I'm just curious to get other people's opinions. As a BS trying to recover, I find myself with the occassional dilema of feeling that I have the right to take certain actions, that I know in my heart I would not feel right doing if my WW had never had an A.

I don't mean anything extreme, just simple stuff.

Once a WS is a FWS, do you treat them like they never had an A at all, or are there always going to be things you expect that you would not have been right in expecting had there never been an A?

this ....


is why you feel this ....

Pep - Perhaps. But I can't change the 3.5 false recoveries. Am I to conclude that your opinion is that once there is a false recovery, that you should give up?

I don't think i can ever treat him like the affair didn't happen because it did and it changed us in many ways, mostly for the good but the betrayal is a hard thing to get over.

And i do not know about taking certain actions, but i do feel that i expect more from my FWH than i did before. Meaning things like transparency and being open and honest, pre-A i did not question his where abouts as much and did not worry about checking his cell phone for numbers, things like that.

I do also feel though that we communicate better than we did before and we are figuring out what when wrong along the way so those are good things.

nope
wrong conclusion

it will be natural if you feel the need to be vigilant longer if your marriage has a history of multiple false recoveries

go easy on yourself

longer recovery time - longer time to restore trust - longer time before you can feel safe and at peace -

go easy on yourself

03/09/07 you wrote this:



You had your timetable reset .... almost 1 year ago

go easy on yourself

Ok. I got that and I agree. I suppose you are saying that the "dilema" will go away in time as part of the recovery process, assuming that goes well.

I guess I'm just concerned that as we go through MC that the MC is going to say it needs to go away faster. I wonder what my response to that should be.


Agree. As I said above, I think the MC will eventually expect this.

If I treated others based on how they had treated, or are treating me, then I wouldn't be in control of my actions, would I?

I have a code now, that I live up to, which determines how I treat my partner...not based on what he did or didn't do...

all about me, all the time.

LA

I DO treat people based on WHO THEY ARE. For example, I will treat an untrustworthy person much differently than a trustworthy person. If a liar tells me something, I am much less likely to believe it than the words of an honest person. An untrustworthy person does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. And yes, I am very much in control of my actions.

The speed at which it goes away correlates to the speed at which you recover. That speed will be entirely different from case to case. For example, it takes up to 2 years for the average person to feel trust again, IF the WS works hard to demonstrate trustworthy behavior. If the WS does not do that, trust will never be restored because it is impossible to trust an untrustworthy person.

What exactly does the MC want to happen faster, rprynne?

p.s. another point that should be made is that I will never blindly trust my spouse again. I blindly trusted him before; that will never happen again. It should have NEVER HAPPENED. Our lives are so completely and totally transparent and interdependent that it would be quite difficult to carry on a second life again.

Harley is in FULL FAVOR of snooping as a MATTER OF ROUTINE so the conditions that led to the affair do not recur.

As he said, it is not LACK OF TRUST that ruins marriages, but a LACK OF BOUNDARIES.

As Harley points out, the conditions that made it possible to have an affair in the first place should be ELIMINATED. FOREVER. AND EVER.

"I have decided to go easy on myself and do the best I can every day - and allow healing to happen."

If that is the way your MC treats this then dump the MC.

rprynne, I went through more false recoveries than I can count. The second A lasted nearly 3 years total and when he finally confessed the truth to me (just over 1 year ago) and truly ended the A it took me months to go from sheer disgust to wanting to work on the M. Now, more than one year out I still do not trust my perceptions because the FR's screwed with my head so badly. Give yourself plenty of time and btw, yes you should treat someone based on experience. Otherwise we would be telling abused spouses to treat their abuser the same as everyone else. Doesn't make sense to do that does it?

all about me, all the time.

This usually precipitates waywardness...doesn't it?

Dangerous, dangerous mindset there.

committed

I know that loving anyway can MORE than speak for herself,
but I wanted to just state that I didn't take her remark in a Self Absorbed or otherwise Selfish way.

Instead I took it more like this:
{In Her Mind} She is in complete control of HOW she chooses to treat and react to others .....regardless of HOW they might or might not be treating her.

Basically the buck stops with Herself.

Indeed,
she is owning that it is "all about me, all of the time" in determining her thoughts, ideas and actions .....and NOT permitting herself to cop out and blame someone else's action or attitudes for her decisions.

However
I do recognize that that remark taken out of (what I believe) is its context and applied to Most every other WS out there, is a concern.
So yes,
I can totally understand someone pointing this out.

Hey Top Rope....where ya been? (Rhetorical, of course as this is NOMB, I know.)

Anyways, glad you popped in .....interesting perspective.

Thanks for sharing it.

Ace

rprynne,

You have gotten some excellent advice from all. My take on this is pretty much the same as everyone else. But, perhaps I will state this differently.

To recover a marriage you are not expected to have a frontal lobotomy. You will NEVER forget what happened, thus you will always treat her differently than you would have if the A had not happened. However, what is differently? Mel pointed out that she will never blindly trust her H again. You should not either. You now will require transparency in your marriage at a level that was not there before. You should offer the same to her.

Pep, pointed out that you are barely a year out since the last d-day, so exactly how you will treat her is still evolving and will as you recover and she continues to be the W she should have been.

But, rprynne, in my mind what will happen in this marriage is really determined by what each of you learns from this experience. How each of you grow from this? and finally how your perspectives have changed. Many recovered couples state that their marriages are better than ever on many levels and are concerned that it took an A to do it. It was not the A, but how the couple responded and used these events to learn and grow.

YOU, must use what you have and are learning to decide how you want to treat your W, and she must do the same. Eventually, these things will be more about what you have learned and how you have put into practice what you have learned than it is about the trigger that forced you to do all of this learning in the first place. AS Pep says, give it time.

Just thoughts, hope some of them help.

God Bless,

JL

The way W2S and I perceive it is that we are working on a better marriage not BECAUSE of the A, but in SPITE of it.

How is your wife responding to you? I she embracing and leading recovery now or are you still sort of dragging her along?

So if your spouse beat the living h3ll out of you and abused your children, that wouldn't weigh in on your decision to no longer treat that person with trust (aka differently)? IOWs, you would still TREAT them with the same level of trust pre-abuse?

Very strange code/philosophy, IMVHO.

Having control of yourself, your actions and decisions in terms of others (spouses included) is not lost or deminished when you base it on how you're treated BY them.

If you fail to use your instinctual protection mechanisms to protect yourself by NO LONGER trusting a person who has abused you (untrustworthy), you volunteer yourself up for victimhood.

Again, JMVHO.
Jo