Please can someone help me??? Have tried to find info on this but can't. Very briefly I left my H after 5 years of sexual, emotional, physical and mental abuse. He used to tell me all sorts of things to undermine my self confidence eg, Nobody likes you, everybody is nice to you cause your my wife they all think you are wierd. While sleeping he would take the opportunity to have sex with me often pinning me to the bed so I couldn't move when I woke up. If I said no not to night he would demand and take it even if I tried to fight him off. If I was injured in the process it was my fault I should have said yes. There are many other things that he did to me he would say that unless I did certain sexual acts (that I found disgusting ) it would be my fault if he did anything with someone else as I had not satisfied his sexual desire. He was an avid porn viewer and user often hiding the fact. Only to have me find out accidently when doing the bills then he would say I was snopping. He never once felt that he had betrayed my trust. Eventually I left !<p>Now to get to the point since being separated I had sex with someone once (over 2 years ago now). He now says that I cheated on him and have betrayed his trust. He calls me an adulterer a s**t he keeps bringing it up in front of the children. He says I am untrustworthy ect. We are not back together (probably never will be). I know that what I did was wrong because I was still married to him. But I am sick and tired of being made out to be the perpetrator. I did NOT sneak around behind his back. I did NOT have sex with someone else then come back to his bed. We were separated ( and still are ) but I am sick of being told by him that I had an affair. I can't seem to find anyone else who has been in a similar situation. Please could someone help me !!!!! It has been driving me crazy for the last 2 years if he is right then fine. Don't get me wrong I know I must have hurt him deeply and I am not trying to excuse myself just am confused. As to the affair thing I know if you sleep with someone else ect but we are separated.

Well you were still married. What you need here is not opinions but professional help. If you are a victim of domestic abuse, then there is more to your situation than your ONS (one night stand). <p>According to your account, your H gave you pain and now you have given him pain. He is showing that the pain you caused is bad. Yes it is. The pain he caused is bad also. Does that make you even? No. It means you both need help. <p>Get with a individual counselor ASAP. Call Steve or Jennifer ASAP. Get yourself some help and protection as you need. Your professional help should be able to assist you. <p>Your children are in the middle of this mess. Can it be resolved? Yes. How is the next step. <p>Take care,
L.

feduptobackteeth,<p>Yep, what you did was adultry. You are still married. Have you read the material on this web site and the books by Dr. Harley? What you will learn is that people have affairs because their emotional needs are not being met. Sounds like your husband not only did not meet your emotional needs, but that he was down right abusive. The thinks you describe are scary.<p>Since you are separated and never plan to get back with him, why are you still married? Just curiouse. <p>But, from what you describe, that the smallest problem in your life/marriage. Do get a counselor. You need some serious help in rebuilding your self esteem and learning how to keep this man at a distance for your own protection.<p>If he is telling you child these ugly things about you, they you need to get your child into joint counseling with you too so that she can be taught to deal with it and her father in a healthy manner.<p>I am sorry for what you are going through.

I'm very sorry that all this has happened to you. Abusive partners operate with a different set of beliefs in their head that often don't reflect reality. Your H obviously believed it was his right to take care of his own sexual wants any old time, and what you felt about it and what it did to you didn't matter a damn. In his mind, "you owed him," and if you didn't give him what he wanted, he was "justified" in injuring you, whether physically by raping you or emotionally by having sex with someone else. That's on top of all the other abuse, verbal and emotional, that you suffered.<p>Part of an abusive belief system is the notion that the abuser's partner is behaving the same way toward the abuser that the abuser is behaving in reality. Abusers interpret their partners' behavior toward them in the worst possible light, and imagine all kinds of things that aren't true. Abusers are paranoid and believe they're really the ones being victimized by their partners, rather than the other way round. This is how they justify their own punitive behavior. If all you did was to leave your H, for the very best of reasons--self-protection--he's probably putting all the blame on you for "betraying" him with your "abandonment." Even if you hadn't had sex with anyone else, there's a good chance he'd accuse you of it anyway! He'll blame you for anything and everything, whether it's your fault or not. So none of his judgments of you are worth listening to, because they come out of a twisted mind.<p>I admit it's usually a bad idea to engage in a new sexual relationship before both partners recognize the marriage to be ended by the formal process of divorce. For your own sake, it's also a bad idea for someone in your position to run to another sexual relationship on the rebound from an abusive marriage. You're very vulnerable and likely to be exploited. You may feel a very genuine need for a strong partner to care for you after what you've been through. Unfortunately there's a high probability at this stage that you'll end up attracting another partner of the same type. Generally though, when spouses separate there's still some hope that they can fix their marriage. When that happens, an affair only jeopardizes the marriage further. But yours isn't the kind of marriage you fix. Yours is the kind of marriage you run like hell from and don't look back. In those circumstances, whether or not anyone has a one-night stand after leaving seems pretty irrelevant.<p>If this seems a bit extreme, let me refine that position slightly. Yours is the kind of marriage where an "ideal" person follows a four-step process:<p>1. You can't negotiate with abusers because they don't understand the meaning of reciprocity. So you lay down the law to them instead--politely, but firmly. You tell them what you won't put up with any more. And you tell them they've got to get professional help for their issues. Sometimes they do it. Usually they don't. At best, they tone down the abuse and get subtler about it instead, which is only slightly less nasty.<p>2. You tell them if they don't sort themselves out, you'll leave--and mean it. Sometimes they do it then. Usually they don't. At best, they go through the motions. At worst, they get mad and start threatening you.<p>3. You leave. Sometimes they start taking things seriously then and get help. Usually they don't. At best, they put on a temporary reform act to get you back, but it doesn't last. At worst, they threaten and harass you and you have to protect yourself.<p>4. You end the relationship and move on, taking whatever steps you need to protect yourself, and dealing with any issues of child custody as best you can. Typically the abuser then goes off to abuse somebody else.<p>But most people in your position are far from being experts at handling all this. If they were, there's a good chance they wouldn't have ended up with an abusive partner in the first place. Nobody is to blame for what they don't know and had no way of knowing. So you muddled through as best you could. All you really did was to collapse these four steps into one. The marriage was not just bad, but intolerable; there was nothing you could do to change that; so you left, and moved on, taking in a one-night stand along the way. If the process is like saying to the abuser "We'll give you a fair trial and then we'll hang you," all you did was to skip the trial, get down to business and string him up. But I'm sure the outcome was no different than it would have been otherwise, except that it saved you the cost of the trial--which was probably more than you could afford anyway.<p>You did what you did, and that's all about the past, which we can't change, so blame is a waste of time. If all this ever happens again, which I hope it never does, you might want to do it differently, but that's about the future. If you're not going to return to the marriage then what you did afterwards is irrelevant. The one-night stand is something your H is using to try to manipulate you with guilt. Ditch the guilt; you don't need it. You're probably too prone to guilt anyway. If your H hadn't behaved as atrociously as he did, all this would never have happened, so that's just tough titty. If he keeps taxing you with it, what you tell him is that as far as you're concerned, when you left, the marriage was over, O-V-E-R, due to his behavior, so anything you did afterwards was none of his business. Then refuse to discuss it any further. You'll probably never get him to see anything your way, because you can't change his belief system. The only thing you can do with abusers is ignore them and disengage completely from their blaming tactics. Otherwise they only keep you entangled with them and under their thumb. You have to get tough with abusers. Not vindictive--as diplomatic as you need to be--but tough. Stand your ground.<p>I realize of course that I can't tell anyone that their marriage is completely over. If you tell your H that it is, there is an outside chance that he might get serious about reform. But I only know offhand of one person who managed to make a spouse as bad as your H into a tolerable partner, after much agony, and even then I think they're only getting by. And if you did ever get back together, in effect the old marriage would have to be thrown away and a whole new marriage established on a very different basis. So anything that happened in between is irrelevant.<p>It's excellent advice to find a professional counselor for yourself, if you haven't already. There are many issues you'll need help in sorting out. Anger and pain from this marriage is only one. I won't pretend either that you may not have acted in ways that evoked some of this guy's behavior toward you, however unintentionally. That doesn't let him off the hook, because he's obviously messed up himself. So this is not about blame, only about learning more effective behaviors. Just as important is discovering why you landed a broken partner like this in the first place, and why you put up with his outrageous treatment of you, so that you can avoid doing that in the future. Plus of course you'll need support in continuing to deal with him over divorce and child custody issues, his attempts at manipulating the children, and all of those things. Just forget that one-night stand. It isn't important in the big picture. Good luck for the future, and keep posting if you need more help!