I feel like I need to post if not for anything else but to maybe get some of my thoughts and feelings of what is going on between Brian and I right now during recovery, I am also hoping to find some advice from others out there that may have gone through what is happening to us at this point during recovery. I know healing and reconciling take time, a very very very long time and I am working so hard to repair the damage that I have done to us by having an affair. I really felt like we were making huge progress towards recovery and now the pain of the A is hitting my H (Brian) like a brick upside the head again, but this time his reactions are more like the reality of what I have done to him are kicking in for real this time, it’s like he has come to the conclusion that it was not a bad dream it is real and it has really happened and the pain is more severe than I have ever seen it so far. I am there for him, I am holding him very tight, I am praying to God out loud for him while I hold him, I am giving him words of encouragement and positive reinforcement, I am expressing how I am making my changes that are needed to make our lives and our marriage successful, but he says he feels like he is drowning and doesn’t have the strength or will to want to try to swim to the surface anymore. I told him that this is where if you don’t or can’t find the strength to swim to the surface then God and I are here to pull you to the top. I feel so helpless and I want to save him so badly and I am doing everything I can and I don’t feel like it is working like before. I use to be able to pull him out of the downward spirals but this time is different, it is as if he is giving up and I know deep down inside he doesn’t want to but he says he just doesn’t have the strength anymore even though he knows he needs to find it he just can’t anymore. “ I am scared for him and our marriage and I know that I will never quit or give up but how can I convince him that what I am saying and showing are true and honest?” He sent me and e-mail at work and in it he said he wants to know where Brian and Karen went? and this is what I told him:
Brian and Karen are here, we are here and now and we will be better then ever before. We now honestly have Christ in our lives and we are going to live life to its fullest together with Christ and our children and our grand children and what has happened in the past will become a faint memory some day, it will always remain a painful memory in life one that we both wish never happened but a faint one. We can also try to look at the positives that has come out of the devastation of it all and that is that we have truly found the deep Godly love for each other, we have opened our eyes to the fact that our way of life was less desirable and damaging to our children and now we have the chance to make our lives right and whole in God’s eyes forever. I promise and make a vow to you and to God that I will remain faithful and honest to you for the rest of my life here on Earth and beyond. Hang on and hang in there Brian, I am here whole heartedly with honesty and open arms wanting you to come into me forever.
Please if there is anyone out there that has gone through this type of feeling during recovery and has any suggestions for me or for Brian then please respond if you think you can help us make sense of these feelings or if I need to change the way I am going about this or if what we are going through now is considered a normal part of mourning, a deep feeling that one needs to go through before they can find inner peace and to move forward. I know everything I am doing is coming from my heart and is pure and honest and I need to somehow make him see this. I love him and I want to save him and our marriage.
I LOVE YOU BRIAN, I TRULYHONESTLY DO AND I WILL ALWAYS BE HERE FOR YOU FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES WITH OPEN ARMS AND COMPLETE HONESTY.
SQUEAKERS

To MHO, what Brian is going thru is what we all have been thru to different degrees..

Remember healing is a 3 prongs proposition: his, hers, and the marriage.

As a WS, you know. You know what went on, the why, the where, and all the other details whether big or small. Brian does not, not really. By telling him you came 'clean' and dropped YOUR nuclear bomb onto him and shattered his reality. He has to find his way now, and it is not easy, not easy at all. It will come a time in the future when he may reach acceptance. In the mean time, be there for him, and be there for you too.

Wishing you peace and the strength to find it.

And as you walk you make your path Kat

I can understand where Brian is coming from. I still have days that i feel like i am drowning. It will be 1 year from my D-Day in a few weeks, and i still have those days. Just hang in there and keep showing him that you are TRUELY sorry. My H tries but does not seem to try has hard as you say you are, i wish that he would!!
I have days that i am ok but then the next day i will feel awful. All the thoughts and visions of what my H did haunts me still. Everyone says TIME,i wish the time would get here when i can feel normal and be able to look at my H like i use to.
Again back to your H, show him everyday how sorry you are , don't give up. It is hard for us BS to trust again. Everything we believed in has been taken away from us, so i guess it is back to the time thing, we will all give it time and see what happens. But prove to us that it is not in vain.
I know how Brian hurts , so be there for him!
Kathy

Squeakers,

I don't know if there is a gentle way to do this or not, so I am going to jump in, but understand, this is not an attack on you, it is what my wife’s affairs made me feel. Remember when you read this, you have had much more time to deal with and process all of these things than Brian has. His time started at D-Day, yours started when you first flirted with the OM, when you first responded to his flirtations. I give you my viewpoint as a betrayed man.

Betrayal destroys the relationship and all the "perks" that went with your relationship. What you destroyed, for Brian, was all of your relationships history. This history includes love, trust, faith, and safety.

Your marriage as you both knew it is DEAD, its gone, it will never be what it once was. With work and commitment by both of you it may be good, it may be better, or no matter how much effort you put into it, it may be over. I don't think for you guys it will be over, but you have so much work ahead of both of you.

What ever you have at this moment and want to have for tomorrow, for all of your tomorrow's is a new relationship. This relationship does not start out with infatuation, progress through the stages to fully in love. It has baggage, and I know your afraid of losing him, but face it, he didn't destroy all of the important things that are necessary for a relationship. You still have all the old feelings, you still have love, trust, faith, and safety in Brian. What you don't have is those things from him, because for him, he is now living with a "familiar stranger." You are no longer the person you once were to him.

So, as much as you want to move ahead full speed, I suspect Brian wants to move ahead at a snails pace right now. Your desire to make it right may as soon as possible may in fact be frightening to him. He is in all likelihood asking himself many of the same questions I asked myself in the first year.

Those questions can come to mind over the simplest things. You say, "I love you!" He may feel, "Yeah right...where was that love when you _______ with the OM, or went here with the OM.

Mind you, that is one example of what my wife saying "I love you" sometimes did to me.

She would tell me "I want you in my life forever" and I would think that forever was what she was supposed to have meant when we married. She says she understands the depth of the pain she caused me, I don't truly think she can understand that. Yet I know that she has went through incredible pain of her own.

The worst part for me were all the lies that were told to find time with the OM, all the time that was "stolen" from our relationship. The lies are the most painful, and they taint any truth that comes after them. This makes trust a very risky, and very tentative thing to give. Learning to trust again, feeling secure and safe enough to start trusting is a long process.

Betrayal also destroys your man's self image and respect, respect for himself, and respect for you.

Many here may call it ego, but from a sexual standpoint for a man, there are many questions that play in the back of a guys mind. For me, I know I am a considerate and gentle lover, by that I mean much of my satisfaction in making love comes from giving my partner pleasure. My physical satisfaction is almost always at or after my wife reaches her climax.

My wife's affairs left me wondering what I had done wrong in the bedroom, much less wrong anywhere else in the marriage. I was initially full of pain and doubt, wondering how I compared to the OM. This comes from knowing I wasn't pleasing my wife in our relationship so she sought comfort outside of the relationship. (Or so I thought for a long time)

I won't say our relationship is better or stronger today than I once believed it was. I won't say that I can love her as deeply as I once did. What is better for us, better than ever before is our communication, this is mortar between all the blocks we have laid in rebuilding our relationship. Developing good communication skills takes TIME, and work, and patience.

For us, there is a twenty year age difference, I am 54, and she will be 34 this fall. (our meeting and falling in love is a looonnnggg story) It used to be if we were somewhere and I noticed a guy staring at her, more than likely undressing her with his eyes I would hold it in, let it eat on me.

Now, I simply get her aside and let her know that I think this person or that person is overly interested in her. In most cases, she will put her arms around me and give me some tongue the first time she notices the guy watching us. Then, she will "hang" on me, and avoid even noticing him.

This seems to send a real plain message to the guy, it hasn't failed yet. In the past, what has played out above would have never happened.

We handle or deal with any issues in a different way than in the past, and at four years, we are still learning to do it better, communicate that is.

Squeakers, you have to understand that emotionally you have been processing all the information you have about the betrayal much longer than Brian has. If he is at all like me, he sometimes needs "time and space" to process his thoughts or problems. (I think it is a guy thing, and I know for a lot of the ladies, you want to talk it through right now)

It just takes TIME....

Dave


Edited to add:

I wrote this sometime in the first two years, maybe it helps explain what I felt.

STARTING OVER

Starting over…you want me to believe in you,
After the lies and deceit…to find something new.

You have broken my heart…you have destroyed my trust,
All this damage …for moments of meaningless lust.

Love, honor, and commitment…intentionally trashed,
What was special is broken…hopelessly smashed.

You say he meant nothing…and want us to move on,
Yet marriage as we’ve known it…is forever gone.

No longer sacred…because of what you have done,
The uniqueness of sharing…you and I as one.

If I didn’t love you …then my heart would be spared,
When your body and emotions…with him were shared.

This act of selfishness…you don’t know what you’ve lost,
Your disgrace, guilt and shame…only part of the cost.

Like Dave, I want you to know that this is not a personal attack. I'm explaining how this has affected me as a betrayed male and from experience here on this website, I suspect that Brian is going through some of the same stages that we have all gone through as BSs.

I suspect that the true impact of what you have done is just now hitting Brian. Denial is a stage that we all go through when a BS finds out about an affair. Its impossible to believe at first that someone that you trusted with your very life and soul would do such a thing to you. But we are all just humans, non the less.

From what you have mentioned I suspect that Brian is trying to sort out what everything that you have ever done or said with him means to him now. We refer to it as the "affair filter". Like Dave mentioned above, since there has been so many lies from "the most trusted" person and betrayal, Brian is sifting everything thru the affair filter to see what is/was and what isn't/wasn't. See, you know when the good times were from your perspective but something (an affair) this traumatic happens and it causes everything that Brian remembers as good to be in question now. Thats how an affair affects a betrayed partner. It takes along time to sift through all his memories as good or bad. You know the truth, he doesn't. He has no clue what is real and what isn't real at this point. Everything becomes questionable especially recent statements by you. "I love you" does not hold the same meaning or weight that it once did. Now they are just words because you said them so many times before your affair and then destroyed their meaning when you had the affair, understand?

Here is where the time comes into play. Your words are empty but your actions over a long time frame help reinforce what you say as long as your consistent actions match your consistent words.

Like my wife, I suspect that you want to get on with a normal feeling of living again soon. Well, guess what you just destroyed normal too. You and Brian will have to find or create a new normal. It will never be the same again no matter how long you have been together. At our ages I'll bet that my wife and I have known each other as long as you and Brian have known each other even though you knew each other from childhood. Brian doesn't know that fifth grade girl like he thought he did. That child needs to find her true self from professional help (individual counseling) and then show Brian her true self through changes of behavior that she makes. Self discovery for the betrayer is necessary in order to correct past behaviors that allowed you to make bad decisions. Otherwise Brian will never feel safe if behavior changes are not being made. Do you expect him to trust you just because you say that you won't cheat again? Do you remember the lying part, the most painful part?

On the trust angle of things, one thing to keep in mind: DO NOT expect to be completely trusted ever again. That part of your relationship is gone forever.

When you think about it, it's a good thing. Being all humans, we are all imperfect, and none of us deserve 100% trust. I'm not sure about you, but I don't even trust MYSELF that much, why should I be placing it in another imperfect human?

Whether you guys can live with less than 100% trust is an answer only you can give. My W and I live with it, and she accepts it.

Cory

The Three Rules of Happiness: Friends, Freedom and an Analyzed Life - Epicurus