Hi Albany
I'm sorry if you haven't received many responses! I'm so sorry, Albany. I haven't been around much this week as I was finishing up school and just posted intermittently these past couple weeks.
Can a marriage survive this nightmare? Yeah...that's the GOOD news. Your marriage can and will not only survive, but it can thrive. But in order to get to the beginning of this recovery/rebuilding process, certain things have to occur first to lay the foundation.
The first thing that has to happen is that your husband must completely cease all forms of contact/communication with the OW under any circumstance. If she needs to contact your husband for any reason AFTER the child's birth (providing the DNA results came back positive), she can call and communicate through his attorney. Otherwise, there is no reason whatever for them to speak to each other. Ever.
The reason for this is to give you and your husband time over the next few months until the birth to concentrate and focus on each other, gain strength and learn everything you need to know on how to meet each others' emotional needs, examine where the marriage went wrong and begin to rebuild the marriage by using the MB tools.
Learn the concepts, principles and policies beginning with Plan A and Plan B, the Rules of Protection and Radical Honesty, Policy of Joint Agreement (POJA) (where neither of you makes any decision without the enthusiastic agreement of the other) and post here often.
Another thing that is remarkably successful (85-90% success rate) is a Retrouvaille Weekend (see
www.retrouvaille.org ) to give your marriage a jump start. The only requirement to attend Retrouvaille is that neither of the people in the couple are actively using alcohol or drugs or engaged in an affair of any kind.
Retrouvaille is very MB friendly as it promotes the rebuilding of marriage and has the same kind of policies so they are very simpatico and seem to compliment MB nicely.
If your husband is reluctant to sever contact with the OW, then you have to make some hard decisions, declare (and stick to) some boundaries, and launch into Plan A for a while to see if you can break through his foggy state and bring clarity...that all important "moment of clarity". If you go into Plan A, do it as long as you can stand it before going into Plan B because Plan B is risky, although often very effective.
What you are going through right now is probably the worst possible thing that can ever happen in a marriage and your emotions are raw. The stages you are facing are very intense and will come and go in a weird succession; vascillating between shock, denial, grief, rage and then acceptance. And not necessarily in that order or one at a time.
Now is a good time to find a counselor, too. Steve Harley is probably the best around and he does telephone counseling. If your husband would agree to a couple telephone sessions with Dr. Harley, this is another way of jump starting your recovery as Harley is able to identify problems and solutions and break through hard cases almost immediately. He is very effective and experienced in this field.
Why don't you tell us more about yourself and your story to give us a better idea of where you've been and how things got to this point.
I hate to "welcome" you here but I do want you to know that you have come to the right place.
Catnip =^^=
