thanks a million, scotland--i'm one of those people who can grasp minute subtleties and overlook the big picture entirely. i just found this site like 2 weeks ago, wayyy after ending my affair, so H and i didn't have the benefit of any plan at all during our "rebuilding effort", let alone a solid MB perspective.

makes sense now...after all, when there's an externally imposed ultimatum in play, especially during an inherently foggy state, WS could grudgingly agree to stay (to which i would say, if i were a BS, "don't do me any favors, Fogmeister") and then spend the rest of their respective lives sulking and feeling rebellious and entitled.

personally, i used Plan Grovel, and Plan Kiss-A55 Compulsively, and Plan Go-Through-The-Motions.

if i hadn't found MB, we would still be living in a wary, tense state of truce. thanks again, Scotty!

let me preface: my husband has no details re my affair, and that's the way he wants it. it occurred to me that there are LOTS of happy things in my life that i had learned to associate w/ OM--after reading Musings from Mark and Managing Memories, i've realized that i need to take a lot of that stuff back. these are things i enjoyed with my husband BEFORE the affair, mind you--anything that i associate only with OM, i'm just dismissing altogether.

here's what i'm taking back ans will forever forward associate with my HUSBAND:
The Doors. The Cars. The Clash. The Ramones.
Boats, and everything associated with them: fiberglass, epoxy resin, sunscreen, panama hats, Sperry Topsiders.
Microbrews.
Chocolate labs.
Surfing.
Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood movies.
Architectural Digest.
Ken Kesey.
Kissing.
Chess.
Pranks.

Things I will forever view in a negative light and will not miss at all because they're strictly OM's territory:
Tommy Bahama cologne (no great loss there anyway.)
excessive, high-school-girl grade vanity and high-maintenance grooming rituals in men. ewww.
pretentious affectations like saying "entree" when you mean "dinner."
name-dropping.
bragging to make up for your shortcomings.

here's my thinking: i can't make OM the bad guy in my mind, because that would make me less responsible for my affair. what i CAN do is associate him with everything i find tacky, cheap, and pitiable. it's a start.

RN,

I said I would reply to you here, so here I am...

I don't know if putting together a list is the way to go about this or not, but it might work for you.

The whole idea with the emotional memory management thing is that we can't control what we feel but we can control what we think. So whenever we begin to think about something that will lead us to a place where we know the emotions will not be the best for us then we have the ability to actively decide to think about something else entirely.

I'm assuming your goal in this is to remove the good memories related to OM and that I think is a laudable exercise, I'm just not certain that it can be pulled off by itself without some active re-association of memories with your husband and this might require his participation.

You see, it was such an exercise you likely used at the beginning of your affair. You probably compared the good things you could think of about OM (many of them actually purely fanciful and concocted by your own mind) against all the negative thoughts about your husband. It was of course an unfair comparison in which you focused on all the good feelings associated with OM while digging into the real life everyday problems that come with being in a marriage for a while in order to identify and enumerate the negative responses you had to various incidents with your husband.

When we are dating or having any kind of relationship with someone that is temporary or intermittent we have an easy time keeping the Love Bank balance going in an upward direction. It is easy to do because we are only with each other when at our best and when we are enjoying ourselves the most.

But once we settle into a daily, hour by hour, marriage or committed relationship we begin to spend all of our time together and that means that we have many more opportunities to have negative emotional responses when we are together. These negative emotional responses don't even have to be caused by our spouse for them to take a toll on their balance in our Love Bank. This is why failing to meet ENs becomes a serious problem in a long term relationship. If we are with each other when we have enough negative emotional responses then we begin to lose love units and before long we have fallen out of love.

In your affair, you probably only had limited time with OM, again assuming this without actually reading every post you have made here. So the time you spent together was probably just about all enjoyable to you. This is going to make it very difficult to remove the positive memories because any positive memory actually reinforces the emotional content of those memories.

Now if you can find enough negative things to associate with OM and thus lose enough emotional content that is positive, replacing it with negative, then things you associate with OM might begin to take on negative emotional characteristics as well, but unless OM is a negative memory in and of himself, or unless you can actually turn him into someone you pretty much loath, anything you associate with him will still be positive and thus make it more difficult for you to break the cycle of triggering into positive emotional responses to thoughts of OM or the things that surround him in your mind.

Ultimately you need to have no emotional response to him at all, but anything that was a good memory from your time with him will only become a less favorable response if you can replace the feelings with something negative that is as strongly related to OM and his memory.

At the same time, begin to shift any positive feelings to thoughts of your husband. So if you find yourself having a good emotional response you should find a way to associate that feeling with your husband. Eventually those things that trigger good emotions will begin to be associated with him naturally but you also need to make OM begin to hold nothing good in the way of emotional responses. So when triggered to a good memory, never allow yourself to think of OM in any way and in fact the more negative things you can associate with him the less likely you are to find yourself missing him or thinking of him fondly.

At least I think that's the deal in theory; your mileage may vary...

Mark

i love Sperry's. They are just so expensive. They also dont dry out very well so they start to smell.


I know on the Wayward mind thread alot of responses say its easier to get through withdrawal if you the A ended on a bad note.

I dont know if you can produce that feeling artificially after the fact or if even thinking about it is counter productive. I think maybe its just a time thing. I think now that your DH is on the MB train its going to be alot easier.

Triggers are so weird and subjective--after the A, certain things were so inextricably linked in my mind to OM that i couldn't feel negative towards HIM w/out feeling negative towards everything i associated w/ him. and i HAD to learn to hate him before i could forget him altogether.

instead of getting all wistful and misty-eyed when confronted w/ these triggers, i would get furious--but that's SILLY.
"Stupid Sperry Topsiders! people who wear them are JERKS! YAHHHH!"
"You're a TEASE, Sharona! I'm NEVER gonna give you some tiiiime, Sharona!"
"Hey mister--your dog SUCKS!"
"Chess is for DUMMIES!"
See how silly?

ok, so it worked. i no longer miss OM or think about him, he's a non-entity. but i realized that unless i'm prepared to go through life being angry at the things i used to enjoy, i need to take 'em back. why should adultery get to have a theme song? "These deck shoes brought to you by Sperry, official sponsors of adultery." by allowing certain things to trigger ANY emotional reaction, that's kind of like taking them from me and H and giving them to OM. Screw that. He doesn't get to keep any of the fun stuff.

DONE!!

I know on the Wayward mind thread alot of responses say its easier to get through withdrawal if you the A ended on a bad note.

I dont know if you can produce that feeling artificially after the fact or if even thinking about it is counter productive. I think maybe its just a time thing. I think now that your DH is on the MB train its going to be alot easier. [/quote]

true that, YEG. i don't need to hate OM because that would require thinking about him. i need to hate ADULTERY in general.

i was reading Dr. H's article on recreational companionship, about how important it is for couples to spend time together when they're happiest, and i'm applying it avidly.

Thank you, Mark, for your excellent clarification. i should have specified, what i'm doing is turning negative subjective triggers that were strongly linked w/ OM (that's why they're negative) into neutral objects linked w/ no one. so that i can ALLOW them to become mine and my H's again, w/ no residual memories or emotions except the new, fun associations my H and i attach to them.

like i said to YEG above, why should adultery get a theme song?

I hear a touch of professor or lecturer in your written tone. I won't speculate, but i certainly hope i'm right. we're fortunate to have you on this forum. thanks again.

RN,

I'm just a radio and cell phone salesman and service tech and a long time Sunday school teacher...

And a guy who knows this stuff works because I used it to save my own marriage.

I read a bit, too.

Mark

you know, i read your troubleshooting guide--in fact i printed it out in case H cared to take a look--and i always assumed the repair vs. replacement bit and the references to the client, etc, were part of a really determined analogy. i'm often great w/ nuance and oblivious to stuff that's spelled out. although, to my credit, tech writer was my third guess re profession.

also--it's pretty evident that you "read a bit." me too. Huxley's good w/ laymans' breakdowns of mastering one's memories and altering them to suit one's purpose, and "Toscanini's Fumble" (forget who wrote it) is KILLER re the mind in general.

thanks again. promise i'll get MB-relevant on next post. =)

OK, everyone, i've been away for a few days--when things are going well, i tend to just enjoy it and don't feel compelled to post about it. it's the stuff i worry about that i tend to put in writing.

update--awesome father's day; i let my girls raid my fancy-stuff stash (i did a brief stint as a jeweler, so my fancy stuff ROCKS) and they glued all kinds of chains and crystals and sparkly stuff all over their cards--the cards weighed about 2 pounds each. 7-year-old's featured daddy horses w/ their colts, 4-year-old's featured daddy lions w/ their cubs. heart-rending, dude. i let them do their thing--he's THEIR daddy, after all, so everything is very sentimental and endearingly misspelled and very much from the heart. our finances have always been feast-or-famine and right now we're in famine mode--this too will pass--but we made him a flippin' ENORMOUS basket full of little fun stuff. i made him a really silly sculpture of a smiling golden whale. would i have liked to get him an e-book-reader instead? you bet. and when the opportunity presents itself, i shall.

at any rate, things have been good in general--we're still technically in an amicable state of truce, but it's more amicable than usual, let's say. we're a little less civil and a little more truly friendly. even flirty, sometimes.

H is NOT on board w/ MB as i had originally implied. he was curious, that's all. making sure i wasn't joining something stupid. (recall my post re W.H.I.N.E.R.S.? that's his opinion of programs. i deleted my post re MCs because it was so amgry it was borderline blame-shifting. suffice it to say, he doesn't trust MCs.) He still has a lot of stuff to deal w/ re MCs and programs and whatnot, so i'm trying to be put the principles in action reallllly obliquely so he doesn't get a programmy-type vibe.

what's the reverse of Plan A? is there an MB plan for winning back the betrayed spouse? actually, no, that's not really accurate--neither of us is going anywhere. it's not so much about winning-back as it is about winning, PERIOD. divorce is nowhere in sight. i think H feels pretty much the same towards me as pre-affair, w/ some lapses, of course--but i think we can do a heck of a lot better. we're basically courting again, and i want to do it right this time.

I know BSs are advised to forgo all relationship talk during Plan A...how does that apply to WSs? when can we discuss our marriage w/out it being perceived as a judgement on H's track-record up til now and a demand for change?

I AM AFRAID TO MAKE H TALK ABOUT THIS. are there any ACTIONS i can undertake that will effect the same changes? not trying to use covert mind-control, here, but i can tell you for a STONE FACT that discussion of how we can make our marraige better is going to be read by H as criticism, and it's going to incite righteous indignation, and it's going to end in tears.

First your not in Plan A. Thats a limited time situation for the BS to meet all the needs the WS will allow them to leave a positive impresion going into a PB situation. So it doesnt apply here.

Your in recovery. Its the hard part. PA is easy if you dont have expectations. Recovery isnt from what id imagine.

Problem is that BS get to drive the recovery bus. You lost that right. you can suggest ideas to him but you move at his pace when he is ready. You cant force him just like BS cant force a WS to become a BUYER in the relationship.

Id tell him what needs he isnt meeting and give him a way to meet those needs. Say I like it when you do XXX.

Your biggest ally here is time. You have only been doing this a comparably short time. Just meet whatever needs he allows you and offer the ones he wont. Let this sink in for a few months and reaccess where you are. Recovery is a long process.

Time is your friend. Do your best at taking care of him. See what he does and revise the plan.

new slogan: forget diamonds, "recovery is forever." well, let me be fair, 2 years is hardly forever.

it would be easier if he were running the show. i'm still in that mindset where i don't feel like i'll ever be able to ask for anything again. still doing a bit of tip-toeing and a55-kissing, as is totally warranted.

Time is our friend, though--i had to read your post twice to get that, and that's the bottom line. time is our friend, there's no deadline. we're not in dire straits. we're headed in the right direction--things can only get better. i can break it down day by day.

time is our friend. i like that.[i][/i]

Remains,

Instead of talking about the relationship, take to the third person. Talk about marriage in general, how he sees things, use articles in the papers, and you can always ask for his help in understanding something. Us guys love to solve problems and help a Damsal in distress.

You are correct that you don't want his defenses coming up, but there are many ways to speak with him without it sounding like you are being critical. You do need to be talking with him, but sometimes talk in the abstract, sometimes us other peoples stories, and sometimes just tell him how you feel.

You need to get over this idea that because you are a WS actually you are sounding more and more like a former wayward Wife, FWW, that you cannot ask things of him or speak your mind with him. You are the one that is going be married to him and that means you BOTH need to be happy.

Please think about this.

God Bless,

JL

Thank you, JL! I didn't reply to either of your recent posts, the one re gifts or the one on my sex-after-the-affair thread--you always give me a lot to think about, and little to argue with. your posts deserve a better reply than a simple "amen to that!" but truly, that about sums it up.

you're absolutely right about making it abstract--we have really, really good discussions and friendly debates about politics, work situations, stuff like that. we're both problem-solvers, strategizers, and FIXERS. and on the converse, we've both always been really shy and awkward discussing our own situation.

here's where we are right now:

ok, so i've been on top of my game re meeting his ENs now that i know what they really are, and it's FUN to see it work...it's nice to feel not just adequate but appreciated. to not just feel that i probably measure up to other wives in general, but to KNOW that i'm being the best possible wife for my husband. he doesn't have my ENQ, and that's fine, no hurry--because as his attitude changes and he gets happier and more relaxed, he's more open, it's no big deal to say, "hey, want to come hang out on the patio and talk about random nonsense after the girls are in bed?" (conversation's a big thing for me.) and trusting that my husband loves me makes it less scary to disagree or ask for things. and of course, it's easier to ask for a one-time favor than a behavioral overhaul.

the hard part is going to be LB stuff. we'll get there.

thanks again, JL!

i need to change the name of this post. right now it might as well be, "Cue Violins for Sad Adulteress". anyone know how to change the title? I'm thinking something more perky. Fewer violins.

edited

Hey RN, I hate to tell you, but you and your H are very well part of two different generations.

Are you familiar with the theories in the book The Fourth Turning? Strauss and Howe discuss how people born during certain time periods are part of distinct generations, with common attitudes and behaviors. Your H would fall under the "13th Generation" in their reckoning, more commonly known as Gen X, while you would be what they consider a "Millenial", although you fall under the transition period for their societal shift (1984).

Quite frankly, between attitudes and family situations, my DW and I have a similar break, with me as a "Boomer" (1959) and her as a "13th" (1961) -- and our age difference is only 19 months!

We also have other major differences. I would characterize myself as an academic-type, while she is street-smart and practical. On many things, I have trouble finding my butt with both hands, a map, and a flashlight. Without her, I would be in real trouble in the real world. But I have other strengths that compliment the things she's not so good at, so we match up well. But like your H, I have a tendency to lecture. That doesn't go over very well, to put it mildly. I have to temper my tendencies to do that. You may want to let him know that his style isn't working very well for you. I mean, you should be getting class credit for listening to him spiel, right?

As for the thinking out loud, join the club. That's me, all the way. Sometimes you say things that, when you hear them you say "That's utter crap. No, that's NOT what I think." If your spouse doesn't understand that's how you process things, that can lead to all sorts of what the website Fark describes as "hilarity ensues." (That goes double for work when you're reasoning things out around your boss. Trust me on this one.)

i actually find his lecturing habit sort of endearing. even if it's stuff i already know, he gets so earnest and intense that i enjoy seeing him in action. i could listen to him lecture on FACTS all day.

what i DON'T enjoy--in fact, what i dislike so intensely that i had to delete my previous post re disrespectful judgements (edit reason: blind fury, dishonorable ranting)--what i DON'T enjoy is being lectured about my own subjective goals, hopes, dreams, expectations, wants, etc. and having it explained to me in great detail why i'm so sadly deluded for hoping, dreaming, wanting, et cetera.

i can counter condescension on an academic level. i can't stand having H pointedly condescend to me when we're talking about what we want from each other and from our marriage. it would be so easy to flip the script and dismiss his desire for, say, domestic support: "well, of course you would feel like that's a valid emotional need, honey. given your upbringing, and all. but it isn't, and here's why:" but i DON'T. I CLEAN THE GOSHDARNED HOUSE BECAUSE IT'S IMPORTANT TO HIM. how do i know it's important to him? because he told me so. do i punch holes in his request and try to find reasons why it's not really important to him and he just thinks it is? no. because it would be patronizing, dismissive, and it would prove me unworthy of his confidence.

my primary worry here? my greatest need is for admiration--as far as feeling respected, appreciated, and VALUED. logic tells us that if one needs to feel admired, one should just be more admirable. ouch.

H has dismissed POJA as absurd and unworkable.

he says we don't have 15 hours a week to spare for UA.

he says my need for admiration is already being more than adequately fulfilled: doesn't he make a point of telling me when the house looks nice, or that dinner's great? well, yes, he does. i've always thought of that as a courtesy--it's COURTEOUS to acknowledge someone when they do something that pleases you. it doesn't make me feel valued, it makes me feel acknowledged. but like i said in my previous post...i guess i just need to be more admirable.

guys...i still feel horribly, dangerously, selfishly, irrationally entitled. does it show? on the pro side, my newfound hatred of adultery and my strict boundaries means that i'm certainly never going to cheat again, ever.

i'm just having a really hard time feeling good about my husband right now.

test

Okay, I am sorry but I forget. When was DDay for your BH? Is he willing to talk to the coaching center or to read any of the material? Does he WANT to recover the marriage?