would laugh and joke around but his family gatherings usually consisted of tension and arguments. That was nice for several years. Eventually marital problems escalated (mostly due to my depression and my newborn's illness) to the point where I moved out (there was no A though) and of course, my sister and her husband took my "side." My H and I reconciled but the tension of those events and the things that were said was always there and eventually we moved. We have since reconnected but never discussed the issues. After my A, my H notified my family about it...I was livid for a time, but now I understand and do not blame him for it. After all, if I hadn't done anything wrong, then why would I be ashamed of it...? Anyway, at this point, my family has "more" respect for my H than they ever did, for the way he has handled the situation and kept the family together. None of this has ever been discussed openly between us though.

The only relevance that I can point to is this...we had a close connection with some of my family for a while. We very much enjoyed spending time together. But that didn't stop us from having problems. So even if you "had" been involved with family or friends, that's certainly no safeguard against problems or affairs...

Maybe he does feel like he is getting the life he wanted to have...he could create that life with you, his wife, and that would be the right thing to do...but it's certainly easier for him to step into a ready made family without all the baggage isn't it?

I don't doubt that someday...days, months or years from now, your WS will realize that he missed out...Assuming he has a conscience somewhere, he will always have this guilt of having never worked things out with you to discover what a great marriage you could've had and it will haunt him and eventually he will realize that was the biggest mistake of his life.

I have posted this somewhere before, but my DH has several friends he's known since the "early days" who are on their second, third, fourth, etc. marriage...and everyone of them has said they wished they had just stayed with their first wife and worked things out, that every relationship has its problems...This from several 40+ year old men, who gave up their first loves when it got too hard. I find that very telling...

Unfortunately only experience and time seems to be the teacher here.

Even after I've written all of this, I think, Eav, you could think the whys and wherefores to death, but in the end, it's in your WH's hands. There may be a million reasons why your marriage (and mine) was lacking but they don't excuse the actions of us WS's. Either he will step up to the plate or he won't...it's been quite a while hasn't it? A BS is probably in a better position to advice you but I think it would be in your best interest to focus on recovery for you at this point. It would be ideal if you could get to a point where it would be great if he came back and made a sincere effort, but if he doesn't, that would be okay too.

Does that make any sense?

mom

what you have said in your final paragraph is exactly what everyone is advising (especially Mimi!)

but i'm just not at the point where it would be okay ifhe didn't return

i'd survive

but i love him and still can't imagine not spending forever with him as i intended when i married him

Eav,

Have you read Pep's thread "Willard Harley is a smart man!" I think it is in Gen Ques. II....It's about the buyer/renter concept. I think you might get something out of it...

gonna try to link it up, i apologize in advance if it doesn't work...

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/sho...rue#Post2847940

mom