I just don't see how exposing OM/OMs side damages your W or chances of recovery.

I don't understand how, if you were willing to choose to communicate with the OM directly, why you aren't willing to choose to do what the program advocates with exposure.

Again, best of luck to you.

You could have had a full cover plan to protect your marriage from this affair resuming but you continue to choose your own version.

Full plan involves:

1)Exposure of the WW to friends and family

2)WW has to write NC letter

3) Expose OM to his side

You have only achieved one of 3. Do you really not see or understand how vulnerable your marriage is to a repeat contact and this affair restarting (if it ever really died that is)????

What are your wife's deterrents from contacting the OM if she craved contact???

Don't care if your computer literally burst into flames if you wanted to expose you would have. This debate is getting old and your not getting any closer to recovery.

If your WW makes contact every 4, 5, 10 months it will set her back into this cycle of depression post contact/withdrawal.
You want to live like this that's our choice or you can get some things in place to make sure that the OM will not contact your WW ever again..

Ps how do you know a friend of the OM told him not to get involved with your wife?? After all you have been through are you still naive enough to believe anything that a WW or OM says??? Or even worse are you in contact with someone who is friends with the OM??

or you can get some things in place to make sure that the OM will not contact your WW ever again..
Falcon,

NB28 is spot on, and it's called exposure.

Why you are failing to do this is beyond me, and I hope you will reconsider.

Falcon seriously!! Cut it out!!

You exposing him and doing your best to sever their "bond" resets things between you and your WW but him contacting her whenever he feels like it without consequences won't damage your recovery one bit.
You making that statement is exactly why your credibility has been questioned. Steve would NEVER say that.

And I'm not trying to twist the knife in but can you explain please what "progress" are you talking about?? She's still heavy in fog, angry with you about exposure and won't get on board with a recovery plan. This is NOT progress.

Ok, it's clear to me that people here seem to think I am lying about what Steve said to me. Some of what I have said is my supposition on what he asked me and stated too me, as I've clearly stated. Why should I ignore what Steve directly told me to do?

By the way, the OM wrote back telling me I'm starting to irritate him (wow, haven't wrote him in months) and that he's not communicating with anybody. Busted! We'll see if he stays away.

Look...read SAA. Exposure is not the only way to end an affair. It's just a very effective tool to do so. If I could go back and fully expose when I got all of his information (knowing now that he would have that one more contact), I would have. If it happens again, I will. For now, I will follow Steve's directions on it. And work on improving myself and getting her to educate herself and seeing how she responds.

I repeat the question you evaded

What "progress" are you talking about??? Has your WW agreed to NC letter?? If not why not??
And don't even think about using plan A as an excuse. Plan A is Carrot and STICK. Where is your stick??

And Steve is certainly NOT telling you to leave your marriage wide open to further contact falcon. Exposure and or NC letter are ways to close the door on contact please explain to me why are you so sure contact will never happen again???

Haven't you been down this road before and then you found out about contact in December???

I just don't understand where your getting your certainty from and if your not certain then why on earth won't you do anything to save yourself any further pain and suffering.

I'm not against you here. If I didn't care I wouldn't get this annoyed by you.

Edited to add
Ps: none of the MB coaches has ever referred to exposure as revenge. Exposure is far from that. You might be telling the truth about Steve advising you to hold off exposure but I am certain you are not being truthful when you say he referred to exposure as revenge.

Steve told me yesterday that he couldn't see exposure doing anything right now since the communication has been gone for a month. The progress is that she readily agreed with the premise that Steve had me put forward, and was willing to read HNHN to learn about the MB principles. During my second session, he asked me extensive questions about the responses she had to everything I said. Apparently he has me doing specific things and seeing what kind of mindset she is in. Ultimately, he wants to see if he can get her on the phone with him and do a full assessment and see if she can get through her fog and get to the logical conclusion that trying to get it to work with me is in her best interest.

Look, everyone says Steve is great at getting WW's on board. Should I not listen to his advice? Seriously...I told him everything. I didn't hold back vital information, or even half-a__ed information. I gave him every detail I could remember through an initial email, my first session, a follow up detailed email on how she responded, a second session, follow up email on if he still wanted me to hold off on exposure, followed by a brief call where he told me to hold off and why. Why is it so hard for folks to understand that he may have some dynamic he's working off? I'm only guessing at where he's going based on what he has said to me, but it fits.

Thanks for letting us know this, Dr Falconrap, because this is certainly not what Dr Harley says. I will let Dr Harley know your informed verdict since he says every day on the radio show that it *IS* the most powerful weapon in killing an affair. He says:
See that? Nowhere does he say that it is not the "only way to end an affair." As you can see, YOUR WAY has not worked. You are telling people who are in recovered marriages what works and what doesn't. BUT YOUR OWN METHODS HAVE NOT WORKED FOR YOU.


You are joking, right? If you spent as much time working on recovering your marriage as you do running from exposure and making elaborate and ridiculous excuses, I predict you would be well on your way by now. This has gone on for WEEKS now. WEEKS. Holy crap!!

Go back and count all the posts you have wasted on the subject of avoiding exposure at any and all cost. One would think that you cared more about protecting the affair than you care about your marriage.

Do you think it is smart to lecture people - IN RECOVERED MARRIAGES - about the minimal benefits of exposure? Seriously?

I'm not certain that contact will not occur again, and it has been something I've worried about. As far as what Steve said, I've been 100% accurate. He didn't say that exposure was revenge, just that he understood my need to want to blow his world up, that it there was a desire for revenge on my part. It boils down to this: he wants me to hold onto a full OM exposure in case he does communicate again. He likened to a last big shot of anti-biotics. He said what he said. He's not telling me to leave my marriage wide open. Exposure doesn't guarantee closing that door any more than me sending the OM a nice gift or a harshly worded email does. The OM simply needs to be in the mindset that she ain't worth pursuing and move on. But even then, he could still, 10 years later, try and contact her again, even if I fully exposed. What WILL end the affair is my wife deciding to end it, send NC, block email/phone, change her email/phone, and agreeing to work things out with me, and meaning it (I still have to worry about a false recovery if I even get that far).

In SAA, the affair had Sue was having had to die naturally, as exposure wasn't used (nor mentioned in the version I had). But once she reluctantly saw that her needs weren't being met, she agreed to work on the marriage with John, and they eventually went from disliking each other to having a great marriage. Exposure was never used in their case. Steve told me what to do. I'm doing it because I trust his judgement based on what a lot of people here have said.

The "dynamic" is your own refusal to expose. We know where YOU stand on exposure and Steve is not going to force anyone to do something against his will.

But exposure it's not just about the now. It's about safeguarding the marital recovery against set backs caused by any future contact between a WS and OP.

I agree Steve is great with WS, he guided my WH out of the fog but I wouldn't even be attempting recovery with my WH until he met certain conditions for example the NC letter and reading MB.

HNHN is not the book usually advised for WW as it gives them justification for the A when they are already in self entitled mode. Usually Surviving the Affair is the right book for both spouses.

Falcon, the problem here is not that Steve is slightly veering off the program to help your situation but by the way you have reported his stance on things you are making it come across like Steve is doing many things the wrong way round and I simply don't believe that be would do that.

for example.

1)exposure is never ever referred to as revenge by ANY of the MB staff.
2)surviving the Affair is the book to read at your state never HNHN
3)advising to hold off exposure??
4) advising the BS that exposing could reset recovery

This is all way too strange.

ML

Help me out here because you have been on MB far longer than I have

Would It really be advised for a WW to read HNHN at this stage??

Would anyone on the MB team ever refer to exposure as revenge??

This all sounds like your own foggy reasoning. For example, saying that "exposure does not guarantee closing the door" does not make alot of sense since there ARE NO guarantees. And obviously a "harshly worded" email does not have an impact on the OM whereas, exposure would.



Exposure WAS USED in their affair. As you have noticed, it was not mentioned in that version of SAA because Dr H left it out of the book for legal concerns. He did, however, recommend exposure in his private practice and on the radio show. He is rewriting SAA to add a chapter on exposure.

Dr Harley recommends a WW NOT READ HNHN because of the way infidelity is presented there. He recommends SAA.


Dr Harley says that it is irrelevant if it is for "revenge." He doesn't care about the motive, only that it is done.

Melody, I was not aware of lack of exposure in SAA. I'm not lying on anything I have said here. I had major computer issues after my first session with Steve where he told me to hold off unless she didn't respond favorably to what he wanted me to do. At that point I decided to wait for my next session, where he said hold off unless/until further contact occurred, where he said I would absolutely need to do it.

So Steve is, according to you, giving me a ton of bad advice? He told me to see if she would read HNHN. I'm planning this weekend to see how she responded to the book and if she is willing to read SAA, which I want her to do. Steve knows all of the details, yet what he thought I should do differs from you.

Like I said earlier, exposure was used in this case. But lets say it was not. Are you saying you wish to go the way of Sue and Jon? You want your wife to kick you out of the house so she can resume her affair? Is that what you are saying? Because it sure sounds like it to me.

Your assertion that exposure is just not an important element in saving a marriage has been refuted by Dr Harley in this quote:


He wrote this on the private forum a few years ago:

falcon,

YOU have provided no consequences to the OM for violating NC with your W.

YOU are missing an opportunity to protect YOUR marriage, to man up and protect YOUR W from OMs current or future attempts to break NC.

Why???

I don't understand why, and I believe you're holding on to SH's advice to you to justify it.

However, if you presented yourself to SH as you are to us, it was most likely obvious to SH that he was dealing with a BS reluctant to expose in the first place.

Again, I was in a similar situation once...but when I counseled with SH exposure was already completed. When I told him that, jeez, when W told him that, his response was "Good, that's an effective tool to get you both on the road to recovery. Now, let's talk about withdrawal and a plan for restoring love between you two..."

My W THANKS ME for exposing, because it is an act of standing up for our marriage, protecting HER from someone who violated her and now she saw that I ACTED out of LOVE to remove that evil presence from her life.

No revenge...CARE....PROTECTION.

No, it does not "differ from" me. Everything I have told you is straight from Dr Harley. I think YOUR own desires are what is in conflict here. Someone who is so terrified of exposure will use any excuse to avoid it. We can see that from reading this thread.

Be honest, falconrap. You are absolutely terrified of exposure and do not want to do it. Why not just admit what everyone can see?

How do you know this?

I forget, is OM a friend or relative of yours?

Has he threatened you?

Falcon no one here is questioning Steve's methods or advice stop putting words in our mouths that we did not say and frankly saying things like that damages your credibility

We are concerned because what you are saying Steve is advising you to do does not make MB sense, something is not right and it not likely to be Steve's advice.


The best way I can explain this to you is

Imaging you live in a really rough and crime riddled neighbourhood, your house has been vandalised and broken into several times.

You look out your window one night, you see a very shady looking guy holding a crowbar outside your house.

You call the police and report it but they say they are not going to respond to your call because the shady guy hasn't actually done anything yet and advise you to call back if he actually attempted to brake in and once he has assaulted you.

How frustrated would you feel at that point?? Sometimes you just got to use your past experiences and common sense to make a decision on a situation. Right now I don't get your logic.