Bumping this for Lost.

LIDC, you kind of got LOST in the shuffle.

How is it going?

Wishing you well,

kirk

bumping one more time for LIDC.

Wow. First time reading this thread, and I must say that I had the exact same counselling experience with my WW. I've never gone back to that counselor...all she did was enable my W's infidelity.

It's not just a part of your life, and you aren't the only one who can't belive it...just so you know.

Hang in there man.

Thank you, krusht--

I'm around. Not had much time to post as I've been on travel and usually try not to take my laptop. These message boards are hard to read on my PocketPC and posting is nearly impossible with my thumb-board -- but it can be done.

I have been going through some dark stuff -- really searching my soul as to why I'm still in this marriage.

I know I stayed purely for my children. Yes, they were older teenagers but I've always tried to guard the 'transitions' in their lives -- they were transitioning out of high school and into college. I didn't want them to start with their parents' divorce in their backpack.

Perhaps I'm just rationalizing my own fear away -- I really don't know.

I don't know how to define how I feel about my wife. At one point I would readily tell you (and anyone) that I would willingly die for her. I would still do this for my kids but I can't say I'd do it for her anymore. That really depresses me.

I care about her. I enjoy bringing her happiness and pleasure. I like doing things for her and provide for her. But do I "love" her? Not the way I loved her before her affairs.

The thread on here about "respect" really hit home. It was a thought I hadn't pieced together but I'm in that boat where I can't see a time (I won't say 'never') where I will respect or trust her like I did before her affairs.

I think I have to add "or love her like I did before her affairs" to this.

I do know that I'm tapped out of reasons to stay if it happens again.

My struggle is with the boundary -- someone asked me about my boundaries.

I told her I didn't want her riding in a car alone with another man or eating lunch alone with another man or hanging out after work alone with another man, etc. She agreed but, as I've read others here relate, she also said it was a "silly" request.

I made a statement in counseling that I would be "out the door" if she took a business trip that was just her and another man.

So, my question -- if she violates these (lunch or travel alone with another man) is that sufficient grounds (morally) to get out before the next affair starts? I'm not saying that she would be automatically having an affair but she would clearly be disrespecting my reasonable (in my opinion) request and doing something she knows would cause me heartache.

Given her past affairs, how reasonable or fair is it to view her as a recovering alcoholic that doesn't need to walk by the bar on the way home? Don't put yourself in tempting situations if you've caved in the past.

I'm trying to set up boundaries to protect myself. I stayed with her through her affairs to protect our children from the difficulties of divorce, now it's time to protect myself. (Sounds sort of silly having to "protect" myself from her, but that's the best word I have.)

Sorry for rambling -- I'm still awash in thought over this whole mess my life has become.

Thanks

You have EVERY right to leave if she disrespects that boundary. It tells you where she places you in her hierarchy.

Thank you, catperson.

I struggle with this because it seems like such a miniscule offense compared to her affairs.

In the past when I ask about what she did for lunch and want to know who was there, she accuses me of thinking she wants to sleep with every guy at her work.

I don't think that, but I do think she is capable of making that choice.

If I didn't divorce her because of her affairs, how do I justify leaving her because she "just" had lunch with another guy?

Somewhat rhetorical question -- my answer would be, "Because I established this behavior as somthing I would not allow to happen in my marriage. I wouldn't have lunch with another woman (just the two of us) and you shouldn't have lunch with another man. It violates a boundary I established to feel secure in this marriage and I'm not going to allow it to be violated."

Am I on the right track with this?

Thanks

Exactly so.

I think so. With her history, if she has lunch with another man despite your request that she does not, it shows a callous disregard for your feelings. It gives you a reason to think she has learned nothing from her previous affairs, and shatters any confidence you have that she would not have another affair.

By respecting this boundary, your wife is doing more than avoiding a situation that has been a problem in the past - she is demonstrating that she takes your feelings and needs seriously, and that she is willing to take extraordinary care of your marriage. Casually violating this boundary shows the opposite.

I think you are on the right track with this.

Thank you, catperson and CuthbertCalculus--

I appreciate the encouragement and reinforcement that I'm not "out of bounds" in these boundaries.

Hi LIDC !

Genuine heartfelt personal boundaries are never reasonable or unreasonable. They are the actual minimum standards of behaviour you require in order to sustain in a situation or relationship.

They're about what you will accept not what the other person is willing to do or find reasonable.

I worked out my personal boundaries 18 years too late back when I first "got" plan A.

They were ( and remain) :

* Permanent NC and Total transparency - give me no reason to police you
* Take all action to protect me from further hurt
* Learn about why FWS had the affair and take action to prevent it recurring.

Sometimes I've wished I made that list harder but that would have been false. Those are my genuine boundaries and Squid has pretty much respected them for four years now.

To begin with Squid HATED my boundaries. Now she just knows they're there and largely respects them.

It saves a lot of effort in policing your spouse LIDC.

Think about what you genuine minimum behaviours are and make them personal boundaries. Don't worry whether they sound reasonable or not.

BTW your wife's "silly" comment was gaslighting IMO.

Thank you, Bob--

While on travel I wanted several times to thank you for your insight here and on your other post on the In Recovery board.

I guess I've got to figure out those boundaries....

I like the transparency one -- could be tricky given the counselors' advice that I should respect her privacy. Yeah, I know -- I actually laughed at the second counselor when he spoke about "respect".

Figuring out why she had her affairs would be nice but only something I can ask for. I don't know how to enforce it -- how could I tell if she really is searching for the reason or if she's just blowing smoke? She claims she's "working" on herself but seems to be able to do that with no one's help.

The whole lunch / travel with other men is a big one for me. Don't know that she's violated it but I would have a hard time convincing myself to stay around if she did. Would probably mean leaving her job -- which wouldn't hurt my head at all.

Good info...thanks bob.

Ask your MC how many marriages their non snooping methods have saved.

Then drop a line to Dr Bill and ask how many marriages HIS process has saved even EXCLUDING the millions and millions which have been saved or improved by his books alone.

Where an MC and MB diverge, I'd fall on Dr Bills side every single time.

I didn't ask about his "success rate" I was too stupid to ask that question.

I did ask, after he was through telling me he sees no reason for me to check her email, "Have you ever been on either end of an affair? Have you had the rug jerked out from underneath you by the one person on the planet who VOWED to never do that only to stand up and have her do it again?"

"It does not matter what I have or haven't been through, what matters is that you are ruining your marriage by checking up on your wife." was his immediate / practiced response.

I'm not saying that a counselor has to have gone through an affair to be capable of helping those struggling with it, but I wish he would have tried to see things from my side. It seemed as if he was more interested in placating my wife than addressing the problems.

My wife came to the counseling session with the statement she was ready to walk out because of my continual invasion of her privacy. I told him I was there to repair our marriage from the damage caused by her affairs.

He triaged her as the priority case and me as the lower priority (my opinion) and decided to brow-beat me (in front of her and in private) to "stabilize" the marriage.

Left me feeling like sh*! after every session and her with more stuff to rub in my face about how I was ruining the marriage.

We don't go to him anymore but I am not able to get her to consider another counselor.

I appreciate all the support, advice and candor on this site.

Thanks

I am very surprised to hear what your MC told you. When I found out my wife wanted a divorce, it was because I'd discovered she had a secret email account, and I managed to guess the password and log into it - and I'd read the whole thing. I snooped her email... and after we "reconnected", and she wanted to know why I'd changed, I admitted to her that I'd snooped her email.

I expected her to be angry that I'd invaded her privacy... but she wasn't. Not at all.

I'm positive that if she had been in an affair, her attitude would have been different... but I really think her openness is a sign of a healthy relationship, and I can't help but contrast her openness with the secretiveness displayed by the WS's I hear about on these boards - and the encouragement for that given by MCs.

How are you doing today?

It sounds like your wife has been transparent and remorseful -- that bodes well for recovery.

Her affairs and subsequent relapses were discovered through email and voicemail hacking. In each case, I alerted the OM's wives and, in some cases, sent them the email copies so they'd have positive proof.

After D-Day of her second affair, I told her I required all her passwords to accounts she needed. Since she knew I already had access to her numerous "secret" accounts I changed the passwords on those accounts to jibberish that even I wouldn't remember. I also deleted the "email reminder" questions and secondary email address. There is no (easy) way to recover those passwords.

She has always reacted violently to my need to check her email / voicemail / cell phone / etc.

I, too, was surprised by the counselor's opinion and felt blindsided by his obvious partiality to my wife's point of view.

I don't know how I could have approached things differently but I need to decide if I'm content with a partial view into her accounts and wait to see if anything inappropriate is going on or press for total transparency.

BTW, when I asked her for her passwords, I did so after I handed her a spreadsheet with all my accounts and passwords contained on it -- it was not a one-sided exchange. She took several days to assemble the info but eventually did.

Thanks for checking in.

I was extremely fortunate - my wife had skirted the edges of an affair, but she decided not to have one. (Perhaps it might have been classified as an one-sided EA at one point, a year or so before I read her emails, but she never told him how she felt, and it only lasted for a month or so before she saw thru the ex-boyfriend.)

The fact that my wife was so open - along with the fact that everything she told me before she knew I'd read her email meshed exactly with everything I read in her email - helped me get at the truth, and get past

She has been extremely transparent... and yes, her transparency has been important to our marital recovery.


I can see doing this once... doing it a second time must be so debilitating. I'd be shell-shocked, and I'm sure you feel that way sometimes.


That's a good way to deal with them!


That, to me, just shows that she still feels entitled. And that would definately be a major stumbling block for me if I were in your shoes. So, I feel you are absolutely right in the boundaries you have stated.

Your wife may chafe at them... but if she keeps them, and stays away from the OM, I think she has a good chance to come around eventually.


I've always been a little suspicious of counselors. A few years before my wife and I reconnected, I went to see a counselor because I wanted help to stop lieing to my wife. I was dishonest, mostly about our finances, and it really hurt her. And I wanted to stop, and told the IC that. And she went promptly to work to help me overcome the guilt I felt at lieing to my wife.

Which, of course, was not what I wanted. I wanted the guilt, because how else was I supposed to feel when telling lies?

I stopped going to that counselor when I figured out the angle she was taking. I didn't need any help with coming up with rationalizations.


I don't know how to advise you on this... I guess I'd say whatever you can live with, although total transparency is the ideal.


Yeah, I gave my wife my email passwords after I 'fessed up about reading hers, too. Transparency works both ways!


Hang in there... I can only imagine how tough it is for you right now, but you can get through it.

Does the DC in your username refer to your city? I work in downtown DC myself...

LIDC,

It has been said here that the only time a spouse needs privacy is in a private journal or in the bathroom.

To think hard and logically on this, in a healthy marriage where both parties are committed 100% to each other FIRST and to all others second THERE IS NO NEED FOR ANY PRIVACY, except for that mentioned above.

If someone becomes violent because their privacy is invaded, then one must consider there are items that the one spouse is HIDING from the other. Seriously, what other reason could there be?

Then what things could she be hiding from you? Plans for your surprise birthday party?

What ever they are, they probably are not good for your continued happiness, or else why hide them from you? Can this be any more obvious? Yet the WS gets totally upset!!

When you are considering boundaries, how about one and only one email account for BOTH of you. And discovery of a secret email account would enact one of your two "get out of the M free" cards. (well maybe not free.) That you are still holding.

Of course what she does at work is a whole other can of worms, but if the company she works for keeps a close eye on their server and has strict rules on personal internet and emails, this could squelch that avenue.

What reason does she give to you about maintaining her privacy?

What reason could the wacky MC give why your WW needed to keep her privacy? I would love to hear his intellectual academia-babble explaining this.

IMHO

kirk

Thanks for your reply, krusht...

As I said, I still have some limited access to certain areas (not all disclosed here).

But, yes, she does guard certain things (cellphone). I do have access to our shared account (personal cell phones) and do view the activity there. I can't see into her work phone, however.

The only thing I can tell she might want to hide is the nature of playful email she exchanges with people at work. Not seeming to be one guy specifically and some are sent to a group of people, both men and women.

To me, they represent her continued inability or unwillingness to erect and maintain strong, common sense boundaries with other men.

We do have one shared account, but she has a work email account and one through her BlackBerry (work). I have limited access to these. She also has voice mail on her BlackBerry and her work phone.

She claims that my checking her email/voicemail/cell reminds her of what she's done and how I'll never get over it. "I'm not doing anything wrong, so you don't have to check up on me."

There is all sorts of flawed logic in that, I know.

The counselor basically took the approach, "If she wants to have another affair, she's going to do so. Your checking up on her is offensive to her and will only push her into another affair."

My wife, of course, played off of this beautifully and made me look paranoid. Not entirely untrue, I am concerned she's waiting around for the next best thing and then she'll dump our family again for the next OM.

For now, I keep monitoring -- looking for signs and hints that she's drifting away again.

What I really fight now is this:

If I see her start to drift away again, I have a strong urge to let her go. I don't think I have another strong Plan A in me. I have been a good husband -- I am supporting her and showing her I value her. But I don't think I could open up all the stops AGAIN.

I'm tempted to bid her Adieu and be done with it. In other words, use what I learn from my monitoring solely to determine at which point I feel she's gone and use that to confront her with the intention of leaving her.

I don't really like this -- I've fought too hard for this hill to let is gradually slip back into enemy hands. But I just don't feel another "Charge of the Light Brigade" within me.

Maybe I'm just tired....

Thanks for your encouragement.

Thanks, CC...

I live in N. VA and work in and out of DC.

The second affair was indeed the worst. The first one I was all sorts of willing to admit my faults in the marriage, where I failed to be a good husband and where we both let the marriage get to a point where it was all about our daughters.

The second affair, however, was not due to my failures as a husband. It was (in my opinion) an expression of her self-centered and self-serving attitude -- she wants it so she should have it.

This is especially true (IMO) given the devastating effect she witnessed her first affair have on me.

I was blindsided and crushed.

Looking back, I wish I had divorced her then. Pure and simple. I should have walked away the moment she looked at me as I confronted her and screamed at me "I hate you."

I should have...I didn't. I feel that door has closed.

So we all struggle on -- working to make our marriages better to be the best spouses we can be. All the while in the back of our minds is the knowledge that this person who vowed to love us forever dumped us and is fully capable of doing it again.

I really didn't sign up for this.

Here is what the Harleys say about it -

Forgiveness is something I believe in with all my heart. I forgive others and have been forgiven many times. God wants us all to be forgiving just as he has forgiven us.

And, as you have noticed, when you don't forgive someone, it can "eat you up." It's not healthy to keep resentment bottled up inside of you.

The vast majority of couples I counsel who have been through the horror of an affair, have better marriages after the affair than before. It's because the affair jolts them into recognizing the need for building an affair-proof marriage, and the safety precautions they use help them create compatibility and love. But has the offended spouse forgiven the offender in these marriages? Yes and no.

First let's try to understand what forgiveness is. One illustration is telling a person who owes you $10,000 that he won't have to pay you back. You "forgive" the debt. In other words, forgiveness is eliminating a obligation of some sort.

But we generally don't think of money when we think of the need of forgiveness. Instead, we are concerned about inconsiderate behavior that has caused us great pain and suffering -- the pain that an affair causes, for example. Forgiveness in these situations means thinking about the person as if the offense never took place. That is extremely difficult to do. The offended spouse usually thinks, what can he or she do to make it up to me. How can I be compensated for the pain I've suffered.

To make matters worse, whenever a wayward spouse sees me for counseling there is rarely regret and rarely a willingness to compensate the offended spouse. They usually ask to be forgiven, but that doesn't mean he or she is deeply remorseful. It usually means that he or she doesn't want us to bring up the subject anymore, or require a change in behavior. In other words, the wayward spouse wants the pain suffered by the offended spouse to be ignored or forgotten. Like a $10,000 debt, they want it forgiven, and then they want to borrow another $10,000.

I'm in favor of forgiveness in many situations, but this isn't one of them. In the case of infidelity, compensation not only helps the offended spouse overcome the resentment he or she harbors, but the right kind of compensation helps restore the relationship and prevents the painful act from being repeated.

In most cases, an offended spouse would be stupid to forgive the wayward spouse without just compensation. It's like forgiving a friend of the $10,000 he owes you, when it's actually in the friend's best interest to pay you in full because it would teach him how to be more responsible with money.

As it turns out, in every affair there is a way to adequately compensate the offended spouse that is good for the offender and good for the marriage. At first, the offended spouse may not want to be compensated. He or she may try to get as far away from the offender as possible to avoid further pain. But if the spouse asks for forgiveness along with a willingness to compensate, the offended spouse is usually willing to entertain the proposal.

So let's talk about just compensation. What could the offending spouse possibly do to compensate for an affair? After all, it's probably the most painful experiences anyone could ever put his or her spouse through.

The first act of compensation to you from your husband should be to end his relationship with the other woman once and for all. He should never see or talk to her again, even if it means leaving his job or moving your family to another state. The reason should be obvious, but in case there's some confusion, he should be reminded that every contact he will ever have with this woman will be like a knife in your heart. He has already caused you to suffer unbearable pain, and any further contact with his ex-lover would keep you suffering. In your case, the affair is probably over, but has your husband taken precautions to never see or talk to his ex-lover again?

And then he should put extraordinary precautions in place to guarantee that another affair will not take it's place. Has he considered the circumstances that led to his affair? Intoxication, business trips that separate you overnight, close friendships with those of the opposite sex, recreational relationships that do not include you, and so forth, should be subject to scrutiny. What was it that made him vulnerable? Whatever it was, he should take extraordinary precautions to avoid it in the future. It's part of just compensation for the suffering he's caused you to bear.

While there's no excuse for an affair, and if your husband takes the extraordinary precautions I've suggested he will never have another affair again, there are "reasons" that people have affairs. And those reasons must also be addressed when considering just compensation.