I am a betrayed spouse. And if you are here, chances are you are one too. Maybe the planets aligned for you and are in recovery, maybe not. Maybe you are in my position where you don’t know what will happen.

What you are going through is probably the most jarring emotional roller coaster you will ever experience. This is worse than the death of a loved one. At least with death, there is closure. You grieve, you say goodbye, you move forward. Not so easy in these circumstances.

I have decided to post this as help to other betrayed spouses out there. I receive email and IM’s from people who tell me they are impressed with where I am at now. I honestly didn’t know I was doing anything special, I just made some decisions for myself that turned out to be the right ones; decision that put me in a better place emotionally.

I still have my ups and downs. I still love her with all of my heart, I am still sad, I still cry, but I am in a far better place than I was a month ago.

I have been asked how I did it. I honestly do not know, but I will share what I have learned.

When this all began, when I found out about the other man, I was devastated. I felt my soul being crushed with that news. I broke down right there. I felt betrayed, angry, and sadness all at once. It was overwhelming. It went downhill from there.

When you get news like this, it destroys everything about you. Everything you thought you were, is now gone. This is the most life altering experience I have ever faced. I have personally stared death in the face during my career in aviation, and those moments are nothing compared to this. Your self-confidence, your sense of worth, pride, is all gone. You will sit and wonder what you did wrong. You feel ashamed and humiliated. You feel scared. You feel abandoned. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear of the pain you are feeling. Fear is the keyword. If you have fear, you cannot do anything effectively.

I was referred to this site. It has helped tremendously in coming up with a plan for myself. Plan A. Many confuse Plan A with trying to lure or to “Woo” your spouse back to you. It is not. It is about making you a better person. It is about becoming more confident in you. To rebuild your self-confidence and to start believing in you once again.
You will come out of the other end a far different and better person than when you began this journey.

During the course of my first month into this, I was scared. I was depressed. I missed my wife, and every moment was spent hoping beyond hope that she would come through the door and say, “Pooh, I am home”. Of course, that never happened. And it drove me deeper into depression. I was getting more and more scared. More fearful of the future. Fearful of being alone. Those feelings kept growing and growing. Feeding on itself and my soul.
Most of you who have been reading my thread no about the worst day of my life. The day I hit rock bottom. In retrospect, even though I felt the lowest I have ever felt in my life, it was…in some perverted sort of way, a good thing.

I let go of my wife during that weekend. I set her free from me. That doesn’t mean I do not want her in my life or I want out of the marriage. It means she is free to choose what she wants, and I cannot control her.

This allowed me to start thinking. About everything. What I feared. What I wanted in life. What I want out of marriage and what I want from a partner.

I realized that fear paralyzed me in many many aspects of my life. One of the reasons I crashed so hard that night and almost ended it was fear. I feared everything that night.
I sat and looked thru our wedding items. Photos, etc…I watched the wedding video the next day. I told a friend about this and he said, “What the heck are you doing torturing yourself like that?!??!”. I didn’t know why at the time, but I do now.

Now, if you breezed over the above, make sure YOU READ WHAT I AM ABOUT TO WRITE.

This how I did it. When I hit rock bottom, and somehow made it through the night without offing myself, I realized that there is nothing to fear. I realized that looking through the wedding stuff and watching the video helped me tremendously.

It helped me by allowing me to feel and deal with the pain directly. I met it head on and came out on top. In order to start the healing process, you NEED to deal with the pain you feel.

This is one piece of advice I never see given here. It needs to be. You cannot do an effective Plan A without dealing with the pain you are suffering. It is easier said than done. It will also take a little while to get to the point where you will be strong enough to deal with it. Sometimes you will hit that point where you get to where I was that horrible night. But I know this, if I would have dealt with the pain sooner, I would have been far better off.

I resisted the pain. I covered it up. When I was in IC, my therapist pointed something out to me. She said whenever I spoke about my situation, I would start to smile. It wasn’t a smile of happiness; it was me trying to conceal my hurt…from myself. I did not even realize I was doing it. During the early part of my situation, my wife noticed I was smiling when we would talk. She asked me what I was smirking at. Again, I didn’t realize what I was doing. I wasn’t smirking, just trying to push down the pain I felt. I didn’t want to deal with it. I was scared of it. Being scared of it is what ultimately crushed me.

In that particular department, I did everything wrong. I tried to cover my pain. I didn’t want to deal with it. I just wanted it to go away. It will not unless you deal with it directly.

You, the betrayed spouse, need to deal the with pain head on. Cry. Cry a lot. Bury your face in a pillow and LET IT OUT. Yea, you will feel like crap, but you will be better off in the long run.

When you deal with the pain directly, you will begin to realize other things about you.
You will realize that if you can deal with pain directly, you can then start to deal with other things. You begin to lose you fear of your emotions. Things that looked insurmountable do not look so tough anymore.

This leads to more confidence in your self. Which then leads to your self esteem rising. Which leads to your sense of worth rising. Which leads to a BETTER, happier you.

How am I doing these days? I am doing pretty well. I am still depressed. But, I am happy with myself and where I am going.

Do I still have pain? Heck yes. I deal with it, though. When I feel like I want to cry, I cry.
When I feel like I am angry, I get angry. I go punch a pillow, or go for a long walk, whatever. When I feel happy, I embrace it.

The point of this long ramble, is it does get better…but only if you take control.

Well said DF.

Sometimes they say "you have to grieve like a child".

For some of us there is no resolution and never will be. You gotta be able to get healed up without it and I reckon you have a good start.

GC

DF,

Quote:
"I let go of my wife during that weekend. I set her free from me. That doesn’t mean I do not want her in my life or I want out of the marriage. It means she is free to choose what she wants, and I cannot control her. "

I remember that weekend, both yours and my own when I reached my own place of revelation.

Isn't it amazing how reaching the point where we quit struggling and just tread water becomes the place where we begin to hope again? For me, the realization that the only thing I had any control over was myself and that if she wanted to go I would survive was the most freeing thing I had experienced in a long time. That is the point when we really start to make the changes that MIGHT lead to recovery and stop worrying about what our WS will think.
In my case, it seems to have turned things around. In yours, perhaps not. (Though Dr Harley does point out that the window of recovery extends up to two years after divorce, if you can wait that long.) Either way, it is the turning point.

As almost everyone who ever came here has heard before,

"Welcome to Marriage Builders. We are sorry you are here under these circumstances, but it is a very good place to be...."

Mark

Quote:
"I let go of my wife during that weekend. I set her free from me. That doesn’t mean I do not want her in my life or I want out of the marriage. It means she is free to choose what she wants, and I cannot control her. "

I did the exact same thing 16 days after D-Day and finally had the focus to Plan A and accept that failure was a possibility but I would survive.

DF.....Great thread. Good for you! Awesome!

I'm glad you did not go overboard and cover stuff up. I did, and when I finally came to grips with the emotional part, I realized i developed a physical dependancy.......Alcohol.

I'm going into rehab next week to kick the booze bug. Sucks!

Keep yourself safe and strong man!

Great post, DF!

Don't be afraid to embrace the pain, b/c it is the pain that will heal you.

You sound really strong.

Thanks for sharing your insights!

~ Marsh

A good description of how the emotions evolve. A BS must ride the pain until it becomes unbearable, and that's the trigger for detaching from your WS from an emotional standpoint. No longer do the wayward's actions, or words, have any impact on the BS. It's nearly like the "out of body" experiece people describe in a "near death" experience.

Sustaining that detachment is when you can concentrate on the personal growth, which will leave a BS in a Win-Win position. The marital situation becomes clear, and can be dealt with sans emotion, and the personal growth allows the BS to survive with an elevated sense of worth, and the knowledge to employ in future relationships, whether it be from the marriage you are trying to save, or a new one down the road a piece.

Nice post, Dog! Good luck in your future efforts. You will be fine whether your marriage survives, or not! I do hope for your sake, you get what it best for you!

SD

This is an excellent thread for new comers. My sitch is a little better than dogfood's right now, but our timeline is about the same and I have been getting the same comments from friends, family, and my MB family about my personal recovery.

I'll throw my story in the mix to help other newbies get through the worst of it.

I discovered my WW's A 12/23/06. I started suspecting it about a month earlier. DDay I exploded. I threw my wedding ring at her along with the cell phone bill with the 10,000 calls to OM. I told her the M was over and I didn't love her any more and I didn't want her around my family and any thing else I could think of to hurt her. That night I sent an email to everybody in her contact list that was in her family or was one of her friends. I exposed her, but I did it to hurt her, not to bust up the A.

The next afternoon she came home and we had it out again, only this time she actually participated in the fight and some feelings of hers came out that sort of put me in my place. She let out the things that I had done that led to the A. That hit me like a ton of bricks. By the end of the argument we were hugging and crying. I've never cried that hard in my whole life. The following day (Christmas Day) we spent the morning as a family and before I left to visit my family we had another talk and I expressed my desire to get her the help she needed (psychological issues from her past) and I told her I wanted to work on the M.

She refused to talk about the M, but excepted IC for her. I had hopes that dealing with her issues would help the M since that is what got the ball rolling in our destruction.
It didn't happen. IC's aren't there to save marriages. They pretty much get you to talk about your problems and go along with what ever you want to do.

The first week I cried constantly and felt completely worthless and hopeless. New Year's eve I got drunk and spent the night in my B's back yard screaming at God, the Devil, my WW, the OM, and myself. I told the whole group to F off in a nut shell. That was my rock bottom. The next day when I woke up I felt calm and peaceful. I just needed to release the poison. Things didn't really get better other than me being able to deal with things. I still spent all of Jan trying to go it alone, riding the rollercoaster, trying to talk sence into WW. When I was low I reached out to other women. I never did anything stupid, but I was making connections, getting my ENs met by whoever would show me some attention. When I started getting positive feedback from other women I started wanting the M to be over again. I had a consultation with an attorney and borrowed money from my parents for a retainer.

At the same time I caught myself. Why was I doing this? Why was I looking for other women to make me feel better? Isn't this exactly what WW did. That's when I started looking for real answers and stumbled onto this website. At first I just read the Basic Concepts and some of the Articles and Q & A's and tried some of it out on WW. When I saw a change in her attitude I decided to start posting for additional help. I was hit with a blaze of 2 x 4's and that's when my education really began.

I never called the attorney back, I started reading all the posts I could, ordered SAA, and took all the advice given. Everyday that I educate and work on myself I feel less pain and more control over myself and the situation.

I exposed properly and that seems to have ended the A. WW moved out 02/10/07 right at the onslaught of exposure. After a 2 week barage of exposure I had developed a decent Plan A and was ready to implement. I handled her outbursts and garbage with grace and dignity. Her words hurt, but bounced off of me. Nothing stuck. I heard every horrible thing a WW will say right out of the text books.

3 weeks later we are talking again. Some days she seems to want to and others she doesn't. She no longer talks of D, but she says she is enjoying the seperation and she is trying to rediscover her old self. She isn't ready to work on M, but I see the cycle working its way through her mind. I now get mixed fog and rational thoughts and comments. I see her once or twice a week and last Sun we spent the whole day together and had good conversation and was close. I even got a hug from her.

I continue to work on myself and improve myself. I still hurt. I still ride the rollercoaster, although the peaks and valleys are shrinking. I still love my W and miss her terribly. I also am enjoying my life with out her. I don't sit around and mope. I walk, go to the gym, hang out with friends, family, and neighbors, spend time with my son. Now that the weather is warming I can start playing golf and go fishing again. I laugh as often as I can. I appreciate everthing that is good in my life like I never have before. I spend too much time on this forum which is what everbody around here does and you will to.

I am happy with myself now. I am strong and confident. I have accepted my part in the conditions that led to the affair, but I don't take resposabilty for the A. I feel good about what I am doing and I can now live my life without guilt or regret.

The most important things a BS needs to know is this.

Don't let your emotions control your actions. If you feel like "That's it, I've had enough!" Don't react. Give it a day or 2 and see if you don't feel differently.

Never expect anything out of WS. They are not going to come running home begging for forgiveness. You will not talk sense into them and you will not fix them. That is up to them to do.

MB is not a send me $50 and I will make your WS come home in a week kind of place. These are real people with real situations that have real solutions, but it is a process that takes time, sacrifice, and determination.

You must follow all of the pricipals of the Harley's. You cannot pick and choose because that will not work.

There is no gaurantee that your WS will ever come out of the fog. There is a gaurantee that you will become a stronger, better person who will be able to deal with this regardless of the outcome.

The A was not your fault. Your WS made a choice and they have to own it, not you.

I hope this helps somebody. I have received so much from this forum and now I want to start giving back.

Good Luck

well good luck BC!

My time line is about 2 weeks behind dogs, and both are heading for simular outcomes... I gald I see someone makling positive progress... I also have good and bad days... but having more good then bad as of late. That is a positive developement.

Not much to add to these 2 posts... beside nice to meet you just wish it was under diffrent circumstances...


JIM

All,

Thanks for the support. I posted this in the hopes it will help people deal with their struggles a bit better than I did.

To everyone, just hang in there.