TomJ said - "Our faltering spouses are not special cases in this. They engage in one of the oldest human actions and reactions… to do what is known to be wrong, to do it willingly by rationalizing it, and then deny and put aside, minimize and ignore it’s consequence."
I'm a little late to this thread, but I had to respond to this. Tom, I don't think you could have said it better. My husband started his affair in mid-November 07. On Dday Jan 08, I asked him how long he had been unhappy with our marriage. I was really upset when he told me that he thought he had been unhappy and that we had had problems for over a year before that.
When I came back to him and asked, "In May when we celebrated our anniversary and you told me how wonderful I was and how lucky you were you found me and how happy you were that I was spending my life with you, that was a lie? You were unhappy and thought we had problems in our marriage?" You could practically see his head spin around while he thought about that. He emphatically said, no, he was very happy then and he meant every word he said, soooo it must not have been quite that long. I asked him about our vacation in June and more events in the following months and he looked more and more bewildered as he realized that his timeline of marital problems was being pushed closer and closer to November and the beginning of his affair.
He knew what he had done and was doing was horrible and so his mind rewrote history to justify his actions because he couldn't believe he would do something so horrible to me without having a good reason. He made himself believe there was a reason. Of course, he was very fair in his revision because it wasn't all my fault that he was unhappy - it was just that he had "changed". He was grasping for any excuse rather than take responsibility for his mistake and face the pain and destruction that his irresponsible actions had caused and it was just easier to be able to walk away with OW and begin with a clean slate, than try to make amends to me and fix the bloody mess.
I'm glad I was able to reach through his fog. I still have difficulty understanding how quickly he was able to brainwash himself, but I know that he honestly believed the new history he had invented and it was very painful for him to be confronted with the true version of events and realize just how out of touch with reality he had become.
Humans instinctively move towards what makes them feel good and away from what hurts them. Facing what he did to me and the fact that he might be responsible for ruining his own happiness with me HURT. OW was there, ready and willing to reassure him that he deserved to feel good and be "happy" with her and that was the only thing he had left to make him feel good in the miserable mess he had created.
My H told his OW all sorts of things about our relationship which had very little resemblence to the reality. That was one of the worst things to see: the way he distorted our life to justify his A. Like yours, he said it wasn't about me, but about him, but all the time he was creating this myth of me as the wicked witch to his prince charming and her damsel in distress. Like you I challenged him with "But what about the time when we ... - do you really believe it was like you said", and eventually he had to face up to the lies he told HIMSELF as well as what he was lying about to me and to OW. It's all part of the fog. The end result is that those times in our past, which I used to remember with pleasure, have been tainted by his rewriting of history and I no longer look back on them as anything but steps on the way to his A.
If it weren't so tragic, it'd be funny how we get ourselves in to those situtaions. How many times has someone tried to get you to do something, even something somewhat minor, telling you that everone else is doing it, or they do it, or the people in authority do it. That happens because we know it's not the right thing to do, but we need something to make it OK.
The truth is that can happen in your own head too.
Now, for me, knowing that is one thing and it seems fairly easy to understand and comprehend. On the other hand, my wife's affair has always been hard to equate to that. There's just an attitude where I don't always accept that the same behavoir is basically what happened. I think part of it is also that this thought process often leads to thinking that this excuses the WS for what they did. However, there is never an excuse.
My wife didn't have an affair "by mistake" as though she forgot to take ticket with her to the concert. She wasn't the victim of the OP's manipulations and her own naivity as she claimed for a long time after D-day as though she didn't understand what constitues an affair. While you could argue that she had a degree of poor forsight, thinking that the effect on our relationship would have been less severe than it was, but even that is a stretch in my opinion. My wife is responsible for what she did, because removing your own clothes, seeing the OM remove his, lying down on a bed, and engaging in intercourse with a man not your husband on more than one occasion leaves little room for any kind of excuse for her.
Consequently, I found that my only escape from her behavior, including all the rationalizing and excuse seeking that she did during and after can only be found through acceptance and forgiveness of her acts, rather becoming a partner in finding those excuses.
