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How far out from dday are you? If you’re in the 6month-1 year range, id argue that now is not the time for MC. The marriage didn’t cause her to have a 2.5 year affair. That’s all her. Going to MC now reeks of the stench of somehow you’re responsible for her cheating, and it’s a very common theme with MCs.

Drop MC for now. Focus on yourself. She can’t heal you. Your relationship can’t heal if you’re both still broken. She actually wants to save the relationship she will. No MC is going to do anything to convince her, only she can make that decision.

2.5 years is a long time. Consider your options carefully. I’m going to make a suggestion. Go on YouTube, look up a channel called Meg’s crime watch, specifically wife has midlife crisis. Watch what a truly un remorseful spouse acts like in real time, and compare to your situation.

Edit: I do want to add it could be an extreme hard watch, it is all about affair and divorce, but it is a remarkable depiction of someone who is willing to ruin her life for AP. It’s eye opening and if you have the ability, can show you the actions to watch out for

[This message edited by HellIsNotHalfFull at 5:31 AM, Friday, March 29th]

Fellow BS here, years downstream, still married, to a WH who has promised and failed to read books or articles I’ve asked him to. No amount of pleading or threats have gotten him to do any "work" I have asked of him. He too, feels it is punishment, "rubbing his nose in it" and refuses to let me tell him "he is a bad person" and other nonsense that is coming from his ingrained issues, not anything I have said or done. We are a bit of a R mess, and are at an impasse with moving forward in the ways I needed to feel safe due to his inability to face his shame. Why am I still here? Complicated answer.

I knew from the start that he was emotionally stunted and uncomfortable with self reflection. My friends and family all believed he was incapable of giving me the reconciliation effort I was due after such a horrific LT betrayal. He does not have the tools in his belt for looking back, assessing, analyzing emotions. He is more bottled up and dysfunctional than I ever realized, because he hid it all so well behind a facade of calm reason and positivity. I have begun to see sides of him I never knew existed, while I have seemed to myself at least, to become more of who I always believed myself to be, not less. I am an open, honest book and he is a labyrinth of compartmentalizations and avoidance. We have always been the model for opposites attract and the happiest of married couples. I had so many things figured wrong.

Anyway, I am still angry and hurt about what he has managed to do to atone for all the pain his betrayal has brought to my life, let alone the trickle down pain from his inept attempts to stop my discovery and do damage control with lies and gaslighting. He truly has serious issues. But so do I.

I have managed to stay and try to work on this life we have built with the help of a lovely IC who is helping me connect the dots from my ingrained feelings about self worth with the feeling that my WH’s lack of effort to keep us together is a reflection of my worth too. I am learning to separate my worth from his actions. If anything, what his inability to grow and learn and evolve have really done is devalue him as a worthy partner to me. I used to have him on a pedestal and I still think he is an amazing, smart, accomplished man, but he is also a very broken man, capable of doing incredible damage to people he claims to care about.

It was my hope that reading and sharing together could help heal the pain I was feeling and bring us closer together. It is his hope that we never discuss his A again and only look forward and be happy together. He isn’t willing or capable of addressing the feelings that looking at his actions and their results have brought to our lives. I wasn’t sure he was capable of even seeing me as a person worthy of respect or honesty for a while, but now I’m more convinced that his inner emotional toddler just can’t handle what he has done or who he let himself become in all his twisted logic. I have a lot of collateral damage due to his damage.

My IC has helped me to understand his limitations and triggers, and to accept what is left by loosening up some of my notions of what is enough from him. Mostly my IC has helped me to see him as he is, not how he presents himself - I used to see his refusal to read a little book as cruel defiance and a lack of care for me, but I now see it as his inability face his own truths. He has weaknesses I never realized existed. I have stopped pushing for what I thought I needed, because I was witnessing his house of cards start to collapse, and his response was anger or shut down. He truly is incapable of doing what I need or want him to do regarding the work, but he is capable of transparency and working to atone in ways I did not ask for, or thought I needed, but am finding beneficial in my life. So there is something I can work with.

We are not in MC, because we did that during false recovery, and I learned how skilled he is at avoidance and how low he will stoop in damage control. It was a waste of my time. I did spend too much time fighting for some work on his end, and all it got me was the angriest version of him I have ever met, and the worst feeling of defeat.

All I can offer is that my needs have shifted, my anger is lessening with time, but my disappointment will probably never go away. I focus on what he is able to offer, the ways he tries to atone, even if they are not what I asked for or need, and I look at the life we have built and am not willing to give up on that yet. Maybe I have given up on the love I thought we shared, and I understand now that I love on a very different scale than he is capable of. I believe he is truly sorry for the pain he has caused me, and if you ask him, he doesn’t recognize the cake eating liar he spent a decade of our marriage being. He is adamant he is no longer that guy, just as adamant as I am that I am no longer that girl. I am changed permanently, but am determined to let my change be for the better. I’m still very sure of who I am, my core values and my life goals. My daily needs regarding my M have shifted, not in the ways I wanted them to, but in ways I am learning to live and grow with.

To echo what others are saying, I think your MC might be a waste of your time and money. Your WW needs IC and you need trauma therapy. That simmering anger is a message that you still need to figure things out. My anger turned to depression which led me to a therapist who could help me with EMDR and some meaningful life coaching. I hope you find the help you need in a good IC, like mine. She was able to point out the obvious that I couldn’t see - I was trying to fix everything and hoping that PhD level research and reading would lead us to the promised R land, but his brokenness wasn’t mine to fix. I kept finding things that spoke to my pain and wanted him to feel it too. He can’t handle that truth because he can’t face who he is. I guess I’m sticking around to find out who I’ve spent the last 40 years with. I’m letting go of the need to talk my way to recovery, and just watching very closely for signs of growth on his part. There have been hard fought gains in how he handles his emotions and how his eyes have opened to his selfishness and his limitations. Slow, painful progress, none of the ways I wanted, but enough for now.

Best of luck to you, finding your way forward, learning what you can live with and finding peace.

[This message edited by whatisloveanyway at 2:42 PM, Friday, March 29th]

At best, the MC could have asked the question more effectively, but it's a question you need to answer for yourself and your W.

What positive outcome(s) do you think reading the books will give you? NJF, like any book on infidelity, can teach a WS how to cheat with less probability of negative consequences. I can't imagine that is what you want, but IMO you - all of us who want our BSes to read about infidelity - need to be clearer about what we really want.

IMO, if one wants empathy, for example, it's better to ask for that directly rather than hope one's WS gets the idea indirectly from a book.

IDK about this MC. If they really did attack you for being a 'victim', the MC needs to be fired - you actually are a victim of your W's betrayal.

What's you goal for MC? If your W doesn't step up, are you ready to D?

I've done several bouts of therapy and one long bout of MC. I don't do homework. I just don't. If your W is like me, she needs another method. OTOH, if she's like many WSes, she won't do enough work because she's trying to dodge responsibility. If that's what she is doing, she's not a good candidate for R at this time.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:19 PM, Friday, March 29th]

Emergent- I found your response very helpful and reasonable.

I am also struggling with repeated promises of reading/watching videos about recovery followed by some follow through but sometimes not.

Like some others have said at this point I don’t know if it is really the content I am looking to see my WH absorb or if I want a measurable demonstration of his effort and commitment.

We have engaged in a ton of discussion so from a big picture perspective I’m not sure he would read anything he doesn’t know.

In the case of the OP here I think what your MC said is absurd. It is true that in the beginning they are struggling to gain rapport with both parties. I would just ask the therapist straight out and say you disagree. A lot of times they will retract or reconsider. But you would certainly be within your rights to say you won’t go back after that comment.

Like some others have said at this point I don’t know if it is really the content I am looking to see my WH absorb or if I want a measurable demonstration of his effort and commitment.

This (along with some of the other discussion that I didn’t highlight) jiggled a few things loose for me.

I feel like my husband never directed me on what to read or do. I don’t think that’s a better or worse scenario. But I will say what his notion of what I needed to work on and what I was working on were often at odds.

The bs is looking for something they can hang their hat on, and that is natural. I wanted my h to do therapy and had certain expectations on discussing the affair and what he was learning. But as a fellow ws I didn’t expect a large amount of his work to really be directed at me.

I wanted transparency, and to know what things he was working on because as a fellow ws I knew his affair was more around his coping, his view of what he needed to get through life in general.

A lot of my unhappiness that led to my affair was about people pleasing and not having boundaries. To him, there was little correlation with what I was doing to fix myself versus being a lying cheater.

And the fact that I was learning boundaries and had banned people pleasing until I could get a grip on sorting what behaviors were loving versus just trying to earn love. So in many ways to him I was an even worse version of who I was before the affair.

So I guess from all this- if she is in therapy, what is her willingness to do research to improve herself. To become someone who understands lasting happiness comes from internal rather than external items.

I am pretty sure that the work I was doing on myself had some to do with my husband’s hopelessness. But I was doing what was needed to become a better person. I couldn’t go back in time and remove the affair from our history. I was doing the basics - NC with AP, transparency on my comings and goings, he had access to my phone. Having no more involvement with anything at all that pointed towards any secrecy. I offered honesty and I got better and better at sitting in affair conversations and answering questions and not being defensive. However, I could not talk about the affair every day for hours every day, it was taking a lot of room to keep all these balls in the air. So we had to spread it out after some time, and eventually I would start and lead those conversations, and take initiative so he didn’t feel alone.

All of this was gradual.

But it’s a good discussion because I do think a bs has their own ideas of what they want to see, like reading a book together. I do think the ws is wise to be cooperative on all asks but at the same time I am not sure we always have a picture of someone’s life. For example, having little kids at home, working, going to therapy, practicing your self work, going to MC (waste of money the first year for most), and trying to work on ingrained ways of thinking, I can also understand that their isn’t a lot of bandwidth all the time for everything. I made my recovery a full time job and when I look back, only a fraction of that was relationship work or work we were doing together for an extended period of time.

I am not saying requests like this are unreasonable, they are not. You are looking for connection on the subject and using books to try and be on the same page in things. But as an anonymous forum it’s difficult to judge any of this. So, all I will say is this forum has some people in it that are greatly experienced in the topic of infidelity, some are well versed in their healing, but at the end of the day, you have to be your own judge of what is happening at your house. Meaning, not all advice on this site is one size fits all.

But what I will say is when a bs says it’s not enough, it’s not enough. And that’s what we can all rest our hats on. But what’s enough for one person may not fit another’s situation. I just know that for a long time I was top heavy in fixing myself, and by doing it that way I was eventually more prepared to fix the relationship. But until the ws goes on that journey, they can be the most compliant person in the world in doing anything you ask, but nothing has really changed.

[This message edited by hikingout at 7:21 PM, Friday, March 29th]

She has said repeatedly that doing that kind of reading felt impossible because of the shame and guilt she feels for doing things so out of character and hurtful towards me.

It is true that some people simply become dysfunctional when they are confronted with the enormity of the emotional harm they inflicted.

But, you work on you, she works on her, and the two of you work on the marriage. If she is not able to work on the marriage to reestablish trust, etc, there is no functional marital relationship.

2.5 years is a long time.

IMO, if one wants empathy, for example, it's better to ask for that directly rather than hope one's WS gets the idea indirectly from a book.

sisoon has tremendous wisdom and a sage perspective. However, I think a contrasting opinion is warranted.

While it is certainly true that reading books as "homework" is indirect learning and not everyone learns that way, some people do.

From my perspective, when a wayward spouse is wrestling with shame and guilt post-discovery, it can be difficult for them to have or show empathy directly to a betrayed spouse in pain because to hold emotional space for the BS sometimes sparks a shame spiral that just directs the WS's emotional focus back to themselves. When this happens, it can be really frustrating to the BS, because they are still not getting the empathy and support they need and the BS is witnessing yet another example if the wayward being self focused, while the betrayed's needs are ignored.

I think, for some waywards, the nature of the indirectness of a book, a forum, a movie, or a video is what allows them to lay down their own shame and begin to empathize with the pain of their own BS. It's a degree of separation from their own shame that they need to start triggering empathy.

Beyond that, some WSs seem to need "objective verification" that the deep pain and trauma their own BS is experiencing is totally normal and typical. Reading or watching the stories of others who are experiencing similar pain can help a WS accept that, as much as they would like to rugsweep, the damage is too great and that's not going to help.

Clearly, "the work" for a WS isn't a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It doesn't have to be reading or watching or any specific thing.

Maybe the hangup is the word "homework" instead if the "work." I tend to see these as fairly synonymous, but they aren't synonymous for everyone and I can certainly see the potential difference between them.

Whatever work is done should, ideally, contribute to reflection and growth.

Going back to the original post in this thread, I was bothered by the IC's assumption that reading something was "punishment" or maybe that the WS doing something they were resistant to doing or would cause them some discomfort in facing it was "punishment." It seemed like a very unhelpful assumption.

sometimes sparks a shame spiral that just directs the WS's emotional focus back to themselves. When this happens, it can be really frustrating to the BS, because they are still not getting the empathy and support they need and the BS is witnessing yet another example if the wayward being self focused, while the betrayed's needs are ignored.

Exactly, what I was trying to say but said better.

I just wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who took time out of their day to read and respond to my post. A couple folks really went above and beyond with their responses, to the point where the insight was overwhelming at first (in the best way). Some of the replies challenged me (in the best way) and I’m very grateful.

I’m still reading and rereading them all and processing your invaluable perspectives. Mostly I just wanted to say thank you for making me feel heard and respected. My hope is that someone is lurking (like I was for 2 years!) and reads all the incredible support and wisdom shared here and learns something new about their own situation. Thank you all!

A couple folks really went above and beyond with their responses, to the point where the insight was overwhelming at first

That’s kind of emergent’s signature move

Glad to have you join the community, best of luck in your journey.

Re: The shame; my husband had so much shame that he didn't work through. Eventually, he relapsed (he's an SA). He was going through the motions of "doing the work" the first time around. The shame prevented the work from being effective.

I wish I had known the depth of his shame, because then I wouldn't have trusted his first recovery attempt like I did.

The second time around, there were a few things I asked for, that my husband never did. For a long time it was hurtful. As it turned out, as he started showing up in other ways, I stopped focusing on what he wasn't doing.

do you just want her to do the reading because you want her to feel pain too?

That’s a fair question to ask, because if there is guilt there, then it is a lever you can use to cause pain, to exert control. It’s worth sitting with the thought and seeing if there is any truth to it. It would frankly take a saint to not at least feel the temptation. I know I saw some of it in myself when I stopped and looked.

But no matter the possibly mixed motivations, whether there’s some blend of reasons to the ask, the right thing for her is to participate. Your motivation doesn’t matter. She needs to grow as a human. If she can’t stare at what she did and accept it and who she is, if she has to bury it away and basically pretend it didn’t happen, that is a problem. Her job is to stand in the storm and be there, not to try to crawl out the side.

do you just want her to do the reading because you want her to feel pain too?

HouseOfPlane:

That’s a fair question to ask, because if there is guilt there, then it is a lever you can use to cause pain, to exert control.

In my experience, its kind of been the opposite. After decades, I've continued to make attempts to get her to read books and discuss certain sections with me. Not to cause her pain, but to get her to see the pain she caused. Because, let's face it, waywards are so deep in their affairs, they do not experience pain during, are in fact having the time of their lives in their fantasy, have no empathy, and simply don't even realize the pain they cause others..

So far, I've had little success..

[This message edited by Adolfo at 6:19 AM, Tuesday, April 2nd]

She has said repeatedly that doing that kind of reading felt impossible because of the shame and guilt she feels for doing things so out of character and hurtful towards me.

This jumped out at me when I was reading your post.

To me, it indicates that she is still not R material, as she is prioritizing herself over everything else. She is still absorbed with herself. Focusing on herself without caring about others. Possibly why she had an A in the first place.

She is paralyzed by guilt, and is not experiencing remorse yet. If she were truly remorseful, she would be proactive at helping to make herself safe for the relationship again, and not wallow in self-pity.

Late to the party…

Cool – the MC question isn’t unreasonable, but his response to your reply (that you didn’t give) would tell us a lot.
"do you just want her to do the reading because you want her to feel pain too? Of course you’ve done all this reading and research, you’re the victim"

Your responses could have been:
"I want her to understand the scope of the damage her affair had on me and the marriage. That can’t be done without her acknowledging and dealing with these issues"

If he nods his head – keep him. If he says that’s not right – don’t go again.

Your responses could have been:
"Do you think all our issues can be resolved in bi-weekly hour long sessions with you, or is your plan to give us tools to help us resolve our issues in constructive ways outside of this room?"

MC’s are a lot like personal trainers: They can show you an exercise and maybe even demo a pushup or two, but the results won’t come until YOU do the exercise, or implement the changed diet into your life. If your MC wants you to settle everything in that one hour… find a new one.

Another key question to ask: Do you think the state of a marriage can justify infidelity?
Note I didn’t say explain – but justify. And delay in answer = find a new one. Any answer including the word "yes" = find a new one.
If the answer is a direct "no" or has some form of "not justify, but explain…" then he might be on some correct track. But follow that answer with a new question: So if the status of our marriage can explain why my wife cheated on me for over two years isn’t there a risk that I can AGAIN do something that explains why she goes and cheats on me again?

I don't want to thread jack anyone else's post, just wanted to say thank you to all the wonderfully deep answers. I found the answers to this post super helpful. I also struggle with a WH who hasn't been able to do the work I would have wanted and needed him to do, but am trying to see what he DOES instead of just focusing on what he doesn't do.
On my end I believe I've gotten stuck too much on him following the script for a good candidate for R laid out here on SI and in all the books to a T, and when he hasn't, I've felt like I would be giving him a pass if I let him 'get away' with not doing it all exactly that way. Sometimes this has stopped me from moving forward even when I would have wanted to or been able to emotionally because I've in some way felt I wasn't allowed to if that makes sense? because he wasn't reading as many books as I wanted etc. Many of the responses here have helped me see that not even R is a one size fits all and I am allowed to R with a WH who doesn't 'follow the script' if what he does is still enough to move forward in baby steps.

Where did you end up on this OP? Do you plan on going back?

Emergent- thank you for asking. We have our second MC session in a couple of weeks, I’m spending the in between time gathering my thoughts and trying to pinpoint what I would like to get out of counseling in general. I plan to respectfully push back on the parts of the last appointment that I disagreed with. I’m going in with an open mind, but also trying to assess whether this person will be helpful to us (and me) in the long run.

I’m spending the in between time gathering my thoughts and trying to pinpoint what I would like to get out of counseling in general.

This is a good idea. I definitely didn't have the answer to, "What do you hope to accomplish here?" worked out in my brain by the first session and I regret that.

If you're willing to share, how did the two of you decide to start MC? What was the impetus? Who was the driving force, and why now after 2 years?

I think sometimes, a bs needs to believe it's shame that is keeping their ws from taking responsibility, and accountability, and preventing them from doing the work.

I'm sure it is...sometimes. But, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just a continuation of the selfish,manipulative, unremorseful behavior they showed during the affair. But, if they can get their bs to believe it's due to shame, it triggers empathy in the bs, and often, the ws.never does do the work to become a safe partner.

[This message edited by HellFire at 10:09 PM, Wednesday, April 3rd]