Let me start by saying that after having read just a few of the posts here, I feel like I may be out of place to ask this group for advise, so if there is a better forum, please just tell me and I'll go there.

I'm in a chaos in terms of emotions.

I am married and over the past 10 years I have made many mistakes that have harmed my marriage. But I made the biggest mistake by having a 6 month emotional and physical affair. It started as just sex for me with a man who was my friend for 2 years before that. But over the last 6 months, I realized I love this man. By this, I mean that I love him, like I love a friend but to a greater degree.

I still love my husband, and he knows know about this affair (which has ended). I don't know what the future holds and I never could profess to know that. But I know that my husband is willing to give me a chance, willing to go to counseling and try to see if we can move together past this and become a stronger couple as a result. So I intend to try.

So, my emotions are in chaos:
I'm hurting because I can't see or talk to my affair partner.
I'm hurting because my husband is hurt and upset.
I'm hurting because I know I hurt my daughter (who doesn't even know), but I'm sure she's still hurt by this.
I'm hurting because I hurt my affair partner, I hurt a friend who is now in alot of pain without his friend to help him through it.
I'm ashamed that I had an affair.
I'm ashamed that I not only hurt my family but also my affair partner and his family.
I have a longing to be with my affair partner as a friend, but I know that wouldn't be okay - that we could probably never have that friendship again.
I'm scared I'll go through years of counseling and not be able to regain my husband's trust.
I'm sad because I don't see any way out of the mess I created.
I'm grateful my husband is willing to understand that a mistake like this doesn't mean I'm a bad person. (Not sure I'm believing this as much as he is though.)

I am going to try to work on myself (finding out what's wrong with me and how to make myself happy) and try to work on my marriage (see if we can save the marriage or have a better one.) If my marriage does end, I won't see/date my affair partner. I hurt him too much, I hurt me too much - I can't go back down that path. And I know (and knew during the affair, that this affair partner was not someone I wanted to marry or spend my life with, but I lied to him about this.)

And yet I want so much to help my affair partner through this pain. He feels rejected, hurt that he can't be loved and that he gave so much to me that I can't give back. I can't change things but I wish I could help, just be there for him. And yet I know I can't.

I want to help my husband through his pain, his anger, his frustration. I want to help rebuild trust and I will offer to do anything he asks to help with that. I have trouble trusting others and I am struggling to see myself as someone who can be a good partner in marriage...but I'm willing to try.

I just struggle with my emotions, so it makes it hard for me to deal with them which I think is essential to helping my husbnd with his. We just started seeing a marriage therapist and I am going to my own counselor too.

I think I'm looking for someone to tell me that they understand why I am so emotional. I do want to try to work things out with my husband, but it isn't easy. The fact that my husband can forgive doesn't make me forget all about my affair partner, my feelings about myself that I could even do this, and it doesn't take away the shame, the hurt, the pain.

Shouldn't I be overjoyed that when many would have slammed the door in my face and left, that my husband is willing to try? Shouldn't I be happy that the man I love (my husband) is willing to forgive, and thus forgive myself from the shame? Shouldn't I be happy that this affair is out in the open so I can try to move forward without secrecy and dishonesty? Shouldn't I be happy that my affair partner can now go on to find someone who can give him back the love he's given me - someone who can be with him as a wife, a partner, not just a lover and friend? Shouldn't I be happy that I can live a better life and become a better person, and maybe even have a better marriage as a result of understanding the affair and why it happened?

I should be, but I'm not happy - I'm miserable and hurting and ashamed and sad and feeling guilty.

And I know there are some here that will push me aside and critique me for "complaining" about my pain when I'm the one who caused the pain. But I'm trying here.

Is there anything that helps this situation, helps the pain? Is there anyone who can give me advise on how to feel any non-pain emotion?

Does your husband post here?

How did your adultery end?

Does EVERYONE know about your adultery? Who is everyone?

Are you only looking for advice for help with YOUR pain?

We have some FORMER WWs here and they're the best, but you have to be willing to listen past the 2x4s you can expect. Excuses won't fly around here, we've heard them all.

Welcome to MB. If you're willing to buckle down, get real and COMPLETELY HONEST, we might be able to help you.

Oh, and forget about ever speaking or seeing your adultery partner again, much less "helping him through his pain".

Meggy - Thank you for the response.

I don't think my husband has come on the site yet.

My affair partner is married and his wife found emails that we had exchanged. Those prompted questions, after which we each confessed to our respective spouses. Thus, the four of us know. I think there are some neighbors that are aware but I'm not sure. I have told a couple close friends as well.

I am looking for help with my pain, and how to help my husband. I am looking for advice to get past my emotions so that I can be more focused on us, not me. I feel consumed by emotions and as if my life is in chaos.

I am willing to listen, even to the things that might be hard to hear. And I am not here to make excuses, as there is no valid excuse and nobody but me made this decision/mistake. I can't and won't blame anyone else for that.

I know that I can't contact the affair partner, and I was not suggesting that I should. I just feel some pain about that - acknowledging the feeling but not saying that the correct relief for that would be to talk to him. I was hoping someone could advise a more constructive way to handle that emotion.

Welcome, Butterfly. I believe yours is a very honest post. Stick around, put on your big girl panties. I believe you will learn something here.

God's Blessings,

Say

B10:

I'm doing this on my Droid, so, bear with me.
My A lasted 4.5 years. So I know what it takes to destroy a spouse.
How flamingo survived I'll never know, but she found this site 3 days before Dday. This site saved our M, and I believe, my life.
Start listening, reading, and learning. There are amazing things here.
Start with scheduling a trip to the MB weekend. It might cost you 2.5k between registration, travel and hotel costs. You two will learn MORE than ten weeks of counseling..... its that good. And YOU setting it up shows that YOU are taking the leadershipin righting all your wrongs.

Also, do not be concerned with your OM pain. That is an excuse to get it touch with him... and that is death to your marital recovery. All that time you spent talking with BH. It did wonders for us.

Yes, your in pain, this will pass. Then the real work of recovery can begin.

LG

First of all, are you neighbors with the OM and still have contact with him, even just in passing? That won't work.

Trust me, six months from now you will look back with disgust at OM. Quit romanticizing about what a great guy he was. He wasn't. He was an opportunist who used you for sex. That's all they ever are. Keep repeating that to yourself until you convince yourself, like how you kept telling yourself OM was a great guy while he broke his marriage vows and slept with another man's wife. Doesn't sound like a great guy when you put it in those terms does it? Right now you are still foggy from the high of the affair, but once you "sober up," you'll see OM for what he truly was.

Butterfly,

You did a wise and courageous thing in posting here. A few points:

The �hurting� you are going through is WITHDRAWAL from your affair-partner (OM). It is normal. It will dissipate and fade away IF YOU MAINTAIN COMPLETE AND PERPETUAL NC WITH YOUR OM. It takes 3-6 months of absolute NC for withdrawal to even begin to resolve.

You are absolutely correct in that you cannot have OM in your life in any way ever again. You must be strong enough to fight through the temptations and longings and not give in. This is not �cruel� to your OM; it is HEALTHY for you, your family, and even for him too (I�m gathering from your post that your OM is likely married as well�that means he too has a wife/kids who have been hurt just as terribly as your husband/daughter have). Failure to vigilantly defend appropriate personal boundaries & values is what got you into this slippery-slope mess; the only way out is to do so now without exception.

Your �emotional chaos� results from the fact that you are still emotionally attached to two men at the same time (i.e. �I still love both of them�). Undoubtedly, your guilt and shame over the affair contribute mightily as well. Resolve this with ACTION�attention & re-commitment to your marriage while you withdraw in NC from the affair. Your �confusion� will clarify as you do this. I am guessing that your affair ended only recently. How recently? How/who ended it? How long have you been in complete NC?

Here�s what you need to start:

1. Read Dr. Harley�s basic concepts and articles on this site. Get and read Surviving An Affair right away. Learn the system and learn it well.

2. Maintain NC with OM! You need to mail OM a NC-letter (examples are here on MB) that your BH reads and approves of in advance. You need to be an absolute open book to your BH�no secrets�tell him the full truth about the affair and allow him to check up on you any time he wants (he must have your cell-phone records, passwords, and knowledge of your whereabouts at all times). Don�t whine about this�he has no earthly reason to trust you and you made it that way.

3. I gather your affair is largely secret other than from your BH. Affairs and their emotions thrive on secrecy. Others (daughter, family, friends, OM�s wife) need to be informed if they haven�t been yet. It is much harder to fall back into an affair that has been fully �out-ed�.

4. You really need to re-direct your empathy, attention, and devotion BACK TOWARDS YOUR HUSBAND. I heard more expressions of regret �for the pain (you) caused� about your OM than I did about your husband! Sorry, but your OM is a cheater and a betrayer, no matter how positively you try to portray him, and he is not your problem. FOCUS ON YOUR FAMILY AND REBUILDING YOUR CHARACTER. You are dangerously close to throwing that away!

5. I would STRONGLY suggest, since your BH is willing to recover and reconcile, that you contact & counsel with the Harleys together immediately!

You asked: �Is there anything that helps this situation, helps the pain? Is there anyone who can give me advice on how to feel any non-pain emotion?� This is a common predicament that WSs/fWSs find themselves in�they are discouraged because their feelings aren�t where they would prefer them to be. In other words, WSs feel hopeless about their marriage and pine away for their affair because they have positive emotion towards the affair-partner and negative (or at least far less positive) emotion towards their BS. The WS constantly wonders and asks: �how can I feel better/differently?� The answer is deceptively simple and is often dismissed and scoffed at by WSs.

ACTIONS PRECEDE FEELINGS. FEELING FOLLOW FROM ACTIONS. POSITIVE ACTIONS & ATTITUDES LEAD TO POSITIVE FEELINGS AND NEGATIVE ACTIONS & ATTITUDES LEAD TO NEGATIVE FEELINGS.

Start DOING better and you will start to FEEL better; start showing love to your BH and you will start to feel it.

or wife...

Levity aside, this is exactly right. He is NOT a GOOD man just as you aren't a GOOD woman. You can be, but you've got lots of work to do.

Thanks for being honest about your emotions. You are going to get pounded on here for some of them. That's OK. That might make you mad, but if you listen, it might start making you better.

Butterfly, I got into an affair with a married woman, and almost ruined a pretty darned good marriage (mine) in the process, and did help ruin the othe woman's marriage. So I understand a lot of where you are right now. And, almost 16 months out, I think I understand a lot about what it takes to get back on track toward becoming a person of integrity. You have a LONG, long way to go. I'll have more to say in the days ahead, but you'd better listen up:
No, you don't. Horning in on someone else's marriage is not a sign of any sort of love. You became infatuated with this man. Not today or this week or necessarily this month, but in time, you'll realize that.
Good. There is some hope for you.
You are way, way too worried about your other man. He was a grownup who made his own choices (which happened to be dishonest, lousy ones, just like yours.) You owe your worry & regret to your husband & your family alone.
You're emotional because you're still in throes of an addiction. You can read about it: The infatuation of an affair has exactly the same brain-chemistry impact as crack cocaine. You need to break this addiction, which requires that there be absolutely no contact between you & the other man in any way, shape or form.
Yes, you should be grateful. Your husband, whom you swore to protect, has just witnessed you tear his heart out and stomp on it... and he has picked it up and placed it back into your hands. You accepted his ring for a reason, and you need to step back from YOUR self-pity-party to put yourself in his shoes and think of HIS feelings right now. That will be huge in determining how far you succeed at saving your marriage.
Order the book "Surviving an Affair" immediately. The marriage counselor that my wife & I went to put us onto this book, and it may have saved our marriage. You and your husband should start reading it. Read it, and you'll start to understand some things about what got you here, and about what you must each do in order to begin recovering your marriage.

I'm sorry I didn't find this place until over 7 months after my affair ended, and my early posts even then were lost due to a server glitch, so I can't show you the evolution of my thoughts. In the immediate aftermath of my affair, some of them weren't unlike yours, although some of them were very different. Either way, buckle up, because you have a chance to start learning some real truths about relationships & what it takes to save, sustain and improve a marriage, or a chance to learn nothing & blow the opportunity.

Things for you to do or start doing ASAP:
--Order the book I mentioned, and read it.
--Ask questions here, and brace yourself for some of the advice you need to hear.
--Establish & maintain "no contact" no matter what it takes.
--Expose to the other man's wife.
--Tell your husband everything he asks, honestly, without trying to "protect" his feelings by continuing to withold information (the same as lying).

Meh...funny how this is ALWAYS the case...all APs (Affair Partners) spew cr*p like this but then turn a blind eye when confronted with the fact that if YOU were lying, doesn't it make perfect, absolute sense that the OM was lying to you as well? Your relationsh*t with him was all fantasy. You just admitted that you LIED to him about wanting to marry him...guess what? He did the same to you.

I agree, quit romanticizing this filthy A...it was disgusting, not just for the fact that you were sleeping with two men but because of the immense pain you have delivered upon two families. You just dropped a nuclear bomb on two innocent families and you are "missing" OM, someone who helped you emotionally rape your H? Do you see the disconnect here?

You MISS the OM, even if just for a "friend"??? He stabbed your H and daughter in the back, did the same thing to his own family, used you for sex and to get his EN for admiration met, and you still want to be "friends" with him?!?! Good lord, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

The first thing you need to do is go complete NC with the OM ~ once that is done you will begin to see how truly disgusting this A was and you will be over the pain of "missing" him. That's your first step.

And NEVER EVER EVER tell your H you "miss" the OM. I am pretty sure we'd be divorced right now if my FWH ever said that to me. You will be glad you held your tongue in a few weeks/months when you defog.

Lots of help available here if you want it...please send your BH here, he is going to need support.

Who knows anymore, it's 2010.

Ended two weeks ago today. It ended when discovered and confessed. Last contact a week ago yesterday so this is all still very new. We have sent a NC letter and I am committed to no contact, but it makes sense that this is a "withdrawal" of sorts.


We have sent a no contact letter and I am committed to standing behind that and having no contact. I have provided full access to anything he wants and I call him anytime I go somewhere - where am I, where am I going, what am I doing. If he wants or needs a tracking device, anything, I have told him that I am open to that. Whatever it takes, I am want him to have it. I absolutely understand that and I don't expect any trust.


There are some circumstances that I am not allowed to share which mean that I can't share this with daughter. However, OM's wife knows as do his parents who live in the area and my aunt. It is "out-ed" as far as people who would know the two of us and our families.


I understand and I am working on that. I do regret deeply what I have done to my husband and I meant for that to come across in my post but it didn't. I am focusing my actions on my husband but I'm struggling through the immediate emotions.


Thank you for the comments and advice. My aunt also gave me the suggestion to show with my actions that I'm DOING the positive things, and my feelings will follow. It is just very difficult, and I have no right to complain but I'm trying to do it quickly so that I can help the marriage more.

Thank you LG for acknowledging the pain. I will continue to spend the time with BH and will maintain the NC with OM.

Thank you Say

No contact anymore.


I think what I am missing is the friendship we had before the affair. I understand that he wasn't a great guy or even a good one if he was involved in an affair with me. I needed to be reminded of that. Thank you.

The friendship you had "before" the affair is what led to the full-blown affair. You need to realize that you should only have that kind of friendship with your husband, otherwise you'll find yourself in this exact same situation again. The whole pretext of the friendship was that OM wanted to sleep with you. If you were unattractive to OM, he wouldn't have been your friend.

I am here to listen, and I know I'll get pounded on...which I deserve.


I know I have a long way to go, and I'm just starting.


Understood. Thank you for the reminder.


That sounded harsh when I read it, but I understand. I believe the best advice I get here will be hard to read. My husband is hurt and betrayed but I honestly believe he is a saint for even being willing to give this a chance.


I intend to learn and I am not going to swear I won't make mistakes along the way. But with help, hopefully I will make fewer. I want to learn and grow - as painful as that process is.


Thank you. Already exposed to the other man's wife. No contact is established and I will honor that. My husband is getting all his answers honestly from me.

GloveOil - Your response was heartfelt and genuine and much appreciated.

I'm not sure he lied to me too. But whether he did or didn't, it doesn't make him a good person.


I understand.


I would appreciate more opinions on this. When I'm depressed about this whole situation, should I be honest with my husband and tell him why or keep that to myself. I want him to know everything, and know when I really honestly get over that. I want him to know he can trust me to tell him my honest feelings - about us and our relationship. Should I keep those to myself?

I hadn't thought of it that way.



Not sure I'm in agreement, or better phrased, I'm not sure I am ready to admit that YET if it is true.

Butterfly10,

Welcome to MB. I'm gonna keep myself from saying more because what I wanted to write wasn't quite nice and it feels like you really regret A.

Please keep posting, you will find wonderful advice, just like what you have already been given.