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I believe you are introspective and are trying to calibrate. I think what I am trying to get you to see is it’s really hard even when it’s not trauma related for you.

I also believe that when you have been cheated on it takes a long time to feel introspection is the answer and trying to calibrate it. The feelings of being cheated on, the impact of that creates this feeling of why should I even try anything. I owe them nothing. I have them my best and they shit on it. Fair or not, it’s a a disposition that is created naturally in that act of betrayal and that’s why I refer to that aspect as completely normal. A bs generally needs time to see, believe and feel the changes before they may start to correct themselves and say you know maybe I will give them a chance. Until the. It’s just this oscillation of what should I do, I want to stay married to this person but I really don’t like them right now.

I feel in reading you, he has always been this way, ocd, litigates a lot. And you have really not been able to cope with it well. I wouldn’t cope with that well either—-I had the benefit of not having these things present in my marriage, my husband is easy to be around and we generally are compatible and get along well. I had complaints and our marriage was in the ditch when I cheated but correcting my side of the equation and looking at house I contributed to the dynamic of how it made me unhappy was enough to dig in and suck it up and then I did maintenance in the marriage going forward in staying true to myself and speaking my issues in a more effective way. This may not be realistic for your situation.

In essence, I feel there is a mixture of things going on here. Maybe you aren’t compatible with him and this will not work. That’s fair and understandable. AND you are being somewhat dismissive and failing to understand his trauma response. You know logically that the pre-affair marital issues sort of have to go to the side for a long period of time, but the cheating has exacerbated them and it pushes you away because it is exhausting in a way that either is untenable or you have not yet found a remedy for.

I am not saying you are wrong in that regard, but your expectations of him after cheating on him the second time are not in alignment with reality. Whether or not you want to remain to be married to him could possibly be in alignment with reality, and in that regard I would consider whether your affair was in hind site an exit affair?

I am not really making a judgment call here on where it is but trying to reflect back what I am hearing. You do not owe him a reconciliation if you don’t want one. I know that part is undecided, but I can tell you he is unlikely to change a thing until he is more convinced of your intentions, trustworthiness, growth, etc. he is going to be self protective to the hilt, which means he is going to continue to push you away. It IS laborious. It absolutely was for me. I was able to resolve it but I had some idea of what we could be because our preA marriage was fairly easy and it gave me a belief that we could be that again but maybe even better.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:17 PM, Friday, August 21st]

I was operating under the assumption that he wanted reconciliation from day 1. I remember during the confrontation conversation he asked me, "What do you want to do?" as in "Do you want to stay together or not?" and I was genuinely confused because I had no doubts about wanting to stay together; I was expecting the outcome to be up to him at that point... Here on this site, we witness BS try to work out what their best option is, R or D, and maybe he, too has done/is doing that internally, idk. It's just inconsistent with what I'm observing from the outside.

Even if he's not all in and hasn't decided to attempt emotional awareness/the beginnings of self-regulation in the moment... Well, that's on him. I still don't have to tolerate the bullshit. I don't have to sit and watch him dunking the marriage in the toilet and starting to press down on the flusher. He's gonna do what he's gonna do.

We see the snares and we-- say it with me boys and girls-- "Side step them!" Very good, kids! 🦌

you are being somewhat dismissive and failing to understand his trauma response

I don't think that's what's happening. I think he is failing to understand his own trauma response, and consequently I have no means of offering him comfort and support. Like I said, when we're having the marital conflict, we're talking about non-infidelity related stuff, often with an infidelity-related magnitude of emotion. We can't figure out what he actually needs to feel better unless we go a layer deeper, and that requires willingness to introspect from his end. I can prompt it, but I can't make him do it. But without it, all I can do is walk away from the conflict and focus on myself.

in that regard I would consider whether your affair was in hind site an exit affair?

Negative.

I fully understand your frustration on him not understanding his own trauma response. We have that in common, it’s how my husband ended up fuxking his assistant in our house for a year until Covid made it impossible.

I think where you may read me wrong is I do not think you should take shit. I think you should continue to worry about your own path of how you can handle it differently the way you are now and understand he is on a different timeline from you. Provide the patience that you seek.

I certainly flailed around in the first year to the point my husband wanted to divorce, we separated, drew up papers. So I was the queen of being lost in all of it and not understanding it.

I kept pushing my husband on understanding his response and it made it worse. Because he wasn’t capable of it. Not forever. For a long time. He just wanted to feel normal again. His methods were not good. But I don’t think he really ever stopped wanting to be married to me in any of it, even as we were filling out the divorce paperwork.

I just think keep focusing on you, and getting yourself where you want to go. I don’t think you will find he is going to do the same for a while to come, because he hasn’t gotten to his own reckoning yet. You can believe he can, you can leave because he doesn’t, but it’s just realistically not going to happen soon. I think that’s what I am trying to underline, but I do trust you will calibrate as you go and figure it out over time.

I believe for my husband, and many other bs (especially men but that may be confirmation bias because I read them more closely to get my own clues on what he might be feeling) I have read from over the years, do not reach that point until they see they actually have someone new in front of them that they can’t say she isn’t doing what I need anymore. When that happens, either they will realize it’s not something they can live with and divorce because it’s clear that the ws has become a model spouse and that’s not fixing it, or they say I need to let this go and see where I can go with this new person who has shown up.

However, you can choose your route whenever you see fit and have every right to do so. I think you keep reading me as saying you can’t. I don’t mind what you want to do with your marriage. And I certainly am not asking you to be inauthentic or eat shit forever.

I will just reflect back what I read from you and maybe something will help you be introspective about things you may or may not have been:

-This is so emotionally exhausting that you really don’t seem to like him, I understand you love him but you don’t really like him right now. Believe me he feels that, and I think it makes him lean into the arguments more. I am not sure if you can fix that or not.

-You have control issues that you would feel better if you could deal with differently. (Please understand I was also the best poster child for control issues at one time—healing those was very hard and the freedom I feel has significantly made my life tremendously better).

Try reading "the betrayal bind" I don’t remember if you already read the body keeps score but that’s a good one that may also help you sort through your patterns as well.

I do wish you the best of luck and just know I do not feel overly invested in a specific outcome outside of you getting to a place of wellness.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:37 PM, Friday, August 21st]

You originally wrote "I, for one, did not begrudge my ex the role of being the "little fawn."

And that level of defensiveness is going to trigger the ever living &$@# out of your husband.

Stop and think about this from his perspective. You obliterated his heart. He’s looking for you to rise up. And here you are calling yourself a baby fawn, effectively saying that you are not and never have been an emotionally functional adult. And now in the moment of his greatest need, your move is to take on the role of a baby, with the helplessness and selfishness that comes with it.

So yes, I stand behind my statement that I did not begrudge my ex that stance, because it seemed accurate and necessary. But it is wildly inconvenient to a crushed BS, and if you can’t appreciate that then your R attempt is deeply at risk, IMO.

How is that defensive? You wrote from your perspective, which seemed to be that you felt you could begrudge or not begrudge your wife a vulnerable New Her.

Begrudge definition:

To begrudge means to feel unhappy or resentful when someone gets something they do not deserve, or to give or spend something reluctantly and with displeasure

I only wrote back that my New Me exists independently of how my husband feels about it, as part of MY recovery, whether or not he resents that I've constructed her, feels I do not deserve her, or "permits" me to have her. Which is quite simply true.

Maybe you were just sharing your experience, but it felt pointed, and yours is different than mine. So I explained mine.

Defensiveness wHere?

He’s looking for you to rise up

What exactly is it that you think I'm doing?

And here you are calling yourself a baby fawn, effectively saying that you are not and never have been an emotionally functional adult.

Ah, okay. So here's where you demonstrate that you don't understand the metaphor. The after-infidelity Me that I've constructing/am constructing is new and she is fragile, as in, vulnerable to external pressures to revert back to participation in toxic cycles (snare) and self-abandonment under pressure. She is like a baby deer getting her legs under her and starting to explore the world. And because she is vulnerable, I have also constructed the protector part, which is like a much larger, adult deer, with great sweeping antlers and a vigilant, nurturing gaze. She makes sure the fawn doesn't walk into any traps, take any shit, or fold against adversity.

So a scenario where those parts are employed might look like:

- It's the weekend. H is wanting me to spend time with him (which always turns into being the whole weekend), but I had planned to catch up on schoolwork.

- Fawn says that she would like to spend time with him, but she needs catch up on schoolwork.

- H might do something like get upset and employ a "never"/"always" type statement, such as "You never want to spend time with me."

- At which point Big Deer is going to turn to Fawn and be like, "Snare. He's trying to drag you into an argument that will be so emotionally costly for you that you'll capitulate, and then he'll soothe your feelings to make up, and then you'll spend the weekend with him and have to stay up at night to finish it, and then he'll complain about you not coming to bed the next day... Hold the boundary. Don't argue. Sidestep the snare."

- Fawn says "I already told you I would prefer to spend time with you, but I have school work to do. Maybe some other time. We could even schedule it if you'd like."

- If the pressure continues (perhaps with him sulking around or being usually grumpy as a means of punishing us for our choice) Fawn would still do schoolwork, but ask him if there's anything going on underneath the surface, because this reaction seems bigger than the school work. Then if he wants to talk about his feelings, we'd talk, but if he refuses to reflect on them, Fawn just continues on without trying to manage his feelings for him.

- If the pressure persists after that, Big Deer is going to come out and be very, very cold in response. Not angry. Not emotionally reactive. Just a big, cold, wall o' deer between Fawn and H, preventing him from using the interaction to make me abandon myself.

That's healthier.

Honestly, I think you are the one responding defensively, InkHulk.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 9:50 PM, Friday, August 21st]

Fawn and mama deer are one and the same, Morbs. It's ALL you. No different than the committee members.

It's impossible to be vulnerable and protective at the same time. Being vulnerable doesn't include internalizing other people's issues, you know? It's about being authentic and confident, embracing what Brene Brown calls the "gifts of imperfection." (A great book, btw).

In your example above, about hubby wanting your undivided attention all weekend, I don't see why you can't simply share your goals and negotiate time spent together. "I love you, honey, and it would be great to spend all of this together, but I have to do this, that and the other thing, too." His reaction is his responsibility. No need to explain, probe or otherwise try to manage. It is what it is.

If you're done with the marriage then be done. Don't fuck around. If you're committed to him and R, then learn to be patience, learn balance.

Of course they’re all me, the deer and the committee members. I never claimed otherwise. But the committee is different parts of me, and different parts of my cognition, working together to process things and make decisions. They have always been and will always be, because that’s just how my mind works. To have only one internal voice would be terrifying to me, because then there would be no one against whom to check my thoughts, reasoning, emotions, etc…The deer are temporary roles that I will need to step into until they are so familiar that I don’t need to consciously toggle between them.

I don’t need more vulnerability as in, emotional openness or willingness to hear out criticism. I already have plenty of that. The New Me has vulnerability as in, she is not yet robust. She can be critically injured or killed by external forces still, and then I’d lose personal growth and progress and be stuck in the toxic cycles. That’s why the protector role exists; when New Me is threatened, I can fall back to the protector role and focus on boundary maintenance and self-preservation. But eventually I won’t need the protector role, and I will become so used to behaving like the New Me that it will just become who I am. Integration.

I don't see why you can't simply share your goals and negotiate time spent together.

I tried that. He doesn’t get it.

I told him I have so many balls to juggle in my life— raising a child, pet care, household responsibilities, self-care, personal interests, my education, my career, a social life (that one gets neglected the most), my volunteer work, my spirituality, my marriage— That I can’t successfully juggle all of them, all the time. That I need to set some down occasionally, and rotate through them, and that I’m trying to get that rotation down pat so that everything is well-maintained and we’re living a happy life together. But what happens is that, instead of me prioritizing the ball that most urgently needs attention in order to amend the rotation, H pressures me to pick up whichever ball would most soothe his immediate feelings. Then the next day he complains about a different ball that got deprioritized, so I pivot to juggling that one… And it repeats. This way I am always soothing him, building my life around his day-to-day wants, never getting the rotation righted, and he is never satisfied with the way I’m managing anything. And I feel like a constant failure, so my mental health plummets, and I get paralyzed with depression and suck at managing everything even worse.

So New Me/Fawn can hear him ask me to pivot, assess whether that’s for the best long-term, and decide if I should pivot or not: "Has this ball genuinely been neglected for too long, or is H asking me to put it ahead of its turn to soothe his immediate feelings?" If it’s the latter, she can have sympathy for those feelings without necessarily pivoting. If the situation escalates, she can be curious towards H’s underlying feelings, and talk with him about those— again, without pivoting. But if that’s not an option that he gives us, and continues to exert pressure on me to pivot, then it’s time to step into the Big Deer/protector role, drop the sympathy, and focus on prioritizing what needs to be prioritized. Otherwise the result is that we will argue and capitulate and get sucked right back into the cycle.

IMO, when someone has been essentially fatally wounded emotionally, their needs have to be top priority and they need to know that the betrayer holds their needs as their top priority.

This might mean pivoting on many things for some time Remember, this is not now business as usual. Life may not go on as it normally did or that it normally should. This won't go on forever, but it does for a time.

After D-day happened to me, our lives were not normal for probably a year or 18 months. Things paused, things changed.

That was part of the cost.

It is part of the impact of betrayal.

I have not read this entire thread, I am commenting on your last comment. So there may be much I missed.

IMO, the important thing I believe to him would be that you are WILLING to pivot, rearrange, meet him where he is at any given moment.

It is not out of control or abuse that he needs or desires this, but out of a sense of "Not feeling he is worth it to you" of you don't.

A betrayal makes the betrayed feel something foundationally that "they did not mean enough" to the betrayer. The healing and amends process has to consistently over time unwind that story and SHOW it otherwise.

[This message edited by WoodThrush2 at 7:25 PM, Sunday, August 23rd]

This is merely my humble opinion on the matter.

So New Me/Fawn can hear him ask me to pivot, assess whether that’s for the best long-term, and decide if I should pivot or not: "Has this ball genuinely been neglected for too long, or is H asking me to put it ahead of its turn to soothe his immediate feelings?" If it’s the latter, she can have sympathy for those feelings without necessarily pivoting. If the situation escalates, she can be curious towards H’s underlying feelings, and talk with him about those— again, without pivoting. But if that’s not an option that he gives us, and continues to exert pressure on me to pivot, then it’s time to step into the Big Deer/protector role, drop the sympathy, and focus on prioritizing what needs to be prioritized. Otherwise the result is that we will argue and capitulate and get sucked right back into the cycle.

​I get what you're saying here. There's definitely value in learning not to drop everything just because he gets distressed. Just because he's having strong feelings in the moment doesn't mean whatever he wants has to instantly become your top priority.

​Where I think the juggling analogy breaks down, though, is the idea that he's just handing you another ball. After a betrayal, the things he's carrying probably don't feel like rubber balls to him. They’re more like chainsaws or swords. He didn't ask for them to be thrown into the air, he has no idea how to catch them safely, and sometimes one is coming down blade-first.

​So, what looks to you like, "He just wants his feelings soothed right now," might feel completely different inside his nervous system. To him, it’s probably more like, "I need to know you see how dangerous this is, because I'm terrified while it's still in the air."

​That doesn't mean you have to pivot every single time. Constantly abandoning the real, long-term work just to manage his immediate distress could definitely create a toxic cycle. But I'd be careful about assuming his reactions are just about wanting comfort, rather than a desperate attempt to feel safe again.

​Instead of just asking, "Have I neglected this specific issue for too long?" it might help to ask, "What does this specific thing represent for him, and what happens to him mentally if I tell him to keep holding it?"

​Sometimes the right answer is still going to be, "I hear you, I know this matters, but I need to focus on what I'm doing right now." But other times, you might realize that what felt like an interruption was actually a chainsaw that needed to be caught first.

​Figuring out which is which is the really hard part.

I think the problem that some of you are failing to grapple with is, I need to change myself in order to make sure I recover and abstain from committing infidelity again, and sometimes my recovery timeline is at odds with the reconciliation timeline.

Whenever we talk about the Work, it's "What made you able to cheat? Do you want this marriage? Are you embracing radical honesty and authenticity and showing up as your true self? Are you meeting your own needs? Are you creating a life in which you can be a happy and whole person outside of your marriage? Maybe you need to let go of the outcome..."

And then you'll also say "Regular marital issues need to take a back seat. Figure out whether you want to R or D and commit to being 'patient'..."

Well what if the marital issues left me lonely, so I was vulnerable to catching feelings for the first person that demonstrated an interest in talking to me? What if I had sacrificed my social life so much to be a mum to a toddler (not exactly a thrilling conversationalist) and a wife to a man who sat in silence any time we spent time together, because his need for decompression after talking to people all day/week long and for "quality time" with me was being put over my need for connection to other adults, including to him? How do I change my actions to ensure my social needs are being met?

What if my low self-esteem and need for external validation is a big part of my why, and my marital issues are actively sabotaging my ability to feel good about myself? If my understanding of my worth is tied into whether my husband is satisfied with how I'm meeting all of HIS needs, and the family's needs, and the household's needs, at the expense of my own, and he's never going to be happy because of the habit of pivoting to whatever it is he wants me to do from day to day instead of prioritizing appropriately, as well as meeting my OWN needs, so that I can be a functional fucking human being... Then how am I ever supposed to cultivate self-esteem and self love, and rely on internal validation instead?

How am I supposed to be authentically me and leading a fulfilling life if my marital issues result in me just constantly self-abandoning to manage his feelings? If I'm structuring my entire life around managing his feelings and doing what he wants, living as something that only exists to serve him rather than being my own individual person, because he's not willing to manage them himself and there's this unhealthy lack of separation between his emotions and mine?

What if instead... I just stepped out of that toxic cycle? What if I stopped being codependent, met my own needs, built a social life outside of my family, engaged in my own interests, allowed myself to prioritize effectively, and got my shit together finally in a way I could be proud of, even if that means my H could become so unhappy in the meantime that he exits the marriage...? What if I started loving myself so thoroughly that I come to know that I'll be okay with or without him?

Because if there's not room in the marriage for BOTH of us to show up FULLY as our authentic selves... Then that's not a place I want to be anymore. That's where I've let go of the outcome.

You guys keep saying "Be patient, be patient," but what does that functionally MEAN, if not capitulate to his every demand? I am perfectly willing to talk about the infidelity and figure out actionable ways I can support his recovery, but he's not talking about it. I ask him, "What are you feeling right now? Is there something bothering you?" When his whole fucking demeanor has changed, and he'll mutter, barely audibly, like a pathetic kicked puppy, that he's "fine," that nothing's going on. He doesn't bother to introspect about what the feelings are or where they're coming from; he just stews in them, and there's literally nothing I can do for him at that point. It's incredibly frustrating. So I just have to let him have his feelings and fucking figure it out on his own, and just worry about myself. Because what other option do I have? Sit around and stressed about it and fawn over him while he manipulates me into doing what he wants again? As was previously stated several times, f u c k t h a t.

I am honestly so disgusted by the "Good Wayward/Bad Wayward" binary mindset that seems to be so pervasive of late. A Good Wayward lives on their knees, doing the Work as long as the BS permits them to, begging for forgiveness and waiting to be picked and to feel like their marriage might, by some miracle, survive... But god forbid the Bad Wayward considers whether they also choose the marriage and their BS, does the work even if it's inconvenient for the BS, develops a fucking backbone and assesses whether their BS is also engaging in their own recovery work, while not exactly waiting around for evidence of it forever...

FFS, we had a Wayward on this forum just the other day describing all the classic red flags for literal abuse-- social isolation, financial dependence, controlling behavior, devastation of her body image, etc., and did anyone grab her by the shoulders and shout, "Girl! RUN!!!" No. Because the BS is always a mortally wounded angel and the WS has to sit there and take their bullshit in perfect penance for what they've done, lest they be accused of lacking 'true remorse.' Sickening.