Sugar Cane -- I'll think about sending him an email. Both my wife and I are in individual counseling and we are also in marital counseling. While I would switch to Dr. Harley and his approach for counseling in a heart beat, that would be controlling of my wife/the situation and I promised her I would not do that. Respectfully I don't think that failing to send a note to Dr. Harley is going to eliminate any chance of succeeding. HOWEVER, we definitely need professional help / are getting it.
Again, appreciate the candor and not pulling any punches
I'm not asking you switch to Dr Harley for regular counselling. He is not in private practice any more, and he does not do regular counselling, anyway.
I am asking you to write to him to ask for his advice in using his programme to recover your marriage. Since you came to the Marriage Builders site, it is a fair assumption that you are interested in Dr Harley's approach, and that you need help with using it - and I am sending you to the best place to get that help. This is his guidance forum after not - not a place where each person can post his or her own thoughts. The advice you have received in every single post so far is based on the advice given by Dr Harley in his books, articles and on the radio show. All of it is from him. None of it is from us as individuals.
I asked you to write to him because your case contains a major feature that is not found is the vast majority of cases that we get on this forum, which is the casual, impulsive nature of what you did, according to your account. Because of the uncontrolled way in which you behaved, your wife is unwilling to go forward with you, and her logic is impeccable. If you can go to fill up your car and have sex with someone who might be an axe murderer, who might be riddled with disease or at the very least, have very poor personal hygiene, or who might film the whole thing and then post it on the Internet, you are not fit to married and she is not safe with you - that is what she is thinking. You might have conceived a child with her, for goodness sake. Do the words "Boris Becker and "broom cupboard" mean nothing to you?
And you cannot follow the "normal" MB recovery methods of never seeing this person again - you never saw her before and you
will never see her again, but that does not give any reassurance whatsoever. You cannot avoid an affair by being "transparent", if you can have sex during a visit to the shops. All the access to your phone and laptop in the world will not stop you from having sex with a stranger in a toilet.
So, what do you do? You need expert help, and Dr Harley is your country's most successful marriage therapist. He is an expert in addictions and he has encountered them all, even people who like dirty sex in public toilets.
Writing to him would not be controlling your wife, but it would be an attempt to take control of
yourself, and your wife will not object to that. She will not object to your seeking help; it is a way of showing her that you are serious. What you are doing now, with your counsellors, is not doing much to bring her back to the marriage. Going to the foremost marriage expert and doing exactly what he says will show her that you are serious.
The help that Dr Harley gives you when he replies to your email is free of charge - that is what he does with emails to the radio show. You can read his reply and decide whether you want to follow his very specific advice. You can compare it to the advice given by your counsellor, which seems to say nothing about taking extraordinary precautions against being in a situation where random sex can occur, and you can decide whether you want to follow it. Your citing a promise you made to your wife about not being "controlling' of the situation is just an excuse, and I don't buy it. Your wife lies bleeding on the floor from the wound you inflicted - you absolutely NEED to take control of this situation, and you need to do it yesterday.
With respect, failing to send the email IS going to eliminate any chance of your succeeding. You don't have the slightest idea how to bring your wife back to this marriage, and neither does your counsellor. How much have things improved after you've both sat there talking about the affair, week after week? After your wife has sat in her IC sessions, rehashing her hurt and crying her eyes out? has this made her feel the slightest bit of love for you?
Dr Harley has brought thousands of heartbroken betrayed spouses back to their marriage, and he DOES know how to bring your wife back. And it does not start with her dwelling on the affair week after week in individual counselling, but with
you instituting extraordinary precautions over your own behaviour.
