BH DD 17/08/2006 long rugweep. Not really 100% on the story yet but also not a JFO in crisis.

WW -ChampionRugsweeper. Be nice, she's really trying

Thoughts from a Reformed Rugsweeper

I hope you enjoy my incoherent ramblings. I’m too inconsistent for a journal so this is kind of me scratching that itch. A lot of the active threads on the board right now are either depressing or make me very angry right now so hopefully this isn’t like that for any of you.

The bullets on my story:

- DD 17/8/2006
- I’m the BH, rugwept after a few MC sessions.
- The trigger train left the station and lost it’s brakes late - - July ‘23
- Wife and I agreed to finally deal with it in September when it was clear that I was going to be an unregulated mess ofnemotions until we did.
- I now have a timeline, she’s in IC.

One of the hardest things about R, is even as it goes well I struggle with self doubt. My view of my marriage has been irrevocably altered and the grieving process for it is too…uncharted?

I have gained much long-awaited truth these past 3 months. That’s good because it lets me put the brakes on my overactive storytelling brain. I have resolved some of the questions about the affair that have tortured me since 2006. Communication in my marriage is noticeably improved. My wife is demonstrating empathy around this affair where before only shame, stonewalling and deception were to be found.

Overall, I’ve been rewarded by this process. I get a bit sad when I think about how many years were suffocated by the elephant in the room but I have much to be grateful that answers were even still possible to get.

One problem with undoing a rugsweep, particularly one this long, is you have to go back and face the music on the parts you skipped over. The grieving I intentionally avoided in the interim years has been hard. I don’t grieve well, I never did.

Another mental battle is the "good enough" question. Am I? Is my wife settling for kind-of-attracted, sort-of-happy and almost in-love? I don’t subscribe to the "unfulfilled needs" thinking but I also know that a satisfied person is hard to tempt. At one point she was easily pulled away from me, is she missing stuff from me? Would she tell me if she was? I can only hope so.

I have come to realise that I may never really feel "plugged in" to my W’s life. She has demonstrated over long years that she has the ability and the tendency to manage my perception of her life when she isn’t right here with me and to keep much of her inner world secret. She hasn’t really trusted me with the intimate details of her life for most of the marriage and has a tendency to manage what information I do get. I have to evaluate what part I play in failing to get that trust. I'm rebuilding here, some of the changes that need to be made are going to be mine to make.

I also worry that my pleading for honesty 5 months ago, where I warned that I needed her to be totally open with me about the infidelity this time around wasn’t taken seriously by W in time. I warned that she probably needed all the truth she had left to really build a new foundation of trust and that any TT or withholding risked "running out of truth", leaving me always wondering if I am still having my perception managed. Unfortunately I got some lies in November and I have to admit I haven’t been able to shake the doubt. My suspicious mind can find reasonable doubt in anything now I cannot prove conclusively. This is a curse I don't think I'll ever be free of as long as I live.

I’d love to hear from anyone that dealt with R well after the actual affair happened. What things were hardest for the BS and how did you resolve them? Did your WS change so much you let go of the uncertainties that currently still tug at my mind?

9 comments posted: Tuesday, February 6th, 2024

Fun with triggers!

I had a complete sucker punch of a trigger today,

I'm driving my children home from a visit with grandma and daughter 2 starts singing "Grandma got run over by a reindeer🎶...you might think there's no such thing as Santa, as for me and Grandpa, we believe!"

Cute.

Daughter 2 picks it up. "...you might think there's no such thing as (AP name)"

I deathgrip the steering wheel and try not to flood. She then repeats this bizarre version 4 more times.

KMN.

15 comments posted: Friday, December 22nd, 2023