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Also Pink, you have convinced yourself that your H was manipulated and taken advantage of by the OW and appear to not be holding him very accountable. He is an adult and his choices and poor boundaries had as much to do with his A than anything the OW did. I know you want to believe your H wouldn't do it if he wasn't tricked or manipulated but that is not true. He did it because he enjoyed it and because he wanted to do it. HE COULD HAVE ENDED IT ANY TIME AND STOPPED IT FROM PROGRESSING AT ANY TIME. Did he?

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Originally Posted by MadMindMonkey
[

**edit**.

No, she is not removing the conditions that made the affair possible since the OW contacted him on facebook and can do it again. Having the passwords does NOTHING to prevent access. Nothing.

I understand the temptation to tell people what they want to hear since it is not your ox getting gored, but telling people to cut corners on very basic affair proofing is a very dangerous practice. This is Dr Harley's board and he wants people to be helped when they come here, not told how to wreck their marriages. If you want to wreck your own marriage, that is your prerogative, but you cannot use his board for your purposes.

Last edited by MBsurvivor; 10/17/13 09:16 AM. Reason: removing quote

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
In my H's needs survey he rated both his need for intimate conversation and his need for honesty and openness as his two LOWEST needs

Pink. I have been getting the sense all along that your WH is not really on board with MB and does not want to change to make a secret second life impossible. redflag



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**edit**

Last edited by MBsurvivor; 10/17/13 09:42 AM. Reason: TOS non MB advice, disruptive

Me: BH, 36 Military Officer
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Alcoholics do not get better by their spouses following them around forcing them not to take a drink, refusing to let them near bars. They get better by becoming intrinsically motivated to not want to take a drink and they make a conscious decision on their own to develop personal responsibility.

If the alcoholic would still drink unless their spouse was forcing them not to (external motivation) they will still drink the second they get enough freedom to have the opportunity.

I think I understand the reasons for EPs but I just don't agree. The cause of my H's affair was not social networking. The cause of the affair was the fact that my H was going through multiple layers of personal tragedy and turned to the wrong therapist to try to sort them out.

That is either what happened or my H may be a very bad man for what he did to his family while seeking escape during a family tragedy.

I think he is a good man. I think he made a mistake for the reasons I have outlined. I want to follow MB but I see the futility of trying to control someone who needs to learn to control himself. I am not sure what this means. I should post it to Dr. H but I am tired of the question now.

(By the way, Reading, I would like to do a polygraph and I do not think he would resist the idea. My H has done literally everything I have proposed, without questioning, though he is prone to dragging his feet for a while. Anyway, we cannot get them here. Next time we're home maybe)


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Originally Posted by pokerface
Originally Posted by pinkstraws
In my H's needs survey he rated both his need for intimate conversation and his need for honesty and openness as his two LOWEST needs

Pink. I have been getting the sense all along that your WH is not really on board with MB and does not want to change to make a secret second life impossible. redflag

Well, possibly now it seems I am also not fully on board too! smile But as for my H, with an ocean now separating him and the OW and with him being the one to make that happen 100% on his own, it does look like he wants a secret second life to be impossible, since it is - at the moment - quite impossible.

He drags his feet. That is true. But he does do everything I've asked in the end, and the feet dragging is less. He would delete fb if I came to the conclusion he needed to.

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The social media was not what started the affair but it aided in the affair progressing and continuing. That is a condition that contributed to the affair. It is a fact and if you choose to ignore it then you do but we are trying to prevent you from a trainwreck. It is up to you to listen, this board will be here when you reailze the mistake.

Secondly, if you want to allow your H to skirt by with zero accountability again, its your decision but its the wrong one. The family tradgedy if I remember correctly happened after he had already engaged in an EA. This was when you believe it became physical (I would only believe if it was verified with a poly) but the A was already ongoing before that. Your H's poor boundaries and allowance of an OS person to meet his needs are what led to the affair, not the tradgedy.

I hope you get your head out of the sand sometime soon because your actions are leading you down those tracks towards the trainwreck. Everybody here is trying to help you, I hope you remember that.

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At this point a physical affair with OW is not possible for the next two hundred and some odd days but his poor boundaries still leave him likely for an A with a new OW. They also leave the door open for him to continue a EA with the OW until you move back to the states.

Dr. Harley has said many times that waywards hold on to the hopes of reigniting the A for years and even decades. It is only natural, he believes the A was a fantasy and he will probably always long for it, whether you believe it or not. The A seems perfect to waywards and that is something hard/almost impossible to let go of.

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Originally Posted by txstunnedman
Also Pink, you have convinced yourself that your H was manipulated and taken advantage of by the OW and appear to not be holding him very accountable. He is an adult and his choices and poor boundaries had as much to do with his A than anything the OW did. I know you want to believe your H wouldn't do it if he wasn't tricked or manipulated but that is not true. He did it because he enjoyed it and because he wanted to do it. HE COULD HAVE ENDED IT ANY TIME AND STOPPED IT FROM PROGRESSING AT ANY TIME. Did he?

He did. He resisted her for a long time. Until what he was coping with became too much and she offered the drug of escape at just the right time. We can say he enjoyed this in the same way we might say I enjoyed sleeping pills in this time, but I didn't enjoy them: they were an escape that helped me not to feel good, but rather to feel slightly closer to normal in a time when that was otherwise not possible. I think my H wanted to feel normal or pretend his life was normal and she plopped that out there and said: Take this drug, I am a professional, you can trust me." and he did.

I am not automatically wrong just because what I discovered when I looked at the evidence and sought to understand was a rouge marriage counselor. It is just what it is. Not a red flag; reality.

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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
Alcoholics do not get better by their spouses following them around forcing them not to take a drink, refusing to let them near bars. They get better by becoming intrinsically motivated to not want to take a drink and they make a conscious decision on their own to develop personal responsibility. , though he is prone to dragging his feet for a while. Anyway, we cannot get them here. Next time we're home maybe)

Alcoholics get better when they stay out of bars and stay away from alcohol. And why do they do that? It is almost always when their spouses/judges/employers hold them accountable.

You don't have the power to FORCE your spouse to do anything, but you do have the power to hold him accountable to uphold the extraordinary precautions that are designed to prevent a repeat affair. If that doesn't happen, Dr. Harley would recommend a separation because your marriage won't make it.

If your spouse won't do these things, then you will know that he is not sincere and that the likely outcome is a repeat affair.

Quote
I think I understand the reasons for EPs but I just don't agree.

You disagree on what basis? Do you know how to recover a marriage from an affair? No, you don't. Your own best thinking has led your marriage to the brink of divorce. You are the fat person who is lecturing the skinny, healthy people on weight loss.

Quote
The cause of my H's affair was not social networking. The cause of the affair was the fact that my H was going through multiple layers of personal tragedy and turned to the wrong therapist to try to sort them out.

The cause of the affair was that your husband was tempted under certain conditions. And unless those conditions are removed, it will happen again. Social networking was the environment that allowed the affair to happen. Unless that changes, you will see more of the same. This is why the environment that made the affair possible must be changed.


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Pinkstraws, I'm not sure what advice others can offer you. There is more than 1 successful recovering alcoholic on this thread and you're arguing with them about alcoholism. You're also using bits and pieces of this program rather than the entire program. In other words, you're again arguing with those that knows what works and what doesn't. When I put my daughters training wheels on her bike, I didn't have to use all the pieces. And, there's a good chance the wheels would have stayed on (it wouldn't have been very stable). But I decided to take the time to use everything to make sure the bike is safe and stable.



Husband (me) 39
Wife 36
Daughter 21
Daughter 19
Son 14
Daughter 10
Son 8 (autistic)

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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
[
Well, possibly now it seems I am also not fully on board too! smile But as for my H, with an ocean now separating him and the OW and with him being the one to make that happen 100% on his own, it does look like he wants a secret second life to be impossible, since it is - at the moment - quite impossible.

But you don't need an ocean when you have the internet! smile That is how many affairs take place.

Quote
He would delete fb if I came to the conclusion he needed to.

Are you really sure about that? I am dubious that he would willingly give up his access to the OW.


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
(By the way, Reading, I would like to do a polygraph and I do not think he would resist the idea. My H has done literally everything I have proposed, without questioning, though he is prone to dragging his feet for a while. Anyway, we cannot get them here. Next time we're home maybe)

He has "done everything" you propose but is "prone to dragging his feet." Isn't that somewhat of a contradiction? He doesn't sound too sincere about all this.


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

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Have you ever emailed Dr. Harley?

Also, here you go.
Polygraph Testing


FWW/BW (me)
WH
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Blended Family with 7 kids between us
Too much hurt and pain on both sides that my brain hurts just thinking about it all.



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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
It's not fb, it's the question of what caused the affair to happen, which I did not think is fb. Anyway, I was rethinking MB for a minute and so checked out some of the writings and no, I am sure I am reading this correctly:

"The first step, complete separation from the lover and eliminating the conditions that made the affair possible, requires a complete understanding of the affair. All information regarding the affair must be revealed to the betrayed spouse, including the name of the lover, the conditions that made the affair possible (travel, internet, etc.), the details of what took place during the affair, all correspondence, and anything else that would shed light on the tragedy."

I have this. I have over 200 emails spanning the entire development of the A.

Stage one:
My H and I were not getting along and spending a lot of time apart. Coincidentally, around this same time, my H found a bunch of old friends from high school on FB. One of them (future OW) had become a marriage counselor and licensed grief specialist. As they chatted, via email, she drew him out about his marital problems, therapist-style, developing trust. OW by her own admission has been in love with my H since she was 18. He had no idea she was alive until last May (I have seen their first correspondence)

Stage 2
OW convinced my H our marriage was in severe crisis. All of her advice to him was designed to make things worse between us, and he was following it as he believed she knew what she was talking about. I have several emails that include the sentence: I know what I am talking about here, trust me, in my experience.... or: In my practice, people think that too, but you can trust me, it isn't right. And lots of the same trust-me-BS. My H's focus slowly changed from talking to her out of concern for our marriage to responding to her (very disguised) flattery and reminiscing about high school but it was still very "flirty email" style and nothing I would have been too alarmed over had I seen it, until:

Stage 3:
December. We had a stressful (thanks to her manipulations) visit home for the holidays and H remained in the US while I took kids back to school. He did not see her (she wanted him to, but he resisted - seen the emails) and he came back home after a few weeks. But he was acting so weird and wouldn't talk about anything with me. In her emails that month, as I later saw, she was advising him not to speak to me or feel like he had to "explain himself" to an irrational wife (I was pretty upset by his behavior by this time).

A few weeks later we had a death in the family. Less than 24 HOURS after this news, the OW started in on offering my H sex. It was like she had struck gold with this tragedy because she knew exactly how to go in for the kill as a trained grief specialist.

Indie girl says affairs are like a drug and this is true and the OW knew it. My H needed an escape from this and she offered it.


You've just described every affair that has ever happened.

The conditions you have described are not rare or unique at all.

The OW 'counselled' my H too. Its what OS friends do. She even gave me marital advice right throughout the period she was with my H!!!

Some do it purposefully as vultures, others stumble into 'counselling' and developing feelings accidentally through frienships.

The vultures are quite fond of facebook though. Easier prey.

60 per cent of marriages suffer infidelity.

EVERY SINGLE ONE was the result of an OS friend meeting the needs of the wayward spouse.

The conditions which led to the A in your marriage were not special or unique - they were typical A conditions.

If you want these conditions to continue in your marriage, go right ahead.


What would you do if you were not afraid?

"Fear is the little death. Fear is the mind-killer" Frank Herbert.

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Let me put this another way. The REASON your husband had an affair is because he did not take precautions to avoid it. Period. If he feels like it is being "in jail' to take steps to avoid one in the future, then you don't have a willing partner who takes recovery seriously and that is a whole other problem.


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

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Originally Posted by txstunnedman
Also Pink, you have convinced yourself that your H was manipulated and taken advantage of by the OW and appear to not be holding him very accountable. He is an adult and his choices and poor boundaries had as much to do with his A than anything the OW did. I know you want to believe your H wouldn't do it if he wasn't tricked or manipulated but that is not true. He did it because he enjoyed it and because he wanted to do it. HE COULD HAVE ENDED IT ANY TIME AND STOPPED IT FROM PROGRESSING AT ANY TIME. Did he?

Agreed. It is really alarming how much pink straws is trying to twist this into her WH was a victim of a manipulative counselor vs it just being a regular affair.

If we can't even get PS to acknowledge that her H wasn't a brainwashed victim of an evil OW, I don't know how we are going to get her to see the importance of EPs. (Although I would say if she believes her H could be brainwashed like this, I would think she wouldn't even let him out of her sight for one second.....)

Anyway, it was also asked a few times and unaswered on this thread how long the A was and I found this on another thread:
Originally Posted by pinkstraws
I felt the same way when H was gone (from Jan. to June 1). My H didn't see our kids for more than two hours total in all this time.

Again, same as every other affair - ENs were met. EA developed, became PA. He became a fogged out wayward. What is different in this situation is that he has you believing he was brainwashed by the OW.


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Originally Posted by pinkstraws
In my H's needs survey he rated both his need for intimate conversation and his need for honesty and openness as his two LOWEST needs

I think this is a red flag as well. But not necessarily that your WH isn't "on board" with MB but rather that he is still taking hits off the crack pipe. Someone who was back in love with his BS I don't think would say this.

Not only have there been other red flags in the thread, but a still foggy wayward who is still being triggered by FB, still has the same email where the OW could contact him who has been spending overnights away from his spouse, the risk for continue contact is so high that I would almost expect it.

I have to wonder if you are worried about that yourself and that's why you will not install any keyloggers.



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Originally Posted by MelodyLane
Let me put this another way. The REASON your husband had an affair is because he did not take precautions to avoid it. Period. If he feels like it is being "in jail' to take steps to avoid one in the future, then you don't have a willing partner who takes recovery seriously and that is a whole other problem.

Exactly.

It should be noted it's not even just FB. I believe PS has stated that there is no need to change the email where her WH and OW communicated or phone number. She thinks since the OW could find him at his work there is no need.

When people take such crazy shortcuts on things that are pretty easy (not give up facebook or change an email?? Really??) I just shake my head because I know they will be cutting corners on the harder parts of the program, like UA time.


Last edited by SusieQ; 10/17/13 11:51 AM.

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