SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

One thing I have learned is your relationships are projections of the relationship you have with yourself.

I feel I betrayed myself and my best interests by having an affair. And it’s the same thing I did to my husband.

I feel in terms of respect, I didn’t respect myself. I let some old married guy use me with no investment and then discard me like yesterday’s trash. If one can not respect themselves they are incapable of respecting others.

If you are jealous it’s because you know how your mind works and you project that on your spouse. Most cheaters are jealous and suspicious because of their own duplicity.

For me, my husband was always held in high esteem by me because I truly felt he was a better person than me. I never felt like I deserved him so I don’t think I always fully believed he loved me. But that was due to my own belief of being unworthy or unlovable. I instead do everything I possibly could for him to make him happy to ensure he would love me and never leave me but then I started to resent that I couldn’t be loved for just me. And my affair I was seeking that validation, but it was very illogical to do that when part of me saw the affair for what it was.

You are trying to solve this with logic where there is none. Did I respect my husband in the decades before the affair? Yes and no. Yes, I believed he was as a wonderful person and made my life better and was better than me. I did everything he asked and more.

But when I learned to respect myself and understand my own boundaries then I had a deeper truer definition of respect that I do apply to him today.

The thing is we are never one thing and we are always evolving but we can only have the relationship with another person that we have with ourselves. We may feel all the feelings, and I have and do. I love my husband deeply. But those are fond feelings, and marriage takes things that were not as strong in my value system, such as commitment when the relationship with myself got hard. I always didn’t things I felt I was supposed to or what a good person or good wife will do, but underneath that was a woman who craved chaos, and felt unworthy.

I didn’t love myself so therefore my love for him was more about romantic feelings than all the underpinnings of being a safe partner.

I had numbed myself for a long period of time because I couldn’t cope with my relationship with myself and that definitely strangled my connection with him (and really my other relationships).

The affair was never about him it was in despite of him. I didn’t value or appreciate much of anything due to the constant emotional numbing because underneath I had all this past trauma and shame. It was like I was holding back a flood with a wall I put up. The affair happened like a hole in the dyke that I stuck my finger in and caused instead a tsunami that left destruction to all that was in its path.

My affair was completely about me and this world I had in my head that I was not pulling out and looking at with any rationality.

Affairs are irrational. They are usually used to irrationally cope with all the things you aren’t dealing with. They have nothing to do with the ap or the bs. They are part of a war we have going on with ourselves in which all this unconscious stuff we are not dealing with is making us miserable. We keep seeing external forces ways to deal with it through various forms of escapism. I drank too much wine for a few years, for example.

You see this as about you, not choosing you. And you are not wrong to feel this way. You only have the ability to say is it safe to even love this person she is disrespecting me, disregarding me, I don’t even know what’s there for her to even try. And you have very right to say she isn’t safe and won’t be safe based on the data you have. So I am not talking you out of that. Understanding a thing doesn’t excuse it, nor does it dictate what to do about it.

But for her this hasn’t been about you. It’s her own deficiencies that has created this complex way of not dealing with her shit in a proactive manner. Her relationship with herself is that she does self-destructive things. Her conditioning is chaos needs to be part of love to feel like love.

If you can really see that, then you can get more objective in what you see as she works on this. The cure for these ws behaviors is to learn to love and respect yourself. You will learn to associate peace with love. Because when you do that, you will want the best for yourself. And you won’t even think about ruining those relationships that are healthy and good. You will instead learn to do the work required to maintain them. Such as: learning to communicate, learning to sometimes live with discomfort, learning to be aware you are avoidant and not allow it to rule you. I could go on and on. But for most ws the affair is an immaturity, an undeveloped person who has to find ways to gain that maturity and development.

It’s not easy work and it’s ongoing long term. I am nine years into that journey and while I have a much deeper self awareness, I keep myself engaged on that path because after getting healthy I see this is never ending work everyone needs to do. Evolving is possible but it takes vigilance and dedication. If she doesn’t have that, cut your losses now. No one does this kind of thing just to keep a relationship, we do it because we have been someone we don’t want to be and we will do everything to keep traveling away from that as possible.

So in essence, you can gauge some of the intention by knowing what they wil do if the relationship is over. If you believe they would continue work on themselves because they are rocked to their core over what they did, that’s a good indication. If they are only doing things to keep you then they will only keep going long enough until they believe you are now secured again.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:03 PM, Thursday, February 19th]

Hikingout.

Thank you.

Yes I can see those things.

I understand even where it lacks logic and is fully irrational.
I think with a slightly different traumas and different confidence in myself I might have been in her shoes.

I have a moral "stick up the ass" in this because it was ingrained by my mom, not through duty but through empathy "understand how your choices reflects onto others, and feel if you would like them to be done to you".
And even if I was the kind of rebel, free spirit, so I was never the kind of "proper guy", I always kept that particular stick known just to myself with pride.

I felt that early. I always refused to cross that line (metaphorically one, but in reality many, not only betrayal but other selfish abusive behaviors deeply disgusted me, so I held my ground always, even when nobody was looking). And that line was crossed on me by people who I held dear, like my few girlfriends, or someone in the family.

It truly hurts.

And seeing her chaos since the start, feeling connected and feeling sure I could help her, just to be burned by it, is what hurt the most in my entire life.
At the same time I knew it could happen, I could never believe it could happen, I felt sure I could fill her void and I was terrified how much I was exposing myself to her, more than I ever dared or felt comfortable to.

Because I loved her.

I know and still I feel the need to understand, even where no logic can be found, because I felt the wound on me, but I also feel like I failed her, I was not capable of giving her the stability to face her issues, and I tried to give her a mirror for those, but I was afraid to hurt her.

This is my dissonance. I know she is a different woman today, and at the same she is the same girl, but she is finally facing her ghosts.
I can't figure how to reconcile the pain she caused me, her failures and the failures I feel were mine to allow her back in and give her a change.

Is like there is no overlap to the past, present and future states that will allow these things to merge and find harmony.

Obviously this thing has no clarity yet, I did not process it it was hidden for a decade, kind of feels I caused both mine and her downfall by my hubris.

And somewhat that caused her loss of respect that was behind the rest.
Still trying to make sense of it all in words, but I can "feel" the sense of what you said through intuition right now.

Thanks

It’s simply not yours to own. It’s yours to decide what you want to do with moving forward and your pain is natural and will take a lot of time and effort to dissolve regardless of the outcome of this relationship.

We can’t save each other from our conditioning and who we have been at our base. There are many things however that I do feel my husband has helped heal in me, but not without my knowing it was there and concerted effort to work on it. He provided the environment, but he couldn’t do that work for him. And the reverse is true as well.

It’s very difficult to see your way to the other side of this and that is to be expected for some time to come, but it does get better regardless of the direction you choose if you keep working through it.