Heart attacks are symptomatic of many life-style related diseases.

When someone is in coronary arrest, do we pull out the diet and exercise pamphlets and educate them on how to have a healthier life, or do we do CPR???

Until the most urgent "symptom" is dealt with, it is of no use whatsoever to delve into the root causes.

Interesting. Your wife “MAKES” you feel guilty.

Aside from your statement above which places blame on your wife for YOUR feelings brwmb, it also implies she has complete and utter power over your feelings. WOW! You’d think with such power she would have MADE you feel nothing but disdain and contempt for all other women.

Why do you think you need to blame your wife for YOUR feelings of guilt?

Jo

Excellent analogy!

For such an "honest guy", someone's having a hard time owning their own crap!

well,well,well,

I will chime in. It seems our poster has a lot of resentment from his fww's EA. Which means he is playing tit for tat. He feels justified because his W did not respect him and would not stop communicating with her EA partner.

Now he feels justified in keeping in contact with HIS EA, because he is JUSTIFIED.

Well, I learned awhile ago that two wrongs do not make a right. And I do believe that the immediate issues need to be dealt with before any recovery can be made.

Wife had an EA, Husband is having the same. That does not make it okay.

The poster that started this thread is obviously still hurt and resentful over his wife's EA. And now it is payback time, and he is NOT remorseful. Until he sees this, and the root of this, nothing any of us say to him will help.

I do not see revenge as being 'sweet' in this case. What a mess!

How is that working for you buddy? :RollieEyes:

You and your wife have a lot of stuff to deal with. Good luck and God Bless.

Love in Christ,
Miss M :RollieEyes:

No kidding. Not only is it his wife's fault for him having an affair (she encouraged him to look at Porn to improve their sex life and he took it to a whole diff level), but now she is also to blame for his feelings of guilt when he cheats.

Gawd, what is wrong with that woman. How dare SHE BE HONEST about her hurt when he is being HONEST about his cheating. It just makes him feel so guilty and its HER fault. :RollieEyes:

Hi ark^^, the question in the title is sort of rhetorical. Of course I should be sorry. The real struggle I'm having is that I'm not and I'm trying to understand why. In the withdrawal state of mind, I've reached the point of not caring anymore, so I guess that's why. Maybe there aren't that many people that have reached the kind of withdrawal I have. Maybe that's why they're having a hard time with me.

Sorry to not respond to much more of your post. It's hard to read. Choppy, sort of like poetry, but not really. Hard for me to figure out exactly what you're trying to say.

Hi Resilient, you're right about the resentments. They are getting in the way. My wife and I are aware of this and are working on it. It's not conscious payback; it might be unconscious, but it's not the vengeful kind of payback. She is NOT reading this, at least not yet to my knowledge.

Are you in withdrawal? It was my understanding you are still in touch with the OW? Is that not correct?

Hi Melody, I can see how you'd think of the analogy about the Titanic, but it doesn't go far enough. The Titanic is not sinking, it has already sunk. The ship is lying at the bottom of the ocean. It's dead. We're back at the shipyard where we're talking about correcting the design problems.

Hi Neak, just like my post to MelodyLane, CPR is not necessary. Cardiac arrest happened a long time ago. The patient is dead. We're in the morgue now doing an autopsy, learning what we can.

Hi Resilient, yes she does make me feel guilty. It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm reading a book, working out, talking with my daughter, pretty much anything I do is not right. No, I take that back, in the last month or two of counseling, she HAS tried very hard to avoid making me feel like I'm walking on egg shells. I've noticed that. But there's a long history of it in our past, and I still do feel guilty about doing a lot of things. Hopefully that'll settle down.

Hi Miss M, I'm wondering about your "Love in Christ" signature. The tone in your post, did it feel like Christ's love when you wrote that? Reminds me of the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. I feel like the adulterous woman surrounded by self righteous people ready to stone me. (And turtlehead feels like Jesus - firm, but loving, it's very refreshing.) It feels like there are a lot of sharks swimming around here just waiting for prey to gobble up. The tone on this website is surprisingly hostile and sarcastic. Unfortunate. There ARE some concerned people who post here, but like turtlehead said, it can be awfully difficult to filter out the insincerity. The religiosity of many of the people here is oppressive.

Oh no, it is not dead until you are divorced. You are not divorced. There is no point discussing "design" while the ship is sinking. Recovery is impossible until the affair ends. That is like expecting a FALLING DOWN DRUNK to work the 12 Steps of AA. Impossible.

Be assured that the first step has to be the end of the affair.

I think that truth comes across like that when we are in a state of denial and delusion. Anyone who speaks TRUTH to us or sees through our crap is going to be viewed as "hostile" and scary. They are a threat to our foggy thinking!

But that is a result of our own fog, not them. They are very threatening to your own DELUSION since they don't buy your bullcrap.

And that is the problem with this forum, I have found. Bullcrap has a very short shelf life here and the forum has a clear deficit of affair enablers. It seems like they have been hogged up by the other websites. :eek:

Between you and I this would not be a good place to get support for your affair. They really suck when it comes to affair support. :eek:

YO Mel. Dyslexic much?

engineers! :RollieEyes:

That's "Miss" Engineer to you, Chicka.

not stoning you at all.

Who am I to judge?

Just wondering if you ever forgave your wife for her continued contact with her EA when you asked her please not to do that anymore.

I realized, as a Christian, that it didn't matter what my H had done to me, it was how I treated him and how I reacted that was wrong. No doubt about it. Therein lies my reasoning for my post.

do you feel justified? I know I felt that way, and it did NOT work.
I was actually empathizing with you. I am sorry if you took it wrong.

I felt that no one else was picking up on your history with your wife's previous EA(except Resilient ) . Sorry for the confusion. I do understand where you are at.

Love in Christ,
Miss M

Reading through this thread, a number of things strike me about brwmb.

There's a pervading attitude of indifference and emotional lethargy, despite life events that would normally arouse intense emotions of anger, fear, jealousy, shame or guilt.

There's an acknowledgement that some of his behaviours may be damaging to the marriage, but an adamant refusal to change those behaviours.

There's a great deal of rationalisation of that lack of emotional reaction.

I'm seeing someone whose automatic, probably unconscious response to anything that would produce intense emotion, is to move quickly towards a distanced, uninvolved position that keeps him safely clear of the uncomfortable feelings.

I'm also seeing someone who has used this strategy to get past the feelings of intense anger, fear and jealousy that past events in the marriage would have generated, had he allowed the feelings in. In other words, it's a defence. It works, but with a long-term cost.

I think the reason you're here, brmwb, is that you recognise - at some level - that this emotional suppression has prevaded many aspects of your life, leaving you pretty numb. Consciously, you may feel that you're balanced and healthy, but your lack of conscience about something that should have a healthy conscience screaming with pain, tells you something about that numbness.

I suspect you sense - if only subliminally - that you're likely to take that emotional deadness with you into whichever relationship you get into after this one. I don't think this is about a toxic relationship, it's about a toxic defence. It's just much easier to blame the current relationship, the current wife, the current mess, than to drop a defence that's 'worked' for a long time. Defences are very, very hard to let go of. The ego had a zillion ways to hold on to them.

You have children. Do you care about them enough to face up to some very painful insights into yourself? I believe that's what it's going to take.





TA