Part of my healing is wrapped up in the OW. She was my DEAR friend who knew me, knew us, knew our kids, and vice versa. She was newly divorced and believed her H had an affair, about which he would tell her nothing. So wouldn't you assume she had felt what we feel? Yet when she saw a vulnerability in our marriage she jumped in before my H had a chance to ask. It's soooo horrible!

My H is sort of ...neutral?....about her. He says he sees that she really showed no integrity in this but at the same time...protects her? Or that's the way it feels.

Now, she claims the role of victim and implies that it is my fault..."If (my H)hadn't been lonely he wouldn't have called me. If he hadn't called me I wouldn't have fallen for him." And his initial call was to work on the house she and her X were preparing to sell because he had run into our realtor friend who said an inspection had been done, there was work, etc. Not that he wasn't vulnerable at that time.

I know a lot, but I cannot know all. I'm going crazy. Crazy. He seems to think of her as an innocent victim yet at the same time will agree w/all the subterfuge I point out in their relationship. She is the one, (hope this isn't one time too many) who managed to execute this w/H believing she "cared" about me even at the end! AUGH!

So, this brings up all kinds of doubt about H's story. He will not admit "coming on" to her, protects her.

I had another thought to clarify the frustration but lost it.

I'm obsessing again...and again...and again... and .........................

It never satisfies. There is a hole in the story. Or is it that it evolved so naturally and slowly that even they don't understand? At the same time, she asked in that first call "How we were doing?" and H said not so good. Felt I wasn't happy in M etc.. Her response was "What's WRONG w/her?" "I always REALLY liked you." I want to blame her! That's it! Why can't HE blame her too? Am I an idiot?

I feel like one.

(((( Deb))))
You are definitely not an idiot, and your responses to Joe, myself, and others help me.. This seems like a matter of gut feelings ( yours), that there is some crazy making going on here, " loose ends".... Their story as told to you, isn't quite right..I don't think you are obsessing, I think it is your mind's way of bugging you, getting you to be persistent in finding out bits and pieces, answers to your questions, until you have their whole true story, then you can get some closure, and start healing...((((Hugs)))
Lisa

this is very early on in recovery so it is possible that in time your H will realize what and who this woman really is.

But think about it from a WS point of view. If your H admitted that this woman was lying, manipulative, sleeze, etc......then what would that say about him?

Sometimes a WS has a hard time admitting that the person they ditched their marriage for, their kids for, the life they had for is that bad of a person.

I know you want all the details and I know they are driving you nuts, but take a deep breath and perhaps find some way to ask all of your questions on paper so emotions aren't so strong. Could you schedule a time period with your spouse to provide him questions, him write down the answers and give them back to you and then take some together time to talk about each answer.

This really takes time....it will get better!

Deb

It took my H three years after the first D-day to be able to let go of the idea that OW was a victim and he was the cause. Like yours, he protected her, sheltered her, felt that the affair was his fault, felt guilty that he has misled her, thought she was innocent and honorable, c/wouldn't say anything bad about her. For three years she was a higher priority than me: my pain and hurt were insignificant beside hers aas far as he was concerned, because he was responsible for hers!!! If pressed he would concede that she played an active part in the affair and that he really wanted it to end from the beginning, but he couldn't follow that through to its logical conclusion, that it wasn't just his fault.

It was only at the final D-day that he was fully able to accept her manipulation and exploitation of him. I think he was becoming more and more disillusioned with her and her persistent fantasy but he couldn't be the one to break away, because he still felt that he had encouraged and deceived her and that's why she believed the fairytale they had created. Finally she pushed him too far and he began to see that she would never have the decency to let him go, that she was going to cling to the dream (which was a nightmare to him) of them being together one day, and that the kindest thing for me, for him AND for her was to cut the ties, pull away the curtain, accept his own reality and leave her to deal with hers.

Once he had done that he was soooo relieved. He no longer had to lie, he no longer had two demanding women to pacify, he no longer had a double life and he no longer lived with a sword over his head, that it might be found out and he would end up stuck with her.

So as Kid says, it takes time but it does get better. Stick to your guns, find out what you need to know, but accept that there may be somethings you will never discover. The main thing is to feel that your H is on your side now; until he can let go of his misguided image of OW he will continue to shelter her and make you feel the outsider.

Thanks everyone. I especially like Kid's idea about OW image affecting H's own image. Very good. I wish I'd seen it a little sooner as I kind of fell apart and did some self destructing detective work w/H tonight. Very sad. I feel rotten and I think he feels rotten and hopeless. And it was all about this subject. sigh.

Also, it was reassuring to hear...it hasn't been very long. It takes a long time doesn't it. Thank you for the support. Deb

Debbie it does take a long time. I would say I didn't start to feel 'normal' until year 2. Year 1 was just merely survival mode. Year 2 I started to heal and by the end of it I was starting to actually remember who I was. Year 3 was better yet again.

Everybody takes a different amount of time, but it is my experience on these boards that at minimum it will take you a few years. So when we say you will feel better in time, we know of what we speak

I know the first few weeks and months feel like years and years have gone by. The hurt seeps into everything you think, you do and you feel. My therapist told me the best thing to do was "put on a smile and fake it until you make it". In anotherwords for the outside world I put on a smile and pretended everything was okay until it really was.

I allowed myself a certain time period everyday to cry and scream and pound my bed until I collapsed. That helped get the anger out and gave me a set time to do it so it kind of helped to focus my head. Of course there were tons of times I lost it "outside" of my allowed time.
As I went through recovery the time period I needed became less and less until it was non existant and I just didn't feel the need to do it anymore.

Remember the stages of grieving the loss of a relationship are similar to the steps in grieving a death. Essentially you have lost something, your marriage. In order to move forward you and your H will need to build a new marriage on a more solid foundation. Building a house on a rocky foundation doesn't get us too far and the house will only collapse.

Deb,

I think I can honestly say that we all did detective work that seemed destructive.. hurts to have to do the detective work.. you were hurt by two people you trusted. You need answers and your H is the only one who can provide the answers.. so we ask and ask, until we feel we have a fair picture of what happened, then we can move forward. I needed to know most things because I didn't want there to be any secrets that I could find out about in the future.

As Kim posted it does take time.. and hopefully your H is being totally transparent.. which really leads to healing.

My H also defended the OW to me.. telling me how she defended me.. he really didn't get that she was playing him.. I am not sure that he sees today how she played him, because he doesn't want to look at that part of his life closely.. he knows he was wrong..and I accept that.

Be gentle with your self..all the detective work is called self protection.

((((hugs)))

pat



"Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time."

I don't want to presume what happened in your situation, but I think it might help you to step back and look at this as if you don't know your husband, or the OW, and this situation is from a stanger's life. Your intuition might tell you something and point out what doesn't make sense about this situation, a more likely explaination of the facts.

In my own situation, my wife wanted to be the victim of the affair. She wanted the OM to be completely at fault. She told me things such as "He wouldn't leave me alone.", "I tried to make him go away.", or "He manipulated me.", and "He kept telling me 'You have feelings.'". In the affair, my wife had sex with the OM, in our home. She went to lunch with him three times. She emailed extensively with him, as if she was chatting with him. My wife isn't that big of a pushover though. She can stand up for what she wants and what she believes in. I saw the emails though. While the OM did invite himself to our house, he allowed her to say no. After it was clear that he wanted to have an affair with her, she still answered his emails right away. When I read her emails I saw that she flirted with him, and told him (in so many words) that she wanted an affair too.

However, I wanted to believe her that she was a victim of the OM. I wanted that for many reasons, but one was that I wouldn't need to forgive her, because she had a "valid" excuse. Yet I couldn't excape the logic that, if she was a victim, then she was a rape victim. But she would never admit that it was rape.. no, it was "a manipulation". I tried for several years to get my head around this... it wouldn't work, but in those days I didn't have the full benefit of her email with the OM. Once I did, the picture became crystal clear to me. The jig was up, she could no longer convice me that she was innocent. Not just that, but she couldn't even convince herself that she was a victim.

Just as in your situation, the OP was a victim of an affair also, and he was also going through divorce at the time of my wife's affair, and she was "helping" him. While my wife doesn't believe that her efforts to help him were a pre-dispostion to having an affair with him, I can see that it could have been. Maybe that's true for your husband. Maybe he offered to help to OW because it was a way to make a connection with her, and to see were it could lead.

The OM could certainly have argued that my wife took advantage of him in his time of pain, but I have the email. I can see the extent of how he pushed her, but I also can see how little she did to tell him that this was unwelcomed, and that her relationship with him depended on him stoping that behavior. He pushed, and my wife allowed him to push. She was more passive than him, but not without responsiblity. I think this was him dealing with his pain. Maybe there is something similar in your husband's affair. Could he have taken this chance to help the OW, did some flirting, created some intimacy, and she welcomed it, or even grabed it, in her pain.

I told my wife that "Cloths don't just fall off". Someone can't remove your cloths without help from you, especially if you're wearing pants. I'm only talking about passive resistance, not forceful resistance. When my wife had sex with the OM, she did it without her cloths on. This was proof to me that she was aiding the OM in their affair. She was not even just passive. She tried to get me to believe that she was, by describing how she acted during the sex. It didn't make sense though. In addition, it didn't make sense that she would get up from the bed and return to it rather than putting her clothes back on if she was looking to get out of that situation.

I had to see this objectively and it took me a long time (several years) of pain to finally come to grips with this fact. However, once I did my wife became much more repentant, and our recovery actually became easier. It broke a cycle of between outright lies and partial truths that we had been going through.

TomJ

Deb,

You have really good advice already. As a FWS, I agree that you should go along with your gut feelings and get answers to things you want to know. My wife also had to know all the details to come to grips with my A behaviours. It was hard for me to tell those details and I often lied by omission but that made matters worse. Over time the details were revealed, which not only helped my wife but helped me face my demons and start healing.

Like Kid suggested ,we used a written journal to write back and forth because it seemed easier to be open because it allowed time to get past initial emotional reactions.

Rett

Thank you "guys". It's especially nice to hear a man's point of view as I think we think differently. I liked, Rett, the gradual opening up you described and how it ultimately allowed healing. That's a hopeful thing to hear. And Tom, the idea of stepping away from MY relationships w/them a bit is an interesting idea. I'm going to ponder that. I do believe there was a terrible vulnerability on both sides, ...I understand that. But it feels so unfair sometimes that I am the one living in this horrible new place in my head. Makes it hard to care about their issues I guess

Have you guys seen Mens brain Womens brain on U-tube? FUNNY and wise. Made H and me laugh one morning when we didn't think we could.

Deb
The U-tube: Men's Brains/ Women's Brains is informative in a humorous sort of way. I haven't finished listening to the whole thing yet, but from what I have seen/ listened to so far, it applies to the men in my family...Thanks
Lisa

Deb,

Youve had some very wise answers; Im just backing up here to concur with everyone that you should go with your gut instincts, to ask for more details, to get you husband to join up the dots, so that you can stop trying to puzzle it out by yourself and worrying about the answers. But he may need some help in giving you the final puzzle pieces.

It sounds like you and your husband talk well together, that he is trying to be transparent, is good at giving you the facts but perhaps not so good at analysis or self-understanding; its very difficult to read between the lines of other peoples situations but it sounds like he is possibly still trying to protect himself, rather than her. If he is not very good at tapping into his interior, the analysis or the self-understanding, your questions may have to be more probing and specific. Are either of you doing IC, or MC?

Your OW (FF for former friend!) was feeling rejected, alone and abandoned, needing validation and reassurance that she was attractive, lovable, that it wasnt her fault the relationship broke down.

Along comes your husband as white knight to the rescue, the hero, being the man to fix the house and the man to fix her feeling of abandonment. So immediate transference from Man Who Had Left onto Man Who Had Arrived.

You said he was already vulnerable, predisposed. What was your husband feeling about himself at the time? That he needed to play the role of a hero or white knight. Why did he go to the house in the first place?

If she had intended the conversation be really about him, and not actually about her, there would have been no self-insertion into it such as I always liked you. And this prefixed with dismissal of you in same breath whats wrong with Deb?.

What was your husband feeling about himself that someone saying I always liked you was some kind of panacea? A validation he may not have known he was needing - why?

Youre right. There are holes in the story. That he says she was not to blame and at the same time will not admit to coming onto her. So how did it happen then? Youre not obsessing, youre just frustrated because you dont have all the details.

Maybe she despised herself all along for being so needy, that it was for herself rather than your husband that she needed to fake altruism, faux concern? A fictive device, to allow herself to act in that way. Not altruistic in any way, but cruel. But in some ways, even going down that route of second-guessing is a mind trap and a cul-de-sac.

Your husband has conceded that she didnt have any integrity, and so is recognizing and acknowledging her moral failings. Are you worried that he retains fond memories of her and doesnt want them tainted by the reality of the lies they told themselves?

I read somewhere else that if a WS has difficulty expurging fond memories, that they can try replacing flashbacks etc with an image of a dagger stabbing their spouses back, between the shoulder blades. I suggested this to my husband; he replied he had no need of image replacement techniques as whenever he thought about it - hardly ever, tries not to - it is always accompanied by a huge nauseous stomach lurch of self-loathing, that there was nothing sweet in remembrance, only pain and disgust.

I watched the Mens brains versus Womens brains extract - it was very funny! Thanks for the recommendation. Why not post the link over on healing fun forum?

Daisy x

Kid

Thanks very much for the timely reminder that it all takes such time - I needed to hear that at the moment so as to stop being so angry and frustrated with myself. At the same time, Im not doing the crying and pillow-beating sessions, so am wondering if I am unhealthily repressed. But maybe still trudging slowly across the plain of lethal flatness.

Daisy



"Women are still getting concussion from hitting our heads on the glass ceiling, plus we're expected to windex it whilse we're up there". (Kathy Lette)

Deb, you often give your husband things to read. Below is copied from another website, in case useful.

Daisy x

Catastrophic extraction has the poorest prognosis for recovery and growth

Having to extract the facts from a protective, unwilling and guilty offender in the first place is a revolting part of the process.

It is the cruellest game of 20 questions. Just tell me the truth or kill me, screamed one of my clients. Others, unable to come to a resolution of the issues with their unfaithful partner, have told me they would rather die than divorce. Rarely, some of these go on to 'coincidentally' develop a terminal illness.

Whilst most sensing the risk to life itself and with incredible determination, fear and tenderness would let go and live on.

Once the secret has gone underground and you, the betrayer have been confronted, the worst approach is to deny it or put the needs of the third party ahead of your partner and your primary relationship.

Then, when the evidence is incontrovertible the zombie thing to do is to minimize it or to claim that you're the victim or to go on the attack when found out. DARVO - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender - is more common as the reaction of sex offenders being caught. You might as well throw another grenade into your partner's lap and run for cover. If the relationship is to survive both of you have to sit in the mess you have made in your backyard, attempt to unravel it and not run away from that process out of fear of what you might uncover.

Withdrawing into silence; disconnecting emotionally; threatening the end of the relationship if your partner continues to respond to your withholding the facts by their doubting you, or even threatening suicide or murder if the betrayed doesn't leave it alone, all are just more of the same callous wounding of trust and dignity.

Since your credibility, trust-worthiness and integrity are already shot to pieces (having been caught and probably destroyed your partner's belief in you and the values you stood for, and maybe you have lost all respect for yourself as well) the next biggest error is to further undermine your standing by progressive leaks of pivotal bits of information often and in direct proportion to the pressure or escalating threats applied by your partner or the third party or both.

Each new disclosure or discovery of withheld information takes the process back to the beginning again. It is death of a thousand cuts. You have a choice - come clean and get 'killed' for it or slowly murder your partner. Read Emma's beginning interrogation on Fidelity 2

Pro-active disclosure is usually the best direction even knowing that once having told the whole story, your partner won't feel better, may feel more hurt and angry, behave with less self-control and not stop agonised doubting, questioning, excavating and obsessing with what each of you thought had been resolved yesterday. That is the expected response of someone who has had their foundations demolished, traumatised by their partner's disregard for the consequences of a failed gamble with betrayal.

Sometimes it is the lack of that window of disclosure into their world, into who they are that allows a window to open to a third party and the walls to close out the primary relationship.

Even after years in this game I can still be almost heartbroken when I hear the aloneness of both the faithful and of the unfaithful people in a long term relationship and how life, rich glorious juicy life, right under their noses, just passes over the top of their defence against living and feeling. In that sense we are the poorest of the poor surrounded by profligate waste.


"Women are still getting concussion from hitting our heads on the glass ceiling, plus we're expected to windex it whilse we're up there". (Kathy Lette)

Daisy, I was just reading your post when H walked in.

We had the BEST, most introspective talk yet. He admitted that yes he probably made himself sound ambivilent about me in his "break up" call. I wasn't there to hear it so he could sort of work both sides. What harm? Intuition is so strong these days that you can't believe anything BUT the truth. Tough to hear but wonderful to KNOW! TRUTH! I had been guessing that. It seems like it comes down to needing to believe they WILL tell the truth. It's a process!

He talked about his state of mind then, some challenges he was facing, all things I truly do understand.

He also said he has been writing the letter in his head and keeps thinking of more he needs to add.

I feel proud of him.
I especially liked your "not altruism at all/ cruelty." When someone else recognizes that it just eases the pain.

Thank you so much for responding so wisely. Deb

PS. I think I've got the posts mixed up if I'm confusing subjects, sorry!

I love the post just before this. I will be showing H.

One of the "gifts" of this (?) has been this gradual opening up to each other. Our issues in our M before were a lack of deep connection due to busy busy busy lives and not digging in. Just becoming robots. Always thinking, it'll get easier. All that understanding definitely helps ultimately w/acceptance. I say ultimately because there is a terrible mountain to climb in adverse, dangerous weather. Metaphorically speaking. *

I relate to your fear of numbness, does the drama create an intensity that in some warped way is attractive? Ooh scarey thought. Or do we get stronger and wiser and w/that a calm? That's a happier thought.