SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’ve been reading on this forum a long time.
I’ve come to this conclusion: I can either believe what multiple fWW - none of whom have any apparent reason to lie here and now - say about their affairs, their reasons for them, what they got out of them, what they put into them, how good the sex was or wasn’t, almost all of which is consistent with what my own WW has said for two and a half years consistently;
OR
I can keep trying to cram my wife’s affair, and by extension all of the fWW here on the forum, into my male construct of what the affair must have been like in spite of what my wife, and all these other WW, say.
My wife has admitted to some very ugly, very shameful, very hurtful things. Hence the mind movies. I do think the "editing" and "narrating" described above is active in my particular mind movies.
Those mind movies seem to hurt less if I narrate and edit them with the version of events told here by countless WW and my wife.
I think maybe I’ll try that for a while, see how it goes.

[This message edited by Wiseoldfool at 9:46 PM, Wednesday, March 24th]

HO I think your posts have been very insightful. You still haven’t convinced me on the LTA vs STA in regards to enjoyment, but your arguments are coherent and sound.

And I am definitely fallible. Let’s face it, you are all still with your spouses, and I’m divorced :)

That doesn't make you fallible - you did what you needed to do. I think what you did in divorcing her was maybe the hardest thing you ever had to do. I respect it immensely.

WaitedWayTooLong:

You and your wife were specifically and cruelly targeted by a sadistic sociopath, who inflicted as much intentional damage as he possibly could, using sex as a weapon.

While I bristled at your reference to a rape victim (I am not a rape survivor but I in fact do have experience with women who were drugged and assaulted) I can, upon further reflection, see how and why you would reference rape.

It is my opinion that you and your wife, and your marriage, were 'raped' after a fashion. This was a cruel, sadistic, intentional defilement and despoilment, exactly meant to destroy your marriage and your love for each other.

It's not like the callous, reckless, selfish, stupid disregard and disrespect for the BS in most infidelity.

This was on a whole other level of damage, IMHO.

And you have an incredible amount of graphic detail. Honestly, more, it seems than most here on SI have.

I'm not sure that most of the usual discourse about infidelity on SI would even apply to you.

I am in no way criticizing you, or trying to minimize your damage or pain, nor am I inferring that you don't 'belong' here.

In fact, just the opposite.

Me getting on top of my mind movies by stripping out my assumptions based on my anxieties wouldn't even begin to touch your experience of the injury that was intentionally visited upon you and your wife by a sick sadist.

I wonder if your damage is actually more in the 'assault' or 'rape' category than in the 'infidelity' category. It's a trauma, for sure, but IMHO it has additional dimensions to it.

It also occurs to me that out of the active participants in this conversation, I appear to be the only BS who identifies as firmly in reconciliation.

And, I will freely admit and always have, my experience with infidelity is not as protracted, involved, or even as severe as many here on SI.

It probably sounds all kinds of glib to people who are not in reconciliation and/or ended the relationship in lieu of reconciliation for me to say,

"Just stop envisioning the worst! It may not even have happened!"

Hrrm, yeah, *exactly* how does one do that?

Again, I got to a point where I realized that I was directing my own mind movies, and I was stuffing a lot of content in there that was not necessarily factual.

BUT- I couldn't get there until we were way past and out of trickle truth, when I felt that my husband was not only being fully truthful about the physical facts, but when I felt that I could truly trust his accounting of his whys, what in the hell was going on in his head that made this thing even possible.

That took a solid two to two and a half years of peeling back layers of not only the infidelity, but also our relationship, our relationship dysfunctions, and our individual dysfunctions.

Somewhere around 2.5 years I realized that the mind movies no longer had a grip on me. Like WiseOldFool said up there ^^^, I had finally reached a place where I could hear my husband, where I could receive what he was saying, accept it and believe it.

And as I believe I said in an earlier post, we came around full circle. Husband had been telling me almost from the beginning, certainly since about 6 months out when he gave up completely on trickle truth, that he wished he could upload his mental content into my brain directly, so I could see for myself exactly what this thing was, and what it wasn't.

He saw me inferring so much more emotional content into my mind movies and into my perceptions- not emotional involvement from him or in the act- but I was layering so much more implication on the incident from my own insecurities and he wanted to alleviate that unnecessary and unhelpful pain.

A big part of diffusing the mind movies for me was as I have already described, which became easier when I was confident in Husband's accounting, when I wasn't connecting the dots or filling in the blanks, and I wasn't assuming the worst as a self defense mechanism.

I'm likely in a very different place re: my understanding of my own mind movies than BS's who have not achieved reconciliation and/or have ended the relationship.

And I am definitely fallible. Let’s face it, you are all still with your spouses, and I’m divorced :)

I agree with hikingout. That's not due to any failure on your part. It takes just as much strength to acknowledge the death of your marriage as it does to make yourself vulnerable again. I think your case is particularly poignant because you're honest enough to acknowledge potential in your XWW. That doesn't mean that you could ever have healed if you stayed with her. It doesn't make any of it your fault.

waited:

the AP becomes more like a prostitute rather than an AP.

If only that were the case. Read my tagline.... they had a 10+ yr EA that preceded the 10yr PA. She was an old GF he "kept in touch with" while we dated, while engaged, and during pretty much the entirety of our M (until dday). He also helped her and her mother professionally, helped her find a divorce attorney when her 3d husband left her, etc. He told her all about me, about my past, my FOO, my shitty childhood/teens, my shitty ex, etc. She knew about our kids, their sports, colleges, etc. She knew about MY college, my career, etc. There were no boundaries. And bonus! Them being FB friends means that every time I posted anything about my WH, she would see it on his FB timeline. This woman had insight into my entire life.... I didn't know she existed.

As to the MM, the dreaded, four-letter T-I-M-E probably helped more than anything. I did EMDR, and that provided some relief, but not much. And I think the MM are different for everyone - like I've said before, it's not what I DO know that bothers me (it did at first, but those images dissipated pretty quickly), but what I don't know. Until I pulled the plug on sex with my WH, I had had to do battle with MM nearly every time. So, I do suspect that if I were to try and have sex with my WH today I would again have to combat some MM.

Given that MM seem to equally impact BS who did and did not get TT, I suspect it's not a significant factor. MM is simply a common (and presumably normal) response to trauma.

Any IC worth their salt references it and usually in terms of recovering trust and safety. Some will offer various "tricks" (eg imagine a stop sign), but none of that offered any relief for me personally (tho I know some on SI had success). TIME and emotional detachment helped more than anything. However, in year 4 I still routinely wake up startled in the middle of the night. After dday, I no longer remember my dreams, so who knows if I'm having MM in my sleep or something else is causing that trauma response. Whatever it is, it's not conscious.

[This message edited by gmc94 at 4:40 PM, March 24th, 2021 (Wednesday)]

I have the mind movies whether I have the sex or not, so I might as well have the sex.

HO and BSR, thanks for the thoughts. You are right, she did have potential, and that decision was by far the hardest I ever had to make.

I just think it was one of those cases where the last chapter which was the split was written the second chapter when she got in bed with him the second time. I really do think I could have forgiven a one time thing. It just took time for the book to play out

GMC, sorry I didn’t delve further. This is truly a sad story. It’s like you were shadowed your whole marriage by the devil. I get where the hurt runs so deep. They both seem like such broken people.

The sad thing is my EX wasn’t broken before her affair. Maybe a little lost, but not broken. It’s sad, but she is truly broken now. It may not seem like it, but I feel badly for her.

gmc94:

I just remembered this:

It was either Linda MacDonald in "Helping Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair" or Robert Weiss in "Out of the Doghouse: A Step-by-Step Relationship Saving Guide for Men Caught Cheating" who specifically pointed out that if the betrayed spouse has prior trauma- not necessarily prior infidelity related trauma, but prior emotional trauma- infidelity will likely invoke it, reanimate it, exacerbate it, and the prior trauma may entangle with this new trauma.

Saying that mind movies will be influenced by the betrayed's anxieties and insecurities is just another way of saying that prior trauma will make itself felt in the infidelity trauma.

I want to say that it was in Weiss' book. You may even find reference to this concept in Weiss' online works. He has several online articles for various publications, including psychology based publications.

This is what my therapist is explaining to me. I think it's why there is a renewed focus on it, also because of some of the recent things that have come up in our relationship.

She thinks also thinks I brought this to the surface more though my own affair dynamics. The problem was I didn't feel secure enough as the WS to explore how it still impacts my current relationship because it would have caused me to reassess those boundaries. I still wanted to be cool wife. I do not know how to express how much this adds to the exhaustion of it all.

That any trauma can re-ignite past trauma is well known and documented.

That fact WRT infidelity is probably in How to Help, Doghouse, Not Just Friends, PISD, and a plethora of others. New trauma triggering old trauma is also discussed in a ton of non-infidelity books, starting with The Body Keeps The Score.

I believe it's also discussed in other contexts, such as attachment theory (eg., Journey from Abandonment to Healing), shame (eg., brene brown's works), etc.