@Iamtrash HT puts it out there excellently.
You're in the same spot as my wife.
She had a mental breakdown during a horribly emotional trauma.
She described her affair as using sex to cut herself, as a child sexual abuse survivor.
This was also an act of self-sabotage, I know her longer and I tell her she "goes dark a lot".
Where everything is just waiting to implode and she gets on a path to find the darkness.
I tell her not to be so controlling and she gets stuck in rhetoric meaning instead of getting what I'm saying, she goes "ohh I'm not controlling it anymore, I'm ready for any outcome".
(She's not) she's staring in the barrel of a shotgun and dramatically getting on her knees. It's just the final step of the same behaviour.
To an extent I think that even if like my wife, you find yourself being able to be vulnerable with just one person your husband.
You will be stuck in that shadow part of yourself, screaming in the back of your head, waiting to be dumped, discarded like trash.
Get to a place you are good enough, period.
Look at the most horrible betrayals in your own life, or neglect, and see what you are trying to protect yourself from.
My wife went into reptile brain mode in a period of trauma, while she cheated on me, she kept telling me she was afraid I would be very controlling over her several times, while I wasn't even close.
She was playing out her worst trauma of her life so far (groomed), during the newer worst trauma of her life (loss of a close relative).
My wife spent most of her life trying to control people by pleasing them, proving her worthiness so to speak.
Instead of being a relaxed person. Whenever things were great between us she would carry her dark other around and get snippy, this I always described to her as "you have no chill".
She's always waiting for the axe to land on her neck, and the longer it doesn't happen it's like a ramping up anxiety.
Because at some point there isn't anything to please, she needed conflict and stress to have reconciliation, a fix to see I was staying.
She got that easily because her ego is incredibly fragile and everything has a direct route to validating she's not enough, not good enough, a piece of shit.
Seeing how much you can push someones buttons to know how much they will take from you is/was a part of that.
From cheating, to the aftermath, there are many many ways to validate that fix of "he/she" loves me enough.
Instead of being truly vulnerable, and letting go of outcomes, which isn't neglect or lack of caring, it's not one or the other you see.
You caring about yourself can go along with loving your ex in a healthy capacity where you don't monitor his perception of you like a doctor with a patient chart.
P.S. (If) You're constantly managing and dampening perceived betrayal and incoming pain.
As a BS I can tell you, this negativity and lack of trust is exhausting.
That alone and seeing that spiral in your WS as a BS, while not being able to label it ourselves until much later can be enough to make us walk.
It's painful to be dealing with someone that loves you while they try to control you and don't trust you.
So the whole approach to trying to make things better can become toxic, and felt as much by a BS without getting it.
He may have been like me, and looking for those wonderful moments you let your guard down, and then you feed him those moments like a reward after that becomes an established pattern.
In that sense, trauma bonding right after the affair is the ultimate reward for a WS and the ultimate high of confirmation and dopamine response sometimes referred to as "ego kibbles".
The point is, these validation cycles go so deep, it's often unconscious, it's super toxic, and it adapts like a damn bacteria.
I'm glad my wife understands it's happening but she's at the start of figuring it out, and I hope you got a little bit out of showing you how it works for us.
In the end you get a BS that feels that everything that happened to them/is being done to them stays within a circle, a coral, of a manipulative behaviour WS themselves don't understand.
As long as you're stuck in a validation cycle, it's felt as an extension of the initial abuse, because it is, and neither of you may get that.
BS don't see it, but they feel they're being controlled even when the WS is trying so damn hard it's the way they do it the approach, in my marriage I called this "everything is always about you in the end" (and she has yet to get that fully).
In the attempt to never be abused again, WS end up abusing constantly, controlling is just that, it's just a lot more subtle and while it may not come from conscious aggression, it still comes from the darker emotions.
Another P.S. This may be recognisable. If I ask my wife an emotion based question, like "how did you feel about this chapter in your life". The times she just answers it in a natural flowing manner are so rare it's unreal.
When they do happen, they're often rehearsed things she told herself that upon investigation are total bullshit.
It's usually met with "ehhhhhh, I don't know it was a long time ago" otherwise.
There's so much that goes into managing outcomes, and it includes gaslighting yourself and others to the point WS don't know who the hell they are just to not look at themselves.
Self ownership is laughably lacking in WS in general in the gallows humor sense. Turning into a rant, anyway, peace
[This message edited by Derpmeister at 9:20 AM, April 18th (Sunday)]