ok...I finally lost it. Everybody has a breaking point and I hit mine. Fortunately it was over instant messenging and not in person. I did manage to end the conversation by telling her that I did not want to continue to lash out at her. Right now I feel like telling her it is over, that I am not coming home and she can have her crummy life to herself if that is what she wants. I know she is depressed but she will not see it or do anything about it.

For 2 weeks I have been going from hopeful to wanting to die. I just cannot deal with the anger and frustration coming from her. She can tear into me with justo but she wants to call OM to apologize for being so harsh to him when she ended their "friendship."

I don't know what is going to happen if I go home tonight. I don't know if I can keep my emotions in check, but if I don't go home she will think I'm just trying to punish her. We have our first MC session tomorrow but I don't know if we will make it that long.

I'm sorry that you are in such pain <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="images/icons/frown.gif" />

Take a deep breath, relax. Take a walk.

Have you been doing a good plan A? I'm at the 2 week point myself, I know how hard it is. She ended the relationship with her OP? Has she agreed to n/c?

You're not wrong for feeling like giving up, I feel like that once or twice a day, but you have to ask yourself, do you want to make your marriage work? Why are you trying to make it work? It's because you love her isn't it.

Go home tonight, be civil (despite the fact that you probably want to scream at her) go in another room if you have to avoid doing that, and go to your MC tomorrow.

And and very big *hug* to you.

Good luck tonight,

Sio

Thanks for the kind words.

We've been in a bad state before their EA. She ended the relationship about 1 wk before I knew what it really was. It was a pretty angry message she sent him. Any Plan A activity has been to get her to a point where she would be willing to see MC and work on the marriage. It went soso. It's been difficult when I'm feeling pretty depressed most of the time. Since it was over I have not told anyone anything beyond "we're having problems" right now. Families don't even know that.

NC has been pretty much implied. But now I am getting concerned, first she wanted to send him a brief message saying that "she was sorry she was so cruel and she could not/would not talk to him again." Last night she admitted again that she missed him when she felt down. Today she said she wanted to call him.

I think(hope) I may be ok tonight. We can always discuss politics to avoid any other discussions. I'm not putting to much hope on MC visit tomorrow, she does not want to work on M. I'm beginning to believe her when she says she does not want to be married. If so then I've been the butt of a horrible cruel joke.

Don't give up just yet. Any decision that is made at the drop of a hat is a wrong decision. I can relate all to well to you. This is far from easy to deal with. May I suggest that you keep a journal and write down what you feel as often as possible. Believe it or not, this does help. It gets a lot of this out of your system, and helps you think more clearly.

I have to admit that this whole EA thing is still new to me. I never knew this existed. I can tell you this, it hurts far worse than a PA. Like you, at least 3 or 4 times a day, I want to bail, but I can't do that without at least giving this a chance.

I think that once you visit a MC, you will feel much better. For some reason, what seems like the end of the world to someone is a very obvious situation with a very obvious resolution to these people. They can see the situation much more clearly than you because they are not involved.

Good luck.

jgnc- Your wife is still in the fog. She is exhibiting all of the behaviors, caring about OM's feelings more than yours, not wanting to work on marriage. Don't take anything she says too personal. Stick with the MB program and go to counseling. Try to detach emotionally and realize that you need to take charge of saving your marriage. She can't do it right now. I know, it doesn't seem fair, but that's the way it is. Like someone else on this site said "you have a plan, she doesn't".

Well things cooled down quite a bit last night. For whatever reason by the time I got home she was feeling much more calm which helped m immensely. We got to the point that we were able to share a nice meal together and talk about non A or R topics. There was some A and R talk later in the evening but it was mostly fogtalk so just taking it with a grain of salt.

Beneath the surface I'm still somewhat upset. Every time one of these episodes suddenly ends, I feel like I've been punched in the gut for no reason. It is leaving me unable to trust in the good moments and not knowing what to take seriously in the bad ones. <sigh>. I am hoping that the first MC visit today will be helpful.

If anyone has any helpful hints as I go into this, they will be greatly appreciated.

Pumkin, I'll try the journal idea, yet again. I have a journal that I have kept on and off for years, it seems that I only write in it when things are bad. If anyone ever read it they would think my life has always been a constant living hell. I know... its for my benefit.

I was wondering how things were going, I'm glad you're feeling a little better <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />

I don't see how you could not be a little upset still given the circumstances, I wish for all our sakes that there was a way to make everything normal and happy again with the snap of a finger hehe.

The journal idea is great, I went to the grocery on D-day (before everything happened) and bought a notebook, thinking it would be just a regular notebook, little did I know that a few hours later everything would explode <img border="0" title="" alt="[Razz]" src="images/icons/tongue.gif" /> . And I know what you mean, if anyone read that journal they would think that my entire existance was a nightmare and that I was probably a little psychotic...but, I find that writing in it when I'm REALLY down helps a lot, puts the negativity there and allows me to function in a (relatively) normal way. I would try it.

Also you mentioned you aren't really talking to anyone? Is that still true? It might help you a lot to talk to a friend/relative about the situation. These boards are great, and getting counseling is wonderful as well, but sometimes just having a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, someone that cares about YOU, can really help a lot.

Anyway I hope that things continue to move in a positive way for you and that you will continue to post updates here. Good luck with the MCing <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />

(((jgnc)))

Wanted you to know that we know it sucks to be going through this.

Have you read the Harley concepts or his book Surviving An Affair? There is some really great advice in there.

You need to work hard at your Plan A if you want her to come out of the fog and see the error of her ways. If you continue to 'bash' her so to speak, she will want to run back to OM.

I know that it doesn't seem fair to be in this place since you are the one that is hurt, but try to see your W for the woman that you love and be there for her so that she can truly see the magnificence in you and remember all the reasons she loves you.

Then when she is feeling guilty, you need to work on your forgiveness and not on punishing or making her feel like she was bad, sick and wrong.

Not too fun of a job for us BS's, is it? But if you want to work on your M, you get to choose into it and do the work for now. Eventually, she will do it with you as well.

Good luck and God Bless!

jgnc, having been struggling with EA for approaching 2 years I have some suggestion for your MC visit. Be extremely attentive. Know what you want to say but be extremely patient in letting her speak. You need her to open up and listen to what she is really saying. While there is a lot of fog talk and you'll have to listen to history being re-written there will also contain some major truth. If you let her talk she will tell you what it is she is missing.

Forget about how much you are hurt right now you have to focus on your PLAN. And that should be first and foremost that there is no further contact. Otherwise the pain drags on. I know this very well. Just make the MC meeting a very safe place for her. You don't want to lose her now that you got her into MC. Good luck. Hang in there you want to be proud of your effort no matter what the outcome.

Well we saw the MC yesterday and I suppose it went well enough. There was very little A talk. It seems like it was a very safe environment. As we talked I came to see just how much loss my wife has experienced in the last 2 years. Loss of career, loss of a place she loved and most recently loss of her one plan to succeed where we are now. It is no wonder to me that the EA developed. Given that all of this loss began 6 months after we were married, well, its no wonder to me that she associates our marriage with her loss of self.

I'm at the point where I want to work on the marriage. She is not there yet. She is at the point where she is testing the marriage, seeing if she wants to stay or not. No surprise. This just affirms that I'm still very much in Plan A.
I'll have to learn not to hope for speed.

Because we pretty much spend our time separately, We are supposed to be working to find ways to spend more time together. This may be the thing that helps me keep my sanity since it works to meet one of my needs that has been starved. But I am concerned that while the aim is to help us reconnect it does not address her needs.

Now if I could just get enough work to get myself home. <sigh>

well, I finally talked candidly to a friend today. It is such a relief to hear a friendly encouraging voice. Thanks for the enouragement Sio.

Contact... !#@$

As the above implies I'm having yet another bad day.

She had written an e.mail to him asking for a phone conversation to clear up somethings and end contact.

A few days ago she told me that she was getting creeped out because she could see him on her friends list when he came online. I asked her if he had ever responded to her request and she answered that he had. First he responded that he would always accept her call but did not see what they had to talk about. She responded via e.mail that she had a change of heart and did not want to talk to him. A day or 2 later he tried to instant message her but she told him she could not talk to him. So far so good I guess. I have since verifed that this is all true. I know it is still contact. Which leads me to the following

We had a date yesterday. She enjoyed it. She was very quiet but, towards the end of the date she brings up our relationship. She is telling me that the date was nice. Then she tells me that she sees that I have needs that are not being met and she knows she cannot meet them. Now that she has become more active (school/political campaign) she is seeing that most of her emotional fulfillment comes from work and not from any relationship. She sees that our relationship is very important to me but that it is only a small part of her life. According to her, I have to decide if I can be in a marriage where she is not capable of devoting the attention that I need. She may as well have put knife in my chest, but I kept my composure.

So I had to do some work on her computer and the temptation to snoop around presented itself. I verified everything she had told me about contact with him and found something else. She had had an online conversation with him. It was brief and reads very benign. Reading between the lines I can see that she was almost showing of to him, making herself attractive with the accomplishments she has made recently.

I don't know how or if to confront her. If I expose the conversation she will know how I found out and if any future contact occurs she can easily avoid detection. I think the best I can hope for is asking her if there has been any contact and hope she comes clean.

I don't know if I should express any of my feelings to her. It seems dishonest not too. But on the otherhand if I do then it could be something that helps push her away again.

Very sad, very lonely.

*hugs* jgnc,

I saw this yesterday, and wanted to respond but, was hoping someone with more expertise would say something <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> .

According to this site, and others on this message board, your wife is still in the "fog". I wish so much that she would just snap out of this for you, because I know that you are hurting terribly from all this.

She is going to MCing with you though, and going on "dates" with you. Is she in IC? Are you? What is the MC saying to you two?

I wish there was something I could say that would help, I do think there is hope though in your marriage. They (the experts) say that recovery is even harder then coping with the affair itself, and that it will be a long road ahead before you and your marriage will be healthy again.

I don't know what the proper response is to the fact that she's been talking to her OM though after she agreed to NC. I think it would be a good idea to let her know (extremely calmly) that you are aware she's had contact with him, I would prefer you get the help of Cerri or Star*Fish before you do anything though. Like I said, I hesitated responding to your last post simply because I don't have the expertise to give you the advice you need. I am thinking about you though <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> and I truly hope that things work out for the best for you and your wife.

Sio

I managed to have a conversation with her. Mostly I felt I needed to be honest with her about how I felt, I was able to do this respectfully and she responded by showing a great deal of care towards my emotions. I also explained to her that I was relying on her honesty to know about contact and that I was having trouble trusting her because of this. She needs to know from me what she can do to help me. The only thing that came to mind is that I need her to tell me about any and all contact regardless of how she thinks it will affect me.
I did not bring up the logs I discovered and neither did she <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="images/icons/frown.gif" /> .

Since then I have found that she deleted all logs except those conversations that she had told me about. This is a complication. Also yesterday I walked into her office and briefly caught a glimpse of her screen. She had begun to write to him but closed the window. I pretended not to see it because I was not prepared to confront her then.

Because she had ended EA before I discovered it I did not find it necessary to belabor NC issues. Now I find myself in the position of having to confront her again and this time spell out exactly what needs to happen for me to trust that there is no contact. This is what I have come up with:

-removal of OM's e.mail, Instant messenging ID and other info from address books and lists.

-Blocking of OM's e.mail, IM IDs and phone numbers.

-Surrender of all passwords.

-Right to inspect her computer.

NC letter.

In addition I am struggling with exposing the EA, contacting OM and OMW. The reason for struggling with EA is that, sadly, I do not trust either of our families to react in a constructive manner. A second reason, for both issues, is that I cannot think of a way to do either of these w/out making my wife understand that I am not trying to punish her.

In fact this is the crux of my dilemma, how to request NC and expose in a manner that is respectful and not combative or interpreted as punishment. Is this even possible?

We have an MC session tomorrow, I do not want to "ambush" her during the session. I think I should speak to her before. Any comments/ideas before then would be helpful.

bump/update

well she could tell something was bothering me and forced it out of me eventhough I was not ready to deal with it.

She reacted pretty much as I expected. Angry and indignant that I had spied on her. She demanded that I tell her how I knew about her conversations and eventually guessed how I knew. But she also seemed to understand my own feelings. I was a very difficult conversation. She said, that she would write what amounts to an NC letter if that is what I wanted but warned me that doing so would make her the unhappiest wife for the rest of our marriage. I did not press any demands then. She was throwing accusations about my wanting to control her life. At some level she seems to think that because OM is 800 miles away that he is no threat to me.

We have an MC session in 2 hours. I suppose I will have to bring up the NC letter and need to have access to her computer in order to rebuild trust. The thing is I want to trust her. I just need her to give me a reason to. Dispite all of this I can't help feeling sad for her, I can understand why she wants to hang on to this person as a friend and why it hurts her to have to end it. It just cannot be.

dear JG..,
of course your W is angry! you caught her! a-n-d she's in the fog! deep in thew fog!

just look at how she responded response to your concerns..."i will be the most unhappy of wives for the rest of our marriage..." "he is no threat to you...he is 800 miles way..."...."you've violated my right to privicy!" come on! all this is as foggy groggy as it gets!

but here's the thing JG, you should have been the one to confront her...instead she had to drag it out of you...this really is not the way. to make this thing end and to begin working on your marriage, you're really going to have to get more assertive. not mean, nasty or disrespectfull...just honest and up front about how you feel.

if it were me, i would not only insist on a NO CONTACT letter, i would get in contact with the OM's W (if he's married) and let her know what's been going on. then block all internet access to him and add key logger software to your computer to boot...just to check her out!

look, your W doesn't get it! she just doesn't! and guess what? it's up to you to see that she comes to understand why you're so concerned and what she's done to damage the marriage and your faith & trust in her in general.

if it were me i would stop being so fearfull of how she reacts to your concerns...if she's going to walk then not letting her know how unhappy she's made you will not prevent it...in fact it may very well prove to her (in her own foggy little mind) that you just don't care...or that you're just not the "man" for her, or you wouldn't put up with this nonsense.

just some thoughts.
coach

Ok, in the 2 weeks right after D-Day she was very withdrawn from me. Since then there has been a change from that which was hard won. My instincts tell me to protect that, so I'm hypervigilant of LBs. Hence sensitivity to her concerns. Maybe my instincts are leading me in the wrong way.

I should have been the one to confront her. I didn't because I was not ready to. It went as expected. She was aware of how contact hurts me but her own feelings about OM(fog or whatever you want to call it) conflict with that. All contact has been infrequent, brief, and benign. Ok that's all rehash.

Yesterday the first thing I brought up with the MC was the contact. The MC tried to get us to begin thinking in terms of how our actions affect our relationship, instead of how it affects each of us or each other as individuals. In a nutshell learning to ask "is this good for the relationship." Then the MC said something that seemed to imply that there may be room for negotiation on this issue! I don't know if the MC said it because MC could feel my W's frustration or what...

During our sessions W responds very well to discussion of our R and we did come away with some good next steps to understanding where we are in our M.

Of course after the session I got accused of distorting her relationship to OM as negative towards her etc. I was also accused of having an personal agenda when we started counseling. This is typical disrespect i have always experienced when she feels threatened. To a point I understand the anger, nobody likes to have their mistakes paraded before a third party. I don't know if that is fog as much as human nature.

I know that I have caved in to her sooo many times in the past that now my wife subconciously knows that she can get what she wants by becoming angry. This is something that I am working on now.

I am not going to back down from NC. For what its worth she seems to be coming around. She knows that the R w/ OM is damaging to me and the M, but she still believes that it was beneficial to her. I will be asking for NC letter even if it does make her the unhappiest wife.