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Morbs

I don't think the most prudent decision would have been disclosure against her will... A husband who leads well must recognize the limits of his authority, and one of those limits is his wife's personal autonomy.

I can't answer for Unconventional. But if I were in his situation, I would have done the same thing. And if I were answering the above for myself, I would say the following.

"I gladly have crossed what you consider my wife's personal autonomy ...for her own good. She will thank me one day. I won't be swayed by her objections, or by the opinions of those who exalt autonomy as the chief determinator. I have revealed this to our professional therapist, who abides by strict ethical standards. Let the chips fall where they may...I will have no regrets in this matter."

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I would love to know what she thinks about it.

Idk if this is relevant or not, but I remember when I was still in high school and being promiscuous with a bunch of older men, and one had SA'ed me, and I was still trying to process that and deal with the consequences... I knew my parents didn't approve of my choices and I didn't want to tell them what had happened. But when I went for STD testing afterwards-- which was a whole fiasco of having to bike several miles on dangerous roads just to get to a bus stop, then having to navigate the bus system to get into the city and get to the free clinic, because I was broke and didn't have a car and again didn't want to ask my parents for help or use our insurance because that would mean I had to tell them what happened, that I hadn't wanted sexual contact without a condom... Anyway, the clinic mailed the results and my parents saw, and they tried to have an intervention with me and I wanted nothing to do with them, and I just shouted at them that I had been SA'ed and to STFU and leave me alone, and that disclosure was not exactly voluntary... Just felt real bad, man. It was one of those times where I went and shut myself in the pitch black of my closet and plugged up my ears because sensing anythingin the moment was just too much, and wished I could just will myself out of existence.

That's something people ought to have control over.

I can't answer for Unconventional. But if I were in his situation, I would have done the same thing. And if I were answering the above for myself, I would say the following.

Sexual abuse is deeply traumatizing, whether it’s through violent imposition or emotional manipulation it does leave deep scars on a person.

Is not something you feel comfortable telling others even closed ones. I experienced it in childhood and I experience it later with infidelity, neither of both felt comfortable to tell anyone.

Weirdly enough it is similarly been disclosed to my wayward, possibly as a search of empathy after what she did. One point for her: she didn’t violate that trust ever.

Because intimate wounds like these cause a destruction of trust and issues with attachment.

Talking about that wound with a person is therapeutic as it is bringin it out to the surface.
Having that person encourage you to address it in therapy is a good thing.

The end result of addressing the unresolved issue is a net positive for the abuse victim.

Disclosing it against their will is simply another betrayal, and will leave another wound.

Morbs,

I just want briefly to touch upon this:

I just shouted at them that I had been SA'ed... It was one of those times where I went and shut myself in the pitch black of my closet and plugged up my ears

Obviously, I had no part in the part of your life when the SA occurred--so, I don't mean to suggest that I feel any culpability in your SA or its aftermath. But, from the distance of the Internet, I just want to say: I'm sorry that the SA happened to you--and I'm sorry that your parents weren't (it seems) immediately more supportive of you in that moment. I don't mean to suggest that parents should support their teenager being romantically--much less sexually--involved with any married man, let alone married men. But, in the moment you described, I just wish that they had paused themselves, given you a big sympathetic hug, cried with you, assured you that they loved you, and vowed to make the bastard pay for what he did to you.

Oh! And thank you for this clarification:

I recommend digging into where your need to understand yourself as a protector/helper/fixer/benefactor comes from. From there you can go tumbling pretty far down the rabbit hole. I was shocked how deep it can go, but I have come to appreciate having a better understanding of myself. It really helps with finding that self love. It should look less like "I need to discover all the ways I'm a bad person" and more like "let me identify the ways life has shaped me and where I could stand to grow..."

[This message edited by Unconventional at 11:33 AM, Monday, October 12th]

Thank you, Unconventional. I appreciate your kindness.

I do believe my parents wanted to support me. The problem wasn't that they didn't want to offer love, support, help seeking justice, or comfort; it was that I was still trying to process what had happened myself, and I wasn't ready to tell them. Their attempted intervention caused me to end up disclosing it because I was still processing, overwhelmed, and wanted to get them off my back. Losing control over that disclosure was part of what made the experience so distressing, and caused me to push them further away rather than to be able to accept their support. Their attempt to help and do what they thought was best for me came at a moment when I wasn't ready to receive it, and it backfired. (As a parent now, I look back at what I put these poor people through and marvel at it. They were really trying their best )

And I think from your previous response that you're starting to realize the potential wounding and distancing that may result from your unauthorized disclosure of your W's CSA to somebody else...even if it was "just" the existence of the trauma itself disclosed to a trained professional in a confidential therapeutic setting, and even if you think your intentions and the reverence to the marriage counseling make the overriding of her autonomy justified...The telling of my story response was mostly to WoodThrush.

Have you told her yet? Are you planning on being apologetic when you do?

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 11:57 AM, Monday, October 12th]

I have not told her. Our session is not until Thursday. I have rewritten the script that I intend to use to try to incorporate more compassion and acknowledge more conflict over the decision to disclose. I think I have an apology or two in there that I ended up having to do something that I recognize may well cause a breakdown of trust. I still feel that the decision to disclose was the right one, so there is no apology for my primary action—because that wouldn’t be authentic.

I respect where you’re coming from about the notion of steady persuasion rather than usurpation of autonomy. I also know my wife well enough to believe that no amount of persistent persuasion will change her course. In defense of that, I can only note: keep in mind that this is a woman who has put up with me (of all assholes) for nearly 30 years!

[This message edited by Unconventional at 1:00 PM, Monday, October 12th]

Morbs,

I too offer sympathy for being forced upon. That is so violating.

My question is this however...and please consider objectively....do you not think that there is a very strong possibility that had your parents not found out...that you would actually have NEVER told them?

I suspect that might be the case knowing how we humans hide from distasteful conduct.

Now, since they did "find out" without your permission, don't you think that overall, the fact that they knew and still showed they loved you, actually was a positive?

And maybe not with your case, but multitudes of others....people may carry serious burdens into adult life because "they never used their autonomy" to disclose one thing or another.

I understand this is a balance. We do need to respect autonomy. But there is also a reality that we often are our own worst enemies.

This concept could even be applied in the realm of affairs. As a general rule, most waywards use their autonomy to NOT reveal their deceitful conduct. Often, at some point, this autonomy is crossed by another. The result in the long run usually is a positive IMO. Not pretty or comfortable, but a positive.

[This message edited by WoodThrush2 at 1:15 PM, Monday, October 12th]

BTW, my middle teen daughter isn’t allowed to date yet. Not until she’s 16 years old. But, I need to know: Where did you meet so many married Zaddies to give yourself to, anyhow?

[This message edited by Unconventional at 1:43 PM, Monday, October 12th]

To be clear, I don't regret my promiscuity in and of itself. I wish I had gone about it more safely, and not assumed I had contingency plans for every situation that could possibly arise, or that I was 'too smart' to let any of that bad stuff happen to me. At the time, doing what I wanted was more important to me than heeding my parents warnings (as it is when young people are getting ready to leave the nest), and I didn't really want to acknowledge that at least some of what they were saying was right.

Hindsight being 20/20, I can say that while our relationship was tumultuous back then, we slowly grew back together over the next several years, after I'd gotten some space and independence from them. I do think that if they hadn't found the test results, I probably would have disclosed it eventually, in a way that wasn't anywhere near as distressing to... well, probably all three of us. After all, I told my mother about my affair when it was going on, and she told me straight up to cut that shit out because destroying my life and marriage wasn't worth it, as she knew from experience, and I didn't listen to her. I still reached out to her for comfort after DDay when I was dealing with the aftermath of what I'd done, even though she had told me so.

I'm not saying that Unconventional's wife never disclosing to anyone else and never seeking professional help wasn't a possibility. It was. I just still don't think that justifies doing the disclosure for her, and that by doing so, he'll never find out if she would have or not. The unauthorized disclosure will probably affect her feelings and behavior going forward as well... Basically, the whole empirical experiment is compromised now, so we can't draw any meaningful conclusions about whether this was the right decision based on the outcome.

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. But we still deserve the opportunity to fight our battles with ourselves on our own terms.

Agree to Disagree....and Agree with some thoughts.

Peace. ✌️

[This message edited by WoodThrush2 at 2:23 PM, Monday, October 12th]

To anyone relying on AI:

Chatbots write with great confidence, and it's human to be swayed by that - even when the confidence is faked ... or programmed. AI is known to back off when confronted by a person who knows enough to question what the programmer tells the chatbot to say.

*****

Unconventional,

What does canon law say about a spouse who committed to give as much of themself as they knew how to give?

What does canon law say about Ms in which the 2 partners do not define 'give self totally' the same way?

(My W was not fully conscious of the CSA she experienced when we got married. She committed as much as she could.)

*****

And how is the letter of the law, civil, military, or religious, interpreted in real life?

In Judaism, the Law is that a man MUST divorce an adulterous W. Except many rabbis find ways around that. I know I was advised by Orthodox rabbis - plural - to use therapy to get through my W's A. Later I found that my W's A was not necessarily adulterous in Law. And that my W was an adulterer in civil law of some US states but perhaps not others.

There isn't a lot in life that's truly binary....

Sisoon: the questions you’ve raised are interesting ones, though not ones over which I have been oblivious. I do not conceptualize or represent myself as judge, jury, and executioner over Canon law, and I don’t know the answers to your questions. I doubt that Canon law addresses those specific situations explicitly at all. If those questions have been answered, they have probably been answered in past tribunal decisions—precedents a Canon lawyer would know waaaay better than me. In my defense, though, I really don’t think I need to know yet the answer to those questions. I am not removing my wedding band and posting profiles at ODSs or anything like that. I am not certain that my M is invalid—nor have I claimed certainty on that front. What I have, I believe, is merely sufficient cause to be uncomfortable—but that, I believe, is enough to want to pull my M back from the brink.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 4:15 PM, Monday, October 12th]

Unconventional, I have followed this thread, and quite frankly, I find your continued attempts to justify your actions increasingly disturbing.

Several survivors of childhood sexual abuse, myself included, have shared deeply personal experiences with you in an effort to explain why your wife's autonomy over her own trauma matters so much. We explained how devastating it can be to have that choice taken away. Apparently, those perspectives didn't align with the answer you were hoping for, so you consulted four AI models instead. And when those models reportedly supported your position, you used that as further justification for doing exactly what you had already decided to do.

Do you not see the problem with that? You came here asking for perspectives, received them from people who have actually lived through the trauma you're discussing, and then proceeded to explain why we were all wrong.

And frankly, I am finding this entire religious argument increasingly difficult to take seriously. I am not criticizing your faith. I am criticizing what appears to be your use of that faith to justify decisions that serve your interests while disregarding your wife's clearly expressed wishes. You can dress this up in Catholic doctrine, sacramental obligations, annulment tribunals, or whatever theological language you choose, but none of that changes the fundamental issue.

You are the wayward spouse. You betrayed your wife. She then entrusted you with something she had carried privately for decades, and instead of honouring that extraordinary vulnerability, you decided that you knew better than she did what should happen with her own story. You even acknowledged that your decision could further destroy her trust in you, and you went ahead anyway.

At some point, the intellectual gymnastics need to stop. Not everything requires a complicated philosophical or theological explanation. Sometimes it's simply a husband who has behaved badly, continues to make selfish decisions, and then searches for increasingly elaborate ways to make those decisions sound righteous.

You are entitled to have needs within your marriage. You are entitled to decide whether that marriage can continue. What you are not entitled to do is treat your wife's childhood sexual abuse as something she must resolve on your timetable to satisfy those needs.

I shared my own history with you because I genuinely hoped that hearing from someone who had experienced both childhood sexual abuse and marital betrayal might help you understand the importance of protecting what little control a survivor has over their own story.

Instead, I have watched you repeatedly defend taking that control away.

That, to me, is not what rebuilding trust looks like. And no amount of AI validation or religious justification is going to change that.

You are the wayward spouse. You betrayed your wife. She then entrusted you with something she had carried privately for decades, and instead of honouring that extraordinary vulnerability, you decided that you knew better than she did what should happen with her own story. You even acknowledged that your decision could further destroy her trust in you, and you went ahead anyway.

You are entitled to have needs within your marriage. You are entitled to decide whether that marriage can continue. What you are not entitled to do is treat your wife's childhood sexual abuse as something she must resolve on your timetable to satisfy those needs.

I too felt exactly what Gemmy is saying here. Almost to the point I wondered if you are mishandling your marriage poorly subconsciously because you feel this "betrayal" by her helps balance your actions, or even worse, continues to destroy your marriage so you are free to do what you want?

I have also considered that there are some cultural differences (you do not seem to live in America?) that play into this somehow?

Whatever the case, this newest decision of yours is truly disappointing and not aligned with marital repair.