THEN YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE CHEATED.



Your choice, your actions is the cause - their knowledge will protect THEM from repeating your sins, or being victim to the same sin from their own spouses in the future.

Dr. H suggests kids know about the affair. Kids as young as seven should be told. You are held accountable when people know about the affair.

Shame is part of it and only you can deal with how you heal from the shame. Reading your husband's journal isn't kind or considerate. Do you not have any self control?

The mere fact you want to keep secrets is scary and dangerous to your husband. He has ever right to question your authenticity because you are suggesting he lie by withholding the truth.

That is very serious, and you need to look into yourself to figure out why you want to lie.

Lying is never an option, and you must go forward with full Open and Honesty.

I had an affair.
I lied to you.
I have poor boundaries.
I want people to know.
I am accountable.
I am responsible.
I created this mess.

Go forth and be honest!!!

Additionally, THIS IS A LIE. You want to protect yourself from shame, not them from pain.

I don't think you were really thinking about how these statements would make your husband feel. I think it shows a real lack of empathy to take one's own pain and compare it to someone else's and tell that other person that you hurt worse than them. I think it would help your marriage a lot for you to learn to speak with more empathy and caring for your husband. Marriage is a relationship of extraordinary mutual care. If you are not going to care for each other in everything you say, it's not going to be a very good marriage.

That might really be a waste of time. You could spend years trying to figure that out while your family hurts and your marriage doesn't recover.


Infidelity is an extremely hurtful thing to do to someone. I suggest that you turn your life around and focus on making amends to the people you have injured and being caring toward them in the future, rather than overanalyzing your own reactions to your own hurtful choices.

Upsidedown,


What you are trying to do is get your husband to heal YOU.

Because.....


you do not want to work.



It is hard to heal him.


You do not want to work on healing him.


So you tell him about your pain, and want him to see that you are hurting.

Because the history between the two of you is that he will rescue you.

And that is very familiar, very comfortable, and very nice

for YOU.


However, this time around, it will not be very successful long term for the marriage. You must do the heavy lifting this time around.

Because this time around, you have some pain, because you did something that hurt everyone around you.

And you are feeling the pain called "shame, guilt, and remorse".


Trust me, that is nothing compared to the pain of "betrayal".


Your job is to put your pain on the back burner - because the only antidote to your pain is to pull up your big-girl panties


and go to work healing the pain you inflicted on your husband.


If you want your pain to go away, then start healing HIS. And that will cure your own.



He has no sympathy for your pain right now. As it should be.


SB

I am also afraid to talk to him a lot of the time. I am afraid I will put my foot in my mouth or afraid that what I say will unknowingly offend him. I am also afraid that something I say will set offa trigger for him and he will be upset. He has a really good way with words and can shut me down very quickly when he wants to which makes it hard to talk to him. This scares me a lot because I know one of the big reasons I turned to my affair partner was because I didn't feel like I could talk to my husband. My en of conversation wasn't being met. I am depressed and scared that I still feel this way.

Well you are just going to have to get over it. Until you learn to be completely transparent (open and honest) about your feelings, thoughts, past, etc, how can your BH belive anything you say? As long as you keep some things to yourself, what else could you be hiding?

Yes, he is angry with you and may shut you down. He does not feel safe talking to you because of your affair. That trust is gone. And if you did have communication problems before this may make it worse.

BUT it is no excuse to blame your affair on any of his actions. It was because you did not protect yourself, your marriage or your husband. You had weak boundaries, did not have precautions in place to prevent an affair. True, there may have been problems in your marriage pre-affair and EN's were not being met. But that does not under any circumstance shift any blame over to your BH. You alone decided it was okay to have your needs be met outside of the marriage. Your husband may have unmet needs but he did not step outside of the marriage. He most likely has unmet needs now and has not stepped outside of the marriage.

Until you see that and take 100% full responsibility for your affair, you cannot help heal your husband and work towards recovery. Granted if he does choose to divorce you, he has every right. You gave him that right. And again I am not trying to be harsh. I am a WW whose spouse wants a divorce.

Your husband doesn't think your remorseful. If you drop as many excuses to him as you have here, no wonder he doesn't think your remorseful. Every other sentence is you trotting something out to justify your affair. Wake up.

**edit**


moderators note: stick to Marriage Builders or please refrain from posting, thank you.

Reported to mods .

Wow, two posts in and already you're looking to take over Dr. Harley's work.

Do you even know anything about his work, or this site?

Upsidedown,

You cannot worry about what your husband will do or say.

You must figure out, first and foremost, that you control one person in the marriage:


yourself.


You are still very worried about how YOU feel.



That will keep you stuck right where you are.


Today, order a book, and as soon as you get it, take the time to read it and understand how it applies to your affair:

"Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box" by The Arbinger Institute.



This book will show you exactly when you are going off track, and help you to stop doing it. You are consistently missing the point, that the difficulties in your relationship with your husband are the result of things under


YOUR PERSONAL CONTROL.


You have the complete and total ability to change the dynamics of your relationship with your husband, and actually, with every person on the face of the planet.


The problem is that you continue to choose to make the exact wrong decision when presented with the choice at the critical juncture.


You choose to serve yourself.


Each and every time, you choose your self-serving needs, and fail to understand that "your issues" would be nearly wiped off the planet were you to choose to serve what would result in meeting the needs of the other person instead.


You are currently blind to this.


Read this book, and it will slap you right upside the head, and maybe at least you won't be so upsidedown......and we could make some progress here.



SB

And it's cheap to. I found a used copy for 1.88 online. Paid 5 bucks and change with shipping. It is a must read for folks who have problems with the truth.

CV

Ok. Thank you. I will order right away. I am having a really bad night- having a tough time- I have locked myself in the bathroom and brought a pillow because I don't I am up for coming out....
I was at lunch with my husband today and I told him some things that he hadn't heard before and he is upset about them. The issue is that I thought I had told him everything about OM and our affair, but today he asked me if he had ever been in my car. I responded yes, because he had been and I did not want to lie to him about it. Previously, I had not thought of the car as a "place" when he asked where we had been together. I did not think of it because we had never been sexual in either of our cars - they were just a mode for transportation. Twice I dropped OM off at places and I did not mention this simply because I did not think of it as a "place" when he asked me where we had been together. He got very upset when I told him this and told me I had lied to him again. The truth is this did not cross my mind to say, especially since it wasn't sexual.

We were supposed to go out tonight to hang out together- but now he says he isn't up for it...

Your husband has just been slammed with another devastating blow and has been put back to Day 1 of recovery. I would strongly advise that you get out of the bathroom, stop thinking about yourself, and go tend to his wounds. He is having a much worse night than YOU, and he did not volunteer for this. You did. You should be rendering aide to him tonight, not ignoring him.

I would also offer up any more information that has been withheld from him so you can get this all over with and move forward. As you can see, anything that is withheld will eventually be sniffed out. He has a right to know everything about your affair. Offering to come completely CLEAN and answering all his questions fully and completely will go a long way. Better yet, go tell him a story . Tell him the story of your affair with times, dates, places, so there are no more surprises. That is the most compassionate thing you do for him.

This is going to be tough, but you are going to have to set aside your own feelings until your H gets to a place he can begin to handle them on his own..

This is an interesting question in general. You are going to have to write down and disclose the most mundane things you can think of. Ever lend the OM 5 bucks for gas? It's a trigger. Ever give him an ink pen? trigger.

Things that seem the most insignificant are HUGE things now. He will wonder how you looked at the OM, how you brushed against him... What you thought about as you lay next to your H at night, what you thought about cooking dinner.

Write down everything you can think of. Have him write down everything he can think of.

Then both of you sit down and talk. about all of it.be proactive. YOu want to get as much as possible on the table in one sitting. Now you should put your pillow back in your bedroom, and never sleep apart from him again.

All. I just want to says thanks for being so supportive of me and my marriage. It means a lot to be able to turn here for advice.

Last night turned around. We ended up talking after I came out of the bathroom and going out to hang out and had a very nice time out. I had so much fun dancing and snuggling with him and it felt so perfect and right.

However, today I had a class I had to attend. During the mid morning break, I was texting with my husband, so I took the cell phone with me to the bathroom. I placed it on the toilet paper roll holder and it slid in to the toilet and promptly stopped working. I went back to my seat and emailed him what happened and then googled ideas for how to recover the phone. I did not get an email response from him, so I went home at lunch and then called him from the home phone and left him a message telling him what happened and to call me at home.

Well, he came home and found me outside watering the flowers. He said "what's up?!". I asked him if he got my message, he said he did. I said well, I dropped my phone in the toilet like the message said. He went inside and grabbed my phone, which I had put inside a bag of dry rice like the website suggestions had suggested and said "it doesn't seem wet! I think you are lying!". Well, of course it wasn't still wet, I had spent the last hour of class trying to shake it dry to no avail. He walked out the door, and I told him I emailed him as soon as it stopped working, which I had. He just said " I'll take a look at that but I don't believe you.". Well, I now have a phone that doesn't work and a husband who doesn't believe me...

I don't know what to do. It is true I really am that dumb that I took my phone with me in the stall and it dropped in the damn toilet... He says he was trying to get ahold of me. So, I guess he assumes that I am lying because I didn't want to talk to him. This isn't true. What shoud I do?

Update: he now acknowledges that I must have dropped my phone in the toilet, but is upset because I did not borrow someone's phone to call him. I did not think to borrow someone's phone, my first thought was to use my laptop to send him an email that my phone was shot. He says I violated my commitment to let him know where I am by not borrowing a phone to call him and tell him I was going home for lunch instead of emailing him.

I feel so emotionally drained. Maybe I should have thought to borrow a phone, but it honestly did not occur to me.

He is having a very strong emotional response to a trigger. That's normal. Triggers are particularly rough to handle this early in the process. Your job is to love him through them, not talk him out of them.